Today the Dallas school board meets to hear the possible "good news" from the superintendent -- that the district may only have to fire a quarter of its teachers instead of a third, depending on how badly the Rick Perry Banana Republicans and the TeeTee Party in Austin underfund public schools this year.
Meanwhile, we keep getting this drumbeat from our only local daily newspaper: On February 23 The Dallas Morning News published an editorial about Wisconsin teachers in which it talked about "union-driven mobs massing at the state capitol" and said, "There are limits to the insanity."
Strange times. Fox News is always flogging the wares of Sarah Palin, telling us how much we hate health-care reform, hate Obama and can't wait for Congress to kick his ass. Here in Dallas, we're sort of inside the bottom drawer at the back of the closet in the echo chamber. Who knows what's really real?
I've been poking around a bit for a column I'm writing on schools for next week's paper, trying to peek over the wall, and guess what! I think the news is good, in a way. The real world is way better than our world.
If you ignore what the Foxzis tell you on TV and look instead at the backup data for their own polling stories, the picture you will see in Fox's own numbers is the opposite of the propaganda they spew on the air. You will find out, for example, that President Obama's approval ratings have been rising for a year and are now the best they have been since September 2009. A majority of us are back in his camp.
Apparently most of us think Palin is a fool. We would vote against her and for Obama by almost 2-to-1 in a head-on match-up, according to Fox's latest polls.
Asked about Palin against other Republican candidates, only 40 percent of the Republicans polled said they would vote for her, and a solid 56 percent said they would definitely vote against her.
By the way, a Bloomberg poll shows that 63 percent of Americans do not believe we should violate contracts with public employees to take away their pension benefits. Of those polled, 64 percent said public employees should have the right to bargain collectively, including a plurality of Republicans.
And back to that Fox poll, while we're at it. While a majority of us approve of the job Obama is doing, we disapprove of the job Congress is doing by 2-to-1. Only 15 percent of us think the Congress should be messing with Obamacare.
Oh, and there are some more polls I'll tell you about next week that find that we're quite open-minded as a nation about gay marriage and abortion.
So the real headlines, if Fox told the truth? AMERICANS TRUST OBAMA, THINK PALIN NUTS. COUNTRY TO CONGRESS: YOU'RE NUTS TOO. HANDS OFF OUR DAMN HEALTHCARE!
Maybe the rest of the country hasn't been taken over by the Talibaptists yet, even if we have. That's good. I think. More on this next week in the paper.
