Category: columns
Introducing the strongest political coalition in the history of representative democracy
It’s coming from the sorrow in the street The holy places where the races meet From the homicidal bitchin’ That goes down in every kitchen To determine who will serve and who will eat… …It’s coming to America first The cradle of the best and of the worst It’s here they got the range And the machinery for change And…
Kate Wallace’s “white paper” ripped off “Lakeland Leads.” They should listen more to Wesley Barnett.
I regret to inform Wesley Beck, Jeff Chamberlain, and David Hallock that they have been ripped off. This three-man super group of Ruling Class Club and Lakeland First calls itself “Lakeland Leads.” They shelled out a ton of money and waited a very long time (almost two years) for a young woman named Kate Wallace to produce a “white paper”…
Gow-Anon: the weird equation of basic democratic government to “slaughter,” murder, and conspiracy
The Polk School Board is considering a truly bizarre overhaul of its policies concerning board member “standards of ethical conduct.” Here is one suggested addition. (I’ll tackle another in a subsequent article.) “Each Board member must recognize that decisions must be made by the Board as a whole and that when made, these decisions must be supported by the entire…
Florida education is America’s worst employer and customer service provider, part 1: your courts are entirely political
Quick note: I’m going to bring back the weekly Facebook town hall starting this Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. I expect it will have a school focus because our audience was people interested in schools. But I intend to keep it going after my term ends; and folks can ask me anything. The community these town halls provided during the COVID…
Ron DeSantis’ campaign “riot” bill weaponizes cars and could have prosecuted most of Lakeland’s “leadership class”
Earlier this week, Florida’s failed governor, flanked by uniformed law enforcement officers in a venue owned by the Polk County taxpayers, announced an election year campaign crackdown on “scraggly looking” protesters and a legal green-light for drivers to kill people in the street, as long they as claim to be fleeing “a mob.” When considering these rather remarkable facts, it’s…
Polk’s got 99 problems; but K12 ain’t one
Try to imagine taking part in this school board meeting, as a described last week by Miami Herald reporter Colleen Wright. Link here. It took 13 hours and 400 public speakers for the Miami-Dade County School Board to decide it had heard enough. The marathon meeting started at 1 p.m. Wednesday and culminated in the board’s vote at 2 a.m….
“Critical infrastructure employees”: safety and capacity are at war in COVID schools
The Polk School District sent out the message linked here on Tuesday. Read the first four paragraphs below. These paragraphs say the opposite of what they mean, which is that the district is making a “shift” in exposure/quarantine policy designed to limit the impact of quarantine on in-person school operations. This “shift” is aimed at keeping COVID-exposed teachers and staff…
Barney Barnett’s approach to power; my approach to power; and the superintendent’s future
[This is not the article I first intended to write in the aftermath of the election. But there is a time element here related to the Tuesday work session and board meeting – and what the superintendent intends to do in response to the election. Barney Barnett’s fake racism smear campaign bears on that meeting.] Barney Barnett is the supreme power…
Drafting education workers into combat — without war games, with very little equipment, with slashed funding, and with no real leadership above the school level
A 2018 study by the Rand Corporation showed from 2001-2015, 2.77 million U.S. military personnel served on 5.4 million deployments across the world as part of the “Global War on Terror.” Total U.S. military deaths in those years in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are 6,729. Add in other deaths related to operations in other theaters, and you get about…
Fighting “for” is harder than fighting “against.” That’s why we do it; and that’s why we’re winning. Join us.
As we enter the in-person early voting phase of the campaign, I want to take a second to declare the obvious: we’re winning. Every indicator I see suggests it. But it really boils down to this: our movement has thousands of people excited to vote for me — and what we’re trying to accomplish in education and citizenship. The other side…
