Those of you who know me well know that I often have a lot to rant about.  A lot of things piss me off – crime, politics, people, corruption, laziness, you name it.  That wasn’t necessarily my reason for starting a new blog … in truth, I really just wanted to get the domain name “spank my kitty” and figured once I did, I should do something with it.  I do have one cat who seems to have a penchant for having his hindquarters tapped now and again, that would be Whiskey.  I can’t speak for him, but I would say from my own perspective, I think he likes being spanked.  Hence the term.

And no, I’m not advocating cat abuse, cat spankings, people abuse, or any other such BS.  Don’t go there.

Today my issue is with unions – specifically, teacher’s unions.  I like teachers.  I have good friends who are teachers whom I respect very much.  Like any field out there, there are good and bad extremes.  Unions are, or were, at least, a good thing at one time.  Now I think they’ve spun out of control and no longer stand for what originally mattered to them.  Here’s today’s examples:

From the San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board, October 13, 2013:

Teacher-discipline reform: Another fiasco in Sacramento

In 2011, Californians were revolted by revelations that veteran Los Angeles Unified elementary-school teacher Mark Berndt used his classroom to feed semen to his students. To make matters worse, Berndt’s job protections were so strong that school district officials concluded they not only couldn’t fire Berndt, they had to pay him $40,000 to resign.

But instead of leading to basic reforms, the Berndt fallout gave the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers another chance to demonstrate they own the Legislature. In 2012, a bill that would have streamlined teacher discipline was killed in an Assembly committee. This year, the Legislature passed a fake reform — AB 375 — that would have made it even more difficult to fire teachers.

Last week, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed the measure. He called on the Legislature to try for a third time to protect students by fixing the teacher-discipline process.

Good luck with that. Democrats in the Legislature — including local Assemblywomen Toni Atkins, Lorena Gonzalez and Shirley Weber and Senators Marty Block and Ben Hueso — all voted for AB 375. Instead of being horrified by a pervert teacher feeding semen to children, they saw it as an occasion to make it even more difficult to fire pervert teachers. This is amazing, and not in a positive way.

Example #2 – related to this same above incident, same school district:

L.A. Unified Voted to Overhaul Teacher Jail (June 11, 2013)

(Excerpt) According to LA Weekly, the average time of teachers’ stay in the “jail” is 127 days. During this period of time, L.A. Unified keeps paying the teachers’ salaries while hiring substitutes to fill the classrooms. The cost is enormous – about $1.4 million a month for salaries and investigations and $865,000 for substitutes, according to the Daily News.

This problem did not cause much attention until the sexual misconduct scandal at Miramonte Elementary School last year sparked a surge of investigations and pushed the number of housed teachers to more than 300. L.A. Unified said it was time to overhaul the system.

So, let’s see, nobody decided that the system needed to be overhauled or maybe even LOOKED AT until over 300 teachers were sitting on their asses being paid to do nothing?  Are you shitting me?  At what point did L.A. Unified forget that they are paid with taxpayer dollars and should be stewards of responsible spending?  Or is that not part of the job?

If this were a publicly-traded, Fortune 500 company, how long would a setup like this last?  “Yeah, we’re just going to keep paying these employees for unspecified disciplinary issues while we hire in a temp to do their jobs.”

When did we lose sight of things like accountability, responsibility, maturity, and even common sense in situations like this?  $1.4 million a month going to teachers to do nothing but sit in a room all day, while other teachers are laid off?  When a taxpayer gets audited by the IRS and my bank charges me $27 per transaction in overdraft fees, but school districts apparently just get to blow money like they have no tomorrow?  I’m hoping someone can explain this to me.

Back to our buddy Mark Berndt up there in the previous discussion.  I’m not sure what more any rational human being needs to read beyond “used his classroom to feed semen to his students” before you decide that this asshole a) should be left to rot in jail, or b) hauled out and stoned to death by the parents of his students.  I don’t think the issue of whether or not he should be fired or continue to get paid should even be discussed.  I’d like to think that if most normal people showed up to work and saw this:

Wouldn’t you think, “uh, yeah, maybe I’ll call in sick today”?  I like to think most people would, as opposed to being able to collect back pay for (again) “feed semen to his students”.   Am I wrong?

NO.  I don’t think anyone needs to quote any law books or invoke any religious beliefs on this one.  This is WRONG.  How have we lost sight of that fact?  Call it a moral compass that’s sitting over a magnet and spinning around in circles, but when the question is whether a guy like Mark Berndt should collect severance pay vs. being tossed in jail for life, we’ve lost our way.