Victims of gay families

No: victims of antigay bigotry

The Sacramento Bee was rash enough to include same-sex couples in a January 21 article titled “New family portrait.” A letter-writer promptly chastized the newspaper for failing to attack gay couples as evil.

From the January 27, 2007, Letters to the Bee:

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Gay families and kids' welfare

Re “New family portrait,” Jan. 21: The Bee's article failed to present the perspective of an adult survivor of same-sex marriage. This would come from someone who had time to reflect objectively on her experience and be able to speak freely about it. Dawn Stefanowicz does this in the August 2005 issue of the American Family Association Journal. This article challenges most of what the “experts” said in The Bee article and leaves one wondering about how objective they were.

Stefanowicz says, “Not only do children do best with both a mother and a father in a lifelong marriage bond, children need responsible monogamous parents who have no extramarital sexual partners. Parental promiscuity, abuse and divorce are not good for children.” No matter what our opinions are about this subject, we ought to stay focused on the long-term best interests of our children.

—Chuck Muller, Shingle Springs

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I've heard Stefanowicz interviewed on EWTN's Catholic Answers, where she held forth on her miserable childhood and replied to callers' questions on gay parenting. With her book and website and lecture tours, Stefanowicz is a successful victimization entrepreneur. During her Catholic Answers appearance, Stefanowicz was a font of shocking revelations. Speaking about her experience as the child of a single-parent gay father, she told listeners that she was traumatized by her father's love life: “There can be multiple partners over the years.” This egregious behavior by a gay father stands in stark contrast to the strictly monogamous lifelong commitments of heterosexual people. No wonder Stefanowicz grew up in anguish and misery.

Having a gay parent also caused Stefanowicz to suffer isolation: “I felt really different: that I didn't belong.” As we all know, gay parents could not possibly relate to this terrible sense of isolation, accepted as they are by mainstream society and the liberal opinion-makers who dominate our culture.

Even worse, Stefanowicz's father was unable to teach her about femininity:

My father couldn't affirm me as a young girl growing up into a woman. It was only a father who loved his wife—who loved women—could really affirm me as a daughter growing up in this situation. Gay men cannot affirm a young woman that's growing up in this environment. There's absolutely no way.

This is an excellent point. Gay men are too wrapped up in sports and macho posturing to have any time to nuture their daughters' tender feelings. (Perhaps we could allow gay men to raise their sons because so many provide wonderful role models of masculine muscle culture, but certainly we mustn't let them raise daughters.)

Stefanowicz took a call from Nina, who offered her own testimony:

You know, Catholics in favor of same-sex marriage, they don't realize the deep harm that will come to the souls and minds of children of these couples. I was raised by parents who were openly bisexual. After my stepdad died, my mother went completely lesbian. I was fifteen. We were shunned by my grandparents, aunts, uncles, their children my cousins, who to this day are still distant from me. You know, I suppose I ought to thank my lesbian mother for making me a traditional Catholic.

Stefanowicz was quick to join Nina in blaming Nina's mother for the destruction of Nina's family ties. It did not occur to either of them to consider that Nina's grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins were bad Christians. Of course, I do not expect professed Christians to be examples of perfection (and most do not claim to be such), but it seems the height of hard-heartedness to reject a child because the mother is out of favor—even “to this day,” as Nina pointed out, now an adult and apart from her mother and still rejected by her family. Nice Christian witness, you guys.

A voice of reason

As one might have expected, The Bee did not simply accept Mr. Muller's stern rebuke and recommendation that we all learn from Stefanowicz and her “gay victim” schtick. No, the newspaper let another correspondent put bigots in their place with a simple expression of gratitude for the common courtesy of being acknowledged as a human being who lives and loves much as others do.

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Same-sex parents still parents

I was so pleased to see gay dads and lesbian moms represented in your cover story as a “rock steady” part of our bigger community. We need more and more of this type of coverage of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. We raise children who are healthy and strong, we do some things better than others and we make mistakes with them; we show up at the PTA meetings, we have to meet with the teachers when something goes wrong and we are there when something goes right. We are parents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and grandparents of children all over the world. We teach love and understanding that “differences” make this world what it is.

Thanks for showing us in a day-to-day light, living our lives and contributing to our community by illustrating such wonderful families in your article.

—Tina Reynolds, Sacramento

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Don't blame me for term limits

Not guilty!

The liberals have gone and upset Bob Dunning of The Davis Enterprise. It seems that Bob just noticed that we're about to lose Lois Wolk as our representative in the State Assembly. Bob thinks that liberals are to blame.

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(January 23, 2007) So long, Lois ... whichever so-called “progressive” came up with the notion of term limits should be taken behind the woodshed and banned from voting for the next 40 election cycles ... I mean, there I was, minding my own business and reading the front page of the Sunday Enterprise when I stumbled upon a story with the headline “Five names emerge early for 8th Assembly District.” ... and all I could think was “Lois, we hardly knew ya.” ...

“With Wolk reaching the end of her allowable three terms or six years in office next year,” the story noted, “someone new will be taking her place as the representative of the 8th Assembly District.” ... poof, just like that, no more Lois ... and I asked myself why on earth we would do this to ourselves .. just when Lois is hitting her stride, she's gone.”

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Don't blame me, Bob. This liberal voted against Proposition 140 in 1990, which nevertheless passed by a narrow margin and imposed ridiculously draconian limits on our legislators' terms. We may value experience in most other professions, but we Californians seem to prefer our legislators callow and disoriented. It's a dirty shame. And liberals did not draft Proposition 140 or organize the campaign that enacted it into law. It was conservatives.

I know the source of Bob's confusion, because he told me himself. When I gently corrected his mistake about Proposition 140, Dunning simply replied that “Many of my friends, who claim to be ‘progressives,’ were very much in favor of term limits.” It's the “some of my best friends are—” defense. I'll grant him this much: there are undoubtedly plenty of progressive good-government types who think term limits are a good way to stir up the pot and ensure broader representation in elected bodies. Term limits probably accelerated the arrival of more women and minorities in the legislative ranks, although that trend was already well established in California before the voters installed rapidly revolving doors on the State Capitol. Some progressives concerned about entrenched incumbents—particularly if they were friends of Bob, apparently—might have been suckered into casting a vote in favor of a right-wing power play.

A short history lesson

The right-wing power player behind Proposition 140 was Peter Schabarum, a disgruntled former legislator who followed his service in the State Capitol with a lengthy stint on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors (1972 to 1991; Schabarum favored term limits only for other people). His initiative contained a provision that gutted the generous legislative retirement system, but that was probably mostly window dressing to attract the support of resentful voters. Schabarum was eager to enact the term limits that would end Democratic domination of the state legislature and, in particular, bring to a close the long reign of Willie Brown of San Francisco as Speaker of the Assembly. Schabarum was joined in his push for term limits by Lewis K. Uhler of the National Tax Limitation Committee. In brief, the leadership of the Proposition 140 was an assembly of all of the usual right-wing suspects.

Proposition 140's victory in the 1990 general election did not quite deliver the results that its conservative sponsors had hoped for. While the legislative pension system was abolished and the term-limit clock began to tick for all of the incumbents in office, Speaker Brown soon demonstrated that his hold on the legislature was perhaps a bit shaken, maybe slightly stirred, but by no means broken. He remained ensconced in the Speaker's office till nearly the end of the his six-year limit.

While subsequent elections chipped away at Brown's majority (some of his allies grabbed opportunities to run for seats in Congress, where term limits did not apply), Brown's power survived even the narrow Republican victory of 1994. He peeled one crucial vote away from the Republican caucus, negating their majority and permitting himself to be re-elected as Speaker with the aid of his Democratic minority. Before he left the Assembly to take office as mayor of San Francisco in 1996, Brown continued to deny the speakership to the leader of the Republican caucus, twice engineering the election of GOP mavericks as his short-term successors. The Republican caucus finally managed to install one of their own as Speaker once Brown was gone, but the GOP speakership was ended a few months later by the Democratic return to power in the 1996 election.

The advent of term limits in California state politics was as dramatic as a professional wrestling match and just about as pertinent to the goal of good government. After more than sixteen years of the term-limit experiment, the legislature continues to be populated by careerists, except that they now are forever climbing over one another to switch from the State Assembly to the State Senate (or vice versa) and seizing every opportunity to seek election to Congress.

Term limits? Bah, humbug!

Bloggers can't get no respect

Nor can meta-bloggers

I know John Hughes mostly as the nice guy who occasionally tells me that The Sacramento Bee can't run one of my missives* in the Letters to the Editor column. More recently, however, Hughes has been trying to make something of Ipso Sacto, an ambitious project to sift through the offerings of blogs in northern California. He idealistically thought that a major news organ like The Bee would be eager to take of the pulse of the local blogosphere, with its fervent advocacy and free-wheeling commentary.

He was mostly wrong.

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(Jan. 3, 2007) When I started this site it was in close association with my employer. My situation at work has changed, and it no longer appears likely that any of my demonstration projects will be adopted.

What to do? I could simply turn off ipsoSacto.com. I own the domain, the server is housed in my home office, I work on this in my “spare” time. Bottom line: I get to decide.

In the 22 weeks that I have been working on this, I've come to genuinely enjoy reading the regional blogs. I would continue reading them even without this web site.

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So what went wrong? It may well be a cultural thing. There are certain professions—journalism is one of them, teaching is another—where it is easy to have a sense of mission. Sure, life would be rough without plumbers and electricians, but journalists serve Truth (and occasionally Justice) by carefully and dispassionately dispensing the first draft of history in the pages of their newspapers and the sound-bites of their broadcasts.

Well, sometimes they do. Writing on deadline is tough work, and tight deadlines are the enemy of accuracy, limiting as they do the opportunity to check and recheck one's facts. I know a little something about this, having sampled the news writer's experience during a summer job in journalism several years ago. My first published article was less than a stellar exemplar of fact-checking. I had to learn fast—and write fast. (One of my acquaintances is retired Bee journalist Walt Wiley, who once laughingly told me that my ten-week fellowship as a science writer at the Albuquerque Journal was “more than enough” to turn me into a journalist. I suppose it was a decent apprenticeship.)

Journalists have also been lionized by their association with the famous Woodward and Bernstein, whose series of investigative reports at the Washington Post were crucial in destroying the Nixon presidency. One could get a swelled head. (Bob Woodward's cranial edema was so severe it clogged his critical faculties. It took three books on the Bush administration before he realized they're all compulsive liars.)

By contrast, what is a blogger? And what are the qualifications to be a blogger? These are easy questions, since the simple answers are, respectively, “anyone” and “none.” Who would want news and information from folks with no qualifications at all?

Well, frankly, lots of people. Haven't you noticed the exceedingly slender credentials held by most of today's noisiest opinion shapers? The talkers on radio are most skilled at heaping praise on callers who agree with them and cruelly taunting those who do not. The books by Coulter, Hannity, Ingraham, and Savage (even when largely ghost-written) are simply their on-air rants in print form. Essayists they are not. (In her last book [and pray that it may indeed be her last], Coulter devoted three chapters to attacking Darwin and evolution, cribbing almost everything from a couple of “intelligent design” apologists.) When the so-called mainstream media are being denounced for blandness and irrelevance, why should journalists not feel defensive? Hughes has certainly encountered this sentiment himself:

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(January 4, 2007) As if my self-esteem as my employer's principal blog-watcher isn't low enough already, I get to edit and publish this opinion from a co-worker:

The initial source of Boxer's concern was the blogosphere, that sometimes subterranean sewer of suspect journalism, where reputation-besmirching rumor runs rampant.

Thank you very much.

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Yeah, bloggers get no respect. And neither does the effort of John Hughes to track the local blogosphere. Say, wouldn't it be nice to go visit Ipso Sacto and show John some support.

Oh, and add Ipso Sacto to your link list.


*Hughes once gave me one of the nicest rejection notices ever, when he took the trouble to tell me how much he liked a bit I did on UFOs, men in black, and black helicopters. It was just too long (and probably no longer timely). I'd run that piece today as a blog post if it weren't long lost in the ozone of my abandoned CompuServe account. I doubt that John's archives go back that far.

Bushier than thou

The escalator to nowhere

Our silly president commissioned a report from the Iraq Study Group, a council of learned elders and retreads from previous administrations, when all he really had to do was chat up Stephen Oakley of Fair Oaks. Mr. Oakley disdains the defeatist talk coming from the ISG because he can solve all of our problems in Iraq with a snap of his fingers and his own personal Fourteen Points (equal in number, but not in tenor, to Woodrow Wilson's).

From the December 14, 2006, Letters to The Bee [with interpolated snarkiness by yours truly]:

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How to win this war

Re “Twin car blasts kill dozens in Baghdad,” Dec. 12: Please, no more special commissions staffed by blow-hards and political hacks from the '60s. Here's my advice to Bush for a course correction:

1) Assert American interests. [Those being?]

2) Dump the Iraq Study Group report in the garbage. [Already done by Bush!]

3) Tell former Rep. Lee Hamilton to just accept retirement; go home; don't come back. [The ISG chair was James Baker; how did you overlook him?]

4) Lock Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in her office from the outside. She's another incompetent academic. [Hey! You got one right!]

5) Find radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr; drag him out of his “mosque” and hang him. [Yeah, once he's a sanctified martyr for the holy cause, Sadr will have no impact at all!]

6) Fire and replace the current crop of field generals and John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander for the Middle East. [The top commander is our commander-in-chief. May we please fire him, too?]

7) Rebuild the Iraqi police from the ground up; implant identity chips in the graduates. [The U.S. has been doing a bad job of rebuilding Iraqi law enforcement for years. Why didn't we realize the problem was lack of ID chips?]

8) Level every single “mosque” in Iraq if weapons are stored there or a single shot has been fired from a minaret. [In the good old days of the Know Nothing Party (not, despite what you might think, the immediate predecessor of the GOP), Roman Catholic “convents” were known to stockpile weapons, conveyed from parish to parish under the long habits of gun-running nuns. Oh, if only we had destroyed them all when we had a chance!]

9) Arrest and hang every imam who preaches rebellion. [Sounds easy. Clerics in Iraq aren't entitled to any of that due process stuff, are they? Didn't think so. By the way, against whom would they be preaching “rebellion”?]

10) Throw the American media out of Iraq and bar them from returning. Let them subcontract their propaganda from Al Jazeera. We'd never know the difference. [Yeah, the America-hating liberal media deserve this for credulously reporting Bush administration “intelligence” on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction in the months leading up to our invasion.]

11) Disarm the “civilians.” Then, search and destroy houses with contraband. [I bet that would work well in this country, too. Can we get the NRA's endorsement?]

12) Arrest, summarily execute and transport to the landfill armed militiamen and phony road-check thugs. [Do we have to kill them, or could we just bury them alive? After all, our supply of nooses is tied up with the hanging imams.]

13) Send Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki packing. [How big a golden parachute would you suggest? There's billions unaccounted for by now. Maybe we could leave some of it on his dresser on our way out.]

14) Tell the United Nations and free-loading Europeans to stuff it. [Already done by the heroic Yosemite Sam—sorry, I mean John Bolton. Say, whatever happened to him?]

—Stephen G. Oakley, Fair Oaks

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See? Victory in Iraq is so easy that even George Bush could do it. Problem solved.

All things to all people

Confusion over community colleges

Some of my colleagues get upset whenever they hear the words “junior college.” The consider it a put-down, which indeed it sometimes is. Also, it reinforces the notion that we are nothing more than the first two years of postsecondary education, training freshmen and sophomores to go off into the world of four-year colleges and universities. You know, the real colleges.

While I don't have the same disdain for the designation “junior college” (Modesto JC and Santa Rosa JC wear the title with honor, after all), I can see how the two-year versus four-year confusion obscures a significant part of our mission. Community colleges are the open-admission gateway to higher education. The students themselves determine what their postsecondary education goals are, although we probably should do a better job of advising them. Still, we are not simply the first two years of a college education. We are that—and a great deal more.

The venerable Peter Schrag, former editorial-page editor of The Sacramento Bee, turned his attention to the plight of California community colleges and their students in an editorial published on November 29, 2006. Schrag referred to an important new report on community colleges by Ria Sengupta and Christopher Jepsen of the Public Policy Institute of California. In his editorial, Schrag takes particular note of the report's finding that only about “15 percent of full-time community college students eventually transfer to a four-year college.” Furthermore, notes Schrag, “Half of entering students never go past the first year.”

A searing indictment? Well, we shouldn't forget that many of our students never intended to go to a four-year college in the first place. One or two semesters may be all they were looking for in the first place. Simple measures of transfer rates to four-year institutions do not accurately gauge the success or failure of the community colleges in achieving their mission of making higher education available to every adult who could benefit from it.

We do have higher attrition rates than we would like. In particular, 33% of our entering students plan to transfer to institutions that grant bachelor's degrees, but only about 15% actually do it. Do half of these students simply change their minds and their priorities during their community college education—or do they flunk out? There's important work to be done, but a key aspect of that work will be identifying the nature of the problems we're trying to solve. “Success” is a highly individual standard, varying from student to student, and we have yet to capture that as accurately as we should.

Schrag acknowledges this point:

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A large percentage of students enroll for only one or two courses to improve job skills or to learn English, or to cultivate a hobby. And because it's hard to determine what many students' goals are, or if they really have any, the numbers are squishy and not precise indications of success.

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While he endorses the idea that we need to encourage the heightened attention being paid to defining student success and finding the means to measure it accurately, Schrag has a fuzzy appreciation of what the community colleges actually do. He reveals this while citing a research project now in progress under Nancy Shulock at California State University, Sacramento. Schrag identifies what he thinks is a significant problem:

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The University of California and the California State University make clear what course preparation they want. The community colleges send as many signals about preparation (109) as there are colleges.

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But this is exactly in keeping with the mission of the community colleges! We are not a unified statewide system, nor should we be. Each college must reflect the needs of its own regional community. As noted on the California Community Colleges website, we operate under a very broad brief stipulated by the Education Code of the State of California:

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By law (link to Education Code Section 66010.1-66010.8) the California Community Colleges shall admit any California resident with a high school diploma or the equivalent and may admit anyone who is capable of profiting from the instruction offered.

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Would you like to come up with statewide community college standards that would cover all possible different situations? The only real requirements for admission to a community college are age (you're supposed to be an adult, with rare exceptions) and likelihood of benefit (you're ready to learn). If you do plan to transfer to a campus of the California State University, then our expectations of you are the same as those at any campus of CSU system—but you don't have to meet them coming in, just going out, when you're ready to transfer. Ditto for prospective University of California transfers.

Unfortunately, Schrag accepts the position of the Legislative Analyst's Office that community college tuition is too low.

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The California Legislative Analyst has pointed out that if California's community college fees were higher, many students would be entitled to higher federal student grants, which would in effect generate more funds for the system but cost students little. In effect, California taxpayers are subsidizing the federal treasury.

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If we raise fees, enrollments go down. We have seen this over and over again. Must we travel that same road one more time? Of course, “many” students would qualify for federal student grants, so we could squeeze some dollars out of Washington, but “many” would not. They'll drop out. When Pete Wilson was governor, he agitated for a sharp increase in student fees and was largely beaten back by a Democratic legislature, but even the smaller fee increases that were enacted hit our student numbers. Furthermore, as Schrag admits, the community colleges don't even get to keep the fees they collect: the state soaks them up. Frankly, I wish we'd go back to the days when the fee was zero.

Community college students pay for their educations after the fact, in the taxes they pay after their wages go up in direct consequence of their improved educations. Fee increases kill the golden goose, yet friends of public education like Schrag keep suggesting we hike our fees. This is bad medicine, previously administered and spit up with much retching.

Chancellor Brice Harris, the executive officer of the Los Rios Community College District (which includes American River College and its three sister colleges), tried to explain some of the varying measures of student success in a letter to The Bee, which was published on December 6, 2006.

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The role of community colleges

Peter Schrag's column (“Community colleges in dire need of finishing touches,” Nov. 29) is yet another example of a lack of understanding about the role of California's community colleges. We don't transfer enough students? Well, according to the report Schrag cites in his article, 33 percent of all UC graduates and 66 percent of all CSU graduates started at a community college, so we must be doing something right. The fact is that California's community colleges are the most accountable system of higher education in the state. It is that accountability that provides all the data so many “experts” are chewing on.

Yes, many of our students lack adequate preparation and need remediation, but guess what: All of us in higher education are struggling with underprepared students.

The report to which Schrag refers is complimentary of California community colleges, but you wouldn't know it from his column. According to the report, attending a community college increases a person's earnings by 8 percent to 10 percent, even if he or she doesn't get a degree or transfer. Earnings increase even more with graduation. Schrag also suggests that our system would be improved by charging students more tuition in order to leverage more federal financial aid. This approach has been tried in recent years, and the net result has been to drive literally hundreds of thousands of students out of our colleges. California's community colleges are providing taxpayers the best return on the dollar of any higher education system in the state.

—Brice W. Harris, Sacramento
Chancellor, Los Rios Community College District

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At a subsequent meet-and-greet at American River College, Chancellor Harris noted that the Public Policy Institute report was “85% complimentary toward the community colleges and 15% critical, but news reports all concentrate on the critical part.” Harris suggested that community college staff and faculty needed to be more active in “pushing back” by raising people's awareness of the nature of our broad-based mission and resisting efforts to put us in a neatly defined box.

There are lots of well-meaning people out there who want to help out the California Community College system. In return, let's help them understand who we are and what we do. In the end, it will help our students and forestall those who would destroy us in order to save us.

Little John

The self-eponymous Doolittle

The only thing that might save Congressman John T. Doolittle is the partisan makeup of his district, drawn to order to send a Republican to Washington, D.C. This year, though, it may not be enough.

Doolittle has his first credible Democratic opponent in years, at least since Patricia Malberg came within two percentage points in 1990 of preventing his move from the State Capitol in Sacramento to the U.S. Capitol. That was in the old 14th congressional district. Doolittle's friends in Sacramento helped him out the following campaign cycle with the new 4th district, reconstructed in an incumbent-protecting scheme to shelter him from future political assaults. The longtime congressman is counting on his registration edge to help him turn back the vigorous campaign of Charles Brown, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel. (Doolittle was otherwise occupied during the Vietnam war era, like many other hyper-patriotic chickenhawks.)

Sleaze: As it was in the beginning

I remember Doolittle's arrival on the political scene particularly well, since I was on the legislative staff of state Senator Albert S. Rodda when the upstart young Republican upended the gray-haired dean of the senate and terminated Rodda's distinguished legislative career. The Sacramento district represented by Albert Rodda suddenly went from having the most experienced legislator, a retired college professor with a Stanford Ph.D., to having the least, a newly minted lawyer who had never practiced law. Doolittle was helped mightily in his campaign by two factors, one outside his control and another in which he probably colluded.

The first circumstance was the Reagan romp of 1980. The former California governor trounced President Carter in the presidential vote and the Republican tide assisted several GOP candidates, especially on the West Coast, where Carter's early concession speech depressed the Democratic turnout. The second circumstance was a deft political ploy that involved the indictment of a state senator. Sacramento's district attorney, a Doolittle ally, indicted state Senator Alan Robbins, a legislator from southern California, in the days just before the general election. The charges involved lewd and lascivious behavior with high school interns in the senator's State Capitol office. Robbins was accused of having solicited oral sex from teenage girls.

The phones began to ring in Senator Rodda's office. People were horrified that “that dirty old man” had molested underage girls. Rodda's staff patiently explained to those who called that Senator Alan Robbins and Senator Albert Rodda were two entirely different people, but the damage was done. Doolittle, of course, was running a campaign in favor of “family values,” which was convenient in those days of the Moral Majority and Jerry Falwell's campaign stop in Sacramento.

On election day, Albert Rodda lost his re-election campaign by a narrow margin. We noticed, however, that he had carried the absentee vote. It's still true today that the absentee vote trends more Republican and conservative than the election day balloting, but years ago the difference used to be even more dramatic. A Democratic victory in the absentee vote in the 1970s and 1980s used to be a sure harbinger of victory. Rodda's defeat in the face of his absentee win was as sure an indicator as possible that the carefully timed Robbins indictment had served its purpose. Doolittle was now senator-elect. (The Rodda forces regrouped in the next race for district attorney and administered a drubbing to incumbent Herb Jackson, who slunk off into retirement, but that was only a minor consolation.)

The redistricting of the state senate was unkind to Doolittle, a junior senator in the minority party, and he was forced to run again in a new district in 1982, only midway through his first term. A veteran Democratic assemblyman knocked him off. Since Doolittle's original electoral term had yet to expire, he remained in office as a man without a district. During the remaining two years left to him, he set his sights on a fellow Republican, a senior member of the upper house, and managed to knock him off in the GOP primary. Doolittle had now managed in two successful campaigns to remove some of Sacramento's most experienced legislators, dramatically reducing the level of governmental expertise under the golden dome of the State Capitol.

For a while, however, it looked as though Doolittle had picked the wrong fight. The defeated Republican incumbent dusted himself off after the fractious primary and filed for re-election as an independent. Since the Democratic nominee was a nobody, who had won his party's nomination by default, the November contest was shaping up to be a grudge match between the senior incumbent and the pugnacious youngster who was a neo-con before people were calling them that. Democrats and independents were wooed by the incumbent's campaign and Doolittle was looking at trouble.

Just before election day, however, the unknown Democratic nominee suddenly came into a lump of campaign cash and launched a barrage of political mailers. They denounced the incumbent's independent campaign and attacked Doolittle, too. The fliers exhorted loyal Democrats to line up with their party's nominee against the twin evils of Doolittle and his incumbent rival. No Democrat who received the flier was ever likely to have voted for Doolittle. Democratic votes were leaning toward the incumbent, but several heeded the clarion call of the official Democratic candidate and marked their ballots for him. The incumbent state senator's vote tally fell short as Democrats failed to vote for him in the anticipated numbers and Doolittle's Republican votes carried the day.

Only after the election was it revealed that Doolittle had funded the Democrat's campaign. The secret transfer of campaign money had violated the law, so Doolittle had to pay a fine. He undoubtedly considered it the price of doing business.

Since consolidating his position in congress, John Doolittle has continued to be creative in his approach to public service. His wife runs a one-person fundraising organization through which the congressman's campaign contributions are funneled. This makes it possible for Julie Doolittle to skim off a 15% commission before the money goes into the campaign treasury. The congressman hastens to point out that this is not actually illegal. The Doolittles appear not to be bothered by the question of whether it is ethical.

Congressman Doolittle's seat in the House of Representatives is at risk for the first time in many election cycles. President Bush has even made one of his rare trips to California to campaign on Doolittle's behalf and to appear at a fundraiser. Was 15% skimmed off by Julie for the household bank account?

Doolittle's legal and ethical failings are by no means enough to deter his fanatical admirers. The congressman is in favor of God and good stuff like that, and opposed to Satan and evil stuff like that. What more does a dull voter need to know?

From the October 5, 2006, Letters to The Bee:

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The case for Doolittle

After reading the various letters condemning Rep. John Doolittle, I stand with Doolittle, and I'll tell you why.

Doolittle stands with President Bush on the war on terrorism, and yes, we are engaged in a war! President Bush has taken the initiative on this war on terrorism and is using some bold and different initiatives to win. Rather than wait for the terrorists to attack us again, he has carried the battle to them.

The Democratic leadership has shown no initiative at all in winning this war except to expound their “cut and run” strategy and return to the failed policies of the past. According to the dictionary, a traitor is defined as a person who commits treason by betraying his or her country. And treason is defined as the crime of giving aid or comfort to the enemies of one's government. That is exactly what the Democratic leadership has been doing.

Terrorists are not dumb; they are waiting to exploit the division in our ranks that the traitorous Democratic leaders are fostering on the American public.

Remember, a vote for Doolittle is a vote to win the war against terrorism and assure that America remains a beacon of freedom in this world.

Les Polette, Auburn

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Got that? John Doolittle supports a president who fights terrorism. Very ineffectively, of course, but I guess it's the thought that counts. And his rival? Well, if we're in a war, perhaps we should try to benefit from the expertise of an experienced military man like Charlie Brown. In the eyes of Doolittle's supporters, though, Brown is disqualified because he supports civil rights and carries an ACLU membership card. Frankly, given the way the administration in Washington is going, we had all better watch out for our civil rights. It's that “beacon of freedom” stuff, Mr. Polette.

Update: You can read much, much more about the reasons John Doolittle doesn't belong in congress at Dump Doolittle, a blog supporting his opponent.

Those silly Christians

Religious taxidermy

Beleaguered Christians must be breathing a sigh of relief at this small victory in their frantic defense against the great War on Christianity. A judge on the U.S. District Court decided not to act against the national motto “In God we trust.”

From the June 17, 2006, Letters to The Bee:

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Amen to ‘In God we trust’

Re “Judge upholds ‘In God we trust’,” June 13: U.S. District Judge Frank C. Damrell Jr.'s decision that the motto “In God we trust” has “nothing whatsoever to do with the establishment of religion” has three cogent implications. It implies that “God” is not exclusive to any one religion, that “God” can be viewed as the source of all religions and that no one person or religion speaks for God. I would say this is a monumental decision to which we can all say, “Amen.”

Burt Wilson, Sacramento

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I do not for a moment question Mr. Wilson's sincerity, but I question what he is celebrating. Damrell's ruling is just another instance of the acceptance of the “ceremonial deism” argument, which faithful Christians should actually disdain. The idea is that public affirmations of such religious sentiments as “In God we trust” are basically meaningless—superficially devout but in reality leached of all significance. Wikipedia provides the following brief definition:

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Ceremonial deism is a legal term used in the United States for nominally religious statements and practices deemed to be merely ritual and nonreligious through long customary usage.

Examples include reference to God in the Pledge of Allegiance, and In God We Trust on U.S. money.

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Those Christians who don't like living in a secular society think that they can use their majority status to compell the adoption of their favorite words and symbols in public life. They feel put upon—indeed, warred against—whenever the judiciary frustrates their attempts to privilege their sectarian interests. The Knights of Columbus, a Roman Catholic organization, in 1952 adopted the goal of inserting “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. Although they were initially unsuccessful, the Knights and other religious lobbyists were able to take advantage of that brief period when President Eisenhower enjoyed a Republican majority in Congress. The Pledge was amended in 1954. (Today's “defenders” of the Pledge conveniently forget that it was a secular composition by socialist Francis Bellamy.)

The simple fact remains that religious practices are drained of their content whenever they are imposed on those who do not share the associated belief system. The wall of separation between church and state is as much a wall of protection as anything else. It not only protects the state from undue entanglement in religious matters, it certainly protects religion from the state. Is there any better way of killing a religion than making it part of the civil government? I doubt it. Devout Christians should blanch at the notion of the United States being “officially Christian,” as this would most assuredly turn the practice of that faith into mere lip service. Do you want your beliefs stuffed and mounted for public display, a dead thing on a pedestal? This has happened before, in matters great and small. Religionists should beware.

And with that I bid you goodbye—which, by the way, used to mean “God be with you,” but has long since become an empty and conventional salutation that atheists can use as casually as the most fervent believer.

You've been warned!

The saucy goose

Take a gander at this

Ann Coulter is on the bestseller lists again with her book Godless. You might think that this would be one of the signs of the apocalypse, but instead it's just a signal for her fans to strut their stuff and join their heroine in their favorite past-time: lying.

I should be more charitable (unlike Ann). Perhaps Ann's fans are entirely sincere and can't tell when they're being fed propaganda. Are they dupes or confederates? It can be quite difficult to tell.

From the June 16, 2006, Letters to The Bee:

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Common tactics of the left

Re “Ann Coulter and the GOP,” letter, June 12: I have a suggestion for Michael Meredith-Saunders regarding his opinion of Ann Coulter and how “the good, decent people of the GOP need to take their party back” by ridding the influence of Coulter. He might try actually reading what she has to say before forming an opinion.

Coulter generates so much outrage from the left mainly because she has the courage to take on liberals' sacred cows. She has not trashed the 9/11 widows known as the Jersey girls. She has in fact expressed sympathy to them for their loss. But since these widows have used their celebrity to be outspoken critics of the Bush administration and the New York Port Authority, Coulter feels they should not be exempt from criticism of their words and actions.

This is a common tactic of the left. Like using Cindy Sheehan to slam President Bush. Critics of what she says are accused of being mean and hateful since she tragically lost her son in Iraq.

Scott Nichols, Rescue

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We should all thank Mr. Nichols for explaining to us that Coulter is merely responding to a “common tactic of the left” when she heaps abuse on others. Oh, wait a minute! He said that she does not do that: “She has not trashed the 9/11 widows.” Thanks for the heads up, Scott! Where we did we get that false impression? I wonder.

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As Media Matters for America has noted, on Page 103 of her book Godless: The Church of Liberalism (Crown Forum), Coulter unleashed the following attack on the 9-11 widows who criticized the Bush administration's handling of terrorism: “These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much.”

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Let's see now: “These broads,” “enjoying their husbands' deaths” well, I sure don't see any trashing there! And we know that Scott Nichols doesn't either. He is a true Coulterite.

Stung by The Bee

This was so predictable

After decades of research and controversy, there is still no significant evidence that anyone possesses so-called “psychic” powers. There's a lot of evidence, however, that I don't.

When I complained to Allen Pierleoni about his puff-piece interview on Allison DuBois, a professional medium and “profiler” who is currently reaping the rewards of a book tour and the dramatization of her life by the NBC series Medium, I hoped to get something better than the curt acknowledgment he sent me. (“Thanks for taking the time to read the piece, Anthony, and share your thoughts.”) Well, given that Pierleoni had been the author of the credulous article in the first place, perhaps it was unrealistic to expect him to take seriously the disappointment of a skeptic.

I sent a copy of my comments to Armando Acuña, the public editor of The Bee (a position that used to be called “ombudsman”). It's the public editor's job to provide a view of The Bee's journalistic endeavors that is professionally informed (the public editor is a newspaperman, after all) and independent of editorial oversight (his column is officially off-limits to The Bee's editorial staff and management). No doubt Acuña would share some of our concern over the use of the newspaper's Scene section for the irresponsible promotion of charlantry.

Boy, was I wrong! From the June 25, 2006, installment of The Public Editor:

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And reader Anthony Barcellos of Davis asked: “Does a feature writer have responsibilities different from those of a news reporter? I know that the Scene section … is devoted to entertainment rather than hard news, but I think even entertainment articles should be scrupulously factual.”

Here's what I think. Yes, the story could have been more skeptical, though there is a deliberate element of tongue-in-cheek to some of the “serious” questions that are laugh-out-loud funny.

Like this one: “Isn't seeing dead people sometimes frightening?” Or this one: “Sometimes you have uncontrollable mental flashes, such as seeing a woman murdered while you're grocery shopping. And you constantly get mental impressions from people around you. I can see where your ability might be a day-to-day hassle.”

Mainly, though, I think people should lighten up. We're talking about ghosts after all.

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Yeah, we're talking about ghosts. And seeing dead people. And problems while grocery shopping. Acuña thinks it's all kind of silly—and I do, in fact, agree— but he does not see that there is a problem in the way his newspaper is treating the story. To me, this is the comment that exposes Acuña's real blind spot:

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It's a straightforward discussion with a successful author peddling a new book on a subject most people find ludicrous.

There's no mystery about DuBois's claims or intent by the paper to portray her as something more than she is. Writing about her in this way doesn't give her more credibility, despite the criticism.

If you believe in this stuff, you will continue to believe. If you don't, you still won't.

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You see, folks—just between smart people like you and me—only idiots take this sort of thing seriously. So it's okay to give it a “straightforward” presentation in the entertainment section of the newspaper, because the only folks who will be fooled by it are already imbeciles. In a follow-up comment to Acuña, I explained why I thought this was a really bad excuse:

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What continues to bother me is the notion that The Bee is dishing out goo for its more gullible readers while giving a sly wink to those who aren't as credulous. “If you believe in this stuff, you will continue to believe. If you don't, you still won't.” The “this stuff” believers are beyond reach anyway, you say, so I guess it's okay to pander to their delusions about yet another financially successful psychic. What's the harm? We can ask that question again when the ill-informed go to thin-credentialed psychics instead of board-certified physicians for healing, but since we've given up on them, it's their own hard luck.

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Acuña wrapped up his column on the DuBois controversy by contacting staff writer Pierleoni and giving him the opportunity to respond to the criticisms:

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“The point of the piece was to interview an author who was touring for her new book,” explained Pierleoni....

“The critics want me to do an investigative piece to show that is a fraud or for me to challenge her and accuse her of being a fraud,” Pierleoni said. “But that's not the point of the piece.”

Pierleoni talked to DuBois for about 40 minutes and did a quick turnaround on the story. He said he was well aware of the skepticism about her claims and asked her in his story how she responds to the skeptics.

“She says I am what I am ... accept me for what I am or not,” he said. “I never said I believed or disbelieved. My concern was interviewing a woman who has made a good living doing what she does.” ...

“Skeptics,” he said, “they jump all over this stuff. And I wonder how many of the letter-writers have actually read the books.”

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Hmm. Well, that sounds sort of fair. We should read her books with an open mind and then decide. Except that I prefer not to waste the time. Her supposed validation in a university's parapsychology lab has been thoroughly shot down. Why should we buy her books and enrich her purse when she and others like her (I'm looking at you, John Edward!) have never produced any reliable evidence of their abilities? I'm afraid that Acuña has a point when he says believers suck this up without question—but we doubters have ample reason for our doubts.

On the Friday after The Bee's publication of Acuña's column, I attended my usual end-of-week lunch group. It includes a number of retired Bee journalists, who teased me about getting blown off by their paper's public editor. The Bee's former book editor also contributed a telling observation: “Oh, Pierleoni? I know him. He's a believer!”

Hey, even without psychic powers I was picking up those vibes!

The real Ground Zero

x = 0 marks the spot

It's time for an episode of “Short Attention-Span History,” courtesy of the letters column in The Sacramento Bee. The city's mayor committed a grievously insensitive faux pas the other day. Or so some would have you believe.

From the June 17, 2006, Letters to the editor:

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Respecting ground zero

Re “City OKs subsidy for K Street revival,” June 14: I was disappointed that Mayor Heather Fargo described the 700 block of K Street as the city's “ground zero.” We all know where ground zero is. As bad as we may think the 700 block of K street is, it could never compare to the real ground zero.

Kathleen Winkler, Sacramento

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Nice try, Ms. Winkler, but those who cannot remember the past are condemned to distort it, as Santayana once almost said. Far be it from me to retard the secular sanctification of the World Trade Center site, but now that Ann Coulter has pointed out how much the 9/11 widows are enjoying and benefitting from the deaths of their spouses, perhaps we should rein in the genuflections. “Ground zero” is not a term specific to the atrocities of September 11. From Wikipedia:

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Ground zero is the exact location on the ground where any explosion occurs. The term has often been associated with nuclear explosions, but is also used in relation to earthquakes, epidemics and other disasters to mark the point of the most severe damage or destruction. Damage gradually decreases with distance from this point....

The term was military slang—used at the Trinity site where the weapon tower for the first nuclear weapon was at point ‘zero’—and moved into general use very shortly after the end of World War II (see Manhattan project).

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I'm thinking that perhaps people could find something more substantive over which to criticize Mayor Fargo than this instance of supposed insensitivity.

Keeping an open mind

Oops, my brain fell out!

The Sacramento Bee runs entertainment and lifestyle articles in its Scene section. It's obviously not a venue for hard news. Nevertheless, you might hope that something approximating journalistic standards would still apply to its contents. On June 19, 2006, however, The Bee dispensed with such niceties as balance or fact-checking and published The medium has a message, a credulous puff piece by staff writer Allen Pierleoni The article took the form of an interview with self-styled medium Allison DuBois, the woman on whose supposed exploits the NBC drama Medium is based. The interview could have been written by Dubois's publicist, taking at face value any claim—no matter how far-fetched—that DuBois cared to make:

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These days, the nationally known medium donates most of her time to helping locate missing children, conducting readings for people who have lost loved ones (“I'm not teaching people about death, I'm teaching them how to live”) and working with law-enforcement agencies as a profiler. Until she became famous for “Medium,” she also worked as a jury consultant for district attorneys' offices.

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Many professional psychics claim they work with law enforcement and say they can use their powers to find missing children, but the documented record is extremely sparse. Most of the time we hear post hoc justifications that try to reconcile the circumstances of the recovery of a child (or the child's body) with whatever the psychic said beforehand. Law officers are nearly unanimous in disdaining the help of psychics, since they are more of a distraction than anything else.

You can judge the seriousness of Pierleoni's interview by the softball questions that he lobs at DuBois, some of which don't even bother taking the form of a question:

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In your late 20s, you spent four years, on and off, at the University of Arizona in Tucson as part of a program that studied psychic phenomena. Afterward, the head researcher emphatically stated that you're the real deal.

Why do the dead contact the living through you?

Where do you believe your ability comes from?

Sometimes you have uncontrollable mental flashes, such as seeing a woman murdered while you're grocery shopping. And you constantly get mental impressions from people around you. I can see where your ability might be a day-to-day hassle.

In your first book, you predicted your father's death.

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While the kid-glove handling of the subject is apparent, at least the item concerning the University of Arizona looks promising. Unfortunately, we get nothing of substance there either. DuBois trots out the common “I was a skeptic, too” gambit in response:

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I was skeptical of myself, which is why I went to the laboratory and let scientists make me jump through hoops. I wanted to prove to myself that I really wasn't doing what I was doing—communicating with the dead and seeing the future. If I was only mediocre, I wanted to return to law school. But I ended up testing to where the scientists' jaws dropped. I was hoping it would have been the other way.

Since then, I don't question (my abilities). I decided that some things are not meant to be fully understood—not yet, anyway—but to be embraced.

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I did a little searching (it wasn't difficult) and quickly established the identity of the scientist in question. Professor Gary Schwartz is the author of The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life after Death. While one might expect “breakthrough scientific evidence” to have a major impact, Schwartz's work has been persuasive only to those who are already believers. His methodologies and conclusions have been roundly criticized. While DuBois speaks as if she astonished an entire team of research scientists, the reality is that Dr. Schwartz is her only significant science-trained advocate. Even Schwartz admits that substandard experimental controls were in place during his investigation of DuBois's abilities, but he dismisses those shortcomings as unimportant. They are, in fact, crucial, since the absence of rigorous controls renders his experiments meaningless. The Bee does not see fit to report any of this, as it would tend to undermine the credibility of the celebrity being profiling. The implication to the contrary notwithstanding, Allison DuBois has not been thoroughly scientifically vetted and she does not have the support of the scientific community.

She seems to be doing fine, however, with more mystical forms of validation.

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I'm lucky. I love talking to (the spirits) who come through. They make me feel how much they love the (living) person sitting in front of me.

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Dubois was given an opportunity in the interview to address her critics, an opportunity she seized with relish:

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Q: How do you answer the skeptics?

A:I can agree to disagree with people and respect their beliefs. I just ask them to respect mine.

There are different kinds of skeptics. There are those who haven't lost anybody and have no reason to believe, and there are people who are strictly academic-minded.

Then there are the angry skeptics who turn red in the face. I'm like, ”Yeah, don't ask me to bring you through when you die.”

Many skeptics like to yell and hear themselves talk, and I don't have time for that. I've never heard of a skeptic helping anybody with their skepticism. To a large degree, they just want to shame somebody so they can feel greater than them. But they're not going to shame me. I'm very proud of what I do.

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Did you notice her “reason to believe” argument? This is a tiresome but common ploy among superstitious people of all kinds. Don't you want to communicate with departed loved ones? Then you must believe a medium can help you do it. Don't you want to live forever in eternal bliss? Then you must believe in one of the life-after-death cults—preferably one of the more popular ones, like Christianity. She also dismisses the “academic-minded,” although she doesn't hesitate to cite the University of Arizona in support of her awesome psychic powers.

Reading the Dubois interview in The Bee was a pretty disappointing experience. I'm obviously not the only one who felt that way. This critical missive appeared in The Bee's Letters to Scene, June 23, 2006:

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‘Medium’ a miss

Wow. When I started reading The Bee this morning, I thought someone had pulled a fast one and inserted a copy of the National Enquirer instead of the Scene section (“The medium has a message,” June 19).

How can any reporter write such an article without checking the facts? Allison DuBois claims a lot of things—being tested by scientists, working with law enforcement agencies—but confirming these statements is yet another thing. There are lots of places to start looking at what skeptics have compiled about her supposed abilities, but you could start with

http://www.twopercentco.com/rants/allison_dubois_week.html

Yes, lots of people believe in mediums. But it's another thing for The Bee to suggest that people like Allison DuBois actually possess such abilities. This is The Sacramento Bee, after all, not Fox News. I expect fair and balanced reporting from my newspaper.

Jim Eaton, Davis

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While I did not write my own letter to The Bee, I did take the trouble to write an e-mail message to Allen Pierleoni, the staff writer responsible for the DuBois article. In it I made some of the same points noted in Eaton's letter and specifically cited the reputation of Dr. Schwartz as something that would have been included in a more responsible story. Pierleoni replied very promptly and very politely to my message:

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Thanks for taking the time to read the piece, Anthony, and share your thoughts.

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That's it. His entire response. I bet he says that to all his readers.

Note: I updated the URL in Eaton's letter so that the link to The Two Percent Company works.

Body count arithmetic

Only 500 to go

There are few less appealing tasks than trying to keep track of the body count in the Iraqi war. We are naturally fixated on our own fatalities, now above 2,500 American military personnel and rising steadily, but there are tens of thousands of non-fatal casualties and a much greater number of deaths and injuries among the Iraqis (combatants and otherwise).

The Bush administration has offered several different rationales for our invasion of Iraq, each new one being cobbled up after its immediate predecessor is discredited. First, of course, it was our great war on terror and Saddam's non-existent weapons of mass destruction. The flow of rationalizations has never stopped.

I thought, however, that the “flypaper” excuse had fallen out of favor, so it surprised me to see it resurrected in the letters column this morning. From The Bee's Letters to the Editor for June 21, 2006:

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Bravery there for safety here

I write with deep regret and sympathy toward the troops and families who have sacrificed so much for this war in Iraq and Afghanistan. They will always hold a special place in my heart for their bravery. With that said I find the 2,500 troops dead during the war in Iraq to be a curious milestone statistically for many reasons.

First, reported in the U.S. uniform crime report over the same three years since the war began, there have been more than 48,000 people in the United States murdered. Also more than 4 million Americans have been victims of violent crimes. That comes to 1.8 people per 100 lives disrupted in the United States every year. These are murders and violent crimes where we live. This does not include how many people die in auto accidents or natural disasters.

Considering the fact that 3,000 people died on 9/11 because of a terrorist attack and zero in the United States since, I hold a selfish logical conception that our brave 2,500 troops gave their lives over there to allow us to live our lives in virtual safety in our homes over here.

Ken Steers, Cameron Park

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Mr. Steers really should be more careful about throwing around the adjective “logical” to describe his notion that spilling American blood overseas is keeping us safe at home. He's saying we've swapped civilian casualties for a similar number of military casualties, but these military casualties do not represent any net benefit to our nation. These were mostly young men and women, torn away from their families and friends and sent on a fool's errand to Iraq. (In case that was too subtle, the fool's name is George Bush.) Are we to be pleased that these young people are dying conveniently out of sight? (That, too, is Bush administration policy.) How nice that we are also spared any of that messy collateral damage involving buildings and vehicles. Our people are now being blown up over there, not here. What a brilliant strategy.

At the current rate of American fatalities, we'll still be ahead of the game until we reach 3,000 dead soldiers (presumably in about 8 or 9 months at the current rate).

No attacks in the U.S.

There is a reason that the United States has suffered no homeland attacks since the singular events of 9/11. The main one is that al-Qaeda exhausted many of its resources in this one big hit. The most dedicated jihadists among their ranks died with their victims, making it a costly undertaking. (Good riddance to you, Atta and company.) Furthermore, the combination of terrorist fanaticism and Bush administration inattention (“Bin Laden determined to strike in the U.S.”) was a rare alignment of hostile opportunity and domestic incompetence. While the will for another massive attack is undoubtedly there, some tricks work only once. An entirely new approach is needed in the wake of hardened airliner cockpits and the on-board presence of federal air marshals.

Our biggest continuing problem is that George Bush is still in office, appointing hacks and cronies to lead important federal agencies like the Homeland Security Department, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. (Even some of the most extreme right-wingers have found cause to complain about Bush's unqualified nominees.) Fortunately for us Americans, there are legions of dedicated men and women in the lower ranks who do their work behind the scenes to preserve our domestic tranquility while the clown show continues in the executive suite. Still, we are plagued by delays and inattention when it comes to progress in homeland security. One of the most significant examples of Bush administration malfeasance (or nonfeasance?) is the vital issue of port security. Years later and almost nothing has been done. At least our nail-clippers are still being confiscated at airport security checkpoints.

As for the idea that terrorists have been irresistibly drawn to the conflict in Iraq and are therefore too busy to plot against targets in North America, it should not be that difficult to see that most of the activities in Iraq are purely homegrown. Opportunists like the late al-Zarqawi have taken advantage of the situation, of course, but Iraq now has an abundance of citizens who are willing to fight against the occupation. In the latest news we hear about how our soldiers are being killed by the very Iraqis whom they trained. Our presence in Iraq is resulting in the deaths of our soldiers, but it's highly questionable that it's done anything for homeland security.

Flypaper is for household bugs, not foreign policy.

Goring the messenger

Lies or misunderstandings?

It's always difficult to tell whether right-wingers are liars or ignoramuses. Do they know they're spouting falsehoods or do they actually have no clue? Beats me. While perusing the San Francisco Chronicle over breakfast this morning, I was treated to a new entry in the cavalcade of conservative confusion. But is confusion the letter writer's goal, or is it his condition?

From the Chronicle's Letters to the Editor, June 21, 2006:

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Gore's message

Editor — Al Gore's movie on global warming has hit rock bottom in the weekly box-office ratings, while “Cars” by Disney grossed millions of dollars. Poetic justice, or do American theatergoers know a lemon when they see it?

W. Grossi, Alamo

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I presume that Grossi was referring to the June 9–11 receipts for the weekend when Cars made its debut. The Disney movie came in at #1 and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was down at #11. How humiliating for the former vice president! Oh, the shame of it all! But what do the box office receipts actually show?

Cars pulled in an average of $15,086 per theater while being shown in 3,985 theaters. (For the math-challenged, that works out to a weekend gross of more than $60 million.) That made Cars the #1 movie that weekend. At the same time, Gore's movie was pulling in an average of $12,333 at each at 122 theaters (a gross of more than $1.5 milion). The overall rankings are based on gross receipts, not the per-theater average. An Inconvenient Truth would have been a strong runner-up in the #2 spot if ranked on per-theater average. The performance of Gore's documentary is truly phenomenal.

The June 16–18 box office results are also out. Cars is still #1, although its weekend gross fell by nearly 44% compared to the weekend before. As for An Inconvenient Truth? It retained its #11 position among all movies in national release and increased its gross take by 27%. It's also increasing the scope of its distribution. Next weekend the movie opens in Sacramento and I'm looking forward to seeing it. An Inconvenient Truth is already showing in San Francisco. Grossi should go. And maybe learn something.

Update: The poor-mouthing of Gore's movie is now a full-fledged right-wing meme. Like the first swallow of spring, Grossi's letter was just a harbinger. Fodder for the neo-cons is being provided by Moonie-owned UPI (which is now merely a propaganda arm of the Unification Church), which published a negative report on An Inconvenient Truth, although it at least acknowledged that Gore's movie ranked high among documentary films: “Yet despite its failing numbers, the film has brought in $9.6 million to date, making it one of the most successful documentaries to date.” The always reliable Powerline blog (no, I'm not linking to those creeps) quickly picked up the UPI item, although spinmeister-in-chief Hindraker (affectionately known as “Assrocket” in blog circles) carefully omitted the one positive point from UPI's article. The grown-ups are beginning to weigh in. Tim Lambert at Deltoid (always one of the best places to separate science fact from neo-con fantasy) put up a post this morning with a graph that illustrates the monotonically increasing weekend grosses for An Inconvenient Truth. (Hi, there, Deltoid readers. Thanks for visiting.)

Hurray for sleaze!

More stalemate please

It can be quite refreshing to read a new take on an old problem. The conventional wisdom needs to be questioned occasionally. However, I'm pretty certain that it does us little good to replace the conventional wisdom with unconventional stupidity.

But I could be wrong. There's a pretty big “government is inherently evil” crowd out there. They are the people who celebrate gridlock and inaction (at least until an earthquake or hurricane or tornado hits their neighborhood).

From the June 18, 2006, Letters to the Editor:

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Fallacy of political compromise

Re “Filling a need: moving beyond hardball politics,” June 15: Morton Kondracke decries “ugly, unproductive” partisanship and yearns for a new third “unity” party. Political compromise is the art of betraying those who put you in office in order to claim that you are above politics.

The Clintons, masters of sleaze, even invented a word for their twist on duplicity: triangulation, meaning they knew how to screw you three ways instead of the usual two. Bipartisans are like bisexuals: unable to make a clear choice, always wanting to have things at least two ways, depending on who is at the party.

America needs more partisanship, not less. Partisan gridlock is a thing of beauty. It stops the government from inventing new ways to collect and waste taxpayer money, and it's the only form of entertainment that costs less to indulge in than to avoid.

So three cheers for Rep. Tom Delay, four cheers for Ann Coulter. Send a brick to your congressman and a can of gasoline to your senator; stand back and enjoy the show. And pray for our sake that they never get along.

Richard Lavallee, Sacramento

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Okay, I agree with Mr. Lavallee that Kondracke is a fool to think that a third party is a miracle solution for our political problems. If you want to get something done, take over one of the major parties and don't waste your time messing around with the psycho fringe. The Goldwaterites seized control of the Republican Party in 1964 (only to discover that the general public did not share their enthusiasm for extremism). The McGovernites outhustled the competition to put their stamp on the Democratic Party in 1972 (although they found out to their dismay that the American voters weren't ready to support a peace party). Both intra-party insurgencies experienced cataclysmic political defeats, but both major parties bear the stamp of those movements. They were just ahead of their time. In fact, the GOP is now the captive of neo-cons that dramatically out-Goldwater Goldwater. (May their tribe soon experience a defeat similar to that of 1964 or 1974.)

Other than our shared disdain for the notion of a third party, however, I think that the letter writer and I agree on rather little. Lavallee celebrates gridlock. It's a simplistic political philosophy: “That government is best which governs least.” The quote is from Thomas Paine, so it has a respectable American heritage. Paine, however, was writing in a time when it was possible to entertain such libertarian fantasies. Things have gotten considerably more complicated since the eighteenth century.

Californians need to learn this lesson. When the state government fails to act, the electorate takes matters into its own hands. Or thinks it does. The initiative measures enacted into law as ballot propositions are mostly written by lobbyists who wish to bypass the scrutiny of our elected representatives. The famous Proposition 13 certainly saved a lot of people's homes in 1978 by slashing the property tax, but it also effected a shift from corporate properties to personal properties (commercial properties don't change hands as often as homes and thus aren't reassessed under the provisions of Proposition 13 for higher property taxes as often as residences). Even worse, Proposition 13 gutted local control (by gutting the biggest local revenue source) and put the state government in charge of the remaining purse strings. Did you think Proposition 13 was a people's rebellion against high taxes. Only in a way. The actual vote was certainly fueled by that sentiment, but the proposition itself was written by owners of large commercial properties. They did very well under Proposition 13, thank you very much.

Why didn't California enact a more balanced property tax reform measure? Gridlock. Deliberate gridlock in Sacramento fostered by allies of the Proposition 13 sponsors. Gridlock is not a solution. It is, rather, a mechanism for circumventing the state government and allowing the monied interests to promote their special causes as ballot propositions. If you include a sweetener for the general electorate, you can get your preferences into state law. Yay for gridlock!

Lavallee's slightly incoherent rant includes some internal contradictions. He lauds Tom DeLay? The indicted former majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives is the exact opposite of gridlock. DeLay epitomizes the strong-arm approach to governance, using the congressional majority to ram through measure after measure. You'd think that Lavallee would prefer to celebrate someone who can't get things done. DeLay's downfall should be an occasion of joy. (It sure is for me!)

By contrast, Lavallee finds it necessary to snipe at the Clintons for their successes. President Clinton's “triangulation” (a term actually popularized by former presidential advisor Dick Morris, who now prefers to shill for the Republican right) enabled him to cobble together support from different sectors for some of his policies. I didn't always approve of the result, but I'm more liberal than Bill. In Lavallee's eyes, Clinton's greatest sin was a modicum of success. By that standard we can be sure that President Bush is his hero.

Death and taxes

A “sin” tax?

Relabeling is a very useful political tool. Just as candidates are warned not to let themselves be defined by their opponents, people must take care not to let their rivals define the terms of a debate. A good current example is the wrangling over the president's plan to abolish the estate tax. Of course, that's not how his allies describe it. Rather, they prefer to call it the “death tax.” Surely no one would want to support something with so chilling a label.

This morning I was browsing the business section of the San Francisco Chronicle. (Yes, I read that newspaper in addition to The Bee. For that matter, I also subscribe to The Davis Enterprise. Don't worry, I don't try to read every page of all three papers. For one thing, I save a lot of time by skipping the sports sections.) An upset reader was taking David Lazarus to task.

From the June 18, 2006, edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, Letters to Business:

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Estate tax is immoral, hurts private economy

Editor — Columnist David Lazarus says that without the estate tax, “we're heading for financial catastrophe” (“Killing estate tax could be deadly to federal budget,” Lazarus at Large, June 11). What nonsense.

There are two things wrong with the death tax. First, it is immoral. What right does society have to impose this kind of law selectively on one segment—the rich? They or their forebears have earned the wealth and paid progressively high taxes on it. But in Lazarus' mind-set, the government automatically owns a dead person's wealth, and letting the heirs keep it is “handing out cash to the rich,” a “giveback to the wealthy.”

Second, almost everything heirs can do with their inheritance helps the economy—the private economy, that is. I would rather see an heir provide jobs for, say, a house remodel, or money for a startup company than see the government spend the money for the likes of the 33rd Robert C. Byrd freeway in West Virginia, or think up another “bridge to nowhere.”

Thomas Letchfield, Palo Alto

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I believe we can conclude that Mr. Letchfield is not sympathetic to the view attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., that “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.” I also note a curious omission in the conclusion of his letter He's willing enough to heap his abuse quite specifically on Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, dean of the U.S. Senate and a leading Democrat, but he lapses into uncharacteristic reticence when he cites the infamous ”bridge to nowhere,” a notorious Alaskan boondoggle sponsored by Senator Ted Stevens, a Republican, and supported by Governor Frank Murkowski, another Republican. No doubt this was an innocent oversight.

There is, by the way, nothing so special about about the estate tax that it should be any less or more immoral than an income tax, or a sales tax. Sure, Letchfield says that the deceased “paid progressively high taxes” on the estate being taxed, but this specious argument need not give us pause. It's a variation on the peculiar bête noire of double taxation, suggesting that an estate should be free and clear of “further” taxation. This same argument suffices to demonstrate that your employee's income should not be taxed because you're paying them with money you've already paid taxes on. (For some reason, I never hear this version of the argument being made.)

As Lazarus points out, outright repeal of the estate tax would punch an additional $1 trillion hole in federal revenues over the next ten years for a benefit that would pour into the accounts of super-rich heirs. Please note, the estate tax is not a tax on the dead person. It's a tax on the heirs. They're getting wealth they didn't earn, didn't work for, and have no special right to beyond the willingness of their forebears to leave it all to them (which some, of course, choose not to do). The bogus claim is that high-value but cash-poor estates like family farms will be ground under the boot heel of the estate tax, but those estates are already sheltered by a $2 million exemption. As the value of the dollar shrinks, it may be necessary to revisit the level at which that exemption is set, but the danger to the family farm is just an excuse for abolishing the estate tax. It's not an honest argument. The ultra-rich are spending their money to lobby a Republican Congress and a Republican president to pander to their base, the morbidly obese fat cats.

Mr. Letchfield decries the estate tax's impact on this tiny—but hugely privileged—segment of society. No doubt he considers the estate tax a form of class warfare. If so, I think he may be right. Instead of lamenting the specter of class warfare, however, I'll just point out that it wasn't the middle class that declared war.

Big bloggers in our backyard

I get published

There are a lot of unvisited blogs out there. This one, for example, gets only a few visitors each week. Daily Kos, however, gets about half a million hits every day. Its proprietor, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, is a young Berkeley resident who has devoted himself to kicking a little Democratic ass in hopes of stirring up the party into a fighting mood. It's time to stop rolling over and taking the crap dished out by the Bush administration and its congressional lapdogs.

Markos came to Sacramento to pitch his new book, give a talk, and answer questions. The Bee, however, didn't notice. So I wrote them a letter.

From the June 11, 2006, Letters to the Editor:

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Meanwhile, here at home ...

Re “Bloggers enter—stage left,” June 7: Thank you for the front-page treatment of bloggers in politics, but The Bee appears ignorant of what's going on in its own backyard.

Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, cited as one of the most important progressive bloggers on the Internet, was in Sacramento on May 30 giving a talk and signing copies of his book Crashing the Gate. Dozens of people poured into Tower Books to meet him, alerted by the announcement on his Web site, but The Bee runs an article out of Washington instead.

I suppose people can go to dailykos.com or Google to search out more information, but they should have read about it in The Bee.

Anthony Barcellos, Davis

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