Archives for May 2006

The Seattle School District has two autism inclusion programs, one at Thurgood Marshall and the other at Graham Hill… both of which the CAC has recommended for closure. Which of course makes sense, because if there’s one thing we know about autism, it’s how easy it is for these children to make new friends and adapt to new environments.

I have an idea for an initiative, and I was hoping some qualified attorney in my audience might be willing to help me draft the text. The idea is simple: I would like to amend RCW Chapter 49.60 to make it legal to discriminate in housing, employment, lending and insurance… against Christians.

As a Jew, I find the so-called “Christian lifestyle” offensive, and contrary to the teachings of the Torah. The Lord commanded Moses, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” and yet the Christians not only worship that Jesus guy, they’re constantly praying to Saint This, or Saint That, and the Blessed Virgin Mary of Whatever. I mean… what the hell is up with that?

That savior-on-a-stick symbolism is kind of gross, holy communion seems downright unsanitary, and transubstantiation? Don’t get me started — the whole eating your god thing just weirds me out. But then, what do you expect from a religion in which the end of the world is considered a good thing?

And then there’s all that pork. That’s just plain wrong. Except for bacon, which is delicious… and of course Chinese food. Anything in a Chinese restaurant is kosher.

The point is, I’m an American, and thus it is my right to be intolerant of all those who are different from me or who challenge my preconceptions or who make me feel uncomfortable in any way. Christianity is wrong; the Torah says so. And so I certainly wouldn’t want a Christian teaching my children or coaching their sports teams… or having anal sex with that nice gay man who lives next door.

Now I know what some of you may be thinking: discriminating against Christians is not “politically correct.” But if we let Christians take out mortgages or pay insurance premiums, we’re just heading down that slippery road towards normalizing their disgusting behavior. Next thing you know they’ll be putting Christmas trees in the public square, or singing Christmas carols in the public schools, or going door to door, recruiting our children to join their freakish, cannibalistic cult.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Christians. Especially the shiksas. In fact, I love them so much that I want to change them, by helping them abandon their abhorrent lifestyle. And change they can, for unlike race or gender or sexual orientation, Christianity is a choice. After all, I don’t know any ex-homosexuals… but I know a helluva lot of ex-Catholics.

Clearly, our arrogant legislators don’t agree with my anti-Christian stance, but this is a Democracy, and thus we the people deserve the right to vote on whether Christians should be denied their rights. So please contribute to my initiative campaign, and join me in saying no to preferential treatment, no to quotas, and no to church weddings.

I have been writing a lot about my daughter’s elementary school, and will continue to do so for quite some time. But I’m not the only one.

My fellow parents at Graham Hill Elementary have joined together to do an incredible amount of research, analysis, creative thinking and community outreach in our effort to save our school from closure. Some of this is now available online at our new website: SaveGrahamHill.com

This new website is not only a terrific introduction to Graham Hill, it is also a demonstration of how integrated we are into the surrounding community, for it is actually the creation of Chandra Inouye, who is not (yet) a Graham Hill parent. Her daughter is only 18 months, a year and a half shy of our unique, Montessori Pre-K program.

My deepest thanks to Chandra for this tremendous gift.

If you want to hear Mollie and me bitch about school closings, tune on in! If want to hear me yell at Will because he doesn’t recognize the charter school and voucher movement as an integral part of the religious right’s conspiracy to turn this nation into a Christian theocracy… this is the podcast for you!

Joining me, Mollie and Will in our phlegmatic efforts to get the CAC out of our throats were infamous potty-mouth Sandeep Kaushik, 45th Legislative District candidate Roger Goodman, and the mysterious "N". Topics of discussion included school closures, charter schools, school closures, vouchers, school closures and school closures. Oh yeah, we also talked about planning for global warming, providing health insurance to all our children, vote-by-mail, Russ Feingold’s visit to Seattle, and… school closings.

The show is 1:03:52, and is available here as a 41.1 MB MP3. Please visit PodcastingLiberally.com for complete archives and RSS feeds.

[Recorded live at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. Special thanks to Confab creators Gavin and Richard for producing the show. Except for Gavin, who wasn’t there this week.]

In the Seattle Times this morning, columnist Danny Westneat defends the Seattle School District’s school closure process:

This list may be flawed. But it’s the best one yet. It comes from the people. I say close at least some of these schools.

I like and respect Danny, but in this case, he’s less than half right. He’s right that the list is flawed, but he’s wrong that it’s better than the first. It’s simply flawed in different ways.

He’s also right that there are some schools that likely should close — under-enrolled, under-performing schools in old, crumbling or otherwise insufficient buildings — but he’s wrong to assume that the worst of these are represented anywhere on the list.

And I think Danny is overstating the case to say that this list comes from “the people.” It comes from 14 people, and for all their good intentions and hard work, they clearly don’t represent or understand many of the school communities they have slated for elimination.

The CAC had neither the time, the training nor the resources necessary to make such momentous decisions, and several of its members have admitted as much. CAC co-chair Ken Alhadeff (a man of the people?) seemed noticeably uncomfortable defending the process, offering that he did not come into this with the expertise to make these decisions. And how could he?

The CAC also had a very narrow mandate: close 12 schools without analyzing the actual fiscal impact on the district, without questioning the demographic data, without considering recent capital expenditures, and without developing a comprehensive plan for how the district should attempt to address declining enrollment and growing budget gaps. The CAC’s mandate is to close 12 schools, the decision to be made in isolation of all other factors, and with no context.

Closing a school is a huge decision, with tremendous repercussions for both the district and the local community, and thus the evaluation and the decision should be made by the people with the most expertise and the most familiarity with the individual schools… the school district itself. Instead, beaten down by the backlash from last year’s aborted closings, the district created the CAC specifically to disintermediate themselves from the decision making process, and the inevitable political firestorm. The CAC members are being used as human shields by a district that clearly lacks the leadership to make important decisions like this on its own.

Furthermore, if the whole idea of closing a dozen schools all at once wasn’t specifically intended to divide the individual school communities against each other in a perverted game of public school Survivor, somebody in the district should have had the common sense to understand that that is how it would be perceived. The risk to this strategy is that rather than playing this game, the families from these various schools would join together to scuttle the entire process, regardless of whether there might be some schools on the list that deserve to be closed. That is what happened last time around, and that is what is happening this time.

Everything about this process was flawed, and unlike Danny, I don’t believe that slapping the word “Citizen” onto the name of the committee is enough of a bandaid to save it. And even if my daughter’s school, Graham Hill, succeeds in saving itself, the whole process leaves me with deep reservations about which other communities may have been equally screwed… if inadvertently.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the process is the fact that by splitting the CAC into subcommittees by quadrant, the published criteria were not applied equally between quadrants — and sometimes within them — while at the same time the data provided to the committee was often misleading, or downright wrong.

For example, the Graham Hill families were told that the most heavily weighted criteria used to evaluate closures was academic performance and family satisfaction, and that all the other criteria were far down the list. And one of the primary criteria used to determine satisfaction was first-choice ranking.

By that measure, using the data the district supplied to the CAC, Graham Hill didn’t fare well at all, with only 11 percent of students having selected the school as its first choice… ranking us 12th amongst South End schools.

But what the CAC didn’t know is that our popular preschool program is not included in the district’s first choice data, and that 14 to 16 four-year-olds matriculate into our Montessori kindergarten every year without making any selection at all. This would raise our first choice ranking to 15.7 percent… making it by far the most popular school in the South End! No wonder we have such a long wait lists for our Montessori kindergarten.

Likewise, the district publishes erroneous enrollment figures for our school, because it does not include the 32 preschoolers in the Montessori program. (Oddly enough, the district never forgets to bill our school for the teachers they hire to teach preschool.) And the trend line showing Graham Hill experienced a sudden decline in enrollment from three years ago, does not explain that our enrollment peaked while we temporarily absorbed students from nearby Brighton Elementary when it was closed for rebuilding, and then suddenly fell when these students returned to their home school. Three years ago we were over-enrolled, with over 32 kids in many of our classrooms… and that’s the starting point the CAC uses to measure decline?

As for applying criteria consistently, the CAC could only justify using academic performance to shut our school by separating the Montessori scores from those of the traditional program… yet at Bagley, the only other school with a Montessori program — and a school that was slated for closure last year — the scores were not separated out, and the two programs were conveniently evaluated as a whole. The same is true throughout the district, where some schools had their spectrum students’ scores separated out, and some did not. How is this comparing apples to apples?

Indeed, sitting through the town hall meeting monday night, watching the CAC’s presentation, it became apparent that all the closure decisions were somewhat subjective (as one might expect them to be, coming from human beings) with various criteria being touted after the fact to help justify the decision. School after school, the CAC cited poor building condition as a contributing factor, yet we were told point blank that Graham Hill’s $5.2 million expansion and renovation completed just two years ago did not factor into their decision making process at all. How is this possible?

Danny says that at least some of the schools on the list should be closed, and maybe they should. But from what I know about of the process I have trouble trusting any of the decisions the CAC made.

And in the end, this is all about trust. The district has never fully made the case for school closings, nor clearly demonstrated how much money would really be saved after increased busing and consolidation costs are factored in. Indeed, while the district has spent $250,000 on an outside contractor to study the fiscal impact of school closures, the report isn’t due until after the school board is scheduled to make its final decision.

Neither has the district talked publicly about a comprehensive plan to stem declining enrollment or fix what can only be described as a structural budget deficit… a deficit in which even the promised savings from school closures barely makes a dent.

So can us parents, who are being asked to sacrifice our children’s schools for the good of the larger district, even begin to trust this decision, when the district has repeatedly failed to earn our trust on a host of other issues? The truth is, we can’t.

Man, there’s a lot of stuff to write about. Good thing thing I’m not the only one writing.

• Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels and his staff have a sense of humor. Who knew? Read about it in the P-I, or watch their video “The Committee to Save Big Ugly Things.”
• Andrew and the folks at NPI don’t normally show much of a sense of humor, but they do have a new version of the Pacific Northwest Portal, the largest compilation of regional liberal blogs. Read about it here, or take a peek here.
• Betcha former Enron exectives Ken Lay and Jeffery Skilling aren’t laughing, now that they’ve been convicted of conspiracy.
• Mollie, our Liberal Girl Next Door, joins the fray attacking the Seattle School District’s deeply flawed school closure process. Nothing funny about that.
• I’m heading off to Town Hall tonight to meet President Jimmy Carter, First Lady Rosilyn Carter, and their son Jack Carter, who is running for US Senate from Nevada. Stop by, tell me a joke to cheer me up, and help Jack Carter help the Dems retake the senate.

Laugh amongst yourselves.

UPDATE:
Oh… and last I checked the Seattle Times editorial board still hasn’t apologized to Ron Sims. Or acknowledge he was a local visionary on global warming. I’ll accept either.

Eli Sanders has got the scoop on Slog:

May 24, 2006

Dear Church Leader:

We saw in the news media last week that organizers of Referendum 65, a proposed ballot initiative, have focused on working with churches to get enough signatures to place it on the state ballot. As the leader of a church that holds services on school district property through a building use permit, it’s important that you understand the legal restrictions on activities that take place on public property in order to protect your organization.

In fact, under Washington state law, the facilities of a public agency, i.e., the Lake Washington School District, may not be used directly or indirectly for the purpose of assisting a campaign for election of any person to any office or for the promotion of or opposition to any ballot proposition (RCW 42.17.130). Our attorneys have advised us that collection of signatures on any proposed ballot initiative on school property is a violation of that law, as campaigning for any candidate for elected office would be. Therefore we cannot allow your organization or another organization at your invitation to come onto district property for any efforts that would assist a political campaign of any kind.

While we have worked with political organizations that use our facilities to ensure their understanding of these restrictions, I recognize that we have we may not have made these requirements clear to other users groups. We will be adding this restriction to the building use guidelines so that it is clearly spelled out. Since we do not know if churches that use our schools may be participating in this event, we wanted to bring this concern to the attention of all churches using our facilities. I appreciate your cooperation on this issue, for the protection of both of our organizations. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me. Sincerely,

Janene Fogard

Deputy Superintendent
Lake Washington School District

Rev. Ken Hutcherson’s Antioch Bible Church was caught red handed last Sunday, canvassing for signatures on school property, which prompted the district to send the above letter to his and 7 other churches to which they rent space. Sanders wonders…

Could opponents of R-65, which would repeal Washington’s new gay civil rights law, go to court (or to state elections officials) and demand that all signatures collected on school grounds be invalidated? And if the Lake Washington School District alone has eight churches renting its facilities, exactly how many school districts state-wide have churches renting facilities from them, and how many of those churches collected R-65 signatures on public school property during Referendum Sunday?

I’ve been told the statute prohibiting political activity at tax exempt churches is “murky”, but the legal issues surrounding public schools are cut and dry. This is at very least a violation of the state’s public disclosure laws, subject to exactly the kind of complaint the Evergreen Freedom Foundation frequently files against teachers.

If these churches want to become so involved in enacting law, you’d think they’d at least have the decency to follow it.

Monday night I attended the emotional and informative town hall meeting at Aki Kurose Middle School, where schools slated for closure in the South East quadrant had the chance to air their grievances to the district’s Citizen Advisory Committee. Well over two hundred of my fellow members of the Graham Hill community marched down the hill to the meeting; you can see a clip of the coverage on KOMO TV.

I spent a lot of the night cornering CAC and school board members, and I intend to write up a bit of a report later on, but I wanted to briefly comment on an epiphany I had while rabble-rousing with parents from other schools slated for closure.

The CAC had belatedly suggested that Graham Hill’s Montessori program might be moved into another school if the parents wanted, but we all understand that this simply would not work. The Montessori program is a community, deeply tied to Graham Hill and its neighborhood. And it is a program that requires the active support of strongly involved parents to succeed.

For example, the school district requires that we waive our $290/month tuition to any applicant qualifying for free and reduced price lunch, but provides no additional money to cover its costs. Without the scholarship money raised by Montessori parents, we can’t keep the preschool open. I doubt half the families would stick with the program if moved outside our neighborhood, and without these families the program will fail. You might as well just start from scratch elsewhere.

And in talking to parents at other schools, I learned that this attitude was shared, particularly by the very passionate families at TOPS.

Possibly the most bewildering of the CAC’s recommendations was the decision to move the extremely popular, 530-strong TOPS program from the specially modified Seward building, into what is now Thurgood Marshal, a building with a capacity of only 420.

Of course, it makes absolutely no sense to recommend moving the TOPS program intact into a building with less than four-fifths the necessary capacity, unless…

Unless you don’t intend to move TOPS intact.

And that was my epiphany. In making this recommendation the CAC must have assumed that that Thurgood Marshal could accommodate TOPS, because in moving it, the program’s enrollment would dramatically decline. And more dramatically than the numbers at first suggest.

My understanding is that about a third of the students at TOPS come from the neighborhood, and choose it mostly because Seward is their neighborhood school. Seward is one of the nicest facilities in the city, and Montlake, the school proposed to take it over, has some of the district’s highest test scores. So we can assume that as much as a third of the students currently enrolled in TOPS will choose to remain at Seward. (It’s really the only way the 230-strong Montlake can even begin to take advantage of Seward’s 524-seat capacity.)

Likewise, we can assume that Thurgood Marshal is the reference school for a significant number of its students, and they too will choose to stay in large numbers, whatever prefix is slapped before the school’s name. So really, there’s probably only room for about half of TOPS students to move to Thurgood Marshal — which I’m guessing is about right, since many of its families will choose other, more stable options, within and without the district.

I personally had hoped to transfer my daughter into TOPS for middle school, but not anymore. I don’t want her to have her education disrupted by the transition years, in which the new, smaller TOPS gradually adapts to its new building and new community. It may be called “TOPS” but it won’t be the program we toured this winter.

The fact is, you can’t move a program like TOPS in this fashion, and expect to keep its community together. The CAC must have understood this, else they never would have believed they could fit the over-enrolled, long wait-listed program into a much small building. It just stands to reason.

Likewise, I take the belated offer to explore moving our Montessori program to another school as a nonstarter. If Graham Hill closes, so will its Montessori program, and neither its name nor its community will survive a move to a different school. The district will essentially be shutting down a program with some of the highest WASL scores in the city: 100% Reading, 83% Writing, 67% Math.

And I can only assume the CAC understands this too.

If Bank of America were to suddenly close a dozen branches throughout the city, what would be the result? Well, short term, they’d save some money. Long term, they’d lose customers.

I’m just saying….

In case you can’t guess, I’ve been reading the Seattle Weekly this morning, and you absolutely, positively must read Mike Seely’s piece on Sen. Maria Cantwell. Really.

Stepping in for Knute Berger in the “Mossback” column, Seely, who worked as Cantwell’s deputy press secretary during the 2000 campaign, presents the most honest and straight forward analysis of Cantwell’s strengths and weaknesses I have ever read. Finally, a Cantwell insider publicly says what most people who have worked for her at Real Networks or on the campaign trail will tell you privately, if you pour enough booze them… though probably not quite so emphatically.

Cantwell is far from perfect. In fact, she ranks high among the most difficult people I’ve ever worked for or with. The seven months I spent in her charge felt like seven years. The campaign, larded with her RealNetworks stock windfall, spent more money on Red Vines than most candidates spend on direct mail. And conspicuous consumption during happy hour became all but a necessity, as it was invariably better to be half in the bag when Cantwell, a paranoid hellcat of a boss who rolls through staff like toilet paper, would make her daily sweep through the office, berating everyone in sight.

On the trail, Cantwell often handled small groups of constituents in closed settings well. But she was not what you would call warm

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Did Port of Seattle CEO Mic Dinsmore violate election laws by using government facilities to recruit and support an anti-reform slate in the 2005 Port Commission election? The Seattle Weekly’s George Howland Jr., suggests yes, and at least two sitting commissioners agree:

But the two commissioners who are Dinsmore skeptics, midtermer Alec Fisken and newly elected Lloyd Hara, believe the CEO did violate the law prohibiting use of government facilities in political campaigns, based on evidence Seattle Weekly has collected. Says Fisken: “We could fire him. That would be good.” Hara, who was elected in November to an open seat, doesn’t support immediate termination but says Dinsmore should leave the Port at the end of his informal term of employment on Dec. 31, 2007. (Dinsmore does not have an employment contract.)

Commissioners Pat Davis and John Creighton, who prevailed in last November’s election with help from Dinsmore allies, say the evidence does not show that Dinsmore broke the law. Says Davis: “I don’t see anything wrong or illegal.”

Howland documents a campaign, at least partially run out of Dinsmore’s office, to influence the composition of the commission, and suggests the possibility of a quid pro quo between private companies that contributed $65,000 to the Davis and Creighton campaigns, and later received $120 million in public subsidies.

Curiously, in investigating this story, Howland never bothered to interview our friend, Richard Pope. Perhaps we can twist Richard’s arm into giving us a few comments in the thread.

Anyway, could be a scandal brewing, so read the whole thing.

I just checked the Seattle Times op/ed page, and still no apology for their vitriolic attack on Ron Sims back in 1988… or at least a public recognition that Sims was a local visionary on the issue of global warming. Perhaps tomorrow.

(Though they did strongly praise Sims’ proposal to provide health insurance to our county’s 16,000 uninsured children, so I guess I won’t be coming back in 18 years to demand another apology.)

The momentum continues to build for Darcy Burner in WA’s 8th Congressional District, with the announcement today that she has become the newest national “Netroots Endorsed” candidate. This is a huge accomplishment that will lead to national attention, and tens of thousands of dollars pouring in from online activists throughout the nation.

A couple weeks ago the national blogs Swing State Project, MyDD, and Daily Kos asked their readers for nominations — kind of like a national, online primary — and Burner won. As Matt Stoller wrote over on MyDD:

The next netroots candidate is Darcy Burner in Washington’s eighth Congressional district.  The district is trending blue, and Burner is incredibly smart and a natural camapigner going against vulnerable incumbent David Reichert.  She is also young (35) and web-savvy, having worked at Microsoft, and these traits will serve her well in a House that is desperately in need of new blood.  She has promised, for instance, to post on her Congressional web site a list of all meetings with lobbyists by her or any staff member, which is a fundamentally new approach to governance.

The Washington State blog community is one of the more mature blogging communities out there.  They don’t fall lightly for a candidate, so seeing this kind of note on the exceptional Horse’s Ass is quite meaningful.

I personally have known Burner for nearly a year, yet I didn’t start actively promoting her campaign until February, after I became absolutely convinced that she was not only a candidate who could win, but who would well serve the interests of the 8th district and the citizens of WA state. During that time I’ve watched her grow from just another passionate Camp Wellstone classmate, into a compelling campaigner and a formidable fundraiser. And the more I learned about her personal story, the more I became convinced that she was the perfect candidate to represent the demographically diverse 8th district.

Burner regularly attends Drinking Liberally, and was at the Pacific NW Progressive Bloggers Conference.  Her diaries at Kos are here.  She’s got a good shot to win this district, and she is part of a new wave of internet candidates who know what it takes to win and know what democracy really can mean.

Aww, gee… Matt called HA “exceptional”. But as much as I’d like this to be about me, it’s not. This is about Burner, the entire local progressive blogosphere (Andrew at NPI should be thrilled,) and the respect we’ve earned from the national netroots. But most of all it’s about the incredible support we receive daily from our readers; if you didn’t read us, nobody else would, and in the end our strength comes from our numbers.

So go check out Burner sitting at the top of the “Netroots Endorsed” page on ActBlue, and show her some love.

The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Please join us for cheers, jeers and beers as we discuss this week’s political happenings… but don’t talk to me unless you’re ready to hear me rant about school closings.

I may be a little late, as I plan to stop by Seattle’s Town Hall to hear Democratic political strategist Celinda Lake and conservative pollster Kellyanne Conway talk about their new book: What Women Really Want: How American Women Are Quietly Erasing Political, Racial, Class, and Religious Lines to Change the Way We Live. 7:30 pm, 8th & Seneca, tickets are $5 at the door.

And if you happen to be a liberal drinker on the other side of the mountains, the Tri-Cities chapter of DL also meets Tuesday nights, 7 PM, Atomic Ale, 1015 Lee Blvd., in Richland. Go ask Jimmy for more details.

King County Executive Ron Sims delivered his State of the County speech today, and in it he made two major proposals.

The first is to provide health insurance to the county’s 16,000 uninsured children, a proposal that is both economically sensible and humane. Half these uninsured children are already eligible for state or federal programs, and the first phase of a pilot project will hire outreach workers to inform parents and help then complete enrollment forms. I’ll provide a full analysis of the entire proposal as soon as I have a chance to, um, analyze it.

But I want to briefly comment on Sims’ second major proposal: the creation of an Executive Office of Global Warming, that would coordinate the county’s response to climate change and advise the various departments in regards to the expected impact. For example, let’s say the county was planning to building a scenic shoreline road about 5 feet above sea level, but sea level is projected to rise 10 feet… well the Office might advise that the road be built a little further inland. Stuff like that.

The scientific community is virtually unanimous that global warming is real, and that it is caused by man’s carbon dioxide emissions, and that unless we start reducing emissions now, the impact is going to be devastating… facts that An Inconvenient Truth is going to drive home to audiences this summer. Nobody but hardcore propagandists and head-in-the-sand corporatists deny it. And so Sims’ proposal is not only creative, it’s downright forward thinking.

At least it would be forward thinking, if not for the fact that Sims first proposed such an office when he was a councilman, way back in 1988. And how did our region’s self-proclaimed paper of record respond to a politician thoughtfully preparing for the future? Well, read for yourself this embarrassingly vitriolic editorial in the Seattle Times from September 7, 1988:

IF THE “greenhouse effect” is exacerbated by political hot air, the world is in real trouble.

The hyperbolic clouds of rhetorical gas belched out on this issue in recent weeks could easily choke someone – or at least cloud the vision of otherwise rational people.

A local example: King County Councilmen Ron Sims and Bruce Laing have proposed creation of a new science-and-technology office to prepare this county for the greenhouse effect’s dire effects. The two-scientist office, costing taxpayers at least $100,000 a year, would study the matter and issue a report on what can be done to save King County.

Does the county really need another government office, which inevitably would grow into a mini-bureaucracy with a big staff and a fat budget? Nonsense.

“I don’t think anyone disputes the reality of the greenhouse effect,” said Sims, warning of rising water levels in Puget Sound and other apocalyptic local repercussions.

On the contrary, many reputable scientists dispute the reality of the greenhouse effect. Others seriously question its long-term impact. Human understanding of climate changes is admittedly imperfect, but some past variations appear to be cyclical and unrelated to human activity.

A climate model developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows that average annual global temperature has often varied by as much as a few degrees over the past 400 years. Normal fluctuations in the climate may explain this, many climatologists believe.

S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist and professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal that the greenhouse effect was by no means a given.

Between 1880 and 1940, global temperature increased by about 1 degree Fahrenheit – “well before human influences were important,” Singer wrote. Then between 1940 and 1965, there was a temperature decline – even though fossil-fuel burning and automobile use increased greatly.

The point is that the sky-is-falling, icecaps-are-melting, oceans-are-rising rhetoric must be tempered by common sense.

If Sims and Laing want to study the greenhouse effect, they should buy themselves some tomato plants and a bag of steer manure – which shouldn’t be at all hard for such experienced politicians to find.

Uh-huh. I suppose Sims should expect a big apology from the Times, because he was right and the were not only wrong, they were complete and total assholes to boot.

More on this later too, including some pretty frightening visual aids.

UPDATE:
Just read the Seattle Times op/ed page. No apology. Guess that’ll come tomorrow.