Keep on the sunny side,
Always on the sunny side.
Keep on the sunny side of life.
It will brighten up your day
It will brighten up your way
If you keep on the sunny side of life.
The kids are home these past two day for a fictional teachers’ convention, so I’ve been only able to take some furtive glances at the computer in between jumping on the trampoline and wiping tears from a playdate gone bad.
Last night, I grabbed all those lovely charts from the Times to use for a lecture on elections and parties next semester. I’m making the big move to power point and am having fun with putting graphics and videoes into my presentations. How can I steer a lecture on the presidency, so that I can insert a 20 second clip of Nixon’s Checkers speech? Technology drives the lecture.
I’ve been loving the post-election spin from the party leaders and media sources. For the Democrats, it’s all about lowering expectations and promising collaboration.
The Republicans have been very good about not appearing to be quibblers. They’ve conceded that they lost and lost big. Now, they all claim some relief. Some say that they are happy to not be forced to back that loser Bush anymore. They said they had to back him, but are now relieved to move on. Others find beauty in the democratic process.
I think the Republican pundits are also looking forward to beating up on Nancy Pelosi. Some are saying privately that they are even looking forward to inevitable Clinton presidency, because it is so much more fun to bash, than to support. The Republicans need another six years to regroup after the Bush fiasco, so four years of a Hillary presidency will give them that extra time.
Perhaps another post later. Right I’m taking the kiddies over to IKEA for breakfast.
Apt. 11d 
“fictional teachers’ convention”?
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I think the teachers from our son’s school are at the same convention – or a different fictional one for speical-ed (I know that almost none of them are attending, but school was canceled anyway).
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I’m confused about what a “fictional teachers’ convention” means – are you talking about days teacher in-service days? If so, wow, how offensive. As a teacher I can assure you that when schools are closed for a teacher work day/in-service – we work.
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In NJ, the schools are closed for two days this week for the state wide teachers convention. Several teachers have told me that most teachers don’t actually attend this conference. Perhaps the teachers are using the days for other professional purposes. I don’t know. I wasn’t making a big point, just parroting what other parents said. Some towns also had off for election day, so the parents had to take vacation time for the whole week.
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OK – I am unfamiliar with NJ’s teacher conference days – does sound suspicious. And a whole week for working parents would be tough.
Thanks for clarifying!
Julia
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IKEA serves breakfast now? Man, is there nothing that store can’t do?!
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Can IKEA get a few more Democrats elected? That would be neat.
And if the Rs think they’re better as an opposition party, whether long-term or permanent, I think that’s just fine. Ducky, even. The party that’s good at governing can govern, and the party that’s good at opposing can oppose. Sounds like a good way to run a railroad, or even a republic.
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Doug,
Be careful what you ask for. Looking across the country, the cities that are ruled by a single party are variously dysfunctional–corrupt, economically stagnant, breath-takingly incompetent, etc. Knowing that your party can lose concentrates the mind in a very healthy way. If the recent election (taken together with the 1994 election) means that no one party can hope to dominate congress long-term, and that power will change hands regularly, it will be a very good thing for the US, particularly given the large number of safe seats, and the scandalously slow congressional turnover.
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Doug — loving your shiny new blog.
Yes, IKEA is my little Swedish utopia with meatballs and bookshelves for all. They’ve also got a 99 cent breakfast and free babysitting for an hour. So, sent the boys over to the ball pit for an hour and picked up some light bulbs and curtains. When I went to pick them up, Ian had buried himself in the center of the balls and refused to get out. I had to swim in and pull him out. Tad embarrassing.
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Laura, thanks for the kudos on the blog. Tobias did a great job with the design and the coding; the rest of us get to enjoy the new space to write in.
V creepy story by China Mieville (in Looking for Jake, iirc) about the Thing that Lurks in the Ball Pit.
Amy, sure there are hazards, moral and otherwise, but I’m still enjoying the victory and hoping for more. As for turnover in the Congress (purely theoretical for me, a disenfranchised resident of the District of Columbia), I sure hope that friendly neighborhood Democrats are working to increase it.
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I’m also in DC. I realize that it’s a lot better than it used to be, but it’s still an excellent argument for having more than one party runnning things. I’d love to stay here, but the public schools in affordable neighborhoods are terrible (I’d love to be proved wrong on this–it could save us a pile of money). Theoretically it would be possible to live in one area and send a child to school in another, but given the lack of bussing, it would mean crisscrossing DC oneself a couple times a day. And then there’s the issue of middle school and high school, which is the point where you look around and discover that all the other upper middle class families are gone. We have a child in DC public pre-K, but I notice that parents who have older children have them going to private schools.
DC/VA/MD schools are my current obsession, so please forgive me for the digression!
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Amy, I’m really only a legal resident of DC, being physically more in Germany for the last few years, but I hear you on the problems with schools there. A friend of mine worked for the school system for a time, but after months of not receiving pay for work done on a contract, she pursued other challenges.
On the other hand, the change from M. Barry to Sharon Pratt Kelley (and back, of course) was as drastic a change in mayoral style as any partisan change. Once upon a time V.O. Key wrote quite a bit about variations within one-party systems as part of his analysis of mid-20th century politics in the south. The short version is that factionalism can promote competition as much as different parties. Japan (say 1955-95) and Bavaria (1960-present) are comparative examples.
And Republican suggestions for what to do in DC have recently varied from horrible to appalling. Colbert King had a strong column about that in Saturday’s Post. It might be different if they were local Republicans working to improve their city, rather than outsiders looking for a lab to test their theories (or just having a place to exercise unaccountable power). Might.
Though the whole idea of DC Republicans requires a change in the R relationship with black (certainly) and gay (most probably) voters. I’m not really expecting either.
Best of luck finding a good combination for your kids! (What part of town are you in, anyway?)
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heh. I was thinking about Amy’s comment and V.O. Key, too. Key wrote about the South in 1950s, which were effectively one party states. Corruption varied from state to state. States like VA had some healthy competition from factions within the Democratic party. Other states like LA were big time corrupt, but their corruption grew out of the culture rather than their one party state. They could have had four parties and there would still have been bribes, kickbacks and scandal.
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We’re in NW, enjoying temporary company housing. My daughter is in a top-ten DC public elementary school and I can walk her to school in 15 minutes. NW isn’t in our budget for a house purchase. Brookland is and I really love the place (the big old houses, the Basilica, Catholic University, the Franciscan Monastery, downtown just a few stops away, the convenience of living on the Red Line), but it seems that the local families do not use the local schools, either public or private. Theoretically, we could hang onto our NW elementary school while living elsewhere in DC, but I just can’t face the day-to-day inconvenience. Current thinking is to move to the suburbs (MD? VA?) and do parochial school for K-8 and then switch to public high school (which is when Catholic school gets expensive). I also like the idea of a single K-8 school, rather than elementary followed by middle school.
A complicating factor is that there is a lot going on (school choice, charters, vouchers) so DC’s school situation may be radically different in just a few years. Of course, those are mostly evil Republican ideas!
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Isn’t getting a kid to a parochial school as inconvenient as getting them to a public school? And are there any guarantees that your local parochial school is going to be any more effective than your public school?
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Yes, which is why we are looking for a neighborhood with a conveniently located parish and school, ideally with good public schools as a backup, in case the parish school isn’t a good fit, or if our finances prove unequal (as seems quite possible).
And why would we want parochial school for our kids? Because we’re Catholic, we want our kids to have a Catholic religious education, and because the parochial system is a tradition worth preserving. Academics are not the only issue.
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Also, as I mentioned earlier, it may be that the K-8 model (which is typical of area parochial schools but rare to non-existent in the public system) makes a lot of sense.
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