Historian and author Rick Perlstein will be reading from his new book “Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America,“ tonight at 7:30 PM at Seattle’s Town Hall. Tickets are only $5.00.
Even conservative columnist George Will, reviewing the book for the NY Times, calls Nixonland “compulsively readable.” Should be a fascinating evening.
I’m not so good at remembering or celebrating birthdays and holidays; I pretty much dread special occasions as opportunities to let a loved one down. And just to be consistent, it looks like I missed a special occasion of my own the other day: HA’s fourth blogiversary.
On May 10, 2004 I relaunched HorsesAss.org as a blog by posting a bit of a manifesto: “Comedy is easy, politics is hard.” Looking back, I’m a bit amazed both at how wrong and how right I got it. On the one hand I clearly had no idea how blogging would come to dominate my life to the exclusion of all other pursuits. On the other, it’s encouraging to see the that original spirit of the blog has never been lost, even as its readership and influence have grown beyond my wildest expectations:
I want to have fun with politics, yet I also want to get stuff done. I want to be sarcastic, satirical, irreverent — even silly — and yet I want to be taken seriously. I want to be edgy, out spoken, and occasionally foul mouthed, and yet I want to maintain my credibility with stuffy politicos and even stuffier editorial boards.
[…] So to those upstanding members of the political and media establishment who insist I cannot possibly expect to maintain my credibility as an activist while producing an irreverent and outrageous blog, the Goldy half of me respectfully says: “fuck you.”
I thought maybe I might some day build an audience of a couple hundred loyal readers, but 2.5 million visits and 4.7 million page views later, HA remains a big “fuck you” to those who confuse “solemnity” with “seriousness.”
Thank you all for giving me a reason to write.
Over on Slog, Josh is worried about the DNC’s lack of fundraising, citing a disturbing paragraph in a front page article in today’s New York Times:
But the Republican National Committee, which is permitted to spend money on Mr. McCain’s behalf, has raised $31 million, compared with just $6 million by the Democratic National Committee.
But Josh makes the classic journalistic error, by failing to heed the creed of journalism consumers everywhere: “Don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers.” Even our nation’s paper of record, the NY Times.
The NY Times was flat out wrong; those are cash-on-hand figures, not dollars raised as stated. According to Open Secrets, the RNC has outraised the DNC $123 million to $73 million for the cycle, but even those figures are meaningless when taken out of context. Overall, between the two parties’ major fundraising committees, we have a virtual tie at about $330 million each, with the Democrats holding a substantial $27 million edge in cash-on-hand.
At all levels, that’s a huge reversal from previous elections, when the Republicans typically out-raised and out-spent the Democrats by wide margins.
But even that only tells part of the story. Bucking complaints from the Beltway establishment, DNC chair Howard Dean has doggedly pursued a “50 State Strategy,” pumping money and infrastructure into states the party has all but ignored for decades, rather than hoarding cash for the general election. This strategy has left the DNC perpetually broke, but paid huge dividends in 2006 when Democrats picked up key seats in traditional afterthoughts like Montana. It has also put Democrats in a position to exploit Republican meltdowns like that happening in Alaska. If you ask me, that’s money well spent.
As for the RNC’s $50 million fundraising lead, $20 million of that has come over the past three months, a time during which McCain had the Republican nomination all wrapped up, while Obama and Clinton continued to fight it out. To put this in perspective, Obama and Clinton have raised a combined $420 million for the cycle compared to McCain’s $77 million — a $61 million to $12 million advantage in March alone. And with the Democratic ticket finally settled, expect the DNC to keep pace with the RNC, if not narrow the gap between the two committees.
So while Josh may be worried, I’m not. Folks can’t let up, but comforted by some actual numbers, rather than a scary paragraph in a newspaper, I remain confident that the Democrats are in a helluva position heading into the fall elections.
When KVI host Kirby Wilbur used his radio show to announce a 30% Property Tax Cut initiative, my reaction was admittedly knee jerk. Washington’s public schools rely on property taxes for 100% of their state and local funding; how could our children possibly afford such a dramatic cut? I was outraged.
But once my knees stopped jerking, I decided to step back and take an objective look. So I steeled my bleeding heart, threw out my assumptions, and delved into the numbers. And what I found surprised me:
Wilbur’s tax cuts may be exactly what our schools need.
I will explain. But first, the numbers.
The Paradox
There are a little over one million students enrolled in Washington public schools, an increase of about 100,000 since 1993, and while annual state spending per student has risen during that time, it has consistently lagged behind inflation. Indeed, Washington’s total per pupil spending now ranks 43rd nationally.
Yet, as funding declines, public demand for increased K-12 spending remains steady. In November 2000, voters overwhelmingly passed I-728, calling for class size reduction, and I-732, granting teachers annual cost-of-living adjustments. And polling data consistently shows that voters believe education spending is growing too slowly.
But tax-cutting initiatives have proven equally popular, so it is not beyond the realm of recent experience to imagine Wilbur’s 30% tax cut measure passing in the fall, slashing about $2230 per student annually from the average school district’s budget.
So how do we honor the will of the people—as conservative talk radio so often demands—when the people contradict themselves? Simple algebra. Solve to x.
If per student spending is too low, yet taxes are too high, there can be only one answer:
We have too many students.
The Proposal
It has been said that a child’s mind is a terrible thing to waste, but the same is true of a child’s body. I have been assured by culinary experts in several obscure internet chat rooms, that in flavor and texture a school-age child compares quite favorably to pork, and is equally versatile and nutritious. Properly prepared, it would be virtually indistinguishable in a taco filling or sausage patty… or perhaps as a substitute ingredient in “turkey” tetrazini.
And with one third of students now qualifying for free or reduced price lunch, it only seems fair that overburdened taxpayers turn toward the student body to help offset the cost of this growing public subsidy.
Fortunately, thanks to the WASL test, a mechanism for culling the herd is already in place. For example, if only those students scoring in the bottom 10% of the WASL were harvested to supply the school lunch program, per-student funding would instantly be restored to 1993 levels.
And the benefits don’t end there.
With 100,000 fewer students, class size would drop an average of two students per room, dramatically improving the learning environment while significantly reducing the cost to fully implement I-728. Average WASL scores would rise substantially, simply by eliminating the low end of the curve. And of course, surviving students would be treated to tasty, protein-rich school lunches that bring new meaning to the phrase “you are what you eat.”
But perhaps the greatest benefit would be motivational, for students will be much less likely to slack off when they know that their Sloppy Joe is eponymously named.
Of course, the 10% cut-off is merely an example, and we can likely achieve a similar return on disinvestment while sacrificing fewer children. After all, many of our lowest scoring students are those with special needs — the most expensive to educate — and thus the source of the greatest potential savings. And merely enacting this policy would shave thousands from the rolls as less civic-minded parents moved their children to schools in Oregon, California, and other states with lower academic standards.
Now I know some might find this policy harsh, or even distasteful. But it would be equally harsh to leave our children ill prepared to compete in the global economy, and we simply cannot attract enough qualified teachers without finding the money to pay a competitive wage.
The math is simple. If Washington citizens are serious about improving education, serious about reducing class size, increasing teacher pay, and raising test scores, then we must increase per student spending. But if voters are equally determined to slash taxes… well then… I thank Wilbur and his cohorts for opening my eyes to the harsh reality of this dog-eat-dog world.
And so I offer my modest proposal in the hope of sparking a much needed public debate, and I trust that it will be received in the spirit in which it is intended.
Goldy recently wrote about the signs of gloom and doom for the Republicans. The bad new and “expectations management” continues. Just look at a couple of the articles that hit the press this weekend:
Politico has the headline GOP getting crushed in polls, key races:
In case you’ve been too consumed by the Democratic race to notice, Republicans are getting crushed in historic ways both at the polls and in the polls.
At the polls, it has been a massacre. In recent weeks, Republicans have lost a Louisiana House seat they had held for more than two decades and an Illinois House seat they had held for more than three. Internal polls show that next week they could lose a Mississippi House seat that they have held for 13 years.
In the polls, they are setting records (and not the good kind). The most recent Gallup Poll has 67 percent of voters disapproving of President Bush; those numbers are worse than Richard Nixon’s on the eve of his resignation. A CBS News poll taken at the end of April found only 33 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the GOP — the lowest since CBS started asking the question more than two decades ago. By comparison, 52 percent of the public has a favorable view of the Democratic Party.
Things are so bad that many people don’t even want to call themselves Republicans. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press has found the lowest percentage of self-described Republicans in 16 years of polling.
It’s hard to dismiss this stuff as “liberal media bias” when elections hand districts (with decades of Republican-control) to the Democrats. The article even has a Republican insider saying:
“The anti-Republican mood is fairly big, and it has been overwhelming,” said Michigan Republican Party Chairman Saul Anuzis.
That’s bad. I mean, at some point even the most heroic self-deception must fail, even in a community that is infamous for rejecting reality and facts.
The Republican gloom and doom is featured in this piece appearing in The Weekly Standard titled Gloomy Republicans: For good reason? by Executive Editor (and noted Wingnut) Fred Barnes:
First, the good news. Conservatives won a sweeping victory in an enormously important election the week before last. Unfortunately, it happened in England….
Alrighty then…. That’s the (totally irrelevant) good news. The bad news is that…
Prospects for Republicans in the 2008 election here at home look grim.
[…]More than 80 percent of Americans believe the nation is heading in the wrong direction. Democrats have steadily maintained the 10 percentage point lead in voter preference they gained two years ago. And President Bush’s job performance rating is stuck in the low 30s, a level of unpopularity that weakens the Republican case for holding the White House in 2008.
There’s another piece of polling data that is both intriguing and indicative. In a Wall Street Journal/NBC survey last month, John McCain fared better with Republican voters (84 percent to 8 percent) than Barack Obama did with Democrats (78 percent to 12 percent). McCain was also stronger than Obama among independent voters (46 percent to 35 percent).
These are terrific numbers for McCain. But they aren’t enough. In the overall match-up, McCain trailed Obama (43 percent to 46 percent). The explanation for this seeming paradox is quite simple: The Republican base has shrunk. In 2008, there are fewer Republicans. [Emphasis added]
This same pattern holds here in Washington state. In the most recent SurveyUSA Washington head-to-head poll, Sen. John McCain gets 87% of the Republican support compared to 83% of Democrats who support Sen. Barack Obama. (One difference is that among Washington state independents, 55% support Obama and 34% support McCain.)
Overall, however, Obama strongly leads McCain, 53% to 40%. The reason for the double-digit lead is that only 28% of those polled admitted to being a Republican, whereas 41% fess-up to being a Democrat.
SurveyUSA polls provide data on the long-term trend in party affiliation. Here are the percentages since May of 2005:
The numbers show a slight decline of about 1.4% per year in Republican affiliation. At the same time, there is a 2.7% increase per year in Democratic affiliation. The big change is in independents, who have declined by about 4% per year.
The numbers support the notion that, in Washington state, independents are increasingly calling themselves Democrats. An analysis of correlations indicates that the increase in Democratic identity is most strongly associated with a concomitant decline in independents (r = -0.872). In other words, declines in independents “explains” about 76% of the increase in Democrats (found by squaring the correlation coefficient). The decrease in Republican identity “explains” about 20% of the increase in Democratic identity (r = -0.451).
The take-home message is that Republicans have good reason to be gloomy in Washington state. Their brand name is tarnished; the percent of Washingtonians admitting to being a Republican is declining. At the same time Democrats are experiencing growth.
And if Republicans are counting on independents to make up the difference, they are bound to be bitterly disappointed: there are even fewer independents than there were three years ago as former independents start calling themselves Democrats.
Is it actually possible for John McCain to actually be older than his mother?
I suppose the idea was that by sitting McCain next to his mother, he’d appear younger by comparison, but it doesn’t come off that way. Hope they give this ad a lot of play.
Now that the legacy media has acknowledged what most of us have known for some time—Barack Obama is the presumptive Democratic nominee—it’s taken much of the ratings-boosting drama out of covering the conflict between Democrats. So they’ve finally started to focus on the ratings-boosting drama in covering the conflict between Republicans.
Sen. John McCain is sailing toward his coronation as the Republican presidential nominee while the Democratic candidates battle fiercely. But Republicans also are engaged in some infighting that could disrupt the national convention and make it more difficult for him to unite the party in the fall.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., faces enormous pressure from social conservatives to ignore his repeated commitment to change the GOP’s platform on abortion.
“If he were to change the party platform,” to account for exceptions such as rape, incest or risk to the mother’s life, “I think that would be political suicide,” said Tony Perkins, the president of the conservative Family Research Council, to ABC News. “I think he would be aborting his own campaign because that is such a critical issue to so many Republican voters and the Republican brand is already in trouble.”
In primary after primary, 20 to 30 percent of Republicans have refused to cast ballots for their party’s nominee, a storyline the media has up until now almost completely ignored… as they have ignored the extraordinary movement that’s continued to build behind Ron Paul. But conflict breeds drama which breeds ratings, so they have to find it somewhere.
More on those McPastor problems:
(There are some sixty more media clips from the past week in politics now posted at Hominid Views)
One my many sacrifices to the angry god that is blogging was my garden.
Over a period of years I painstakingly built up 175 square feet of raised beds out of the compacted sod, clay and cobbles in my backyard, and one of my greatest joys was eating and sharing the produce of my labor: raspberries, tomatoes, peas, lettuce, cucumbers, carrots, mustard, kale, radishes, arugula, green beans, herbs, and of course, zucchini… more zucchini than one family can ever eat, and always more than I ever intend to grow.
But between the demands of the blog and the dog, my garden has laid fallow over the past two years.
Well, no more. This year I vowed to reclaim my yard and garden, and so far have kept my resolution. And I’m loving it.
So if, occasionally, on sunny days like today, I disappear for a few hours… you’ll know where I am.
Over at Slog, ECB sticks it to Knute Berger for his latest column on Crosscut (you know, that online “newspaper” that has no news and no paper), and while I genuinely like Skip personally… Erica’s kinda got a point. There’s a “Blast From the Past” like quality to the Brewster/Berger/Van Dyk crowd that fails to connect with mere 16-year transplants like myself. Their’s is a Seattle more commonly found in history books than in, um… Seattle.
But I was particularly struck by Erica’s snide comment on Skip’s snide comment about Mayor Greg Nickels’ supposed call for secession:
Nickels’s “call for secession,” as Berger surely realizes, was a joke.
Or does he? This is the second column in a row in which Skip has raised this canard, to which I previously (and sarcastically) responded:
Berger dismisses Nickels’ assertion that his call for secession was “tongue-in-cheek” because apparently, journalists are much more capable of climbing inside the heads of their subjects than their subjects themselves, and no politician could ever be subtle enough to deliberately suggest an absurdity purely for dramatic effect.
In writing that sentence I was very conscious of my own recent run-in with the joke police, when the Times’ David Postman rejected my explanation that my intent was satirical when I responded in kind to BIAW charges of eco-Nazism. In his headline, Postman put the word “satire” in quotes, clearly refusing to accept my explanation as anything but an ex post facto excuse.
So I feel Nickels’ pain. Nickels denies that he really supports secession, in the same way that I denied that I really think the BIAW are Nazis. (Compare that to the BIAW, who passionately defend their assertion that our state’s stormwater regulations are the environmental equivalent of the Nuremberg Laws.) In both cases, journalists have concretely taken our original comments at face value, while stubbornly refusing to do the same when we explain that we were speaking tongue-in-cheek. Apparently, they did not find it funny, so it couldn’t possibly have been joke… a standard by which the bulk of sitcoms would be properly classified as reality television.
Years back, before I started blogging, I responded to yet another Eyman tax-cutting initiative by writing an update to Jonathan Swift’s classic satire “A Modest Proposal,” in which I proposed slaughtering students who failed the WASL, and using their flesh to supplement our school lunch programs. My column was instantly rejected by the Times and P-I, but the editors of the TNT mulled it over for weeks, eventually declining due to the consensus opinion that their readers “lacked the satire gene.”
I’m beginning to wonder if our journalists suffer from the same genetic defect?
On May 8 the Washington State Republican Party reported a $30,000 contribution from the Republican Governors Association, which in itself wouldn’t be all that extraordinary except for the fact that the check was cut on January 24th.
That’s four months late in reporting a pretty substantial chunk of change, and I’m told even then they only filed after being prompted by the Public Disclosure Commission in response to an inquiry from a watchdog following up on the RGA’s own federal reports.
I suppose it was most likely an accounting screw-up rather than a deliberate attempt to evade our public disclosure laws, but if they can’t audit their own books it doesn’t give much credence to the GOP’s tired old saw of being the party of fiscal responsibility.
In the middle of a busy week. Here’s a bunch of random stuff:
I’m surprised that no one had pointed this out already, but (barring unforeseen disaster) Obama’s nomination speech on the last day of the Democratic National Convention will be on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
A list of possible McCain slogans.
A substitute teacher in Florida lost his job after he was accused of ‘Wizardry’ (for doing a magic trick in front of middle school students).
Can the San Diego State University fraternities busted this week for drug distribution legally be considered “gangs”? The President of San Diego State’s chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy speaks out.
What do the current British and Canadian governments have in common? They’re both threatening to ignore their own appointed advisors in order to fall in line with the drug war.
Which is the more infuriating drug war story: this or this?
Some amazing photos of a volcanic eruption in Chile.
A strong contender for the Nobel Prize in Marketing.
Game 1 of the Flyers-Penguins Eastern Conference Finals is tomorrow. If you’re looking for a good place to watch the game, head to Spitfire at 2219 4th Ave in Belltown.
This week’s Birds Eye View Contest is posted along with a special announcement.
Perhaps I just missed it, but I don’t remember seeing anything about this in the Times or P-I:
Microsoft stirred some controversy last week by announcing that it would no longer issue DRM keys for defunct MSN Music after August 31. This effectively will prevent former customers from transferring their songs to new devices after the deadline. Customers could potentially lose their music if they get a new computer or if the hard drive crashes on their current one
[…] “MSN Music customers trusted Microsoft when it said that this was a safe way to buy music, and that trust has been betrayed,” Corynne McSherry, an EFF attorney, said in a statement. “If Microsoft is prepared to treat MSN Music customers like this, is there any reason to suppose that future customers won’t get the same treatment?”
Um… no.
Microsoft’s Rob Bennett said that continuing to support the DRM keys was impractical…
Because that would require maintaining and operating these strange things called “servers,” something Microsoft has absolutely no experience with whatsoever.
… that the issue only affects a small number of people…
How many exactly is a “small number of people” to a behemoth like Microsoft? A couple dozen? A couple hundred thousand? A couple million?
… and focusing exclusively on Zune was the best way to go.
Well, the best way to go for Microsoft.
He also noted that it wasn’t Microsoft’s decision to wrap music into digital rights management.
They were just following orders.
I know Microsoft is a mainstay of our local economy and has made a lot of people here very wealthy… but this is simply a crappy way to treat your customers, and you’d think our local media would have called them on it.
Eager to share our brilliant political commentary and blunt media criticism, but too genteel to link to horsesass.org? Well, good news, ladies: we also answer to HASeattle.com, because, you know, whatever. You're welcome!