This IJ story chronicles a coalition in Marin advocating for universal preschool.
The article summarizes a survey reportedly showing a high level of support for the concept, stating:
“The initiative’s informal survey last year showed 86 percent of Marin voters would support a county “children’s fund,” 74 percent would support more sales taxes to pay for it and 68 percent would support more property taxes. But before they propose anything specific, members said they must conduct a scientific poll to gauge support.”

• Oklahoma was the first state to offer public preschool.

Of course, go to the comments section and you’ll find a slew of peeved taxpayers exercising their First Amendment rights on a very different note than the survey. Nanny state, big government, entitlements, crime, welfare, overpopulation—all the fun stuff that usually comes with any kind of discussion about the notion of public preschool.
So instead of looking at the usual polarized players, why not go to a story that not only shows many of the varying layers of this complex issue, but is also downright awesome. Perhaps you know that Oklahoma, maybe the most conservative state in the country, has publicly funded preschool. And perhaps you know that it offers universal preschool not because it was voted upon, but because it was more or less snuck in. And perhaps you know that the people who snuck it in were not those Godless liberals who want to indoctrinate kids with their socialist agenda, but a group including business-folk and conservatives who did the research and thought it just made good fiscal sense.
You can listen to this fascinating story here, on This American Life.

If you haven’t seen the crazy before-and-after photoshop GIFs that have been circling Social Media today, you can take a glance here.

• Brit is shown in one of the GIFs

Katy Perry, Madonna, Kim Kardashian, George Clooney—of course we knew they were being photoshopped, and we’ve seen the before-and-after photos, but seeing them as GIFs, where the images literally jump back and forth between reality and airbrushing, is still pretty shocking. And it’s not just the things you’d expect—slimming the ladies down, removing their pores, pushing up their boobs. It’s also weird stuff, like shrinking ribcages and flattening eyebrow ridges.
In Bossypants, Tina Fey argues that the outcry over photoshopping is kind of silly while makeup and pushup bras and “slimming” outfits are completely normalized. But shrinking someone’s ribcage?
Her answer in the book is simple: Have photoshop but have the feminists be in charge of it. Like this.

This week, we wrote about Secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration Robert Reich, who will appear at the Glaser Center on Feb. 25.

• Beyond Outrage by Robert Reich

Reading Reich’s writings (say that three times quickly) is addictive. He’s drops facts like Jay-Z drops luxury product names, recounts complex ideas in strikingly simple language and almost every other paragraph has that trade-mark journalist “Holy Crap” moment.

You can read more on his blog, here. He takes on fiscal cliff rhetoric here, writing:

“Here’s the truth: After the housing bubble burst, American consumers had to pull in their belts so tightly that consumption plummeted — which in turn fueled unemployment. Consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of economic activity in the U.S. No business can keep people employed without enough customers, and none will hire people back until consumers return.”

This is an idea that he expounds on in his latest book, “Beyond Outrage,” which you can read bits of here. This book views The Recession and its aftermath not simply as a by-product of government spending, but of what he calls “anemic recovery” because private spending power is so unequally distributed between increasingly polarized wealth stratas.

“Because so much income and wealth have gone to the top, America’s vast middle class no longer has the purchasing power to keep the economy going—not, at least, without going deeper and deeper into debt,” he writes.

Fun stuff.

If the proposed plan to cut Saturday service by the United States Postal Service goes through, letter carriers will lose jobs, delivery will be delayed and the budget problem might not even be solved. The problems locally will mirror those being faced on the national level. “We’re going to lose a lot of jobs,” says Jerry Anderson, president of the North Coast Branch of the National Association of Letter Carriers, which covers Sonoma and Lake counties. The union’s official stance is against the proposed cut and instead to look at avenues of growth to fund the 75-year pension and health care requirement. “I think there are other ways to go about growing the business,” he says, suggesting shipping wine as an untapped potential resource.

Santa Rosa letter carrier Jeff Parr says there hasn’t been enough study, in his opinion, on the potential loss of revenue from the Saturday stoppage plan. He says it sounds as if the Post Master General “has given up on the business.” Saturday service is the competitive advantage of the USPS, since others charge a premium or just don’t offer it at all. “I see degrading of service.”

The plan refers only to stopping letter delivery and pick up; the post office will still deliver parcels on Saturdays. This is no surprise, as the parcel business went up 14 percent last year compared to the year before for the USPS. Rural service will suffer adversely, as will those who require medication delivery. The average letter carrier handles about 15 to 20 medications daily, and those don’t count as parcels, says Anderson. In fact, anything under two pounds, or is smaller, roughly, than a shoebox, does not count as a parcel under current guidelines.

Senate Bill 316 and House Resolution 630 have been introduced to stop the 75-year prefunding requirement, which was introduced in 2006 and expires in 2016. But it might be too little, too late. “Congress put us in this mess and they can fix it,” says Anderson. “But [so far] we haven’t been successful with that.”