Back on the treadmill after a brief respite to get over my under-the-weather feeling. Ran three miles in about 26 minutes (listening to Richard Hell and the Voidoids). Felt good to get back into the swing.
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It would be difficult to identify a non-player who has had more impact on baseball in the last 40 years than Marvin Miller. So the failure of the Veterans Committee today to enshrine the former player’s union director in the Hall of Fame seems a slap in the face of the game’s history.
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Dispatches is up — an overview of the state’s clean elections law.
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Gov. Jon Corzine is ready to wade into the swamp that is school funding in New Jersey, a move that could go a long way toward determining what real tax and budget reform will look like.
After more than a year of review, Gov. Jon S. Corzine will propose a new school financing formula as early as next week that would give at least $400 million in new state money to poor and disadvantaged children who live outside traditional inner-city school districts, according to officials familiar with the plan.
The new formula would replace a two-tiered system that concentrates education spending on 31 districts in historically poor cities like Newark, Camden and Paterson.
The current arrangement, known as the Abbott system, has been widely criticized as shortchanging the other 584 districts in largely suburban and rural areas, some of which serve children just as needy. The new approach would apportion money to schools based on the characteristics of the students, including income, language ability and special academic needs.
The new aid formula is likely to create a political firestorm in the state — legislators have irresponsibly pit the urban schools against middle-income suburban ones — and certainly will land in court. This is especially likely because the looming budget gap has killed any chance that the state will boost funding to the level necessary before the plan has been unveiled.
According to the Times, the governor is proposing an increase in school funding of about $400 million, which sounds like a lot but isn’t when you take into account that the state pays such a small portion of school funding across the state now.
That means that, in order to create a formula that addresses the main issues — equalizing funding for rich and poor, ensuring that all students in the state have access to the same level of education, cutting property taxes — school spending in the state will probably have to be cut, a move destined to create more problems than it solves and that could end up benefitting no one, while hurting the court-protected Abbott districts. (And this doesn’t even take into account future funding.)
If that happens, the courts are sure to dismantle the formula, sending everyone back to the drawing board.
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Over the summer, I tried to read Barrack Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope. I abandoned the effort about two chapters in, frustrated by the book’s seeming conflation of stepping away from partisan thinking with an aggressive refusal to stake out strong positions based on a core philosophy or ideology. Sen. Obama, in his book and in his campaign, has confused the willingess to and necessity of breaking with party orthodoxy with a need to avoid ideology altogether.
It is why, though I liked some of what he has said as a candidate and viewed his youth as a plus, I just can’t see myself getting behind his candidacy during the primaries.
Paul Krugman, in today’s New York Times, offers the latest in what has been a long line of what I will call Obama triangulations that leave him sounding like the Clintons — a soulless politician, lacking a philosophical core.
Krugman raises questions not only about Obama’s flawed health care plan — universal coverage it is not — but about his defense of it and his attacks on his opponents:
Mr. Obama, then, is wrong on policy. Worse yet, the words he uses to defend his position make him sound like Rudy Giuliani inveighing against “socialized medicine”: he doesn’t want the government to “force” people to have insurance, to “penalize” people who don’t participate.
I recently castigated Mr. Obama for adopting right-wing talking points about a Social Security “crisis.” Now he’s echoing right-wing talking points on health care.
What seems to have happened is that Mr. Obama’s caution, his reluctance to stake out a clearly partisan position, led him to propose a relatively weak, incomplete health care plan. Although he declared, in his speech announcing the plan, that “my plan begins by covering every American,” it didn’t — and he shied away from doing what was necessary to make his claim true.
Now, in the effort to defend his plan’s weakness, he’s attacking his Democratic opponents from the right — and in so doing giving aid and comfort to the enemies of reform.
It is a troubling tendency that, I suspect, will haunt him thorughout this campaign and could result in the kind of flawed presidency — should he win the White House — that we witnessed during the Clinton years.
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Hank Kalet 