The Recovery Bill

heheh, no money to Illinois until they get rid of Blago.I’m serious.

pretty amazing, eh?

It’s a neocon troll fest over at HuffPo on this story and the Bill Lynn story.I think that Obama has sent the neocons into terminal fright. (I wish.)

I’m trying to figure out if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that the Inspector Generals for Homeland Security and the DOJ have such a comparatively small amount of money allotted to them. Is it just that everyone knows those departments need more attention from a higher source?Is the E-Verify clause one of the fobs for the Repubs?In the history of federal government, has there ever been insistence that a department establish a website?And…wow. Whistleblower protection!Y’know, reading this, after being under the thumb of the Ruprechticans for almost a decade, I can’t help but be paranoid and think this is like a Twilight Zone “To Serve Man” setup.

I’m still making my way through it according to the things most important to me first. One thing I ran into in the education section was a very general note to make classroom sizes smaller. That’s a great goal. My question for them would be this, there is no mention anywhere in there (that I’ve seen so far) about increasing staff. All of the things are promising for education would free up the local district budgets to add teachers if they chose to. The problem with depending on the local districts to use excess funds for staffing is that they are unlikely to do that. The boards are typically made up of parents from the more affluent parts of town and they are more likely to allocate any extra local funds freed up as a result of HR1 to building new football fields or pimping out their current stadiums and gyms.I don’t know what could be done about that if anything, but it is a concern. Here in Knoxville, TN, we just found out that teaching positions are being cut. How that’s acceptable, I can’t imagine. We did have one board member who fought during the meeting to stop this. She correctly pointed out that some of our schools have a frightfully disproportionate number of students to teachers. Cutting more would be one more grave step toward the inmates running the asylums. My hope is that the HR1 money will indeed free up local budgets and they will wisely save the jobs being lost and even add additional staff to reduce class size and help keep a reasonable number of adults in the buildings.