Category: politics

I do not think it means what you think it means

stimulus: something that rouses or incites to activity: as a: incentive b: stimulant 1 c: an agent (as an environmental change) that directly influences the activity of a living organism or one of its parts (as by exciting a sensory organ or evoking muscular contraction or glandular secretion) Children’s Services -16.40% Division of Mental Retardation […]

help me understand

I am not an accountant. Reading the TN budget for 2009-2010 is about as pleasant as watching for the return of a swallowed Playmobile toy. I understand clearly that we are cutting or eliminating: family resource centers, school safety grants, school health positions and funding, the child health and development (CHAD) program, the healthy start […]

ice cream does not equal murder

Several times a year and in multiple environments, I have to pull out the tired, old dinosaur statistic that murder rates go up when ice cream sales go up. Eventually, everyone will recognize that statistics are not enough. The “most single parents live in poverty” statistic ignores the fact that people with severe mental or […]

If I had stimulus dollars (for schools)…

Our school system could benefit from a lot of things. Old, decrepit buildings need repairs and shiny new buildings need basic supplies. We have students with multiple disabilities who need adaptive equipment and gifted students who need advanced tools and information. Maybe our new Super would like to put his STEM high school in a […]

criminalizing cigarettes

I don’t smoke, so I don’t feel the personal assault that the many, many smokers in Tennessee are going to feel about the proposal to make it illegal to smoke in a car if children are in the car with you. It seems like a basic common sense choice not to smoke around children and […]

I still need professional media

I don’t need newspapers. I do need the people-formerly-known-as-newspaper-writers. I need an online news source that gathers only the truth from rumors on blogs and provides an honest and accurate explanation of local news. I need someone to explain the what if we do and what if we don’t of proposed political amendments. More than […]

I like my bubble

As Thanksgiving dinner digested and the children wandered off until they heard the word dessert, newspapers became one of our many topics of conversation. My mother expressed displeasure in the local paper’s recent changes and my father scoffed at my suggestion that he was the last generation to rely on newspapers. Actually, he laughed at […]

subjective or objective?

One of the middle school teachers told the class that the United States is THE most racist country in the world. I tried to imagine what criteria was used to make this assessment. Clearly, sexism didn’t factor into the equation at all, because women and girls in other countries are routinely raped, mutilated, killed, bought […]