In the news
You should probably never leave me alone with a newspaper. I haven’t sat down and read one in a long time (let alone purchase my own), but this morning, recovering from some revelry last night, I stuck some quarters in my pocket to pick up a Chronicle on the way down to a local diner for brunch. I didn’t get further than section A, and in the course of reading it, I constantly wanted to link to something or make a comment. Luckily I’d also thought to bring along my as yet unused moleskine notebook, so I jotted down the stories that I found of interest. And I realize they could be divided into two camps. Thus what follows are my thoughts on today’s “news.”
Death and Destruction
A 16 year old beat to death the wife of a local prominent defense attorney, David Horowitz.
Horowitz is currently representing Susan Polk, who stabbed her estranged husband 27 times (she claims out of self-defense) in 2002. But it gets freakier:
In an interesting twist, Polk is concerned that the prosecutors in her case now have access to Horowitz’s defense files which they’ve collected in the process of investigating his wife’s murder.
A mother, previously diagnosed with schizophrenia, is accused of throwing her three young children into San Francisco Bay.
On a flight home to Texas the next day she opened the newspaper and saw the photos of the three children. “When I recognized the boys, I just lost it.”
Poor New Orleans.
Without money, governments cannot run buses so that residents without cars can search for jobs. They cannot educate the children of families that might try to return. They cannot provide health care, or pick up garbage, or begin the detailed planning and engineering necessary to bring a city back to life.
And so they are locked in a painful loop, unable to lure back exiled residents without services, but unable to provide the services without a tax base.
Politics is War
Schwarzenegger is upset with Bush over campaigning in California and raising $1 million 2 weeks before a state-wide special election.
One gets a sense that the Republican party is about to tear itself to shreds. What’s at stake in this special election?
Schwarzenegger is campaigning primarily for four measures of the eight on the Nov. 8 ballot:
- Proposition 74, to increase the time it takes teachers to gain tenure;
- Prop. 75, to curtail the political power of unions;
- Prop. 76, to alter the budget process;
- and Prop. 77, to take the power to redraw legislative districts away from the Legislature.
(ibid.)
I admit I’m new to the whole California-style, ballot-measure politics, but the things he’s campaigning for sound pretty slimy taken together. Here’s what I’ve found out.
Supporters of Prop 74 say that bad teachers “hide” behind tenure. Wow, what an accusation. I wonder if that’s really the case. Any thoughts Jackie?
Prop 75 has to do with requiring written consent from union members on a yearly basis as to whether their dues can be used to support political campaigns. Reminds me of a brouhaha at UNC over complaints that student fees were used to support organizations that some students didn’t agree with. I think the Young Republicans were complaining about some student-funded organization that had something to do with abortion or gay rights. Sure would be nice if the president had to get written permission from me every year to use my taxes on the war in Iraq. All in all, Prop 75 seems to be aimed squarely at the traditionally Democratic-leaning labor unions.
Prop 76 is about allowing the state government to suspend minimum spending levels on schools. That sounds like possibly the worst way to cut costs.
Prop 77 just sounds sketch because you’ve got a Republican governor in a traditionally Democratic state supporting a different model for legislative redistricting. Smell fishy to you?
Meanwhile the Bush administration, traveling the world to bolster Muslim support for its war in Iraq, can’t seem to get their story straight. Or right as it turns out.
Her remark was an impassioned answer to familiar criticisms of U.S. policy raised by her audience at one of Indonesia’s leading Islamic universities. But it was also wrong. (emphasis added)
Damn! I can’t remember the last time I read something in the news that laid such a gnarly smackdown. The truth goes something more like this:
Although at least 300,000 Iraqis are reported to have died during Hussein’s 24 years in office, his government’s use of chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds cost the lives of only a small proportion, most notoriously an estimated 5,000 people who died in a 1988 military campaign in the northern town of Halabja. (ibid.)
When did politics become such an all out war?
No, clearly any judge coming within arm’s reach of “the hammer” should be entirely apolitical. Or Republican.
A sign of the times.
In a sign the prosecutor may be preparing indictments, Fitzgerald’s office erected a Web site
Yes, you read that correctly, they have erected a Web site. “Stand back everyone, the Web site is going up.” And yet there’s a glaring omission: the Chronicle (actually the AP) left out the URL!
Who would have thought that the panopticon-like technology described in Orwell’s 1984 would end up doing more to protect us (and others) from our government than harm us? The only fear I have is for the atrocities not captured on film, and thus not investigated.
Finally, the offical death toll in Iraq is nearing 2000. But Cliff May of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies says, look on the bright side, people:
2 years down, 198 left to go.
And that’s the news.
I don’t know anything about prop 77, but getting redistricting out of the hands of the legislature is something every state should do. It’s way too easy for either party to game the system when they’re in power.