Puppetshow news

A couple of items of interest today.

First off, Chris Fitzsimon at NC Policy Watch smacks Rick Martinez (News Puppet at WPTF-AM) upside his wooden head with a great column on public education.

The market fundamentalists are relentless in their crusade to privatize public schools and don’t mind ignoring facts and social science if they have to. They are even willing to temporarily put aside their normal demonization of the poor.

WPTF News Director Rick Martinez does all that and more in his latest column for the News & Observer, arguing that North Carolina public schools are incapable of educating the vast majority of minority children in the state and the only solution is to send them to private schools.

You have to hand it to the Puppetmaster, though. He's mainlining the free-market kool-aid straight into the pages of the N&O AND through the WPTF airwaves. And it doesn't cost him a nickel.

On other fronts, Jack Hawke, the big cheese at the Civitas Institute, is turning in his strings, apparently for a life of leisure. Jack has run the Institute into virtual irrelevance lately with an ongoing series of laughable polls and more than a few violations of the rule against partisan hackery by non-profit organizations. This story courtesy of the Dome.

Could Francis Deluca, who used to be with the Americans for Prosperity ring of the Show, may be next in line to do Art Pope's bidding? Or maybe Max Borders, one of the newest Civitas representatives, is in the hunt. As you may remember, Borders once famously said, “If boiling people alive best served the interests of the American people, then it would neither be moral or immoral.”

Following that declaration, he wrote that he was throwing in his ego-dripping towel:

Due to the controversy surrounding one of my posts on JG, I have decided to discontinue blogging early in my career. While I don’t fancy the life of a blogger condemned to anonymity, I will consider over the next couple of months whether blogging under a pseudonym is a realistic option for me. (My guess is I would eventually end up like Joe Klein after Primary Colors, minus the fanfare and employment options.)

Either way, I'll have to be updating ye olde Puppetshow map sooner than I thought.