Let's Hear it For Bipartisanship . . .
Congressman David Obey (D-Wisc) has published an open letter to Congressman Ralph Regula (R-Ohio) in which he details the Republicans' latest effort to 'change the tone' in Washington.

Regula is the chairman of the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. Apparently his committee submitted an appropriation bill which offered $8 billion less for No Child Left Behind than was authorized when that legislation passed 2 years ago, and $1.2 billion less for education of disabled students than the Republican leadership had authorized in a budget resolution just three weeks earlier. Apparently we can afford $1.62 trillion in tax cuts and $87 billion for the war in Iraq, but not $9.2 billion for education.

Not surprisingly, all 205 congressional Democrats voted against the appropriation. Not surprisingly, Republicans were upset about it.

So Regula and the Republicans on his subcommittee have decided to retaliate by adding $1 billion in 'earmarks' --- little pork-flavored gifties directed to specific congressional districts --- into the appropriations bill, none of them going to Democratic districts. This is clearly being done to punish the Democrats for voting their conscience.

One might be tempted to conclude that this is politics as usual, but at least according to Obey, it's not. He writes:

      "Significant earmarks did not begin to appear in the Labor-HHS-Bill until after 1995. In the fiscal year 1996
    appropriation, after the Republican takeover, $33 million was earmarked. Two years later, earmarks jumped
    to $97 million and the following year (fiscal year 1999) earmarked Labor-HHS funds jumped to $300 million.
    In fiscal year 2000 they jumped to $453 million and the following year to $911 million. In fiscal year 2002
    they hit $1 billion."

So the Republicans seem to believe that we can't afford $1.2 billion to help educate disabled kids, but we can afford to spend $1 billion to spite our political enemies. How compassionate.
6:49 PM | Link

 
Children Left Behind?
According to Jay P. Greene and Greg Forster of the Manhattan Institute, only 70% of all students in public high schools graduate, and only 32% of all students leave high school qualified to attend four-year colleges. Stated another way, the overall high school dropout rate is 30%.

This is bad enough, but in a companion piece on NPR's All Things Considered, Professor Greene discusses how pretty much all of the states systematically underreport their dropout rates. Some of the key tidbits from that story:

• The Department of Education reports that the national dropout rate is no more than 11%, versus the 30%-plus Greene computed
• Texas is singled out as a state with a 33% dropout rate, compared to the 4.2% dropout rate reported by the state.
• The state of Florida reports a 3% dropout rate, while Greene's report names Florida as having the highest dropout rate in the country at 44%.
• In New York (City?) and Houston, school administrators forced underperforming students out of school so that average test scores weren't dragged down. These students were not included in dropout totals.

It goes without saying that a high dropout rate is alarming, but just to drive the point home, NPR interviewed Franklin Schargel, a former New York City schoolteacher and author of several books on dropouts, about the consequences of such a high dropout rate. Schargel noted that:

• According to the Justice Department, 82% of all prisoners are dropouts.
• Only 60% of dropouts find a job within one year of leaving school.
• Half of all people who earn the minimum wage are dropouts.
• Dropouts are more likely to live in poverty, more likely to join gangs, and more likely to develop drug problems.

How do the states get away with underreporting the problem? Partly through sloppy bookkeeping (if a student transfers schools, s/he is often 'lost'), partly through making exceptions (for example, students who go to prison and never finish school are not counted as dropouts), and partly through mechanisms peculiar to each state (in Texas, students who flunk the state's gateway test and thus never graduate are not counted).

The upshot is, this is a huge, huge problem which we cannot even start to address because the dropout rates reported by the states are wildly inaccurate. Greene and Schargel both point out that it would be fairly easy and inexpensive for the federal government to mandate that states monitor and report accurate dropout rates, which would bring the problem into relief and allow the feds and the states to start taking concrete steps to address it. However, this is unlikely to happen any time soon, because the real numbers are so embarrassing.

So instead the feds and the states, and the media (except for this one NPR story) take no notice.
4:15 PM | Link

 
News From Iraq
The administration complains that the media are underreporting the positive things that are happening in Iraq. That may be, but it looks like they are also underreporting the negative things. From today's New York Times:

      "U.S. forces are suffering an average of 33 attacks a day -- up from about 12 daily attacks in July."

Maybe I've just been out of it, but this is the first time I've heard that U.S. forces are enduring multiple attacks every day. Fortunately it seems that only a very small percentage of the attacks are fatal. Unfortunately, it appears that the number of such attacks is climbing sharply.

I can understand the administration's frustration about good news being underreported, but I don't think the reason for such underreporting is liberal media bias (which, I'm convinced, is not nearly so pervasive nor agenda-driven as conservative media bias). I think the press is doing the same thing in Iraq that it does in the U.S.: emphasizing the big, eye-catching stories and ignoring the less sensational ones, like non-fatal attacks on U.S. troops and schools opening.
3:01 PM | Link

 
Bullets or Ballots?
A quick follow-up to the earlier discussion about problems with touch-screen voting.

First of all, Avi Rubin, principal author of the Johns-Hopkins paper about the problems with Diebold's touch-screen voting system, has acknowledged that he had a conflict of interest in producing the report, as he held stock options in and was a member on the technical advisory board of VoteHere, a competitor of Diebold.

The concept of 'conflict of interest' is that Professor Rubin had an obligation to present a fair and unbiased report on the merits of Diebold's voting system, while at the same time he had a personal interest in promoting VoteHere. One might conclude that Professor Rubin neglected his academic obligation and undermined Diebold to help VoteHere. I'm only bothering to explain the concept in such detail because there are many conservatives who deny that John Ashcroft has a conflict of interest in investigating who leaked Valerie Plame's name to Robert Novak. Do you get it now, folks?

So, does this mean we should all ignore Professor Rubin's report? Well, not necessarily, but we should evaluate it with much more scrutiny.

What lends the Rubin report some credibility is that Rubin had three co-authors, none of whom had a similar conflict of interest. Then there's the fact that Rubin didn't cook up this story on his own; apparently it all started with a part-time Seattle journalist named Bev Harris, who brought this issue to Rubin's attention. And other scholars, cited in the Seattle Times piece, support Rubin's conclusions.

Amid all of the chatter, it's important to hold on to one fact. The Diebold machines do not produce a printed ballot. About this one thing, everyone agrees. And no matter how wonderful these machines might otherwise be, this is a fatal flaw in their system, and they should not be used.

Why? Because if there is no paper trail, then there can be no auditing, no independent verification that the machines are working correctly. The concept of a 'recount' is completely lost (after Florida 2000, some may feel that this is a good thing), because there's nothing to count. If someone demanded a recount, a worker would simply ask the machine to check its results, and the machine would spit back the same number it produced before. That worker wouldn't know whether the machine got it right. The voters wouldn't know. Judges wouldn't know. The candidates wouldn't know. The people who designed and programmed the machines wouldn't know. It would be absolutely impossible to determine whether the machines got the count right!

This seems like a pretty serious problem to me. Not only because it means that we are now placing the very heart of American democracy in the hands of machines which may or may not be reliable, but because such a system is simply begging to get hacked. Maybe these machines have absolutely bulletproof security, but if a hacker did get in and tamper with the results, we would never know about it.

So when I see a Diebold official saying ". . . election supervisors would detect any manipulation of votes," my immediate response is "how"? If the folks who coded the machines in the first place can't detect it, then how is a volunteer election judge with little or no knowledge about computers supposed to detect it? So far, Diebold hasn't answered. And in reality, they can't. It's all a bluff.

And I'm a little confused when a University of Iowa computer science professor says "While the facts she's reporting appear to be accurate and carefully researched, the tone appears to be alarmist." Um, yeah. If you agree that she's reporting the facts accurately, then wouldn't you also agree that she has very good reason to be alarmed? The main thing that holds a democracy together is the idea that no matter who wins an election, that person won the election fairly. If there's no way to confirm that the vote count was accurate, then that sense of fairness is gone, and with it, any reason for folks on the losing side to accept defeat gracefully. I'd say that's pretty alarming.

Of course, if you really want to see something alarmist, you should read Victoria Collier's article. She claims, among other things, that any paperless voting technology is illegal, because the law requires that the vote counting process be open to the public. If the actual vote counting takes place in the guts of some machine, then by its very nature it is not open to the public.

Her tone is definitely alarmist. But that doesn't mean that she's wrong.

And by an amazing coincidence, Tom Tomorrow again echoes my theme.
5:07 PM | Link

 
That said . . .
It's becoming clearer with every passing day that the Bush administration is going to have to give up on its charm offensive to convince the public that everything is really okey-dokey dandy-fine. In the White House photo op where Bush and Bremer answered questions about this weekend's attacks, Bush and Bremer mentioned the success(?) of the recent donor's conference, the creation of an Iraqi cabinet (which, although it is a sign of progress, has been marred by the assassination of one of its members), the fact that "all schools and hospitals are open", and "electricity is back at pre-war levels". All of which, while possibly overstated, is indeed positive.

The problem is, these guys refuse to acknowledge that they have a problem. That's disturbing, because we all know that the first step to solving a problem is to recognize that the problem exists. In spite of all of the fuss that's been made about Rumsfeld's memo, it seems as if the administration is merely asking itself whether their strategy is failing, rather than acknowledging it and taking steps to correct it.

Consider the White House 'photo op' with Bush and Bremer. Bremer called the past two days, which have seen more violence than any days since the infamous aircraft carrier landing on May 1, "rough days", downplaying their significance. And two different reporters asked Bush essentially "What measures are being undertaken or discussed to insure better protection for our troops?" Bush dodged the question the first time, and referred it to Bremer --- who dodged it --- the second. Each time, instead of answering the question, Bush and Bremer went on at length about how bad the attackers are, that they were acting out of "desperation" because we're making so much "progress".

To me, this indicates that the administration doesn't know how to respond, but wants to keep the public from getting upset by continuing to emphasize the whole "good versus evil" metaphor they've been running with ever since 9/11. When asked "What do you know about who is behind these attacks? Is it Saddam?", Bush replied "(they) are cold-blooded killers, terrorists. That's all they are." And that's a great way to build up support for your cause, by dehumanizing the enemy. But if the U.S. really doesn't have a better handle on who the enemy is than "they're bad guys", we could be looking at a very long, hard slog indeed.

And here's a really terrifying thought. The Bushies have received a lot of criticism about "cherry-picking" intelligence data before the war and "stovepiping" anything that supported their case uncritically up to senior management. You know the list: claims about Iraq's nuclear capability, it's ability to strike quickly and without warning on targets in the U.S., the supposed Iraq/al-Qaeda link, etc. etc. Recall that there was also a claim that the Iraqi people would greet our troops with open arms and flowers.

Well, maybe they stovepiped and cherry-picked exactly that evidence not only because it's what they believed, but because it's what they wanted to believe. And maybe they still want to believe it, so much so that instead of viewing yesterday as a wake up call, they see it as merely a "rough day," which we must struggle through in order to get to the open arms and flowers. It is certainly difficult to believe that the administration could be so clueless, but they've been dead wrong about most other aspects of the war (except for correctly predicting that the U.S. would take control of the country fairly easily --- and boy, was that ever a bold prediction!), mostly because they steadfastly clung to beliefs which the best information from our intelligence community contradicted.

And a number of people have pointed out how insulated and introspective the Bush administration is. Heck, Bush doesn't even read the news, he relies on his advisers for that. In a recent interview with Brit Hume, he says ". . . the best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world."

Uh huh. I think we must at least consider the possibility that Bush really thinks reality will bend to his will if just keeps the faith and wants it badly enough.
9:06 PM | Link

 
Progress
First off, I am obliged to call out a bit of anti-Bush spin in the Washington Post. This article leads off with the sentence:

      "President Bush this morning said the increasing attacks on U.S. personnel and supporters
    in Iraq are a sign of progress because the attacks indicate Iraqi opponents are getting
    increasingly desperate."

This is misleading. It makes it sound like Bush actually considers the attacks themselves to be a sign of progress. As if more frequent, more devastating, better organized attacks on U.S. troops and Iraqi authorities and civilians is actually a good thing. Why, what we really need is a 9/11-style attack on Baghdad, then we'd really be making progress!

No, if you look at the White House transcript of the photo op with Bush and Bremer (that's actually what the White House calls it, a 'photo opportunity'), Bush never says this. The essence of his message is best summarized in this statement:

      "(T)here's a handful of people who don't want to live in freedom, aren't interested
    in their children going to schools, aren't -- don't really care about the nature of the health
    care they get, aren't pleased with the fact that the electricity is coming back on line, aren't
    happy about the fact that Iraq is now selling oil on the world markets and people are
    finding work. And they'll do whatever it takes to stop this progress."

His point is, that the progress the U.S. is making is causing the opposition to get more "desperate", not that the opposition attacks themselves are a sign of progress.

I'm serious about trying to keep the media honest, without spinning toward the right or the left.
7:07 PM | Link