HOLY HOT GARBAGE, THAT DEBATE LAST NIGHT.... was an absolute dumpster fire of the first order, which is WAY worse than a normal dumpster fire. I'm talking about it in the first hour. Watch the MSNBC reaction, which is magical.
MAYOR MICHAEL HANCOCK IS ON TODAY AT 1. We're talking about the airport debacle, homelessness and more. Tune in and send questions to mandy@koanewsradio.com if you want me to ask them.
JEFFCO TEACHERS CARE SO MUCH ABOUT STUDENTS THEY ARE SHUTTING DOWN THE DISTRICT FOR A DAY Remember last year when teacher's went on "strike" and got a crap ton more money for education? Well they are SO CONCERNED about student achievement that they are doing it AGAIN. A parent shared this email they got from the district:
Dear Jeffco Public Schools Families, Staff, and Community,
Jeffco Public Schools will be closed for students on Thursday, March 19 due to labor shortages.
Jeffco Public Schools will be making a change to the district calendar on Thursday, March 19, due to the high level of reported teacher absences for the CEA “Educator Day of Action.” This decision has been made because the current number of teaching staff who are submitting an absence has moved beyond the maximum number of absences that can be covered by our guest teachers. Even with calling in as many substitutes as possible, we will not be able to run academic programs and the lack of sufficient staff creates an unsafe school environment.
For that reason, there is no school for students on Thursday, March 19. All schools will be closed to students, including preschools.
Though students will not be present, this will still be a regular workday in the district for all employees; leave time must be appropriately used if employees are not at work that day. Employees wishing to attend the CEA Day of Action must use personal leave for this purpose - the use of sick leave is not allowed.
Extracurricular activities will proceed as scheduled, unless you hear differently directly from your school. Charter schools may not be closed; please check with your school. We will not have to make up the school day unless we encounter more snow days before the end of the school year. We will inform families when or if that becomes a concern.
School will resume as usual on Friday, March 20 and attendance is expected for all students and staff as normal.
The Colorado Educators Association (CEA) is promoting a day of action for educators to rally at the Colorado State Capitol because “Colorado students deserve a fully funded education system and educators who can afford to stay in the profession.” CEA has communicated that they are targeting the following outcomes: (1) secure a living wage for educators, (2) pass an initiative for a statewide ballot issue in 2020 to fix the broken education funding system, and (3) eliminate the Budget Stabilization Factor (a measure of how far below pre-recession levels schools are funded) by 2022.
Teachers in other districts throughout the state will also be participating in this day of action, though it's possible not all districts will be affected by absences to the same degree that we are experiencing at Jeffco Public Schools.
We understand that this unexpected change is inconvenient for families. We made this decision as soon as we reached the threshold where we could not reasonably fill the anticipated absences. Please know we exhausted all resources before deciding to cancel school for students. Our intention in providing this notification now is to allow families to plan for this change.
Jeffco Public Schools
Got that? ALL SCHOOLS ARE CLOSED FOR THE DAY BECAUSE THEY CARE SO MUCH ABOUT THE KIDS. Teachers are making it very hard to maintain the level of respect and compassion many parents including me feel for them. This is garbage.
SO STATE GOVERNMENT PROPOSES TO FIX THE MESS AT RTD THAT REGIONAL GOVERNMENT COULDN'T There is a new bill at the legislature which would propose a State run overhaul of the troubled RTD system. In this lengthy article about the bill, they referenced that a similar deep dive was done in Boston in 2016 to fix the struggling MBTA system there. I did a quick Google Search and guess what? After the deep dive, four years after to be exact, there is still no real progress on the MBTA and they say they need more money. Uh-huh. Of course they do.
CORONAVIRUS IS GETTING A LOT OF PLAY THESE DAYS As the CDC has issued and "not if, but when" statement about Coronavirus hitting the US. Markets are still roiling, but they were up when I last checked.
A NEW POLL IN EUROPE SHOWS ANTI-SEMITISM IS ALIVE AND WELL IN EUROPE And this is just depressing. One in 5 thinks that there is a secret cabal of Jews who run the world. DON'T THEY KNOW THAT'S REALLY THE ILLUMINATI??? It gets worse. Check the results here.
I'M TOTALLY GONNA ENTER DAVE ON THIS SHOW ABC is doing a spinoff of The Bachelor only this one is for people over 65. I'm gonna enter Dave. Shhhh, don't tell him.
AGAIN, THE RICH DO PAY THEIR FARE SHARE And this will be redundant to many, but after last night's "eat the rich" fest I thought it would be a good idea to share just how much they do pay. Read this and please share it with your friends! It is paywalled, so here are some good parts, like where we talk about how progressive our tax system already is:
Data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that the U.S. has the most progressive income tax system in the world, with the top 10% of earners paying 45% of all income taxes, including Social Security and Medicare taxes, compared with only 28% in France and 27% in Sweden. If the U.S. government spent as large a share of gross domestic product and had the same tax structure as France, the top 10% of U.S. earners would pay about what they pay now in income taxes, but the bottom 90% would see their taxes almost double. Although the last OECD tax comparison was made in 2015, before the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, the Joint Committee on Taxation has shown that the U.S. tax system, in terms of proportionate tax burden, became more progressive after the 2017 tax cut than it was in 2015.
Or this part where they talk about actual tax payments:
The claim that rich Americans pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than any other households is verifiably false. The nearby graph shows that taxes actually paid, as a percentage of income earned and received in transfer payments, rise steadily from 5.1% in the bottom quintile of households to 39.6% in the top 1%. While it’s too small to show on the graph, the top 0.1% of earners, which included 127,586 households in 2017, had an average gross income of $2,892,434 and paid $1,304,769, or 45.1%, in federal, state and local taxes.
REMEMBER THAT STUDY BERNIE CITED THAT MEDICARE FOR ALL WOULD SAVE US MONEY? IT'S GARBAGE. the theme of today's blog is garbage apparently. Bernie Sanders last night referenced an article that had been published in The Lancet That allegedly showed that Medicare for All would actually SAVE us money. It's already been attacked and debunked and Reason.com explains why here, and least of which it was written by an unpaid Bernie adviser.
AFTER LAST NIGHT'S DEBATE, I THOUGHT EIGHT HOURS OF SOOTHING NATURE SOUNDS MIGHT BE NICE.
THE NEW JAMES BOND SONG IS OUT And it's by Billy Eilish and though I like her, I'm sort of already over the dark and brooding slow talking style she's got. Judge for yourself.