The period from May 3 to May 28 is the final opportunity for student applications to Polk County magnet and choice schools for the 2010-2011 school year. Applications can be submitted online only at www.polk-fl.net. Individuals without computer or Internet access can complete the application on school district computers at any magnet or choice school or by visiting the Office of Magnet and Choice Schools at the school district administrative office, 1915 South Floral Avenue, Bartow. Applications will be processed according to the date received. For more information: (863) 534-0631.

froint photo credit: Tom Hagerty for Metro I4 News

In a time when funds are short at the state and local level and teachers are in need of more pay, this grant would have made Polk eligible for nearly $19 million dedicated to teacher pay. It’s one of the “strategic” investments I spoke about earlier this month.

Citing minor changes to the way we’ve always done things, Polk County put the Union first, the teachers second, and the students last today. I’m sorry for that. We will still be applying for the dollars and districts across our state will benefit from this opportunity to challenge and reward one of our most valued assets–our educators!

Regionally, Hillsborough County voted unanimously to support the application, and 60 out of 67 Florida counties support the plan. We simply must realize that this failure is another competitive disadvantage for Polk–a mark against us– in a region where our unemployment rate lags our neighbors and where our education policy must improve if we are going to climb out of this hole.

1906 Eastpoint FL school photo illustration credit: State Library and Archives of Florida

What accounts for this discrepancy?

I’m willing to bet that it’s our news media, aka MSM, including newspapers, cable news, and broadcast news.

Continue reading  Re/Creating Tampa – The MSM makes us dumb.

Polk School District Protocol For President Obama’s September 8 Speech:

(September 4, 2009) The superintendent’s office has announced its directive to schools regarding the broadcast of President Obama’s September 8 speech.

A determination of whether the speech will be broadcast live in schools is a school-based decision and will be made by principals and teachers at individual schools. The content of the speech, which is to be released Monday by the White House, will be provided to school staffs so that they may determine if the content is appropriate based on students’ ages, curriculum and class schedule considerations. The release of the content of the speech will allow schools to fully analyze the situation.

If schools decide to broadcast the speech live, schools will provide an opt-out provision for parents or guardians preferring that their children not view the speech. Students may be excused from participating and given an alternative activity if parents communicate to the school with their preference of opting-out. If a student indicates an objection at the time of the speech, an alternate activity will be provided.

The text of President Obama’s speech will be posted to the school district’s www.polk-fl.net Web site.

The speech will be recorded and rebroadcast on the school district’s cable and fiber optic television channels at a later time. This will allow parents the opportunity to view the speech in the company of their children at a later time if they so wish. The broadcast time is undetermined at this point and will be provided to schools at a later time. The school district’s cable television channels are Bright House Networks channel 614, Comcast channel 7 and Verizon FIoS channel 45.

Monday marks the 40th anniversary of the moon landing of Apollo 11. For my father, Bill Townsend Jr., this entire summer marks the 40th anniversary of his service in Vietnam. In about three weeks, he’ll mark the 40th anniversary of the wound he suffered that ended his tour after about four months. Over the years, the story I heard Dad tell most often recounted the strange duty he was performing when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. My mother, my sister, and I convinced him to finally write it down. I think it will speak for itself. Enjoy.

The moon landing would occur at 4:17 PM Eastern Daylight Time on July 20th, 1969, according to the spate of old news reruns and modern specials I’ve seen as part of the 40th anniversary. Not only the US but the whole earth, we were assured back then, was agog at the upcoming triumph. It was the first time man would touch another world.

In my world, the touchdown happened at 0317 military time–just past three o’clock in the morning–on July 21st. As momentous as the event was, the earth did not stop its turning, and half a world away the next day had inexorably come. The waning moon had set, and the meager lights of a nearby town were almost nonexistent. It was very dark.

The bridge after damage with temporary pontoon bridge.
I was sitting comfortably behind a waist-high wall of sandbags that served as a bunker among the twisted girders of an old steel bridge that crossed the Saigon River near the town of Phu Cuong from which the bridge took its name among the troops. It probably had a real name, but to us it was always just the Phu Cuong Bridge. At least once–some said twice–Viet Cong had blown up the bridge by floating down the river and breathing through snorkels until they reached the pilings. There was much speculation about how they could have carried enough explosives to do the damage we could see. The favorite story was that they buoyed a large American bomb they had recovered until it could float with buoy almost submerged, covered it with one of the large rafts of vegetation (which really did float down the river) and using straws for snorkels swam invisibly beneath the plant mats until they could tie the bombs against the pilings. Whether only one bomb had been used was frequently debated.

Whatever they did, it worked. Every piece of metal in the original bridge was twisted or broken and the engineers had propped it up with a crazy quilt of beams and buttresses that looked like the product of a madman with an erector set, the tinkertoys of that long ago time.

Being at the bridge was good duty since it was almost never attacked by land. One infantry company at a time would protect it, and a much smaller bridge across a creek about a mile away, for thirty days. Given the bridge’s history, our sole job was to continually throw hand grenades and a plastic explosive known as C-4 into the water. The idea was to keep up continuous random concussions to discourage enterprising VC aquanauts.

Three hours after midnight on the 21st I was using a flack jacket as a lounge chair and throwing my explosives. My feet were propped on an empty grenade crate. Boxes of grenades and explosives that had not been emptied were stacked around me, much higher than the sandbags. (We joked about them as our “bunker” walls.) The tinny sound of armed forces radio drifted from the small portable perched behind me. The Beatles had just come out with Get Back! And the song was much loved. Its line: “Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged…” became a mantra for a while. The rainy season had started a couple of weeks before but this night was calm and clear. I think I remember “Get Back” drifting from the radio just before the moon landing coverage broke in.

Concertina wire waiting to be installed on the bridge.
There was an incredible surreality about our Vietnam nights. The land was entirely flat with rice paddies and the remnants of defoliated jungle. At night, you could see for many miles, and the horizon was lit up in all its circle. Like distant carnivals, streams of tracers from ricochets or apparently pointless firing into the air lit the sky, usually too far away for any sound. Distant explosions also flickered like heat lightening. We could usually recognize the types and could tell an RPG from a 105 with casual expertise. Sometimes we would see the solid tracer line going down from American gunships like a hose of fire with no separation between the individual rounds. On many nights, far away to the west in Cambodia, the B-52’s would endlessly bomb the supposed transit routes of the Ho Chi Min Trail. The flickers of light would seem continuous, and usually we could feel–though not hear–the vibration in the ground. On this night they were bombing, and I thought I could feel the faintest rumble pass through the torn metal of the bridge.

The feed from NASA through the radio was live and direct. I suppose we heard the same feed as those back home. The astronauts neared their rendezvous with something incredible, the first human touch of another world in history, and their voices were proudly professional and in charge as they counted out the approach in distance units. I remember I thrilled when they called their approach in miles and feet. Like many of our soldiers, I met metric units for the first time in the army and it still seemed traitorous to speak in “hundreds of meters” and “clicks” (kilometers). I hope my memory runs true.

As Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin closed on their landing site I made up another charge. C-4 came in sticks of 2.2 pounds–a kilo–and I pulled one from the crate. While listening to the radio I prided myself in how expert I had become. I perfectly made the hole in the modeling clay-like substance with my knife, crimped the blasting cap to the fuse, inserted the fused cap in the hole and squeezed the clay tight around the cap. I did each of the steps professionally, expertly, and felt my pride there in the dark at the adroit movements of my fingers, handling the caps where an explosion would set off the whole bridge. Only a few months before, I would have been totally inept in the darkness. Now I had mastered a dangerous task and did it with sureness and calm.

Behind me Aldrin, obviously reading an instrument, spoke in a voice that crackled slightly on the cheap radio: “twenty feet…fifteen…ten…seven,” in a tone like he was counting toothpicks. “Touchdown.” The sky was completely dark except for a faraway explosion or two. I wished the moon had not set, leaving no crescent in the sky to look at in honor of the occasion. Then, close to the river, a much longer string of tracers rippled the sky. For an instant I thought it might be a gesture in honor of the moment, like fireworks at New Years, but the colors quickly showed they were not ours.

I somehow lost time for a moment, and the radio had returned to music when I became aware. A faint smell of pot mixed with the odor of cooking blew softly down the bridge. I split the fuse end with my knife exposing the powder and lit it with my lighter. The fuse made the faintest red glow as it circled through the air into the water. The explosion was solid but somehow unsatisfying, as was the one that followed from two bunkers down the bridge. The radio kept playing music. I reached in the crate and took out another stick.

Cross posted at LakelandLocal.com

Jem Lugo wanted to do something different with her opportunity.  She was the valedictorian at Springstead High School in Hernando County, and her intent was to present the traditional challenges to her classmates in a more contemporary fashion, in which those receiving their diplomas would actually pay attention and be reminded that life is not Easy Street.

Remember, this is not a run of the mill teenager.  This young woman will begin her college career this fall at no less than Harvard University, and is one of ten recipients this year of a Barnes Scholarship, awarded by The St. Petersburg Times Fund Inc., the nonprofit philanthropic arm of the Times Publishing Co. to high-achieving high school seniors who have overcome significant obstacles in their lives.  Her unweighted GPA is 3.98.

Ms. Lugo’s original speech was never heard at the ceremony Thursday evening, because  Principal Susan Duval rejected it.  Ms. Duval and faculty advisors ordered her to rewrite it stating that it was “too individualized” and that some in the audience may be offended. 

Well, the 18 year young honor graduate’s words have received a much wider audience than originally intended.  Excerpts of the banned speech have been read on many of the local television newscasts, with the full versionn printed on most media Web sites.   She was even invited to New York by the CBS News Early Show to read a portion of her original version, but declined so that she could remain home for the ceremony.

It should also be mentioned here that Ms. Duval, the principal who said that the original speech could not be given, had a prior problem with remarks she has given at graduation herself.  She had been suspended one day (with pay), fined $1,500 and had a written reprimand entered into her personnel file after it was discovered that remarks she made at Springstead’s 2004 and 2005 commencement ceremonies had been plagerized without giving credit to their original authors.  The fine was part of a settlement with state education officials, who could have stripped Ms. Duval of her certification had she contested it and lost.

So, what did Ms. Lugo write that caused such an uproar?  Check it out yourself.  The St. Petersburg Times put up the link which features both the original version of her speech, and the version that was approved.  And let me know what you think.

School trustees voted Monday to approve the new name, Polk State College, to reflect the fact that it will begin offering bachelor’s degrees in addition to the two year associate’s degrees and certificates students now earn.

The class graduating in May will be the last whose diplomas will read “Polk Community College”.

Current plans are for the school to begin it’s first four-year degree programme, a bachelor of applied science in supervision and management, in January.  It will have three areas of concentration: 

Business administration, preparing students for jobs such as chief executive, business operations specialist and marketing or sales manager.

Public administration, preparing students for leadership positions in the public sector such as government and not-for-profit agencies.

Public safety administration/management, preparing firefighters, Emergency Medical Services workers and law enforcement for leadership positions.

PCC received approval from the State Board of Education in January to being it’s first four year degree programme, six months after the Legislature passed a bill establishing the State College Pilot Project for nine community colleges.

Take a moment and study the graphic above. You are looking at the arc of job losses during the last three recessions, 1990, 2001, and 2008-09 and counting. The graphic traces how long it took once the economy began to shed jobs until it returned to original overall number of jobs. One caveat: these are raw numbers, not adjusted for overall population increases, so the relationship between the three lines might adjust subtly if you plotted job losses per population. But the trajectories wouldn’t change.

Let that picture sink in.

We are riding the green line right now. This period of job loss already exceeds by an order of magnitude anything anyone my age really remembers. And the overall economic condition is different – and far worse – than anyone except the very eldest among us remember. The economy has already been in recession for more than a year, and the downward slide is accelerating. Most modern recessions run their course within about a year, as you can see here.

No recession since the Great Depression has lasted even 600 days. But 400 or so days into this one, no one sees an end yet, and it’s getting worse. I can’t emphasize that enough.

Friday morning, I ended up in a civil and intellectually stimulating argument on WLKF with Mayhem-in-the-Morning host Seth Mela. (I was listening because my wife Julie was on to promote First Friday. It was a little surreal to talk economics with guys who had called her a “hottie” a few minutes before, but I couldn’t help myself.) Mela had been attacking the government spending in the proposed versions of stimulus plan, echoing the Rush, Hannity, and Joe-Not-A-Plumber mantra of pork barrel, private sector, socialism, etc….I swear, it’s like a chant at a football game.

And here at MI4, I noticed Mr. MacMeekin recently used the same spiel. Echoing Rush’s party line, both Mela and Mr. MacMeekin insist that the New Deal didn’t help pull us out of the Depression. MacMeekin even goes farther, saying that World War II didn’t do it either. Only the conditions caused by World War II and the Depression lifted us out of the Depression, he argues, which I find to be a classic angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin bit of obtuse thinking. It’s sort of like saying the gas in my car doesn’t work, it only allows me to drive from one place to another.

And somehow the socialist Democrats are responsible for all the bad stuff that happened from the Depression forward and none of the good stuff. Like I said, it’s a very strange post.

But it makes for a useful jumping off point for rummaging through the nihilistic silliness Rush-the-Plumber conservatives are now spouting. What follows is very long. I’m sorry. It’s as much a way to collect my thoughts for future use as it is a post, but I hope you’ll read through it. It’s a piece-by-piece examination of the general criticisms one hears of the stimulus plan and my reaction to them.

1) Why do we need a stimulus? And did the New Deal work? Actually, I’ll take the second question first. I am neither an economist nor a historian. But I can read graphics and assess arguments. Herbert Hoover, a Republican, was president between 1929-1933. His record combating the Depression is more complicated than the popular perception that he did nothing and just let everything play out. But he clearly looked at direct government intervention far more skeptically than did the subsequent Franklin Roosevelt administration. And it wasn’t until the very end of his term that Hoover backed a major stimulus bill, which Roosevelt, a Democrat, greatly expanded on with the New Deal. So did the late Hoover and then Roosevelt approach work?

MacMeekin says no. Key quote: “Massive federal programs of the Roosevelt Era were more an effort to improve conditions than they were a statistical success.”

First reponse to that: Economies do not exist to produce statistics; they exist to “improve conditions.” What else the hell is the point?

Second response: Consider this string of unemployment numbers from the U.S Commerce Department: 1929-3.1 percent; 1931-16.1 percent; 1933-25.2 percent; 1937-13.8 percent; 1938-16.5 percent; 1940-13.9 percent. You tell me, did it work? It’s always difficult to prove causation, as opposed to correlation. But clearly, New Deal policies coincided with a time that saw the unemployment rate drop from 25 percent to 13.9 percent by the eve of World War II, while the rough approach advocated by Rush-the-Plumber crowd these days concided with a time that saw it go from 3 percent to 25 percent. Those seem like statistics to me, but perhaps Mr. MacMeekin can explain how they are not.

Liberal economists make a convincing – to me – argument that the recession between 1937 and 1938 came about because Roosevelt bowed to pressure to cut spending before the economy was fully ready for it. But even that recession didn’t send the economy back into collapse. And WW II finished things off by artificially repressing demand and hyperstimulating production.

Perhaps most importantly, people alive at the time perceived that the New Deal worked because they kept voting for Roosevelt over and over again, setting the tone for a national economic and social consensus that lasted until Reagan and probably would still be in place without the backlash to the civil rights movement and 60s era social turbulence. I’ll take my chances with the Roosevelt approach, which also gave millions of idled men something productive to do and left behind lasting, valuable public facililites. I grew up across the street from one in Palatka, FL: the Ravine Gardens State Park, built through a New Deal program. I still, from time to time, go walking and picnicking there with my parents and kids when we visit.

Why do we need a stimulus? is a related, but different question. It has everything to do with two numbers: $2 trillion and 0. The first number is the amount of domestic product that economists predict that will be idled over the next two years. The second is where is the Federal Reserve’s benchmark interest rate stands right now, meaning it can’t be lowered. Most, if not all, recessions in recent history resolved themselves after the Fed lowered interest rates and made money cheaper, thus spurring investment and spending. Virtually every economist I’ve read agrees that interest rate changes (known as monetary policy) have far more power to affect the economy than normal tax cuts and spending plans (known as fiscal policy). However, because of the zero percent interest rate, the Fed cannot do what it has done in every other recent recession. That leaves only fiscal policy with the capability of bridging the $2 trillion, 14 percent gap between real and potential GDP. In that gap lies misery.

To his credit, Mr. MacMeekin very accurately describes the macroeconomic problem. “Today we have a glut – a massive oversupply of houses, autos, computers, appliances, most everything.” Yes. That is true. The credit bubble drove the economy into overcapacity. Mr. MacMeekin completely misunderstands what caused this, and I didn’t see anything resembling a solution or even willingness to address it beyond letting a lot of people die off. But he does accurately describe the problem. My own feeling is that we need to manage the process of matching capacity with real aggragate demand in a way that preserves our police forces, hospitals, water and sewer plants, schools, transportation and energy grids, and basic society in a form that we recognize in 10 years.

Government spending, to my mind, is the only possible tool available to us to accomplish that. All other countries are tanking right now as well. There’s no one to swoop in with money to buy our stuff. And we don’t have money to buy their stuff. Tax cuts right now will just add to the overcapacity. People will either save them, which provides little economic activity, or they will spend them in an artificial boomlet that will prop up capacity temporarily while producing nothing useful. Giving a tax cut to someone who loses their job is not nearly as helpful as allowing that worker to keep his or her job by direct government investment in production.

We will finance this stimulus spending by borrowing more money, which, of course, is dangerous. But we are very fortunate in that U.S. Treasury bills are one of the very few places where people and countries who do have money feel safe putting it. We may eventually very well default on our bonds one day or see a dollar devaluation. That’s a risk. But understand, there is no private sector job creation right now, and it’s hard to see where it will begin again. I think the almost inconceivable social risks of sitting around and watching unemployment surge to 25 percent in five years outweigh the fiscal risks. But I’m definitely out of my field of expertise here, and I’m open to reasoned argument.

2) Stimulus and Pork: Perhaps the most annoyingly stupid aspect of this debate is the, “Oh, it’s all pork, not stimulus, yada, yada…” line.

Take one of the celebrated “pork” projects: Resodding and landscaping the national mall. For a relatively small amount of money, that project would have helped a sod producer, landscaping designers, and landscape workers. And it would have refurbished a vital national symbol that has been allowed to wither into embarrassing condition without creating new overcapacity. But no, Republicans and so-called centrist Democrats would rather give tax cuts to people in the hope that they’ll create new capacity on top of the overcapacity we already have and must destroy.

As President Obama said, spending, of any kind, is stimulus. Certainly, there are debates over what’s most effective. But nowhere is it written that road-building is stimulus, and everything else is pork. That’s just head-smashingly stupid. Read this terrific story in the New York Times about Japan’s decade-plus-long economic morass, which avoided depression through massive and often wasteful stimulus spending focused on beautiful bridges-to-nowhere and other capacity-increasing projects.

Money quote from the piece:

Moreover, it matters what gets built: Japan spent too much on increasingly wasteful roads and bridges, and not enough in areas like education and social services, which studies show deliver more bang for the buck than infrastructure spending. (Emphasis mine)

“It is not enough just to hire workers to dig holes and then fill them in again,” said Toshihiro Ihori, an economics professor at the University of Tokyo. “One lesson from Japan is that public works get the best results when they create something useful for the future.”

Infuriatingly, the Senate version of the stimulus bill trades out direct aid for states, almost all of which would go to help stave off major health care and education service cuts, in favor of pointless tax cuts. That state aid would go immediately into economic circulation by paying doctors, nurses, or teachers, and it would provide a vital service in the process by keeping people healthy and/or educated. Without it, the Polk School District will be furloughing employees. And much worse will come next year.

Building, say, an unnecessary freight superhighway designed to give a private company a dominant future business position with $600 million in tax money isn’t as effective as sustaining the vital economic and social activity around which communities have built their existence.

3) TARP and Stimulus: These are not the same things. Not. The. Same. Things. Mela and Mr. MacMeekin conflate them because Rush conflates them because people hate the TARP, otherwise known as the bank bailout. I also lament the TARP, but the Rush-the-Plumber crowd does not acknowledge the very plausible alternative to it. Had we definitively defeated the baliout back in the fall, it’s entirely likely, though not certain, that massive portions of the nation’s financial system would have gone bankrupt. The practical impacts of that – ATMs not working, runs on banks, insurance policies gone, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria – would have caused the government to nationalize banking because there would have been no other choice. I probably would have preferred that becasue we may still have to do it, and at least we’d have it over with. But it’s a very tough call. No TARP very, very likely would have meant nationalized banking and insurance. Which of you good conservatives is down with that?

4) Socialism: And honestly, when did socialist become the rhetorical equal to child molester? What is it you think socialism is? Isn’t it just the population, through tax money levied by its elected representatives, paying for and administering a service for the benefit of itself. Guess what, folks. You already live in a highly socialized country. We have socialized national defense, socialized law enforcement, socialized firefighting, socialized foreign intelligence gathering, socialized space travel, socialized water and sewer treatment, socialized enforcement of private sector contracts through the socialized court system and that socialized police force I metioned before. We drive on socialized roads, take our children to socialized parks, and often bury our dead in socialized cemeteries. We have socialized insurance of private sector bank deposits. And we already have a half-socialized health care system. The best, most financially efficient health care system in America, the VA health system, is completely socialized. Socialism encroaches on and/or enhances our quality of life every day. World War II, which most people other than Mr. MacMeekin consider the ultimate nail in the coffin of the Depression, was the greatest act of socialism in the history of mankind – by far. The Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Europe and set the conditions for a half-century of peace and prosperity on that heretofore fractious continent, is probably the second.

Go back and look at that recession history graphic. Mr. MacMeekin and Seth Mela think economic conditions were better before all those socialists started trying to provide basic economic and social security, before the hyperstimulus of World War II worked its grisly, murderous magic. Really? There were eight recessions in the 27 years between 1902 and the crash of 1929. Four of them lasted longer than the longest of the 10 recessions in the 63 years since World War II ended. Eight longer recessions in 27 years is better than 10 shorter in this 63-year post war period? Really? You want to go back to the pre-Depression national economic and social structure? I do not. Most importantly, I don’t want my kids returning there.

There are completely legitimate arguments to have over the role of government. European countries tend to inject it more heavily in their societies than we do – see media, telecommunications, health care, public transit, energy production, and private sector job protection. But don’t kid yourselves, the difference in their brand of socialism and ours – even under St. Reagan – has always been a matter of degree, not kind. We’re not nearly the rugged individualists we pretend to be, thank goodness.

6) Depressions Kill and Destroy. A couple of years ago, I took a walk with my grandmother and other members of my family to the homestead where my deceased grandfather lived as a boy. The lot’s within sight of the St. Johns River. The remains of the house stand within a mini-wilderness of untended trees and underbrush. You can tell the house was once a nice, very comfortable place to live, probably about the size of my own house. My great-grandfather was a prosperous agricultural businessman in land boom Florida. Then the land bust and Depression came. It ruined him, and he sank into alcoholism. My grandfather, as a teenager, found my great- grandfather dead one morning not far from this house. Watching my grandmother walk through a place that represented so much loss for the man she loved was an incredibly moving experience. I’ll never forget it.

My great-grandfather died more than seven decades ago. No one has ever cleared the house and built on that valuable piece of property. It stands as a monument to the awesome and lasting destructive power of economic collapse.

One of my favorite quotations – which I’ve heard attributed to Karl Jung – is: “Those who will not learn will be made to feel.” I don’t pretend to have the answers to what’s coming. I don’t for a second think any stimulus package alone will fix what ails us. But it can help treat symptoms. It can help keep people alive and reasonably productive, while sustaining industries and services vital for our long-term well-being. And it can occupy some of the hordes of young men the marketplace is disgorging into idleness. The alternatives to massive government intervention is – for me – too hideous to contemplate. There’s this sense out there in the ether that this long overdue reckoning is just a matter of taking our flat screens to the pawn shop and keeping those wretched poor kids from wearing the expensive shoes they have no business wearing. We’ll all just tighten our belts and mosey happily onward. It’s like people think the Great Depression was some sort of rustic camping trip where we all learned thrift and got back to nature. It wasn’t.

A good argument can be made that the global economic trauma of the Great Depression brought us Nazisim, Fascism, and internationally viable Communism. It can be argued that nuclear weapons and 6 million murdered Jews are just as much monuments to the Depression as the ruins of my grandfather’s childhood home. What will be the monuments of this looming depression, in a world of far more people, far more heavily armed?

Those are the stakes.

I have a good, relatively stable job, good health care, a ridiculously reasonable house payment, and a paid off 10-year-old Honda that runs like a top. But I know well how much luck contributed to this hard won security and how fragile it is. The misfortunes of friends and acquaintances and faceless people you read about in the shrinking newspaper are always just a heartbeat away from my own life. It’s like that for all of us.

You’re certainly under no obligation to take my word for anything. And I encourage you not to. But don’t take anybody else’s either. You owe it to yourselves, your children, and communities to get informed. Turn off Rush. Read. Think. Don’t just spout “socialism, pork, libruls, and TARP,” as if repeating them often enough turns the chant into an argument or a point. By all means, refute anything I say because I want to be wrong about all of this. But don’t bring weak factless aspersions backed by rants on the Sean Hannity show. If you want to blow up government efforts to stave off a new depression, at least have a good, soundly argued reason. Come strong, because this is not a damn game.

The school has placed a survey online to get the opinions of PCC alumni, students, employees and community members.

Here are your options:

Central Florida State College (CFSC)
Cypress State College (CSC)
Florida Central State College (FCSC)
James K. Polk State College (JKPSC)
Peace River State College (PRSC)
Polk College (PC)
Polk Community State College (PCSC)
Polk County State College (PCSC)
Polk State College (PSC)
Sunshine State College (SSC)

The survey asks that you pick no more than three, but doesn’t give you the chance to rate them. You do have the option to write in a favorite.

I see only one includes “community” and only one lacks “state.” I also note the survey writer made sure to note the initials of the various names. I wonder if they’ve checked which .edu domains are taken?

I can only imagine the John Denver hit, “Sunshine on My Shoulders” would become the school song if the Sunshine State College option is chosen.

Note: Thanks to Darby Critendon for the heads up on the survey.

photo credit: Tom Hagerty for MetroI4News.com

USF (Lakeland) Polytechnic hosted the FIRST Tech Challenge this weekend. It’s a mid-level robotics competition for high school students. Over 15 teams had a long day at the USFP campus. Team check-in was at 7:30 am, the qualifying rounds began at 10:15 am after the inspections and the final elimination matches were 4:30pm-6:00pm. The students had very creative names for the teams such as S.P.A.M., Ro Ro Ro Ur Bot, Wehrmacht and Georgia’s Left Ear. Tom and I were both on had to take pictures and I made sure to take video. Enjoy!

The compeition even had a 3 camera set up so that the audience could have a great view as well. This is a sample of what the audience saw –

For more photos and video from RoboBattle see Battle of the ‘Bots on our sister site LakelandLocal.com

photo credit: Tom Hagerty for Metro i4 News

The Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn’t totally agree with the school board’s assessment.

What happened? Well, two months ago the feds raided McKinzie’s Facilities and Operations Division, the division which doles out hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to a limited number of contractors, monies intended for school projects.

The top man in this division, Bob Williams, Assistant Superintendent of Facilities, his son Rob, Project Coordinator, and Terry Collins, Director of Maintenance, each resigned earlier this month.

Just before they were to be fired.

Ron Ciranna, Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources, confirmed that Bob, Rob, and Terry were to be dismissed, but would not reveal the reasons why.

As if we have no clue to what the reasons might be.

Here’s the saddest part. Responding to news reporter’s questions, Dr. McKinzie said she was not to blame. That she had, “Repeatedly asked Williams for information, which he failed to deliver.” She followed those comments with, “Our oversight of the Facilities Division will improve in the following months, and we will be more objective in selecting contractors.”

McKinzie, who has had the watch for over four years, and has repeatedly asked Williams for weekly information concerning the status of school projects, which he failed to produce, and yet she considers herself blameless? If the feds hadn’t raided the joint, when do you suppose McKinzie might have suspected something?

When will the School Board react to this situation? Her managerial skills have been sadly exposed, at a cost to the taxpayer of…how much? Big money, certainly.

Dr. McKinzie, please resign. Leave quietly. If not, and if the School Board fails to act they, too, will feel the brunt of voter’s disdain. Maybe. The voters of Polk County are…very often…um…what’s the word?

Am I too harsh? If so, what culpability should be assigned to our Superintendent?