If Amanda Jones can cast a ballot, so can you:
Amanda Jones, 109, the daughter of a man born into slavery, has lived a life long enough to touch three centuries. And after voting consistently as a Democrat for 70 years, she has voted early for the country’s first black presidential nominee.
Amanda Jones, a delicate, thin woman wearing golden-rimmed glasses, giggled as the family discussed this year’s presidential election. She is too weak to go the polls, so two of her 10 children — Eloise Baker, 75, and Joyce Jones — helped her fill out a mail-in ballot for Barack Obama, Baker said. "I feel good about voting for him," Amanda Jones said.
What could Montana’s schools expect from Elaine Sollie Herman as Superintendent of Public Schools? For one thing, support for Ed Butcher’s education agenda. In 2005, Representative Butcher introduced HB 314, which limited the definition of basic education to “reading, writing, and arithmetic.”
While the bill was widely derided by educational professionals, only one person came forward to speak in favor of the bill, Elaine Sollie Herman:
Butcher’s bill drew a single supporter Tuesday. Elaine Sollie Herman of the Montana Eagle Forum, a conservative lobbying group, said Butcher’s bill achieves their goal of local control of schools.
Just how bad was the bill? Its sponsor, the inimitable Ed Butcher said that it would allow local school boards to turn away students with disabilities:
REP. RASER stated that she is concerned with the language regarding children with disabilities. She asked, "Can local school boards turn away children because they cannot afford services for disabilities?"
REP. BUTCHER stated that they can in fact do this if they cannot afford to provide for students with disabilities.
What, Ed?
REP. RASER expressed concern about providing needs for special needs and how this affects those children without special needs.
REP. BUTCHER stated that life isn’t fair. He added that most parents wouldn’t want to keep a child at a school that is unable to provide for them. It is hard to accommodate everyone.
It seems like it might be a bad idea to select a head of Montana’s schools who testified on behalf of a law that not only violates federal law, but human decency.
Rather than posting a set of probably predictable endorsements, we’ve decided this year to highlight some of the posts that we feel best represent our viewpoint on the upcoming races. The most important thing we can say is that Montanans have a chance to elect some incredibly qualified people to represent them, and we believe we can add this state to Barack Obama’s win column. Get out there and vote; motivate your friends to vote; talk to strangers about voting.
You can see our (in progress) guide to the candidate at the link on the top of the page.
Jodi Rave, of the Missoulian, though ignoring my post on the subject 
, has added more details about Elaine Sollie Herman’s recent posting for help against Denise Juneau. Herman has a great excuse: her daughter did it:
“That was my daughter who wrote that – she lives in Seattle,” said Herman. “I didn’t do it. I had nothing to do with it. I am not a young girl looking for meet-ups in Puyallup.”
Better yet, Herman wants you to believe that it’s negative campaigning to bring the subject up:
“It’s not appropriate to bring up my daughter in this campaign,” she said. “If you bring my daughter into this election, I will really, really be upset. No one wants their daughter brought into an election for dirty campaigning.”
It’s one thing for Ms. Herman to have run one of the most inept statewide campaigns in the history of the state. Whether it was an illegal raffle, lies about the MEA, the worst campaign web site in human history, atrocious spelling and grammar, or her absurd focus on the ethnicity of her opponent, Ms. Herman’s actions have been harmless, if annoying, and even occasionally humorous. It would be quite another thing to let her do that kind of damage to our schools.
Next week, vote a candidate with the experience and wisdom to lead Montana’s schools: Denise Juneau.
So sleazy that three dozen telemarketers walked off the job today in Indiana, rather than read the script that the McCain campaign had given them:
Nina Williams, a stay-at-home mom in Lake County, Indiana, tells us that her daughter recently called her from her job at the center, upset that she had been asked to read a script attacking Obama for being "dangerously weak on crime," "coddling criminals," and for voting against "protecting children from danger."
Williams’ daughter told her that up to 40 of her co-workers had refused to read the script, and had left the call center after supervisors told them that they would have to either read the call or leave, Williams says. The call center is called Americall, and it’s located in Hobart, IN.
Now, if only these people, who took a real risk with their jobs, would get the same kind of attention as that “plumber.”
