The NY Times’ Frank Rich wants Al Gore to run for president:
Even so, let’s hope Mr. Gore runs. He may not be able to pull off the Nixon-style comeback of some bloggers’ fantasies, but by pounding away on his best issues, he could at the very least play the role of an Adlai Stevenson or Wendell Willkie, patriotically goading the national debate onto higher ground.
After you see An Inconvenient Truth, you’ll likely want Gore to run too.
Anybody who knows anything about state politics knows that this is shaping up to be a tough year for Republicans in Olympia… that is, everybody except, perhaps, our state GOP leaders:
Republican Party Chairwoman Diane Tebelius, however, said she sees no cause for concern.
“I’ve never been a believer that what might be happening in federal politics is necessarily affecting what goes on in state politics,” she said. “I think we’re going to pick up seats in the [state] House and Senate, and at a very minimum will retain all our seats in the state Senate.”
Party leaders in the state House and Senate agree. “I don’t feel like I’m going to lose any seats and I could possibly pick one up,” said Senate Republican Leader Mike Hewitt, R-Walla Walla.
Uh-huh. National politics never impacts local races. Tell that to all those Democratic legislators swept out in 1994.
Of course, not all state Republicans are as steeped in denial as Tebelius:
“I’m worried,” said Rep. Fred Jarrett, a moderate Republican from Mercer Island. “If it’s a bad year for Republicans everywhere, I’m a Republican.”
Fortunately for the ever popular Jarrett, he’ll easily win reelection whatever baggage the “R” next to his name might carry. And fortunately for the Dems, as one of the state Republican caucus’s last remaining true moderates, nobody in his party’s leadership much heeds Jarrett’s sage advice anymore.
But it’s not just the general political climate that sucks for local Republicans (and man does it suck), for circumstances have conspired to leave the GOP with a buttload of open seats to defend, many in swing or Democratic-leaning districts. All things being equal, Democrats were poised to pick up a few seats this year just on pure numbers.
But they’re not equal. President Bush’s approval rating in WA ranks near the lowest in the nation, while local polling consistently shows Democrats with a double-digit lead in generic preference. And in a more nuts-and-bolts measure, Democrats are out-raising their opponents in close races throughout the state.
GOP faithful may be momentarily comforted by Tebelius’s cheerleading, but there’s a good chance we may witness the beginnings of a structural realignment on her watch. Former Republican strongholds in the East King County suburbs have been trending Democratic for years, and a new class of socially progressive, fiscally moderate Democratic legislators could go a long way towards pushing many voters to redefine their party identification.
The fact is that King County — a government larger than that of 13 states — has been remarkably well managed under the leadership of Ron Sims and a Democratic council, boasting one of the highest bond ratings in the nation. Compare that to the fiscal incompetence of national Republicans who are running up the largest budget deficits in our nation’s history. Our local “Dan Evans Republicans” must wonder, which party is it that more closely represents their values?
For years, state and local Republicans have benefited from extraordinary feats of party discipline, but this strategy will not work in the face of the political disaster that is unfolding under the GOP’s one-party rule in the other Washington. Local Republican candidates who refuse to openly and honestly criticize their President and their Congress, will be viewed by voters for what they are: Republicans.
And that’s simply not an attractive brand to run on in 2006.
I read through the Seattle Times op/ed page today, and still no apology to Ron Sims. Maybe they’re saving it for Sunday?
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.
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
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.)
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!