Mario’s Kid to NY Teacher’s Unions: Suck It!

Yes, I’m stealing “Mario’s Kid” from the fake Shelly Silver account on Twitter. It cracks me up.

Anyway, Governor Cuomo is announcing his budget for New York tomorrow and apparently he’s using it to push for education reform, specifically the arcane concept of tying teachers pay to job performance. How? By tying “…4 percent state aid increases promised to the districts in last year’s budget — some $800 million — to adoption of the teacher-evaluation system developed by the state Education Department, which has been blocked from city schools by a teachers-union lawsuit.”

Long story short, if the districts don’t comply, they don’t get the money.

I know the teachers union hate anything that requires their members to have to do their jobs well in order to keep them, and the Democrat controlled Assembly hates it because the unions give them lots of money so they hate what they’re told to hate. But whenever I hear “performance pay” come up, I think back to high school Chemistry.
Continue reading

365 Days in the Life of Rep. Tom Reed

Most cats didn’t hear of Rep. Tom Reed until the Tickle Me Massa scandal (Google it), but a lot of us were fans of the former Corning Mayor well before that, so there is a great deal of pride to see him getting national attention. Granted the NY-29 might as well be part of Canada as far as us on The L.I. are concerned, but I’m still a fan. :-)

Just in the past few months, Speaker Boehner chose him to be one of the conferee’s of the payroll-tax bill (don’t get me started), and Politico named him runner-up of the Freshman classes “Most Likely to Succeed.”

As his sophomore year starts, Reed recently interviewed with National Journal to reflect back on his time so far in Washington…

Continue reading

Interview w/ Dan Bongino (R-MD)

Mitt Romney Ad Defends Candidate’s Record at Bain

Smart move…

Ricky Perry’s New Campaign Commercial: Vulture Capitalism

If we reached the silly season of the Presidential Primaries, let it be the silly season for blog posts too…

Battleground: Westchester

The news coming out of Westchester (which is what we on The L.I. consider “upstate”) is that Democrat Senator Suzi Oppenheimer has decided not to run for re-election. Local businessman Bob Cohen, who came close to winning in 2010, has already declared his intentions to run for this now open seat.

Of course we’re still waiting to see what the new redistricting map looks like, but this makes Westchester an interesting battleground. Yes, it’s a heavily Democrat area, and President Obama won with 60%+ last time. But let’s look what has happened since then…
Continue reading