But after dismissing the initial rush of vitriol and anger at hearing the word, I calmed down, and settled on the more diplomatic “tolerant." That was before the guy sitting next to me, when asked to describe conservative, said pompously, “hypocritical." The look on his face—which said, “I'm so proud of myself, but I'm not going to show it"—set me off the most. I could almost see the gears turning in his mind as he thought of things that justified his accusation of conservatives: Christian teenagers are more likely to have abortions than their secular counterparts! While criticizing Bill Clinton for his affair, Newt Gingrich was having one of his own! So when it was my turn to describe liberals, I said self-righteously, “self-righteous." The class laughed, but after I was finally done patting myself on the back for my oh-so-clever remark, I realized what a fat hypocrite I was: Nothing makes me more self-righteous than others' self-righteousness.

SNP 'not fit to govern'

Last night Labour promised to cut council tax for pensioners by a quarter, and the SNP said its own plans to replace council tax with a new local income tax amounted to "the biggest tax cut in a generation". Midwinter is a highly-respected former adviser to the Scottish Parliament's powerful Finance Committee, and has been a trenchant critic of the Labour-led Scottish Executive. His paper analyses the pledges already laid out by the SNP, and costs them against the party's budget proposals. The Nationalists say that, over the next three years, they will find £4.3bn from within the Scottish budget, made up mostly of reserves, efficiency savings, and from cash saved through scrapping 'capital projects' such as the new Edinburgh rail link. Of that figure, £3bn will be used to pay for policies such as reducing class sizes and putting more police on streets.

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If the state doesn't step in and help us, this is an impossibility for a lot of school districts," he said. "But the state does say they're going to fund it." Passage of the bill, however, means less local control. "If this bill passes, local control will be at an all-time low," Greguson said. "I thought one of the foundations of the Republican platform has always been more local control" [emphasis mine; Elisa Sand, "Bill Setting Minimum Teacher Salaries Takes Away Local Control," Madison Daily Leader, 2008.02.18]. There is another, simpler bill to increase teacher pay, SB 187. It simply raises the per student allocation 3.8% in FY 2009 to $4700 and requires that schools certify that they will raise their average teacher salary and benefits by at least the same percentage. No raise, or not enough of a raise, and the state only gives the school $4642 per student.