By Ralph Schwartz
Just now I came across a resource that helps voters in Washington state make sense of the sometimes confusing statewide initiatives that are on the current ballot.
The site is LivingVotersGuide.org, which purports to be a nonpartisan information site with fact-checking by the Seattle Public Library.
The site was endorsed by Columbia resident Flip Breskin, author/editor of regular emails with updates about goings-on in her charming neighborhood.
(We’ve been receiving Flip’s emails at home for six years, ever since we moved to Bellingham with a strong desire to rent in Columbia. Now we own a home in Happy Valley, and we are [what else?] happy.)
“It’s run by public librarians, who are GOOD at checking facts.They take no stance. They only check the facts. If you haven’t voted yet, I would strongly suggest making use of this resource. I’m a great believer of more light and less heat,” Flip said in an email from this morning.
Amen to that, Flip.
The site did help me understand what “repeal the elimination of a business & occupation deduction for financial institutions” really means. But not without some head scratching. The first commenter put his pro-bank-tax stance on the wrong (pro initiative) side, not understanding initially that you have to vote against the initiative to maintain the b&o tax. So you’ll find his comment on both sides of the issue.
Also, finding local initiatives by typing in my Happy Valley address didn’t work. You have to “browse by county,” after which the Bellingham Home Fund, the expansion of the Port of Bellingham commission, and the two Lynden measures show themselves.
You can also say whether you are in favor or opposed to an initiative, on a sliding scale. Either with or without expressing your own opinion, you can see what other users think of the initiatives. (The 2/3 vote for taxes wasn’t polling well. The charter school initiative was more mixed.)
The Auditor’s Office says you aren’t required to fill out all items on your ballot, and I’ve been of the opinion that people are better off leaving items blank rather than voting for a person or an initiative they don’t know or understand.
But Flip’s advice is to vote on everything, and to make informed choices. She hopes that’s where LivingVotersGuide.org comes in.
It just goes to show, how bad the WEA has screwed up the school system…
As explained in 1942
The man who has gone through a college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work. His failure to do so may be due either to lack of natural ability—perfectly compatible with passing academic tests—or to inadequate teaching; and both cases will . . . occur more frequently as ever larger numbers are drafted into higher education and as the required amount of teaching increases irrespective of how many teachers and scholars nature chooses to turn out.
The results of neglecting this and of acting on the theory that schools, colleges and universities are just a matter of money, are too obvious to insist upon. Cases in which among a dozen applicants for a job, all formally qualified, there is not one who can fill it satisfactorily, are known to everyone who has anything to do with appointments . . .
All those who are unemployed or unsatisfactorily employed or unemployable drift into the vocations in which standards are least definite or in which aptitudes and acquirements of a different order count. They swell the host of intellectuals in the strict sense of the term whose numbers hence increase disproportionately. They enter it in a thoroughly discontented frame of mind. Discontent breeds resentment. And it often rationalizes itself into that social criticism which as we have seen before is in any case the intellectual spectator’s typical attitude toward men, classes and institutions especially in a rationalist and utilitarian civilization.
Well, here we have numbers; a well-defined group situation of proletarian hue; and a group interest shaping a group attitude that will much more realistically account for hostility to the capitalist order than could the theory—itself a rationalization in the psychological sense—according to which the intellectual’s righteous indignation about the wrongs of capitalism simply represents the logical inference from outrageous facts. . . . Moreover our theory also accounts for the fact that this hostility increases, instead of diminishing, with every achievement of capitalist evolution.
Whoops,
Making too much sense, sometimes you do find a magical truth!
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444897304578046520760656926.html
Link exchange is nothing else however it is simply placing the other person’s blog link on your page at proper place and other person will also do same for you.