Monday, January 30, 2006

Happy Tet!

The Vietnamese community here in Oklahoma celebrated their new year's eve Saturday night, and we all woke up in the year of the dog yesterday.

Speaking of which, the Sunday Oklahoman had a front-page article on how the state budget is spent. More than half of it goes to education. This comes out after the local branch of the NEA teachers' union filed a lawsuit this month to increase education's share of the state budget. (Original is registration only: Google cache here.) The Oklahoman notes:

The Oklahoma Education Association wants $4 billion more to educate students and upgrade school facilities statewide. The lawsuit supposedly reveals vast funding problems in the state's school finance system but we've yet to hear a plausible solution as to how to pay for what it deems an "adequate" education.

The entire budget of the Great State of Oklahoma is $6.2 billion. $3.1 billion already goes to education, so the OEA is actually suing for a total education budget that exceeds the entire state budget.

One reason it's not so much fun blogging politics anymore is that our honorable opponents have turned themselves into clowns recently. Galloway in a leotard, Kerry rushing home from Davos to lead a filibuster, the teachers' union here ...

Anyway, the Republicans aren't doing so well themselves -- more lobbying corruption? Man, and after McCain-Feingold, I thought they all went honest. (cough)

Yeah, welcome to the year of the dog.

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