Pardon My French

It occurred to me while I was writing last night that the American concept of "cool" was pretty close to the French phase "je ne sais qua". At first I was going to say "savoir faire", which is the same only different. Savoir faire literally translates as "way of going", and it's something like je ne sais qua except that it also implies some kind of skill or competence, while je ne sais qua means some indefinable charm with no competence implied. Donald Trump is a good example of what you get when you choose your leaders by je ne sais qua instead of savoir faire. Well, he might have some savoir faire, but you wouldn't know it to hear him speak. The only way we will find out is if we elect him and see how he works out, which is not likely to happen. Of course he wouldn't do half of what he says he will do, but the trouble is we don't know which half. Hillary probably has more savoir faire than she has je ne sais qua, but the trouble with her is that she is likely to use it against my ilk. Your man Bernie probably has both qualities, but he is even more likely to use them against my ilk. Trump is surely an asshole, but he is our asshole, or at least he pretends to be. It doesn't matter what Cruz has because he seems less and less likely to win the nomination as time goes by. I would rather see Trump run against Bernie than Hillary because the voters would have a clear choice between a right wing nut and a left wing nut, and the wishy-washers would have no place to go. If Hillary wins the nomination, she is sure to capture the wishy-washer vote and a good measure of the left wing nut vote, which will likely put her over the top.

My hypothetical wife and I went to vote today, and we were the only ones there except for the workers, who were drinking coffee, and one of them was practicing his guitar. They said only about a hundred people had voted before we did, and the polls had been open for eight hours. With only four more hours to go, it would be surprising if the total turnout was more than double that. The bad news is that the proposal we went there to vote against wasn't even on the ballot. I asked about it and the nice lady said that she had never heard of it. This might explain the apparent news blackout of the proposal, but I don't understand why it was in the official election notice that they are required by law to publish. I wish I had saved the paper in which it was printed, but I didn't, so now all I've got to go on is my memory. While a certain amount of memory loss is normal at my age, I find it hard to believe that I imagined the whole thing. It's one thing to forget something that happened, but it's another thing to remember something that didn't happen. Be that as it may, the good news is that there were three other school tax proposals to vote against, so we didn't make the trip for nothing.

I'm sure we have talked about this before, I am not against education, I am against the sneaky backhanded way they fund it. In my lifetime, the State of Michigan has passed about a half dozen tax "reforms" that were supposed to pay for the schools and get them off of our property tax bills. All these laws are still in effect, but the schools are still on our property tax bills, and they're still crying for more money. Another thing is that they needed more money back in the 60s and 70s because of increasing enrollment, and now they say they need more money because of declining enrollment. With declining enrollment they get less state aid, but they also have less kids to educate, so why should they need more money? Another thing is that one of the proposals we voted against today was for special education, but the state is already supposed to be funding that, since the state mandated it in the first place. (Unfunded mandates are illegal under Michigan law.) The local schools funded special ed for years while a lawsuit worked it's way through the courts. When the local schools finally won, the state was supposed to take over the payments and reimburse the local schools for the money they had already spent. Now, years later, they want to renew the special ed millage that was supposed to be only temporary in the first place. No, I am not against education, I'm against the people who run it.