HorsesAss.Org

Time for the weekly sandbox. Here’s a starter for the culture of life crowd… felinicidal maniac Bill Frist isn’t the GOP’s only cold-blooded killer. Tom DeLay killed his father, and Laura Bush ran over and killed a boyfriend. (That should get things rolling, but please feel free to rant on whatever you want.)

On a lighter note (well… unless you are a cat,) I point you to an amusing image posted over on Upper Left, that reminds all Americans that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is a cold, heartless cat killer.

No, really. As UPI Science and Technology Editor Dee Ann Divis reported back in December of 2002, Frist is a kind of kitty-cat Dr. Mengele, carving up kitties he fraudulently adopted from animal shelters.

Frist acknowledged in a 1989 book that he routinely killed cats while an ambitious medical student at Harvard Medical School in the 1970s. His office said it had no record on how many cats died. Frist disclosed that he went to animal shelters and pretended to adopt the cats, telling shelter personnel he intended to keep them as pets. Instead he used them to sharpen his surgical skills, killing them in the process.

Well so much for the “culture of life.”

Yeah, I know, you self-righteous, knee-jerk Frist defenders are going to whine that such actions are moral because cats don’t have souls… but then, neither apparently does Frist. These are kitty cats, and if not for their fraudulent adoption by Dr. Death, they may have lived out their lives as somebody’s beloved pet.

But what I find most disturbing about this little biographical tidbit is not that it shows what a heartless, unfeeling prick he is. We already knew that. It’s that it shows a pattern in Frist’s life of sacrificing ethics in the name of his personal ambition.

A man who could so callously carve up a cute little kitty is capable of anything.

UPDATE:
Reading the comments in the thread, it seems to me that a lot of you righties miss the point, so let me spell it out for you:
“F R A U D”

It’s not that he dissected cats, it’s that he fraudulently adopted them from shelters. The guy is a total puke, with no moral or ethical compass. (And… he hates cats.)

The local story that’s making national headlines is the tale of the pansy-ass hypocrites at Microsoft who withdrew their longtime support for HB 1515, the gay and lesbian anti-discrimination bill, after pressure from a Redmond-based, Evangelical mega-church.

Sandeep Kaushik apparently broke the story in The Stranger, before it swept through the national blogosphere (Slashdot and AMERICAblog, and landed on the pages of the New York Times: “Microsoft Comes Under Fire for Reversal on Gay Rights Bill.”

While I’ve been pretty darn loud in expressing my personal disgust over the defeat of HB 1515, I totally missed the boat on Microsoft’s role — or lack thereof. Fortunately a lot of other local bloggers have provided excellent coverage, including Evergreen Politics and Pacific Views. But the best local commentary I’ve seen thus far comes from Columbian Watch, both on the Microsoft debacle and on yesterday’s defeat of the bill.

This is a really important issue, and not just because HB 1515 was a deserving bill, or because it’s fun to stick it to Microsoft. It is important because it demonstrates how powerful the right-wing religious extremists have become, and how dangerously close they are to establishing their neo-fascist theocracy. That a powerful company like Microsoft, with a long history of supporting gay rights… or a politician like Sen. Finkbeiner, who has previously supported the legislation… would feel compelled to bow to pressures from the Dominionist forces, should scare everybody who naively believes that our basic human rights are somehow protected by that yellowed scrap of parchment on display at the National Archives.

I need to run out, but I have a lot more to say on this issue. And I intend to say it while I still can.

Tim Eyman’s career as a grassroots initiative sponsor ended a couple years ago. (Actually, it probably ended with I-695, but let’s not get too technical.)

And so, when on election night, in an effort to deflect attention away from the spectacular defeat of his gambling industry backed Initiative 892, Tim announced to the media his plans for a performance audits initiative, I was more than comfortable predicting that he didn’t have a snowball’s chance of qualifying for the ballot without the financial support of a sugar daddy.

Well, as David Ammons of the AP reports, Timmy’s pinched his pigeon:

Michael Dunmire, 60, a wealthy investment executive from the Seattle suburb of Woodinville, has contributed nearly $240,000 to Eyman’s Initiative 900 and says more could be on the way. The initiative, now circulating for signatures, would require regular performance audits of state agencies and programs.

The Dunmires have also given $20,000 to Tim’s personal compensation PAC “Help Me Help Myself” (or whatever he calls it.)

Oh, I could go on and on about how Tim hasn’t qualified a grassroots initiative for the ballot in over two years, and about how people need to get it through their heads that he is just a shill for wealthy special interests, and about how Dunmire is just propping him up. But I think the expert quoted in the AP story sums it up best.

Eyman critic David Goldstein, a Seattle software designer and blogger, said Dunmire is “basically propping up Eyman. People should finally get it through their heads that Eyman is not some grassroots guy. He is a front for the monied special interests.

“It’s not scary. It’s disappointing. There is no way he gets on the ballot without a Sugar Daddy. Clearly, Eyman is no longer a grassroots activist in any way whatsoever. For two years running, he couldn’t get a grassroots initiative on the ballot.”

Now that guy knows what he’s talking about.

I hate to give incredibly wealthy right-wingers, eager to distort our political system, any free advice, but the Legislature just passed a very thorough performance audits bill, so perhaps you could have marshaled your resources a little more efficiently, huh? Hey, I know… how about financing a bill that legalizes discrimination against gays and lesbians!

Anyway, so now we know why Tim chose this dog of an initiative in the first place: Dunmire told him to… and the customer is always right. Sure, I-900 generates about as much excitement as a Pam Roach Pin-Up Calendar… and yeah, it’s almost totally superfluous now that the Legislature has passed its own performance audits bill. But Timmy knows a meal ticket when he sees one, and Dunmire is his a free pass to, um… less irrelevance.

My only hope is that Dunmire is as sharp a businessman as he claims to be, and eventually realizes what a crappy investment Tim Eyman really is.

The Washington state Senate narrowly approved a procedural move to bring HB 1515 to the floor for a vote, only to see the bill defeated by a 25-24 margin. The bill would have added “sexual orientation” to the state’s anti-discrimination laws.

All 23 Republican senators voted against the bill, along with conservative Democrats Jim Hargrove and Tim Sheldon. Hargrove says he opposed the measure for religious reasons.

“I believe adultery is wrong, I believe sex outside marriage is wrong, I believe homosexuality is wrong. Therefore, I cannot give government protection to this behavior,” Hargrove said.

I suppose then, that Jim would support legislation permitting discrimination in housing, employment, lending and insurance against straight couples having premarital sex? (And if he thinks he’s gonna get a blow job from me tonight, he’s got another thing coming.)

So there you have it… the entire Senate Republican caucus has gone on the record sanctioning discrimination against gays and lesbians.

Seattle Times publisher Frank Blethen must not be feeling well this morning. How can I tell? Well, every time Frank catches a cold, he blows his nose all over the editorial page with yet another op-ed attacking the estate tax.

A new death tax, rising to 16 percent of assets, is levied on children who inherit businesses and property from parents who have died, which will unfairly force heirs to sell family businesses they had hoped to operate.

Translation: Frank, and the rest of his family, are mortal.

The Times likes to remind us that it is a “family owned” newspaper, implying that the extended Blethen family’s 50.5 percent stake (the rest is owned by media giant Knight-Ridder) somehow makes it a more honest guardian of community interests than the apparently evil, corporate drones over at the Hearst-owned Seattle P-I. But their unrelenting obsession with the estate tax shows that the community they care most deeply about is that which gathers around the Blethen family’s Thanksgiving Day dinner table.

Indeed, in a February 2003 interview in the Seattle Weekly, Frank was quite blunt about the family’s priorities:

“We have–and this is part of the governing documents–equal responsibility for perpetuating the family ownership and for practicing independent journalism.”

And what happens when these responsibilities conflict with each other? Well for one, you get the Time’s cynical adoption of the term “death tax.” A truly independent journalist would wince at the thought of using such a shamelessly loaded piece of Republican sloganeering. And then there’s the Times’ OCD-like focus on the issue itself, editorializing against the death estate tax six times in the past six months.

The Times’ eligiac lament for the days of family-owned newspapers is also misleading… evoking a romanticized image of three generations of Blethens bravely pounding away at their Underwoods as they fend off the sudden assault of a faceless, out-of-state, modern media giant. The 142-year-old Seattle P-I has been published by Hearst since 1921, and the paper’s editorial board and staff are just as much a part of our community as that of the Times. Indeed, the Blethen family’s holding company is no mom-and-pop shop itself; its assets include a number of online news, information and advertising web sites, printing and distribution subsidiaries, plus nine newspapers in Washington and Maine, including the Yakima Herald-Republic, the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin, The Issaquah Press, and Maine’s largest circulation papers, the Portland Press-Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram.

While the Blethen family’s holdings are dwarfed by those of Hearst, both the Times and the P-I are in fact, family-owned newspapers… the Hearst Corporation having been privately held by the Hearst family for its entire 118-year history.

I actually empathize with the Blethens, and wish them the best of luck in transferring the business intact to their fifth generation. But it is arrogant of them to ask us to eliminate a century-old tax, shifting burden to the already over-burdened poor and middle-class, in the interest of easing the Blethens’ selfish — if admirable — goal of maintaining their family legacy. While millions of American children are forced to get by in substandard schools, and without adequate health care, it is hard for me to squeeze out a few tears for the children of wealth and privilege.

Three generations of Blethens have managed to keep their inheritance in the family despite a much higher estate tax than the Times now rails against. If the current generation proves unwilling to make the same kind of sacrifices as their elders, then the Blethen family should blame itself, not the tax code.

The Seattle P-I reported yesterday that according to a GOP statistical analysis, Dino Rossi won by about 100 votes, when accounting for ballots cast by felons, dead voters and non-citizens. How convenient.

How very, very convenient.

Indeed, to achieve this stunning reversal of fortune, several extremely convenient events would have to take place. First, the Republicans would have to prove that the number of illegal votes is anywhere near the thousand-ish they have alleged (not likely considering their track record thus far.) Second, the court would have to ignore offsetting errors from pro-Rossi counties… like the 1793 provisional ballots that were improperly counted without matching signatures. Third, the court would have to accept a statistical analysis. And fourth, the court would have to adopt the rather unscientific methodology the Republicans are proposing for their analysis.

As the P-I explains, Republicans are relying on a precinct level analysis to pad Rossi’s numbers.

For example, if Gregoire received 60 percent of a vote in Precinct A and Rossi 40 percent, and there were 100 improper votes from that precinct, Gregoire’s total would be reduced by 60 votes and Rossi’s by 40.

In most cases, the number of improper votes traceable to a single precinct is very small — often, as few as one. In that case, using the same percentages, Gregoire would lose 0.6 votes and Rossi 0.4.

The problem is, a single illegal vote per precinct is not a statistically significant sample. This results in what statisticians call an “ecological fallacy,” a logical flaw whereby aggregate statistics collected for a group are used to make inferences about an individual member.

For example, Democrats have argued that the majority of felons are male, and men tend to disproportionately favor Republicans, thus complicating any statistical analysis of the felon vote. One could also argue that felons tend to be, um… felons, and as such, would be less likely to vote for the state’s leading law enforcement officer.

Republicans, on the other hand, argue that such a demographic analysis would be absurd… that the only accurate means of deducing a voter’s behavior is to simply look at the totals for his precinct. But the absurdity of the Republican’s favored methodology can be clearly illustrated by using it to infer the ballot of a single voter: Stefan Sharkansky. If right-wing poster-blogger Stefan were an illegal voter casting a ballot in his heavily Democratic Greenlake precinct, the Republican analysis would subtract .78 votes from Gregoire, and only .19 votes from Rossi.

Of course, Stefan is not your typical Greenlake voter… but then, neither is a felon. And that’s exactly the point. The fact that Stefan is an angry, selfish, right-wing, extremist prick a Republican, is a helluva lot more predictive of his voting behavior than his precinct.

Thus any court judicially active enough to read statistical analysis into a contest statute that clearly doesn’t envision it, would be faced with a quandary: if statistical analysis is to be used to determine the winner of this election… which statistics should be analyzed?

No court is going to put itself into that kind of a quandary.

I tuned in late to catch the score of a World Series game back in 1989, only to find coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. I was somewhat confused by overhead footage of what reporters kept describing as a massive freeway collapse, that to me appeared to show an elevated freeway still standing. Unfamiliar with the Bay area, I had no idea that this was the remnant of a double-decker freeway, the top deck having collapsed onto the bottom, crushing cars and their occupants underneath tons of steel and concrete.

Since moving to Seattle a couple years later, I have always been wary of this doomed freeway’s kissing-cousin, the Alaska Way Viaduct. Whenever I drive across the Viaduct or walk beneath it, I do so speedily, with images vividly in my mind of the dead being pried from between the decks of San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway. While I know my chance of being in the wrong place at the wrong time is exceedingly small, my discomfort is not the product of irrational paranoia. A major earthquake will hit the Seattle area, and left as-is, the Viaduct will collapse, killing dozens or even hundreds, depending on the time of day.

And if this tragedy occurs due to the partisan bickering currently transgressing in Olympia over funding the Viaduct’s replacement, I will personally blame these deaths on the petty, heartless legislators who are clearly willing to risk sacrificing the lives of innocents in exchange for a few extra dollars of spending in their own districts.

This exploitation of regional tensions is politics at its most disgusting… and incredibly stupid and shortsighted. House Transportation Committee Chair Ed Murray (D-Seattle) sums it up bluntly:

Murray said complaints that state spending is too concentrated on Seattle-area projects were misguided. “We’ll come back here in two years when that thing falls down and we’ll get all of it.”

Lives are at stake. The Viaduct is a human and economic tragedy waiting to happen… as is the 520 floating bridge, one of the oldest structures of its kind in the world. In a region that has witnessed not one, not two, but three major bridges collapse or sink, it is absurd to pretend that it could not happen a fourth time, especially with a structure so in need of repair or replacement.

To oppose this transportation package because the spending is too “Seattle-centric” is an arrogant, absurd and dangerous fiction. Transportation spending is Seattle-centric because Washington state is Seattle-centric. Seattle is our cultural, economic and population center… it produces the lion’s share of the tax dollars, and currently has the most immediate transportation needs. If Republicans want more money for projects outside of the Seattle area, then they should propose raising additional tax dollars to pay for them.

Like most Seattle voters, I’m willing to pay my fair share to fund needed transportation projects in the rest of the state. But personally, I’m not willing to die to save a couple pennies on a gallon of gas.

Congratulations to Rep. Mark Miloscia (D-Federal Way) for finally, finally getting a performance audits bill through the Legislature, after years of trying. HB 1064 passed the House today by a 75 to 22 margin, after having passed the Senate 30 to 19 earlier in the month. Gov. Christine Gregoire is expected to sign the bill into law.

(A curious note… the always luscious Sen. Pam Roach voted against the bill, while her son Dan voted for it. Hmmmm.)

Of course, professional initiative sponsor Tim Eyman is still pushing his bullshit performance audits initiative, I-900, but then… he wouldn’t be Tim if he didn’t. I imagine it’s kind of hard to feign outrage about the need for performance audits, when we already have them, but I suppose Tim will find a way.

Anyway… it’s a kind of boring topic I’ve written about on way too many occasions, so if you’re interested in my take on performance audits, you can find my previous blogs here.

I haven’t spent much time dwelling on papal politics, but the choice of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany wasn’t much of a surprise to anybody.

Of course, if the Irish Catholic family I married into had any say in the matter, it would have been somebody else. Judging from the dinner table conversation the other night, the only choice less acceptable to the extended family (only slightly smaller than the College of Cardinals) would have been Cardinal Law.

Personally, I could care less. Though I am a bit disappointed he adopted the name Benedict XVI instead of sticking with Ratzinger. It would have been amusing to have a Pope Ratzinger.

I suppose one explanation for why the WA state GOP is so unwilling to join Democrats in moving the primary back three weeks, is that they don’t actually intend to hold primaries anymore.

At least that was the gist of news reports yesterday, all over the radio and in the Seattle Times, about how former U.S. Rep. Rick White, state GOPolitburo Chair Chris Vance, and Safeco CEO Mike McGavick all hope to win the primary, um… capture the nomination, uh… be hand picked by Karl Rove to run against U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell in 2006. As the Times succinctly put it:

There will be a primary of sorts

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The Seattle P-I chimes in tomorrow with an editorial I could have written myself, if… you know… I was a bit more even-handed… and not quite so verbose… and, um… on the P-I editorial board:

Strangely, key elements of the Republicans’ “real reform” have little relevance to the issues in last fall’s controversial election. Included in the price for Republican votes in the two-thirds majority required to move the primary have been a massive voter re-registration and requirements for photo identification, birth certificates or passports for voter registration and voting at the polls.

Among the problems that cropped up in the November election, there were hardly widespread allegations of voters claiming to cast ballots for someone they’re not or of non-citizens attempting to vote. The Republican proposals seem to echo last fall’s attempts across the country to intimidate certain groups of voters.

Oh… and as Jon helpfully pointed out in the previous thread, another good reason not to purge the rolls, is that it would violate the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. So, Republicans are fighting for an illegal provision that fixes a problem that doesn’t exist.

Come on guys… quit the grandstanding and move the primary.

There were several votes in Olympia last week that clearly illustrate the philosophical difference between Democrats and Republicans on election reform: Democrats are focused on fixing the problems we know exist, whereas Republicans are focused on fixing the problems they fear might exist.

I’m not going into the details of what the various bills do, except to say that they standardize and streamline registration, elections, and canvassing procedures statewide, while enabling the secretary of state to better screen for felons and non-citizens. What interests me are the most contentious points of disagreement between the two parties.

Republicans are angry that a voter registration and record-keeping bill did not include two provisions they consider the heart of their election reform proposals: 1) require picture ID at the polling place, and 2) completely purge the current rolls, forcing all voters to re-register. Meanwhile, Democrats are struggling to get a bill through the Senate that would move the September primary date back three weeks, to August.

The primary date proposal was the number one priority for Secretary of State Sam Reed, as well as every county auditor to whom I have talked. All of the Republican bluff and bluster over military ballots during the early days of the contest (Rossi has since quietly dropped the issue from his lawsuit) will prove to be just that, unless they get on board and support the only reform that assures these ballots are mailed on time. Moving the date is also the only way to avoid the catastrophic electoral meltdown that will occur in the inevitable event of a razor thin primary contest.

Ironically, while Republicans block the one reform elections experts say we need most desperately, they stubbornly cling to the one reform the experts say would be most counterproductive: purging the rolls. Forcing 3.5 million voters to suddenly re-register would be a logistical nightmare that our state and local elections departments simply don’t have the resources to handle; if you want to introduce errors and illegal voters into the system, this is exactly the way to do it.

Likewise, requiring a picture ID to vote, places an unreasonable burden on the six percent of voters without a drivers license or passport — predominately seniors and the very poor — adding little upfront security in return. The Democratic measure does require identification at the polls, but allows a utility bill or voter registration card to suffice. Last time I checked, it was a helluva lot easier to get a fake ID in your name than an account with a local utility.

But such arguments miss the point, for the most outrageous part about the Republicans’ feigned outrage that the Democratic measures don’t go far enough to stop the illegal voter problem, is that they have presented absolutely no evidence that we have an illegal voter problem in the first place. With all the time, money and effort that Republicans have put into uncovering illegal votes in the 2004 election, the only substantial numbers found were that of felons who have not had their voting rights restored… and this problem would be largely solved without further legislation, once the statewide voter database (two years in the making) goes live in 2006.

The first-ever computerized state voter database will replace 39 separate county lists, some meticulously kept on file cards.

Once it comes on line in January, it will enable election officials to make sure that felons, dead people and non-citizens aren’t allowed to vote and that people aren’t registered in more than one locale or voting more than once per election.

Secretary of State Sam Reed and state and local election officials are optimistic that the move will purge and protect the voting lists and guard against illegal votes.

By merging voter registration and drivers license data with felons lists and data on deaths from Social Security and the Department of Health, this database would have eliminated nearly every illegal voter uncovered thus far. The Secretary of State is also trying to get access to federal databases on non-citizens… both legal and illegal aliens.

But even in this last election, the number of illegally registered voters was statistically tiny… the SOS estimates maybe 2,000 out of 3.5 million registered voters… about 0.05 percent. And the vast majority of these were the felons the database will be most capable of purging.

Republican rhetoric about polling-place vote fraud is not only unsupported by the evidence, it is implausible. A picture ID at the polls is intended to stop an individual from casting a ballot under another voter’s name — a crime for which there was not a single allegation from the last election — and which in any case, would be a logistically impossible means for individuals to skew a typical election.

That Republicans would focus on imagined problems while ignoring the known ones, suggests an unfortunate willingness to continue to politicize what should be a bipartisan issue. Clearly, purging the rolls is intended to wipe out years of Democratic voter registration efforts, while a picture ID requirement would mostly inhibit voting by the very poor and the very old… a predominately Democratic constituency.

But of course the Republican’s main motivation for harping on voter fraud, is that it fits so neatly with their ongoing PR campaign, painting Gov. Christine Gregoire as the illegitimate beneficiary of a stolen election. To view the Republican focus on fixing non-existent problems in any other light, would be naive.

UPDATE:
Actually, the state Democrats do a pretty good job of explaining their stance on election reform.

I didn’t really feel like doing much blogging today, so I started scanning Daily Kos, looking for a quick link to fill some space. It didn’t take me very long: UPDATE: It’s the Jews.”

That’s how close we are.

Watching Frist join the “religious persecution” bandwagon brings to mind the Nazis.

I’m sorry if some of you may think I’m overstating the case. But I see it all to clearly…

Hollywood is evil.

Hollywood? That’s the Jews.

The liberal media is evil.

The liberal media? That’s the Jews.

Folks, we are at a critical turning point in our nation’s history. Make no mistake about it.

Oh, I wish I could just leave it that, and spend the day tending my much neglected garden. But recent events have left me with a head full of dark thoughts, just aching to spill out through my fingertips and onto the screen. Yes, it would be counterproductive hyperbole to call the Republican leadership and their Dominionist backers “Nazis”… and I’m not sure if our nation is quite at the critical turning point that DKos diarist Bob Johnson fears.

But clearly, something is happening in America, reminiscent of the early days of McCarthyism, and we would be foolish to shy away from discussing it for fear of appearing alarmist or paranoid. Something is happening in America, that has given a strange confidence to mainstream politicians to publicly ape the hateful and divisive rhetoric of right-wing Christian extremism. Something is happening in America, where emboldened by Bush’s reelection, and inflamed by the Schiavo case, the Dominionist forces are suddenly willing to openly flex their theocratic ambitions.

It is thus ironic that respectable pundits and editorialists so cautiously and carefully avoid the use of the word “fascism” at the same time the ascendant political elite so callously embraces its tenets.

Still, I take issue with Johnson on one point: it is not the Jews, per se, for the antisemitism has always been there, lurking just beneath the surface. Antisemitism is not an end in itself, but rather the canary in the coal mine of political discourse… an early warning system that tells us that something is happening in America.

When Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist steps to the national pulpit and declares that Democrats are “against people of faith,” he gives aide, comfort, and political legitimacy to religious extremists who preach that people like me are less moral, less human, less worthy in the eyes of God than they. These are people with a devout, unshakeable faith that I am going to Hell (a subject I’ve also touched upon here, here, and here.) These are people who believe that their political opponents are doomed to burn in the eternal flames of Hell… so is it really so alarmist to wonder what stops them from preheating the oven here, in the Kingdom of God on earth?

Yes, something is happening in America, where even my non-Jewish friends nervously joke about their “exit strategy”… imagining what nation they might seek refuge in, should the worst case scenario occur at home. And that worst case scenario is not nearly as far-fetched as we might want to imagine.

A few months back, a former high-level Clinton administration official told me that it was the consensus of analysts he respected — people with higher security clearance than his — that some time over the next five to ten years, there is a fifty-fifty chance that a small nuclear device will be set off in a major American city. In its wake, he suggests that in exchange for a promise of increased security, the American people will be more than willing to surrender their civil liberties. And who can argue that the current administration wouldn’t be more than willing to take them?

Something is happening in America that sets the stage for something much worse… and now is the time to discuss it. Just like we should have imagined terrorists flying jetliners full of fuel and people into buildings, we must imagine an extreme right-wing — un-American and anti-Constitutional — seizing the reigns of government, imposing their theocratic dictatorship, and silencing the opposition through whatever means.

I’m not saying it is imminent. I’m not saying it is likely. But if the genocidal history of the 20th Century teaches us anything… it is possible.

No… really…

VOA says the move could save at least $300,000 in salaries and benefits each year.