Missed the candidates at VSU Tuesday?
You can
watch them on video (now with a third viewpoint).
And you can come to Hahira tomorrow to see them in the
31st Annual Hahira Honey Bee Festival, Inc. Parade.
Here are some
pictures and videos from last year.
The food and festivities start early in the morning and continue all day,
with the parade in the middle.
They had about 35,000 people last year, more than a dozen times
the usual population of Hahira.
-jsq
Here are videos of all the presentations from the Meet the Candidates event at VSU Monday. This adds to the previous LAKE videos, and also includes a different perspective from George Boston Rhynes.
Update 4:40 PM 5 October 2012: Toma Hawk has supplied a third viewpoint.
Ron Borders, Introduction
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Yesterday I asked But what does the joint resolution actually say? Karen Noll has supplied the answer, in the form of a PDF of the signed resolution, transcribed below. This thing makes the education paragraph in the Occupy Valdosta Mission Statement sound mild-mannered. We’ve already seen the state’s response. -jsq
Continue readingLOWNDES COUNTY BOARD OF EDUCATION
AND
VALDOSTA CITY BOARD OF EDUCATION
JOINT RESOLUTION IN SUPPORT OF
QUALITY PUBLIC EDUCATION
Update 10:15 AM 5 October 2012: Ignore this version and go directly to the complete version.
Here is the first set of LAKE videos from the Meet the Candidates event at VSU Monday.
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Ron Borders, Introduction
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Paul Bowers, CEO of Georgia Power, doubled down on baseload nuclear, coal, and natural gas for the next fifty years. What’s he scared of?
Nick Coltrain wrote for OnlineAthens yesterday, Renewable push not in the cards for Ga. Power,
“Renewable (energy sources are) going to have a sliver,” Bowers said of fuels to create electricity. “Is it going to be 2 or 4 percent? That’s yet to be determined. Economics will drive that. But you always remember (that renewable energy is) an intermittent resource. It’s not one you can depend on 100 percent of the time.”
One time you can depend on it is hot summer days when everybody is
air conditioning, which is why
Austin Energy flipped in one year
from spouting such nonsense to deploying the most aggressive solar rooftop
rebate program in the country.
Austin Energy did the math and found those rebates would cost
about the same as a coal plant and would generate as much energy.
And when it is needed most, unlike the fossilized baseload grid,
which
left millions without power in the U.S. in June
and
hundreds of millions without power in India in July.
Bowers knows better than the nonsense he just spouted; as recently as November 2011 he told Georgia Trend,
Continue readingPushers of the charter school amendment must be desperate! Blurring the line between public officials and private citizens, state Attorney General Sam Olens wrote:
Local school boards do not have the legal authority to expend funds or other resources to advocate or oppose the ratification of a constitutional amendment by the voters. They may not do this directly or indirectly through associations to which they may belong….
As Jim Galloway wrote yesterday for the AJC in Sam Olens orders local school boards to stay out of charter school fight,
That means organizations like the Georgia School Boards Association, and perhaps, the Georgia School Superintendents Association, would be barred from speaking out against the proposed constitutional amendment.
And would that include organizations like PAGE, which produced the slides that a local middle school teacher used last week? What about that teacher, or Dr. Troy Davis, speaking a few weeks earlier, both on their own time?
Olens’ letter would apply to what the VDT said was in the VBOE and LCBOE joint resolution, at least the part about “The resolution explicitly states that the boards are asking voters to not support the Constitutional Amendment relative to state charter schools.”
But what does Olens mean, duly elected local school boards don’t have authority to express opinions about educational matters that would directly affect the people who elected them?
Why has Sam Olens suddenly gotten religion about this now, after he was silent last year when both VBOE and LCBOE adopted resolutions against the school “unification” referendum? Where was he when both boards of education hosted numerous forums opposing consolidation?
Will he next be telling the Valdosta City Council it can’t pass a resolution opposing a referendum? What exactly is the difference between that elected body and an elected school board as far as expressing such an opinion? And all of those resolutions were non-binding opinions.
Will Sam Olens next be telling the VDT it can’t editorialize against the charter school amendment?
How desperate are the pushers of the charter school amendment?
Continue readingThe Valdosta Board of Education, followed by the Lowndes County Board of Education, adopted a “Charter School Amendment Resolution” or a “Joint Resolution in Support of Quality Public Education”, depending on which ones minutes you go by. What does the resolution actually say?
Brittany D. McClure wrote for the VDT 11 September 2012, School boards to adopt resolution against charter school amendment.
“The Lowndes County and Valdosta City Boards of Education request that the Governor and State Legislators commit their support to adequately fund a first-class K-12 public education for students in Lowndes County and Valdosta City and across the state of Georgia,” the resolution states.
The resolution explicitly states that the boards are asking voters to not support the Constitutional Amendment relative to state charter schools.
Valdosta Board of Education did that at their 10 September 2012 meeting:
Continue readingEven the VDT opposes the charter school amendment.
“Staff Writer” editorialized in the VDT 12 September 2012,
Will charter schools hurt public education?
So the state has consistently run down the public education system in Georgia over the course of the last decade by drastically cutting funding from programs, but are now complaining because student test scores and graduation rates have decreased.
The state solution? Allow for basically anyone who has a building to apply to run a “charter school” that would siphon money away from public education. Students would be able to choose where they would go, the parents or community officials would “run” the schools, and they would not have to meet the same standards as the current public schools, but taxpayers would still be forced to pay for them.
State officials are fond of saying that charter schools aren’t private schools, but when a school gets to pick and choose who they let in and who they don’t, that’s the definition of a private school. Only the elite whose parents want to run the schools will have a chance, and the poor and disenfranchised will have no choice, will not be accepted, and will suffer even more because the money will no longer be there to educate them.
Here’s an idea: Restore all those drastic austerity cuts from education to pre-Gov. “Sonny” Perdue levels, invest in the public education system which is already in place and doing quite well in spite of the state’s best efforts to shut it down, and restore the true value of a public education to the taxpayers of the state who are footing the bill and seeing fewer results.
I like that idea. Let’s vote No on the charter school amendment in November so we can get back to funding public education.
-jsq
Who’s running?
What are they for?
Come see tonight!
According to the Chamber’s facebook event:
Continue readingThe Valdosta-Lowndes County Chamber will host a Meet the Candidates event on Tues. Oct. 2 from 5-7 p.m. at the VSU Continuing Education Building located on 903 N. Patterson Street.
The event is an opportunity for the public to meet and hear from contested candidates running in the Nov. 6 general election. Attendees can speak one-on-one with candidates and candidates will be given three minutes to discuss his or her main initiatives.
“The election is quickly approaching and it is important to know who i s on the ballot and their stance on key issues. This event provides a way for the public to have personal interaction with the future decision-makers of our community,” said Chair of the Chamber’s Government Affairs Council, Ron Borders (Real Living Realty Advisors).
Attendees should look forward to meeting the following candidates:
The
failed EDF nuke project at Calvert Cliffs in Maryland
makes it clearer why Southern Company (SO) was the first company
to get a nuclear permit in 30 years:
it was the only one big enough and monopolistic enough to pull it off.
Even then it’s such a
bet-the-farm risk
that even
“great, big company”
SO only dared
to deploy its
“great big huge scale“ equipment
with the regulatory capture triple-whammy
of
a stealth tax on Georgia Power bills,
PSC approval of cost overruns,
and
an $8.33 billion federal loan guarantee:
a legislated
stealth tax in the form of
a rate hike on Georgia Power customers for
power they won’t get for years if ever.
If you’re a Georgia Power customer,
look on your bill for Nuclear Construct Cost Recovery Rider.
You’ll find it adds about 5% on top of your Current Service Subtotal.
Georgia is one of only a handful of states where such a
Construction Work in Progress (CWIP) charge is legal
thanks to our regulatory-captured legislature.
Doubling down on bad energy bets,
Southern Company is also
trying to use CWIP to build a coal plant in Mississippi.
A captive Public Service Commission that
rubber-stamps costs for Plant Vogtle.
In case there was any doubt as to the PSC’s role in legitimizing those new nukes,
the very next day Fitch reaffirmed Southern Company’s bond ratings.
Translation: Georgia Power customers subsidize SO’s bonds and SO shareholders’ stock dividends. The PSC also approved cost overruns being passed on to Georgia Power customers, and those nukes are already over $400 or $900 million, depending on who you ask. What do you expect when 4 out of 5 Public Service Commissioners apparently took 70% of their campaign contributions from utilities they regulate or their employees or their law firms, and the fifth commissioner took about 20% from such sources? Hm, there’s an election going on right now!Southern Company’s regulated utility subsidiaries derive predictable cash flows from low-risk utility businesses, enjoy relatively favorable regulatory framework in their service territories, and exhibit limited commodity price risks due to the ability to recover fuel and purchased power through separate cost trackers.
An
$8.33 billion federal loan guarantee.
Even that’s not good enough for SO and Georgia Power: SO is
asking for less down payment.
And what if even one of that three-legged regulatory capture stool’s legs went away? Continue reading