Listening to Tom Waits, Down there by the train, and Colin ponders, “Does he have a frog in his throat while he’s singing this?”

Arne Duncan (meet the new boss…) suggests that states had better not get in the way of charter schools, as if the hold up with charter schools is occurring at the state level.

It’s as if he didn’t spend time running Chicago, squealing at every moment about the lack of state support. One of the few things that state legislatures WILL support is charter schools: doing so sticks it to teacher unions, school district bureaucracies, and allows many business types an entry into the education trough. The hold up for charter schools in Philadelphia doesn’t come from the state but from the SDP, who has control over how many charters they will grant.

There’s a Paul Krugman editorial today detailing some of the ways that the Obama administration has alienated the left; I think more could be made about the decision to go with Duncan as opposed to someone like Linda Darling-Hammond and the betrayal that many educators feel about Duncan’s work so far.

[C]oming to the ballpark this time of year, being nervous, is an unbelievable feeling. When I was in Philadelphia, … you get to September and … we’re out there trying to tell ourselves we’re going to try to win today and be the spoiler. You know what? [Expletive] that. That’s not that much fun.

Found here (great RS blog); original article here.

So we owned a Gran Torino, one not nearly as nice as Clint’s, but still, it was cool to see it again in this awesome film.

I loved his garage — a lifetime of buying and using tools — his second chance at fathering, and the way the film presents teaching about tools and fixing things…

I also thought it a smart rejoinder to the recent Obama decision to move away from home ownership and towards supporting urban rentals. Yeah, the Clint character might be racist and a pig, but he cared deeply about his own property. It cuts both ways, I think; there’s something to be said for a neighborhood of homeowners who subtly pressure each other to keep their properties up. Apart from NYC/SF/Seattle, I’ve not seen many cities where there are communities of renters that are places you’d want to live.

And looking at the various landlords who own places on my block: it’s not about making a community to them, it’s about getting paid, about their building as an investment, not as a home. Only a pretty special landlord can do both.