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Sparks just waved the magic wand. This move will guarantee him a victory in the general election if he can win his primary, which until now was looking doubtful. Artur’s response was weak and inadequate, which also is a first. Listen carefully in the background and you will hear the band tuning up the theme song from “Rocky.”
Good Morning, Danny…
Quote of the Day:
If I demanded you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who needed work you’d think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?
I want to open up concealed aspects of modern schooling such as the deterioration it forces in the morality of parenting. You have no say at all in choosing your teachers. You know nothing about their backgrounds or families. And the state knows little more than you do. This is as radical a piece of social engineering as the human imagination can conceive.
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Before you hire a company to build a house, you would, I expect, insist on detailed plans showing what the finished structure was going to look like. Building a child’s mind and character is what public schools do, their justification for prematurely breaking family and neighborhood learning. Where is documentary evidence to prove this assumption that trained and certified professionals do it better than people who know and love them can? There isn’t any.
The cost in New York State for building a well-schooled child in the year 2000 is $200,000 per body when lost interest is calculated. That capital sum invested in the child’s name over the past twelve years would have delivered a million dollars to each kid as a nest egg to compensate for having no school. The original $200,000 is more than the average home in New York costs. You wouldn’t build a home without some idea what it would look like when finished, but you are compelled to let a corps of perfect strangers tinker with your child’s mind and personality without the foggiest idea what they want to do with it.
Law courts and legislatures have totally absolved school people from liability. You can sue a doctor for malpractice, not a schoolteacher. Every homebuilder is accountable to customers years after the home is built; not schoolteachers, though. You can’t sue a priest, minister, or rabbi either; that should be a clue.
If you can’t be guaranteed even minimal results by these institutions, not even physical safety; if you can’t be guaranteed anything except that you’ll be arrested if you fail to surrender your kid, just what does the public in public schools mean?
What exactly is public about public schools? That’s a question to take seriously. If schools were public as libraries, parks, and swimming pools are public, as highways and sidewalks are public, then the public would be satisfied with them most of the time. Instead, a situation of constant dissatisfaction has spanned many decades. Only in Orwell’s Newspeak, as perfected by legendary spin doctors of the twentieth century such as Ed Bernays or Ivy Lee or great advertising combines, is there anything public about public schools.
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– John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education To read all of this.
-Pookie
On no. 1, I personally think Davis should have blasted Sparks for trying to get in bed with the gambling industry and for relying on a low income sales tax like the lottery. But such a move would have guaranteed that the McGregors and Stan Pates of the world singlehandedly financed Sparks campaign. The only way Davis gets in trouble in this race is if Sparks offsets the edge in advertising money that Davis is counting on. Politically, Davis should be trying to blunt Sparks by minimizing their differences. But my two cents, both Davis and Sparks are too open to more gambling.
be kind of stupid to blast someone for their support of electronic bingo when you support it yourself….
#3 – My reasoning is a result of several factors that align themselves seamlessly. Independent polls for several years have consistently shown the public’s consistently growing approval of electronic bingo as a vehicle to deliver hundreds of millions to the cash-strapped state coffers, particularly since the taxes would be voluntary and not forced on us through property or income tax increases. The last poll I saw was taken in April of this year and it even had Republicans approving in the upper fifty percent range – which includes me. If someone else wants to voluntarily add to the tax kitty and keep me from having to pay more taxes, then more power to them. If the polls are accurate, and I believe they are, Sparks has just positioned himself to soon shout, “BINGO!”
To finish my though from #3…The problem with your analysis, pragmatical, is that it assumes that voters will vote on a single issue, gambling, instead of any number of other factors. That would be so in only one situation, only if there were sharp differences on that issue between the candidates. You assume that other candidates will draw a line and say something that is the opposite of what Sparks might be saying.
As long as Davis looks electable, and the polls today show he is, he has a better story and to most voters is a more exciting candidate than Sparks. He can get in trouble though if he gets on the wrong side of a big issue. As much as I disagree with both of them, I doubt Davis makes own “bet”, that the anti-gambling position helps him with the blacks and working class whites who are a big chunk of a primary. I am not the biggest admirer of the openly political way Davis takes positions on national issues,but his campaign was smart to do what they did-vague rhetoric about bolder ideas but no sharp line drawing with Sparks on gambling or the lottery.
#3/#6 – I do not disagree with your judgement or reasoning. I think your assessment is spot-on, but I also think it is in real-time. By next June, and the following November, there will be a dominating issue that distinguishes all the candidates in both parties. Today, that seedling issue is gambling. With Sparks’ bold move, that seedling will grow into a big and deeply rooted issue of the economy. Every time another candidate praises apple pie, Sparks will be able to ask, “how do you propose to pay for it?” What some today see as a gambling issue, will morph into a revenue stream issue with the bottom line being – Sparks can fund his ideas without new or increased taxes. When we walk into the voting booth, one thing is for sure – the majority of us will always vote our billfolds. Davis has assembled quite a poltical talent pool. Now would be a good time for him to start dipping into it, lest he discover too late that rhetoric without reasoning is weak and shifting sand.