The chamber, the charters, the charcoaled remains of our civilization: Please enjoy these Gleanettes

  • The President of the United States is a pathological liar with severe narcissistic personality disorder who has surrounded himself not merely with crooks, dilettantes, charlatans and fools, but white supremacist fascists who believe they must destroy civilization to save their vision. Sen. Dean Heller could not be reached for comment.
  • At 1:30 Wednesday afternoon your Nevada Assembly Commerce and Labor Committee is scheduled to hear AB175, the bill to raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour in $1.25 increments over five years. If you’re like me, and thinking really there’s probably no reason that you can’t go through the rest of your entire life without actually setting foot in Carson City ever again, you may decide to stream it. Meantime, the leaders of the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, all of whom are paid substantially more than $15 an hour, predictably warn that if everyone made $15 or more then any future legislation will necessarily have to be scrawled on the walls of cold dark caves because civilization will have collapsed (and not in the good way like Steve Bannon wants). So I guess this means the Chamber will be supporting a reasonable compromise such as SB106, which only raises the minimum wage to $12 over five years.
  • The last time the Nevada Legislature met in a regular session, in 2015, Pat Hickey was in it. He resigned, during the off-season, as it were, in January 2016, and took an appointment on the state Board of Education. Now he’s working and lobbying for the charter school industry, and he has written a thing in the Nevada Independent which I will now exhaustively critique. Ha just kidding. However, I will note that Hickey deploys at least two of the industry’s favorite arguments – the “no-excuses approach” and “accountability” – which I also addressed (except differently) in a post here on the Gleaner last week. So if  you read Hickey, you should also read that, unless you already have, in which case of course you should REREAD it…
  • …and then, also in the Department of If You Haven’t Already, you should read that “compelling,” “provocative” (actual words used by somebody who isn’t me) piece that some other guy published in the Indy yesterday on why workforce development and education are not substitutes for raising the minimum wage. Because, you see, it’s all related.