Here's
a video playlist
of the Candidate Forum last night organized by the 30 Club at Serenity Church.
Probably more commentary later; for now, in the interests of speed, just the raw videos.
Candidates Forum, 30 Club,
J.D. Rice, President
Video by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 22 October 2012.
-jsq
An excellent article about the problems with Georgia Power’s
new nukes on the Savannah River gets at something you may not know:
they can charge you for them even if they’re cancelled!
Steve Willis wrote for the Georgia Sierran Oct./Nov./Dec. 2012 page 5, Overruns, Uncertainty Plague Vogtle Expansion,
If Southern Company abandons this project, the CWIP law not only allows Southern Company to keep all of the CWIP payments legally extorted from customers, but allows them to keep CWIP fees in place or even increase them until all their costs and profits have been fully recovered. Due to the run-away cost overruns, the CWIP charge on your monthly bill is already more than three times what Southern Company confidently claimed it would be at this time when they presented their case to “your” Georgia legislature in 2009.
And that 2009 legislature rubberstamped CWIP so it appears on your Georgia Power bill as Nuclear Construction Cost Recovery Rider. Willis reminds us that the 2 nukes already at Plant Vogtle were projected to be four nukes for $600 million and ended up being two for $9 billion.
Continue readingEveryone has heard the saying “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” If the Vogtle expansion costs balloon, as many analysts expect, it will cost
Here are videos of last night’s
Political Forum.
The goal of this post is speed, so there’s no fancy format,
just
a video playlist
in which you can find candidates by video title or thumbnail picture.
We will probably come back later and use some of these videos in other posts.
Political Forum moderated by Chris Beckham of NewsTalk 105.9 WVGA
The Home Builders Association of South Georgia (HBA), Franklin Bailey President,
Videos by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 18 October 2012.
-jsq
Several recent local elections have been decided by less than 100 votes. Your vote counts. Here’s when and where you can vote.
According to a Word file buried three levels deep in the Board of Elections website, and also according to GA Secretary of state Elections Division:
| Early Voting: |
Monday through Friday,
October 15-26, 2012, 8 a.m. – 5 p.m. 2808 N Oak St., Valdosta |
|---|---|
| Saturday Voting: |
October 27, 2012, 9 a.m. – 4 p.m.
2808 N Oak St., Valdosta |
| Extended Hours: |
Monday through Friday,October 29 – November 2, 2012, 7 a.m. – 7 p.m. 2808 N Oak St., Valdosta |
| Vote by Mail: | Get the form from the Board of Elections |
| Election Day: |
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Go to your assigned precinct Find your precinct through My Voter Page by the Georgia Secretary of State. |
For a sample ballot, Continue reading
A record 2,861 total votes were cast
in Lowndes County by Tuesday 16 October 2012.
Greg Gullberg reported for WCTV yesterday, Early Voting In Lowndes County Sets New Record,
Georgia state officials say the pace for early voting is slower this year than for previous presidential elections, but as Eyewitness News reporter Greg Gullberg shows us, you’d never know it in Lowndes County….
Jessica’s not alone. In fact, she was joined by a wave of voters of all ages here in the first week of early voting here in Georgia. Now they’ve actually already set an all-time record here in Lowndes County for the most votes in the first two days of a presidential election, with almost three thousand.
Deb Cox, Supervisor, Lowndes County Board of Elections, and Gregg Gullberg of WCTV:
Continue reading
Candidates Forum, 7-9PM today 18 October 2012, at the
Rainwater Conference Center,
1 Meeting Place, Valdosta, GA,
organized by the
Home Builders Association of South Georgia
and
NewsTalk105.9 WVGA,
moderated by Chris Beckham.
This thing is astonishingly poorly advertised, unless you happen to follow one of the organizing organizations. It’s not in the VDT calendar, it’s not on the conference center’s calendar, and people keep asking when and where is it. Now you know.
Here are
videos (from three different cameras) of all the candidate presentations
of the
2 October 2012 Meet the Candidates event at VSU.
Tonight, if I understand correctly from there being a moderator, they debate.
Presumably all the same candidates will be there:
Continue reading
What’s really behind the charter school amendment referendum? Corporate greed.
Jeff Faux wrote for AlterNet 15 October 2012, Education Profiteering: Wall Street’s Next Big Thing? Wall Street’s involvement in the charter school movement is presented as an act of philanthropy, but it’s really about greed. He reviews some of the evidence that charter schools don’t improve education, especially when forced on states. Then he gets into why so much money is flowing into charter schools anyway.
Education privatization would not, per se, create a net new stimulus
for the economy. But by diverting large existing flows of money from the public to the private sector it would create new profit-making ventures that could be capitalized and transformed into stocks, derivatives and leveraged securities. The pot has been sweetened by a 39 percent federal tax credit for financing charter school construction that can double an investor’s return in seven years. The prospect of new speculative opportunities could well recharge the animal spirits upon which Wall Street depends.
Some “liberal” privatization promoters claim that charter schools should not be considered private. But that’s an argument the management companies that run the schools only use when they are asking for more government funding. At the same time they argue in courts and to legislatures that as private enterprises they should not be subject to government audits, labor laws and other restrictions.
These companies rent, buy, and sell buildings; make contracts for consulting, accounting and legal services, food concessions, and transportation; and pay their managers far more than public school principals earn. In cases where city governments have given land to charter schools, for profit real estate companies have ended up owning the subsidized land and buildings. In states where charter schools are required to be nonprofit, profit-making companies can still set them up and then organize a board of neighborhood residents who will give them the right to manage the school with little or no interference.
In 2008 Dennis Bakke, CEO of Imagine Schools, a private company that managed 71 schools in eleven states, sent an email to the firm’s senior staff. It reminded his managers not to give school boards the “misconception” that they were “responsible for making decisions about budget matters, school policies, hiring of the principal, and dozens of other matters.” The memo suggested that the community board members be required to sign undated letters of resignation. “It is our school, our money, and our risk,” he wrote, “not theirs.”
Yet in Georgia it’s our tax money they want to use to fund those “public” private charter schools. That’s the “large existing flows of money” they want to divert into their profiteering pockets. No wonder ALEC is so big into charter schools! And look who else:
Continue reading
According to ALEC’s own website, states that score high on ALEC’s education policies score low on education. Remember, ALEC is behind the Georgia charter school amendment on the November ballot. If you didn’t believe Stanford Credo’s study that showed adding a charter school authorizer, as that amendment would do, reduces academic learning, how about ALEC’s own data?
Bill Simon write for The Political Vine today, Charter Schools and ALEC: The Facts ALEC Doesn’t Want You To Know,
If you take the state performance rankings and match them up to each state’s education policy rankings, you come-up with an entirely different picture of how little (if any at all) a state’s degree of conservative education “policy” translates into actual education performance.
I did this ( PDF copy available here) and this is what the 2012 Top 10 states in Performance looks like, and their corresponding Policy ranks:
2012 Performance/Policy Rank
- Massachusetts / B-
- Vermont / D+
- New Jersey / B-
- Colorado / B
- Pennsylvania / C+
- Rhode Island / C
- North Carolina / C
- Kansas / C-
- New Hampshire / C+
- New York / C-
The numbers are ALEC’s performance rankings, and the letters are ALEC’s policy grades.
Continue readingReceived today on Georgia charter schools do no better than traditional public schools. -jsq
The Stanford study, Multiple Choice: Charter school performance in 16 states (p. 4), also found that multiple authorizers:
States that empower multiple entities to act as charter school authorizers realize significantly lower growth in academic learning in their students, on the order of -.08 standard deviations.
Currently we have the local boards of education that authorize charter schools at a very high rate, 94%. If the charter is not approved by the local board then they can appeal to the Dept of Ed. For approval. So, by adding another authorizer in the form of the UNCONSTITUTIONAL charter school commission you simply reduce the academic learning of the students! This is not about education this amendment is about the money earned by some to keep power! Our constitution states that we have an obligation to provide free quality education to all Georgians. We have no obligation to line the pockets of the rich with our tax dollars!
-Karen Noll
Karen Noll spoke to the Lowndes County Commission Tuesday
about the charter school amendment,
saying it would implement taxation without representation
and would take more tax dollars from our public schools
to give twice as much money to special charter school students.
When you’re talking about my kids in the schools and you’re going to take their money and ship it to somebody else’s family and then there’s no accountability, that’s just unacceptable.
Here’s the video.
-jsq