Reader and ex-teacher Jennifer Prochaska writes in response to this letter last week that criticized teachers:

First and foremost, the gripes about how teachers are trained and an elitist club of career educators dominating the job market really have nothing to do with teachers themselves. As a former teacher, I have made comments to many people about the training process for teaching and the actual moment you receive your first classroom. If you are lucky, you shake hands with your administrator, are wished the best of luck and find you are completely on your own.

The credential program offers a series of classes to reinforce your subject matter and prompts you to transfer your knowledge and understanding of the subject matter into lessons. You then work as an unpaid teacher congruently with another teacher for about a semester. During this time, the focus is mainly rehearsing the lines you’ve planned in front of a live audience, which is a crowd of children whose names you need to know immediately. You must also alter your techniques regularly in order to suit the needs of each individual according to his or her learning styles. It is only a couple of months of observation, alterations and interaction with students and a lead teacher. If you are lucky, the teacher with whom you “train” is open to your ideas and helpful in cultivating your style of teaching.

Like any profession, there are some who are absolutely phenomenal at their job, some who are mediocre and some who are simply resigned to work this job until they retire, biding their time. This particular profession requires only a Bachelor’s Degree and teaching credential. There are pay raise incentives for higher degrees. I have met many professionals who made more money in other jobs but had a passion for passing on knowledge to our youth, and thus took a rather large pay cut to teach. Teaching does not pay well. Most people with any college degree can find a better paying job and do so. I was ridiculed several times for even wanting to become a teacher since “they don’t make any money”.

I was truly passionate about teaching and loved my job for several years, but it was extremely challenging. I, like many others, worked long after I was being paid at school and very often on weekends and at home. I also chose to work in an inner city school with kids who have a lot of disadvantages. There were a great number of incidences outside of teaching my subject matter that as a role model I had to incorporate in the class. For instance, a student I’d taught for two years committed suicide. The school administration did not want it discussed since it was a suicide; however, my students and I mourned the loss and grieved together on a daily basis. It is extremely difficult not to be somewhat attached to these kids you see five days a week, if only for an hour. In some cases, this is more time than they spend with their own family.

During my final year teaching, each of my classes had 50 students. My maintenance of classroom order had been better than most throughout my career, but 50 people, let alone teenagers, equals a lot of people! Class begins and the lesson is given. Three students walk in late: disruption, one doesn’t feel good; disruption, one has to use the bathroom; disruption, one has a question about the assignment; actual teaching, repeat. Part of the reason I left teaching was because I felt like a babysitter. Let’s see … babysitting wages are about $5 an hour per child (50 in each class), times 5 hours a day at 180 days in a school year comes to $225,000.00. I was making just below $40,000, and with that many kids, I had lost my patience, my passion and I burned out.

I have the utmost respect for the teaching profession and I hope to see drastic changes that encourage teachers to teach and students to learn. Unfortunately, the rapid growth and constant budget cuts are collaboratively destroying education. Class size and supply shortages have made it nearly impossible to conduct an orderly lesson. There are literally not enough chairs for the students who show up the first day of school! The education system definitely needs some reconstruction, and teachers are only human. Fix the system; don’t blame the women and men who wake up everyday with a new plan to inspire children to learn!

The scene in front of the Las Vegas Library is getting weird these days, but in an interesting way.

I used to just have to cut polite berths around the homeless people perched on the rock in front of the main entrance. Now I have to cut polite berths around flip-flopped hipsters and urb-moms pushing Bugaboo baby carriages — who are in turn cutting polite berths around the homeless people perched on the rock in front of the main entrance. This little concentric class orbit says the folks moving downtown are starting to use public amenities downtown. Hurray for that. (I hope the homeless people don’t get scared or chased off, though, because I’m starting to suspect they’re the only people in Las Vegas who actually read. These days, I think Borders makes most of its money off lattes and magnetic poetry kits.)

Anyway, this Las Vegas Library tableau I frequently encounter got me thinking about the g-word — gentrification. Does it mean a wholesale displacement of the less fortunate, the nonwhite? Well, eerily straight-outta-Zeus’-frothy-head projects like Union Park sure make me think so (intuitively slapped upside da noggin by krit king Dave Hickey in this recent New York Times piece). Then again, there’s no shortage of diversity inside the Las Vegas Library, where getting a DVD can be like bobbing for apples in a mosh pit. (”Hey, look! I got … a BBC production of Antigone. Great … “)

But it’s certainly worth thinking about. A more grown-up city in the northwest is doing just that, with Portland even holding community meetings (with the ghastly title of The Restorative Listening Project) to talk about the tensions between the new white neighbors and the longtime minority residents in changing Portland neighborhoods. Put it on the plate for Las Vegas in the next 10 years — right after the city re-opens Circle Park already.

I used to wonder whether Pat Mulroy, head of a development corporation known as the Southern Nevada Water Authority, ever had plans to look beyond our state’s scraggly little borders for water — you know, long after the authority’s pipeline had turned Lincoln and White Pine counties into wizened, formerly quaint scabs to keep Southern Nevada growing. Nawwww, I thought. I mean, the water czar’s aggressive and forward-thinking — if tragically wrongheaded — and all that, but not that aggressive, forward-thinking and tragically wrongheaded, right?

Now I’m not so sure. Because clearly our water-rich neighbors in the northeast must have smelled some pretty rank conquistador dreams on the wind in order to do this: Circle their wagons vise-tight around their precious Great Lakes — which hold 90 percent of the nation’s fresh surface water — in order to pre-empt any attempted water grabs from us parched Southwesterners. Yesterday, Wisconsin was the fifth state to formally join an eight-state compact to protect their lakes from would-be water thieves.

Suuuuurely Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle couldn’t possibly be suspicious of li’l ol’ us, could he? In a word, helllllllyeah:

The pact was motivated largely by fears that states such as Arizona and Nevada in the booming but arid Southwest will try tapping into the lakes, which hold 90 percent of the nation’s fresh surface water.

”People are already looking enviously at this water,” Doyle said. ”The Great Lakes define this region, and their waters sustain our recreation, our way of life, and our economy.”

Even Canada emerged from its cheerful torpor to take notice, with Quebec and Ontario signing on to the anti-water-deportation compact as well.

When you see the press release about the water authority announcing its immediate invasion of New Wisconsivania Oyorkio, don’t say I didn’t call it.

Martha Woodworth from Henderson writes:

I read with interest Andrew Kiraly’s feature, “Personal injuries,” about the alleged mistreatment of females employed by attorney Adam Kutner. In my twenties and thirties, I worked for attorneys in Boston and New York. Despite my jaundiced objectivity (I have always been wary of employers in general), I found that lawyers were the worst employers. For example, in my 14 years as a legal secretary, I encountered louts, boors, bullies and infantile practitioners on a par with (allegedly) Kutner.

There was the attorney who invited me into his office to examine his new gun, which he pointed at me, imitating Clint Eastwood; the Mafia lawyer who leaned over my desk and whispered, “Are you ever going to sleep with me?” When I responded with a loud, startled, “NO!” he tried to get me fired, claiming that I was “not at all helpful.” One attorney’s desk was impossible to breach, as the rug before it was strewn with large piles of pornography. Yet another would leave the office a sane man and return insane, having downed multiple martinis at Bogart’s, a Chinese restaurant popular with lawyers in Boston for its lunchtime triple shots. Wild-eyed, swinging his briefcase at the head of his cowering secretary, he would berate her to the end of the day. I exhorted my associate to quit, but she was so afraid of him she thought he would kill her if she tried to leave him.

Not all legal bullies are men, by the way. A woman attorney, a partner at a large, prestigious firm and later a notable judge, had me running back and forth between her and another partner with love notes. When he was pouting and unresponsive to her flirtation, I was her scapegoat, subjected to withering slurs about my “competence” and her “sloppy desk,” which I was ordered to dust and straighten three times a day.

It’s not a “nice” profession, in case you haven’t noticed.

You probably missed this one, but the Vatican’s chief astronomer went all X-Files earlier this month, telling reporters that believing in aliens doesn’t mean you can’t believe in God, too. Damn, that’s gotta be a relief for the world’s estimated 1 billion Catholics. Nothing frightens the faithful more than having to trade one figment of their imagination for another. That sort of spiritual sea change hasn’t happened in our little corner of the Milky Way since the Crucifixion, when so many traded in Yahweh for the Holy Trinity (that’s three … three … three gods in one!).

However, there is a school of “thought” out there that claims the so-called Original Jesus (or, O.J, as they prefer) was the product of an alien experiment designed to show humanity that the religious and the paranormal are nearly one in the same. According to these paratheologists, you’ve already traded up to believing in aliens if you follow the Lamb of God. So, you’re good in almost every cosmic sense of the word.

We ask you: Isn’t it bad enough that this age-old system of social control (aka The Church) is allowed untold billions in untaxed profits (or, as ministers call them, donations) while still, to this day, refusing to use its Third World missionaries to teach that it’s wrong to kill in God’s name? What’s it gonna take for a true Great Awakening, that all of this is all total bullshit, that there’s not a sliver of scientific evidence to back up any of the world’s “great” religions and that you might as well waste all that free time believing in flying spaghetti monsters or pink unicorns?

Secretary of State Ross Miller sent a letter today to Scott Scherer, saying that petitions that don’t conform exactly to Nevada law will not be counted. This could spell doom for a trio of petitions bankrolled by Las Vegas Sands Inc. Chairman Sheldon Adelson: Two that would divert room tax dollars to education, or education, public safety and roads; and a third that would require all taxes raised by initiative petition to receive two thirds vote.

Scherer had argued previously that because the petitions were in “substantial compliance,” they could and should be counted. But Miller’s ruling says that words like “must” and “shall” in initiative law show that petitions must strictly comply with rules to be counted.

Could we be seeing a lawsuit? Adelson hasn’t done too well in court lately, but it seems this one is ripe for the filing.

The letter is linked below as a .pdf. (We hope. We’re still learning how to use the series of tubes known as the Internets.)

petition-response.pdf

HBO has scored again with the premier of its film Recount, starring Kevin Spacey and Tom Wilkinson as the two top characters fighting over the disputed 2000 election in Florida. (And don’t forget the unforgettable Laura Dern as then-Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. She’s delightful! Dern, that is, not Harris.)

Now, there’s been plenty of controversy over this movie. Former Secretary of State William Warren Christopher (played by John Hurt) is portrayed as somebody unprepared and unwilling to stage the street fight brought by the Republicans, led by Secretary of State James Baker III (Wilkinson). Spacey’s Ron Klain (one of ex-Vice President Al Gore’s top lawyers on the case) says at one point he’s not even sure he likes Gore, which the real Klain says he never said. And whole parts of dialogue are essentially made up, which happens in drama.

By the way, for our money, the scene-stealer in this production is Denis Leary as operative Michael Whouley, whose affinity for the word “fuck” is both humorous and (we know since we deal with political operatives every day) realistic. And given that the election was being stolen right out from under the Democrats, we’re sure the word got more than its fair share of use in December 2000.

What’s most poignant about the movie, however, is not the disputed parts, but the undisputed: Votes were not properly counted. Black voters were disenfranchised. Recounts were begun, but stopped before they were completed. And the Supreme Court of the United States essentially ran out the clock on the whole process, and handed the election to George W. Bush, when it’s entirely possible he was not the true victor. “I want to know who won this fucking election!” an exasperated Klain shouts at one point. So don’t we all, sir. But we never will: The movie ends with boxes of ballots stored in a huge warehouse, reminiscent of the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a safely stored government secret far too dangerous for the public to know.

(Now, you want some hard truth, check out Vincent Bugliosi’s book The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined Our Constitution and Chose Our President. It’s a devastating legal analysis of the infamous Bush v. Gore decision and the facts surrounding it that would make even the most hard-core Republican blanch.)

The outcome of that Supreme Court ruling — which, by the way, the court said shouldn’t be considered precedent, a precedent in itself for legal mendacity — has literally changed the face of the world. Would Gore have invaded Iraq after Sept. 11? Would he have signed the Patriot Act? Endorsed torture? Established a military gulag in Cuba? Would his heartfelt concern over global climate change have led to a wholesale revision of U.S. environmental policies? What would America look like right now, had all the ballots in Florida been counted properly?
Like the true winner of the 2000 election, we’ll never know.

In journalism school, they teach you to get both (or all) sides of a story, and to present them to the reader so he or she can decide who’s right. That’s one of the many reasons journalism school sucks.

Let’s say we were writing a story about the Earth. Should we give equal weight to those people who believe the Earth is flat, and that the sun revolves around it? Or should we instead ignore those people as ignorant throwbacks to a less enlightened age, whose disrespect for science and human knowledge disqualifies them from being taken seriously?

Our point: You’ve got to call bullshit sometimes, objectivity be damned. Journalism — and politics — would be much better off if we did.

So take the comments of Merrill Lynch’s Hugh Anderson, the chairman of the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce’s government affairs committee, as an example. No, Anderson does not think the Earth is flat. But he is trying to get us to buy into a concept that’s similar, in that it’s fictional. Here’s what he told the Las Vegas Sun for a story today:

“We’re all for having the best education system possible, we’re all for the best transportation system possible, we’re all for making sure the vulnerable population is attended to the best we can do,” Anderson said.

But not now, “If you start increasing taxes at this, the worst time for many businesses, you’ll encourage small business to close doors or lay off people,” he said.

We don’t want to be impolite, but this is bullshit, every bit as much as saying the Earth is flat. Why? Because the chamber — specifically the people on the government affairs committee — have at every turn rejected ideas that would help give us the best education system and transportation system and help vulnerable people “…the best we can do.”

The chamber has said no to funding that would have been directed to doing those very things.

The chamber has endorsed candidates who come out against properly funding those very things.

And then the chamber has bragged about its success in stopping initiatives that would have done those very things.

And Anderson knows it, or at least he should.

As for this being “the worst time” to increase taxes, and the specter of closures and layoffs, this, too, is bullshit. Why do we say that? Because the chamber used the exact same threats back in 2003, when it was looking down the barrel of a gross receipts tax, and the economy was humming along fairly well.

So if you can’t raise taxes when times are bad, and you can’t raise taxes when times are good, when can you raise taxes? Never! Get it?

But wait, you protest. You seem to be implying that the only way to get better schools, better roads and better social services is to raise taxes. What’s up with that?

You’re right. That’s exactly what we’re saying. And more than that, we’re saying it’s time to raise taxes on businesses, the ones that currently pay nothing on their gross or net profits. Businesses such as Merrill Lynch, Cashman Equipment Co., Republic Services, Green Valley Grocery, Inc., Priority Staffing USA, Lucchesi, Galati Architects, Inc., Silver State Materials, Wells Fargo Bank, Sierra Health Services,  O’Reilly & Ferrario, LLC, DJS Consulting, Ted Wiens Tire and Auto, Sierra Pacific Resources and The Molasky Group of Companies, all of whom just happen to be represented on the chamber’s rabidly anti-tax government affairs board.

The Earth is round, people. And if you really believed in good schools, good roads and healthy social services, you wouldn’t be doing everything in your power to avoid paying up.

You know, its nice when bipartisanship rules the day, Republicans and Democrats reach across the aisle and agree on solutions and everybody goes home happy, isn’t it?

Yeah, right. That kind of sentence reminds us of the unpublished political cartoon by the great master Paul Conrad, who once drew a Democratic donkey being mounted from behind by a Republican elephant, with the one-word caption: “Bipartisanship.”

But from our reading of a nice Sunday conversation among Republican and Democratic leaders in today’s Las Vegas Sun, it seems the elephant is getting ready to have its way with the donkey.

The upshot: Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio and Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley agree (with each other, and with Gov. Jim Gibbons!): This is not the time for taxes. Instead, we should conduct a broad study of local and state tax revenues, and see if we might be able to identify a need for some changes down the road. In the meantime, let’s try to protect what programs we can with our existing (albeit ever declining) revenues.

Now, we were not part of this great Sunday conversation, no doubt because we’d have asked Raggio (the guy who came up with the study idea) a few pointed follow up questions, like, “Gee, senator, don’t you think all the other studies that have already been done point out the problem quite nicely?” Or maybe this: “Isn’t a study the classic way legislators avoid taking action?” Or perhaps this: “You’ve been up there since the friggin 1970s! Are you telling us you don’t already know exactly what has to be done?”

Of course, Raggio (and Buckley, and Senate Minority Leader Steven Horsford and Assembly Minority Leader Heidi Gansert) all know what the problem is, without benefit of a study. We all do, or at least all of us outside Gibbons.

But just for fun, we’d also like to ask Raggio something along these lines: “So, senator, if we do a study and it shows that we need new taxes, would you support something like a gross receipts tax, which was proposed after the last tax study back in 2003?” We don’t have to call up north for our answer: No, said Raggio. That’s off the table.

Oh, so if we don’t need a study to determine that, then why do we need a study at all? Questions, always more questions after these things.

Like this one: Raggio said local government tax revenues should be in the mix, since perhaps the state might want to share in some tax revenue that currently goes to local government. Isn’t that an implicit acknowledgment that the state needs more money? And — wow! — hasn’t he come to that conclusion without the need for a study?

We were sad to see neither Buckley nor Horsford — bright, savvy and experienced leaders both — didn’t lean across the table to say something like this: “Look, we all know what the problem is. Our tax system is broken, and it has been for years. We come up to Carson every other year and cobble together a plan to get us through until the next session, and then go home. Meanwhile, real people with real problems suffer, and we don’t ever do anything to fix their underlying problems. We don’t need a study to tell us that. We’ve been living that! Now let’s drop the horseshit and get together on a tax package that will see everybody — not just the gambling industry — pay its fair share, and to hell with political considerations!”

But we’re idealistic that way. We loved The American President, for example.

Sadly, it was left to Sen. Bob Coffin, term limited and facing his final legislative session in 2009, to speak for the Democrats. Sen. Coffin, thanks for rescuing us from what otherwise could have been a very bad Sunday. We promise that when we write the definitive novel about Nevada politics, and they make it into a movie, we’ll try our best to get Gene Hackman to play you.

Despite what appears to us to be the largest amount of self-promotion in the history of the universe and recorded time, Las Vegas resident Wayne Allen Root lost the Libertarian nomination for president of the United States.

Instead, he’ll be the party’s vice-presidential nominee, which ensures at least six more months of Root-centered remarks from Root.

Meeting at a convention in Denver, the Libertarians (after six ballots) picked former Republican Congressman Bob Barr of Georgia as their standard bearer. No doubt immediately after learning there was a person named Wayne Allen Root and that this person had money, Barr endorsed Root for vice president.

For his part, Root’s road to the Naval Observatory has led his through plenty of local media outlets, most recently in the Las Vegas Sun, where his passion for protecting people earning between $300,000 and $500,000 really came out.

For Root, the hardest part of the day was probably not being eliminated in the fifth round of balloting, or being forced to play second fiddle to Barr, who left the Republican Party over civil liberties concerns (he realized the party didn’t have any). No, for Root, the hardest part was no doubt trying to figure out where on his website he might find the space to mention Barr.

UPDATE: In a news release, Root blows himself.

If the Jim Gibbons administration decides to take up Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki on his favorite scheme to sell bonds against tobacco settlement funds, which he says would generate $775 million in revenue, just promise us one thing: Let somebody other than Krolicki do it.

We don’t want to give in to our natural skepticism, see, but we can’t avoid it: Krolicki has a documented history of trying to steer contracts to friends or people who can help him politically. It’s one reason all Nevada taxpayers should be happy he’s nowhere near the state treasurer’s office anymore.

As for the idea itself? Other than the fact that the state would have to come up with money to fund the Millennium Scholarship and health programs elsewhere in the budget, other than the fact that we’d be leaving money on the table, other than the fact that suggesting this idea (which he’s advanced unsuccessfully in the past) right now seems a convenient way for Krolicki to suggest that current Treasurer Kate Marshall isn’t doing the best job possible (she is, by the way) and other than the fact that it could very well be that Herr Weasel may be trying to weasel his way back to a place where he can once again wheel and deal with state money, it sounds like a nifty idea.

But seriously, don’t let Krolicki do it. That’s bad news waiting to happen.

Remember a few weeks ago, when we wrote in CityLife to tell you that Hillary Clinton should get out of the race for president, not because she was losing in every measurable way, but because she’d proven herself unworthy of the office? Yeah, this is what we were talking about.

Now, some talking heads on Fox News Sunday said today it was no big deal, but host Chris Wallace dubbed Clinton’s remark “ghoulish.” And you know when Fox says it’s ghoulish, it’s pretty bad.

We’d rant, but it would be a waste of energy after Keith Olbermann already did it so much better than we ever could. Watch and be outraged.

Well, it turns out that Las Vegans are just too cool to ride the bus — despite rising gas prices that are making Hummer drivers weep onto their tiny penises.

OK, so maybe our bus system isn’t ideal, a fairly unimaginative grid setup imposed on a postwar, suburban-styled, car-centric city, but Las Vegans who shun rubbing elbows and other body parts with public transportation’s great unwashed may have a change of heart later this year when … the SUPER-SPIKE arrives. That’s the coinage of one greenie oil analyst for Goldman Sachs who predicts a price surge this year that will take crude oil to $200 a barrel — why, that’s, like, half an Xbox 360! (However, you can’t play Rock Band on a barrel of oil.)

The refreshing thing is that the analyst, Arjun Murti, isn’t wringing his hands or clamoring to crack open Alaska or advocating bum-rushing Iran to steal its oily goodness. Rather, he sees a silver lining of such prices encouraging people to actually think about their energy consumption choices. Shocking! A snip from the IHT story:

But the grim calculus of Murti’s prediction, issued in March and reconfirmed two weeks ago, is enough to give any American pause: At $200 a barrel for oil, gasoline could cost more than $6 a gallon, or about $1.60 a liter, in the United States. U.S. pump prices are now around $4 a gallon.

That would be fine with Murti, who owns two hybrid cars.

“I’m actually fairly anti-oil,” said Murti, who grew up in New Jersey. “One of the biggest challenges our country faces is our addiction to oil.”

In short: See you at the bus stop this fall, wearing that vaguely constipated expression public transportation users don when peering down the road, wondering when the damn thing is finally gonna come …

It’s been a busy day for us at Various Things & Stuff, mostly spent in the car on the way to and from meetings. But we couldn’t leave the office without noting that, as expected, it appears former Assemblywoman Sharron Angle has once again failed in her attempt to cap property taxes in Nevada. (Why? Clearly, it’s because the misanthropic Angle hates the government workers paid with property taxes dollars, like nurses and cops and firefighters.)

Our colleague Anjeanette Damon has the details on her excellent, Reno-based blog, Inside Nevada Politics. Suffice to say, Angle’s people turned in some petitions up north after the deadline and, down here in Clark County, turned in original signatures mixed with impermissible photocopied signatures.

This marks the third time Angle has tried to cap property taxes, and, if her petitions are rejected, her third failure. Wouldn’t it be great if politics was like baseball, and when you strike out, you have to go back to the dugout? Only in this case, the “dugout” was a giant hole that leads to the center of the Earth, where you’d be doused with hot liquid magma?

Yes, that would be cool. Alas, Angle will get another chance to shine in her primary challenged to state Sen. Bill Raggio. Let’s hope he uses his dark Jedi powers to finish the job that fate has begun.

“Damn was it hot yesterday! I mean, like, really, really hot! Did you see the news? They said 108 degrees. Damn! That’s like … hot! And it’s only May. Can you believe, May? The heat sure was uncomfortable. I think I was even sweating a little bit. I touched the hood of my car and was like, ‘Ouch!’ Boy oh boy was it hot! I know, I know. There’s really no solace or sense in talking about how hot it is, but — I don’t know — I guess there’s like this retarded part of my brain that feels this strange compulsion to remark on the heat and the weather in general in a pointless, circular, conversational grinder that seems to require mundane subjects — ones over which it is completely obvious I have no influence or control — to be fed into it, because if I even dared for a moment to make some kind of more substantive observation on something other than the stultifyingly banal topic of the weather, my brain might fart right out of my ear and then where would I be, huh? So anyway: Damn was it hot! …”