It’s the first week in May and it is still chilly in ChiTown. Anne and I went to a Cubs-Brewers game Tuesday night. It was a party on a roof top on Waveland beyond left field. It was so cold we couldn’t sit outside. We ate our dogs and drank our beer inside the third floor apartment.

There are four Mondays until summer break.

Sol Stern would have a stroke.

The NY Times reported earlier in the week that many classes in the Oakland CA school district were focusing their classroom discussions on the war in Iraq.

Third period at Paul Robeson High School in East Oakland was pretty much what you might expect on a sunny Thursday afternoon at the end of the term: distracted students, talk of graduation and nearly silent response to teachers’ questions.

Until, of course, the topic turned to the recent cuts in the state’s education budget.

“We don’t have any money because it’s all going to the war,” said Ashley Lawless, a 18-year-old senior who moments before had been obsessively fixing her hair. “And now they’re shutting all this stuff down.”

Free pander.

First McCain proposes the gas tax holiday. Then Hillary. What don’t these two agree on? The NY Times’ Gail Collins nails it:

Hillary Clinton, who jumped on the gas-tax holiday bandwagon posthaste, wants to pay for it with a windfall profits tax on oil companies. This makes her plan much more fiscally responsible. Not only does she balance the books, she turns a proposal that was unlikely to ever get passed into one that could not make it through the Senate if Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy both rose from the dead and hand-carried it there.

There are few things more satisfying than taking a strong stand in favor of something that is never going to happen. Free pander!

And Mark Kleiman posts this:

Hillary Clinton:

There are a lot of people in Indiana who would really benefit from a gas tax holiday. That might not mean much to my opponent, but I think it means a lot to people who are struggling here, people who commute a long way to work, farmers and truckers.

Ummm….Senator? Didn’t anyone tell you that fuel used in farm vehicles doesn’t pay the gasoline excise tax (p. 36)?

Not that she minds lying to the voters, but the problem is the farmers already know it.

Did I hear someone say “Out of touch”?

What is going on over at SEIU?

A half page ad in this mornings NY Times criticizes SEIU President Andy Stern. It’s all about their jurisdictional battle with the California Nurses Association and Stern’s attempt to reel in their United Healthcare Workers. It also involves the issue of union democracy.

The ad is signed by many respected progressive activists and academics.

We are writing to express our deep concern about SEIU’s threatened trusteeship over its third largest local, United Healthcare Workers (UHW). We believe that there must be room within organized labor for legitimate and principled dissent, if our movement is to survive and grow.

There is more at Open Left.

And at In These Times.