I don’t endorse political candidates all the time, but once in a while I get asked to. In this case, I didn’t even get asked – but recent events in the news made my decision for me. (For those of you who don’t live in the Sierra Foothills in Northern California, feel free to skip this post if it bores you!)

Nevada County has had a long history of drama in its Clerk-Recorder’s office. This is an important and critical function in county government. They protect your identity when you get a birth certificate, wedding license or death certificate. They manage the safe transfer of property between buyers and sellers. And they protect the foundation of our representative democracy by running our elections.

The Clerk-Recorder before this one, who was appointed to the job, made a bunch of idiotic mistakes in the process of running elections. Then it was discovered that she was moonlighting for another city two hours away and collecting double salary.

Fortunately, she resigned. But her replacement, a fellow I’ve never met named Greg Diaz, has continued the drama. He’s gone through four assistant recorders in the last fifteen months. And in the last couple of weeks, a new story exploded on the scene: Greg Diaz is now the only County Clerk-Recorder in the state being sued in federal court for fraud.

More on that in a second.

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It’s still hard for me to believe that after New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts, the White House is refusing to listen and intends to try to ram through a $2 to $3 trillion dollar subsidized health insurance bill that the public doesn’t want.

(And yes, it is $2 to $3 trillion. The CBO still hasn’t scored this proposal because there isn’t enough detail. But we know relationally that the last proposal was in the $2 trillion range. And just because you delay the implementation of your program for four or five years doesn’t mean that you can cut the ten year cost in half. This is the kind of flim-flammery that we put corporate executives in prison for, and for good reason.)

Here’s the excerpt of the Wall Street Journal piece today (hat tip to Fred for sending this my way):

A mere three days before President Obama’s supposedly bipartisan health-care summit, the White House [Monday] released a new blueprint that Democrats say they will ram through Congress with or without Republican support. So after election defeats in Virginia, New Jersey and even Massachusetts, and amid overwhelming public opposition, Democrats have decided to give the voters what they don’t want anyway. Ah, the glory of ‘progressive’ governance and democratic consent.

‘The President’s Proposal,’ as the 11-page White House document is headlined, is in one sense a notable achievement: It manages to take the worst of both the House and Senate bills and combine them into something more destructive. It includes more taxes, more subsidies and even less cost control than the Senate bill. And it purports to fix the special-interest favors in the Senate bill not by eliminating them — but by expanding them to everyone. …

The larger political message of this new proposal is that Mr. Obama and Democrats have no intention of compromising on an incremental reform, or of listening to Republican, or any other, ideas on health care. They want what they want, and they’re going to play by Chicago Rules and try to dragoon it into law on a narrow partisan vote via Congressional rules that have never been used for such a major change in national policy. If you want to know why Democratic Washington is ‘ungovernable,’ this is it.

Republicans aren’t smart enough to have designed this great of a playbook for sweeping the 2010 elections. I honestly thought President Obama was an exceedingly smart guy when he was elected (despite my disagreements with him on policy). His inability to heed multiple warning calls has dramatically changed that perception.

Last week, I tweeted about how “Music City” (Nashville) united to help Haiti in the wake of the horrible earthquake that devastated that country in January.

Now they’ve released the music video. (Mobile, feed and e-mail readers: the embedded video is above.)

This entire project was the brainchild of Christian music artist Michael W. Smith, and the results are simply stunning.

Buy “Come Together Now” today – 100% of all proceeds go to Haiti.

LA Weekly has an investigative piece on over 1,000 unqualified and incompetent teachers that the Los Angeles Unified School District simply can’t fire because of unions putting their own interests ahead of student success.

In pursuing a firing, school officials rely on a teacher’s formal classroom evaluations and, sometimes, disciplinary write-ups, to file an "accusation and statement of charges," which lays out an educator’s teaching problems. The teacher can then ask for a decision on his or her case from the Commission on Professional Competence, a panel convened by the state Office of Administrative Hearings. Either side can appeal the outcome of that hearing in California Superior Court, and, ultimately, in higher courts.

It cost the district roughly $3.5 million to try to fire seven teachers because of the cost of hiring outside lawyers with special expertise, administrative overhead, paying ongoing salaries for each teacher during the lengthy legal battles, and other expenses. Documents show only one instance in the past 10 years in which an LAUSD teacher accepted his firing and left without a fight or big payment.

Just a few blocks from LAUSD’s skyscraper headquarters, Los Angeles City Hall’s approach to firing public employees provides a stark contrast to protections enjoyed by teachers, also public employees. Despite civil-service protections, City Hall fires from its 48,000-plus workforce of garbage, parks, street-services, engineering, utilities and other employees more than 80 tenured workers annually. During the past decade, in which LAUSD fired four failing teachers, 800 to 1,000 underperforming civil service–protected workers were fired at City Hall. City Personnel Department General Manager Margaret Whelan says nobody is paid to leave. She was dumbfounded that LAUSD is paying to dislodge teachers, saying, "That’s ridiculous. I can’t believe that. Golly, it makes no sense. Some are not even mediocre, they’re horrible."

Caprice Young, founder of the nonprofit California Charter Schools Association, was LAUSD school board president until 2003. She saw, behind closed doors, what the public can’t: the "dance of the lemons," a term that broadly describes controversial tactics LAUSD utilizes to cope with tenured teachers who can’t teach but, under the current system, cannot be fired. Those tactics include not only paying them to leave, but quietly transferring bad teachers to other, unsuspecting schools or repeatedly and fruitlessly "retraining" them while they continue to teach, sometimes harming the educations of thousands of children.

Young believes the inability of the schools to oust poor L.A. teachers is playing a key role in L.A.’s emergence as an epicenter of the charter-school movement. "One year with a bad teacher puts a kid a year, or two, behind the other kids," Young says. "If a parent sees their child has a lemon teacher, if they can get them into another school, they will."

…

President Barack Obama has begun pushing for tougher evaluations of teachers, tied to their classroom test scores, and for direct comparison of teachers with their colleagues along the same hallway. As those and other reforms aimed at teacher quality begin to find acceptance in other parts of the nation, however, it seems a stretch to imagine LAUSD, the district so big it educates one in 10 California children, joining in.

"The power of the union [and] the California Teachers Association in this state has definitely tipped the balance in favor of protecting the incompetent teacher," says Collins. Somehow, she says, "Parents and students need to know they have a voice."

Nobody should have a job that is impossible to get fired from for incompetence. This lack of accountability is an affront to taxpayers across our state, a disservice to our kids and an insult to the ideals of public education.

Photo Credit: LA Weekly

Did you know that Google makes it possible for you to use Gmail on a personal or business domain name? It’s called Google Apps for Your Domain, and if you already have a domain name, it’s completely free for up to 50 e-mail addresses!

It’s a little bit technical, but I wanted to share the steps here for you to set this up for yourself!

1. Buy your domain name. There are a variety of domain name providers out there, some cheaper than $10/year, depending on the services you want and whether you’re comfortable with managing the domain yourself.
2. Get access to your “DNS” settings. DNS is a little bit like a giant phone book. It translates friendly names like “aaronklein.com” into the numbers that represent the particular servers that host my web site. It also establishes where the e-mail sent to that domain name will be routed to. You’ll need access to edit your DNS settings to tell your mail to go to Google’s servers.
3. Establish your Google Apps account. You can sign up for Google Apps Basic (the free version limited to 50 e-mail boxes) completely free.
4. Update your “MX” records. In your Google Apps account, they’ll give you a list of “MX” records to put into your “DNS” (MX stands for “mail exchange” and that’s how the internet knows to send your mail to Google’s servers). You put in more than one so if one of Google’s servers are down, your mail keeps flowing.
5. Verify your domain with a “CNAME” record. Google Apps will ask you to verify your domain name to ensure you actually own it. They’ll give you a special code to create what is called a “CNAME” record. You do this in the same place you put your “MX” records…by editing your DNS settings.
6. Create your Google mailboxes. In the Google Apps administrator app, you can create up to 50 different user accounts (which double as e-mail boxes). You can also create “aliases” (for example, if you want jim@jim.com and j-dude@jim.com to come to the same mailbox, you can create a mailbox called jim and an alias for that mailbox called j-dude).

That’s it! You’ve now got Gmail for your own domain name. Enjoy.

I’ve written about this before, and Newsweek notes it in a recent article: big business is parting ways with the Republican Party. I think this is long overdue, frankly.

Take health-care reform. From the time the bill hit Congress, Republicans found themselves opposite big industry interests. From the drugmakers to the doctors to the insurers, every major player in the health-care battle declared themselves willing to work with Democrats to enact some variant on reform. Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, were almost universally opposed. Health-care reform advocates eventually dug up a handful of Republican notables to support reform, and in a radio address, President Obama singled out four for special notice: former health and human services secretaries Louis Sullivan and Tommy Thompson and former Senate majority leaders Bill Frist and Bob Dole. But, as reported by The Washington Examiner’s Timothy Carney, it turned out that each of those Republican defectors had direct financial connections to the health-care industry, either as lobbyists or corporate consultants. In other words, these were folks whose allegiances to industry trumped their allegiances to their political party.

Congressman Paul Ryan and Senator Jim DeMint make the case for why…

That’s souring relationships on the Hill. Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, one of the House’s most economically conservative members, says that he’s talking tougher with corporations than ever before. The problem, he argues, is that industry has drifted away from its support of free enterprise. "As long as big business was defending free markets, we didn’t have a problem," he says. The trend now is for individual businesses and industry groups to push for regulation that is structured in such a way that they come out ahead—or make competitors worse off.

Ryan and DeMint believe that the Republican Party bears the blame for the current state of affairs. While in power, Republicans became too used to making bargains with business, such as the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, which provided the pharmaceutical industry with a windfall at taxpayers’ expense. As a result, the party got "caught up in trying to win different industries by doing something for them," says DeMint. Now "established firms are used to cutting deals with the party in power."

Free markets are the key driver of prosperity for all and are the foundation this country has been built upon. Cutting deals for regulations that promote one industry or one company over another has nothing to do with either capitalism or free markets.

I’m not sure if this is a true story or not, but the underlying principle is infallible: you cannot multiply wealth by dividing it. Special thanks to my friend Allison for sending this my way!

A college economics professor made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had once failed an entire class.

That class had insisted that the free market had failed, and under a “fairer system” no one would be poor and no one would be rich – a great equalizer.

The professor replied, “OK, we’ll have an experiment in this class using that system.”

All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A, unless those were the averages.

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who had studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were quite pleased with themselves.

As the second test rolled around, the students who had studied little studied even less and the ones who had studied hard decided they wanted the free ride they were entitled to as well, so they also studied very little.

The second test average was a D!

No one was happy.

When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was, you guessed it, the average grade was F.

The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

To their great surprise, every student failed the class, and the professor told them that their system of economics, socialism, would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great. But when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.

Chuck Whitten of KNCO NewsTalk 830 did a story on the Sierra College budget challenges. They helpfully post their radio pieces on the web in written format, so I thought I’d share it here.

The Sierra Community College District Board of Trustees has heard public comment on proposed cuts in district jobs, salaries, programs and services. The board needs to cut ten-point-seven million dollars from the budget for the fiscal year that begins July first. The proposed cuts include a five percent across the board salary cut, six unpaid furlough days for non-teaching staff, elimination of 35 jobs, elimination of six sports, and elimination of three programs. District Board Member, Aaron Klein, says the board questions the choice of programs to be eliminated, "The issue that the board had on this past Tuesday evening was, we don’t quite understand why the three programs that were slated for closure, construction, agriculture, and automotive technology are the correct choices."

Klein says the board has sixty days before it has to make a decision. He says the board has asked the administration to take another look at the proposed program cuts, "What we requested of our staff was to go and review our options and come back to us with alternatives, different cuts, maybe private industry support for those programs, and find a way that we could potentially save those programs, or at the very least, keep them in some kind of skeletal form, so that we can bring them back when better fiscal times come back to our budget."

Klein says a crowd of several hundred people showed up at Tuesday’s board meeting, and about 85 of those expressed their concerns to board members. He says he’s worried that this is not the end of cuts for community colleges in California, especially since the state is facing a 20-billion dollar shortfall going into budget negotiations for the coming year.

I want to tackle an important issue and clear up some confusion about the issue of “declining enrollment” with this post.

As you know, Sierra College’s governance groups recommended the closure of three programs to the Board of Trustees. The Board is willing to make tough choices to ensure that we budget sustainably and protect access to college for the largest number of students possible. Yet the Board didn’t feel it had enough data to approve the recommendation, so it ordered a 60-day review of our options to try and save the programs.

There were a variety of criteria that the governance groups used to come up with those recommendations – including unfunded equipment needs, our ability to fund a program that prepares a graduating student for the jobs that will exist over the next ten years, the productivity and cost of delivery in the program, and enrollment trends.

For the programs in question, there is undeniably a trend of declining enrollment. That alone doesn’t mean a program should close. (If a program can be streamlined to better prepare students for the jobs that exist on the other end, it can often be saved – but that does take resources.) But there is no question of the trend.

I’ve heard from many people, including this letter to the editor, that the programs can’t have declining enrollment, because the classes are full. This sounds convincing, but it’s not true. Let me try and help clear it up.

Let’s take a fictional career training program called “Underwater Basket Weaving.” Three years ago it had 400 students enrolled, two years ago 350, and last year 300. Can we agree that is declining enrollment?

In our fictional program, let’s say we had 6 different classes that we offered in the program – covering all the different facets of becoming an underwater basket weaver. Then assume that we offer many of those classes multiple times, at different hours of the day, to handle the demand. Let’s say there are a total of 20 course sections in this program. 400 students, divided by 20 sections, is 20 students per section.

Let’s pause for a minute and consider what happened at Sierra College in the 2009-10 fiscal year (all the cuts we are talking about now are for the 2010-11 fiscal year).

In 2009-10, the state passed massive cuts as well, but we were able to fill the hole in three ways: (a) cutting spending in the operational areas of the college, (b) the one-time use of rainy day reserves, and (c) cutting about 600 course sections across all of our disciplines.

When I was first elected to the Board, we had 82% of our seats filled – one of the state’s worst productivity rates. In effect, we were paying teachers 100% salary to teach 82% of the seats in their classroom. Last year, that number reached 96% and today, that number is 99%.

Back to underwater basket weaving. Let’s assume that last year, because of the enrollment declining from 400 to 300, the college reduced the number of available sections from 20 to 10. (They might even have the same six classes, but they are offering some of them once and only a few of them twice.) Now, divide 300 students by 10 classes. You get 30 students per class, or a “full” class.

So now you can see the difference. The fill rate of a class is not an indicator of a program’s enrollment trend.

Our job at Sierra College is to make sure we’re offering job training programs that are training students for jobs that actually exist, will pay livable wages, and will build our economy. We also have the responsibility to ensure that the programs are targeted at people trying to get job skills, and not just folks pursuing a hobby.

The final determination for the three programs in question is still unclear, but I’m hopeful they will each offer our management team a workable plan to shrink their costs, build private sector support or dependable revenue streams, refocus and streamline their curriculum, and return to growth. If we can find the resources to give them that chance, it’s my guess the Board would love to do so.

As many of you know, we have an international multi-cultural family and we love it. My son Spencer was born in South Korea…my daughter Emma was born in Ethiopia…and my sister Dora was born in Romania.

So last night at the Olympic opening ceremonies, we were cheering for all four teams that our family represents as they walked into the arena in Vancouver. It’s going to be a fun Olympic games to watch!