Nah, could never happen in New York and certainly never in New Paltz

The Beholden State: How public-sector unions broke California:

The unions’ political triumphs have molded a California in which government workers thrive at the expense of a struggling private sector. The state’s public school teachers are the highest-paid in the nation. Its prison guards can easily earn six-figure salaries. State workers routinely retire at 55 with pensions higher than their base pay for most of their working life. Meanwhile, what was once the most prosperous state now suffers from an unemployment rate far steeper than the nation’s and a flood of firms and jobs escaping high taxes and stifling regulations. This toxic combination—high public-sector employee costs and sagging economic fortunes—has produced recurring budget crises in Sacramento and in virtually every municipality in the state.

Hit the link because you do not want to miss the political cartoon by Sean Delonas just a paragraph down in the story.

The one man revolution in education

This is the best, most brilliant, straightforward attempt I've seen to use the internet to educate.

The Khan Academy.

As far as I know, there is nothing like it.

And at its heart is an elegant simplicity. Note also the absence of educrat jargon.

"The American Golfer"

That's the title of New Paltz writer Anthony Robinson's new novel.

It will be out through Amazon in about ten days. But it can be ordered now directly from the publisher.

I've ordered my copy.

And here's the novel's facebook page.

Are journalists generally smart enough to cover the news?

My answer is "No, not by a long shot."

There are some great ones, but most seem not to know enough to put the simplest stories together without using more ideological glue than facts. And even in the relative absence of ideology, there is often a lack of basic rigor in handling the facts.

For instance, I don't think that I've ever seen a single good news article in any of the local papers on something as important as school budgets. There's no digging, so there's no perspective and no context. It's all just "he said, she said."

But to be honest, it's not just the local papers. The New York Times has become about as objective as The Daily Worker. It's crap, up to and including its Pulitzer Prize winners.