Mom, apple pie and education budgets
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- May
- 16
  As voters prepare to cast ballots on school budgets and board members Tuesday, New York State United Teachers has launched a $1 million ad campaign urging them “to remember that opportunity for children, good jobs and a healthy economy are all part of the American Dream—and depend on passing school budgets on May 20.â€Â  Â
  The commercial explains that “times are tough,â€Â but its message is to “pass on†opportunity to children by voting yes. (It does this by showing a senior citizen, mother and businesswoman receiving and passing on paper airplanes with messages to vote yes, and a young girl holding a “Vote yes†sign—written on a paper airplane she opened up—against a school window.
  “Children deserve every opportunity to succeed,†NYSUT President Richard Iannuzzi said in a statement. “Supporting school budgets is the best way to provide children with the resources they need to be successful, to go on to college and compete for high-quality jobs here in New York State.â€
  The commercial is airing in eight upstate markets and on cable television on Long Island and in the New York City suburbs. It can be viewed here.
  NYSUT members will be making thousands and thousands of calls through organized phone banks, mailing out postcards, fliers and letters, and “campaigning†door-to-door and at community and school events.
  The school budget pass rate was 95.3 percent last year, an all-time record.
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on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 2:42 pm by Cara Matthews.
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May 18th, 2008 at 12:34 am
When we built the St Lawrence seaway, we doomed the Hudson shad.
The shad are anadromous, meaning they spawn locally, but don’t live here. Like salmon, they go to sea to live their lives.
At sea, in mid-Atlantic, the Japanese, Portugese, and Russian factory ship fleets have killed off all the larger herring species. (Yes, herring are large,.... yes, shad are smaller herring).
The result?
Those big fleets, of prime importance to their home nations’ GDP, now go after shad, which they used to ignore. You are not gonna stop this, without WWIII. These countries depend on this industry.
Its just a fact of evolutionary life, that mankind has eaten all the big herring to extinction. Its now a sad new world, where shad are the target.
So what do these shad find, when they come home to Tarrytown bay?
They find the waters stripped clean by zebra mussel infestations. The zebra mussel, native to the Black Sea, was inoculated into America’s ecosystem by Russian ships blowing ballast in the St Lawrence seaway, in the 1960’s.
The zebra mussel horde filter-feeds, processing all the water in the Hudson estuary in 1.4 days, according to Lamont-Doherty, stripping out ALL THE FOOD.
1.4 days.
The water, stripped of all its microscopic food supplies by the zebras, affords little comfort to the few remaining shad, stumbling home from the Portugese decimation they just suffered on the high seas.
So they evolve away. Its a new day, a new post-civilization estuary.
I myself deeply regret it.
But…. Don’t give me any lying bullshit about Indian Point hurting these fish.
That would be a purely fictional case, made up to get money for Riverkeeper ( Al Matthiessen makes $298,000 per year).