Burnt Orange Report

Editorials about Supreme Court Pub Ed Ruling

By Phillip Martin

Since the Texas Supreme Court ruled that the property tax structure we use to fund our public schools is unconstitutional, many papers have weigned in with editorials. Here are the highlights of eight editorials (four before the jump, four more below the jump) that have been sent to me. (I provided a link to the full editorial when possible, along with the article's title and where and when it was printed, for future referencing).

"Court has spoken: School system on verge of collapse," 11/26/05, Houston Chronicle.

"There is substantial evidence ... that the public education system has reached the point where continued improvement will not be possible absent significant change, whether that change take the form of increased funding, improved efficiencies or better methods of education," the court wrote.

Gov. Rick Perry chose not to emphasize that warning during his postmortem spin session.

He seized instead upon the opportunity to vow (once again) to deliver cuts in local school taxes, an elusive goal that the Supreme Court ruling should finally help him accomplish.

Texans, in return, can expect an assortment of increases in state taxes to pay for the cuts after the Legislature meets to address the court order, probably after the March 7 primaries.

But whether the governor is committed to actually improving the schools remains to be seen.

"Focusing on taxes, not schools," 11/27/05, Austin-American Statesman.

Court testimony in the original lawsuit brought by the school districts estimated it would take about $4.8 billion more per year in school spending to meet all state and federal standards for student education and testing.

But Perry said it "is possible for the Legislature to implement new reforms that will improve student success without necessarily spending additional dollars."

That's something else the court ruling couldn't change: political promises of something for nothing.

"Time's a-wastin'; cut the bickering," 11/26/05, Denton Record Chronicle.

Everybody had best get on this right away. If January is too soon, well, OK; if everyone lacks the courage to make a decision before the March primaries, that’s understandable — disgusting, but understandable.

But, please, governor; please legislators; please remember this: If fear of alienating big business interests paralyzes you into inaction one more time, hundreds of thousands of Texas schoolchildren will suffer. If petty turf battles between legislative houses results in flouting a court order, schools may not open on time next fall.

And that, ladies and gentlemen of the Legislature and the governor’s office, will be all your fault, and everyone in the state will know it.

"William McKenzie: School champions held ground in Austin," 11/23/05, Dallas Morning News.

The school groups also balanced out the many Republicans who were loath to raise taxes to help schools. Anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist was pressing from Washington to not raise one cent, and without the coalition pressing for more aid, lawmakers likely would have passed a puny package and gone home.

Maybe that's why some in Austin, mostly House Republicans, came to refer to the coalition members as the "Whiny Ass School People." (I started not to include that vulgarity in a family newspaper, but it reveals the contempt some elected leaders have for those who run our schools.)

Fortunately, the WASPs didn't budge. Our state is better off for their uncommon leadership and independence, which is what this editorial board seeks in bestowing The Dallas Morning News Texan of the Year award.

It would be best if legislators and the education groups could work out a common solution when Austin takes up school finance again. But if Republican leaders keep offering higher standards and little funding, someone has to force the Legislature to give students the means they need to achieve higher ends.

"Lawmakers need to get it together -- and soon," (Registration Required), 11/25/05, Dallas Morning News.

The preferred way of reaching consensus – and making good law – is not a repeat of the deadline-testing battle of wills between the speaker and lieutenant governor.

Texas has seen four such legislative sessions in the past two years and can do without another...

Austin leaders will have scant time to pass a good bill if they have to deal with hastily crafted legislation of this complexity.

The importance of properly funding schools demands true cooperation and early consensus. Only then can the court-imposed reforms have the scrutiny and input from stakeholders that the issue deserves.

"Schools Need More Than Tinkering," 11/23/05, Austin-American Statesman:

Even while upholding the legality of the overall structure and funding of public schools, the court's majority warned that the system is drifting toward "constitutional inadequacy." It also cautioned that the gap in wealth among districts might become so great that it is unconstitutional...

That majority seems to understand that public education in Texas is inadequate and inefficient, even if not unconstitutionally so. This state faces an enormous challenge in devising a system to educate a growing, poor and often unprepared student population.

"To the drawing board editorial," 11/23/05, Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

No one who sincerely cares about the future of this state and its children can be happy about any of this. More than a decade down the road, the Supreme Court is still saying that the state should be able to do better.

"Lawmakers get last chance on school finance," (Registration Required), 11/24/05, The Beaumont Enterprise.

Few lawmakers looked good in this process, but House Speaker Tom Craddick was believed to be particularly at fault for his stubborn refusal to compromise in any meaningful way. Maybe now Craddick and other roadblocks to reform will realize that they must act.

BMW Ad Contract Goes to GSD&M

By Karl-Thomas Musselman

Kudos to GSD&M, local Austin advertising firm that was responsible for the "We're Texas" ad campaign (which you can watch here) which just won BMW's $75 million dollar ad contract for North America.

AAS: GSD&M employees were celebrating Monday night at the company's headquarters on West Sixth Street, with a German band playing in the background while BMW and agency executives made the announcement.

"They don't call Austin the live music capital of the world for nothing, if we can get an oompah band on short notice," said Roy Spence, president and co-founder of GSD&M.

Though I'm not certain if getting an oompah band on any notice is something I'd want to be able to do...heh.

Inner Child Escapes, Obliterates Tokyo in Computer-Generated Rampage

By Jim Dallas

I'm waiting word as to the outcome of the summary judgment hearing in the Alabama video game killer case (Strickland v. Sony). I don't know much about the case, but I'd like to see a judge order wacky Jack Thompson to go home and play Pong.

Meanwhile, though, this story says that the wave of the future in political advertising is... cartoons:

Politicians looking for a fresh way to get voters' attention have seized on something that is more "South Park" than "West Wing": cartoons. Around the country, candidates are running cheeky animated political ads, mostly on the Internet, but also on television.

...

Animated political spots are not new. Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson both deployed primitive black-and-white cartoons during their 1952 presidential race. But the recent cartoons are far more sophisticated, and wickedly satirical as well.

"They are magnets for attention, and that's the name of the game in political advertising," said Martin Kaplan, an associate dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.

The burst of animated ads may be traceable to the wildly and unexpectedly popular "This Land" clip that was unleashed over the Internet by JibJab Media during the 2004 presidential campaign. The musical satire skewered both President Bush and John Kerry.

In it, oversized photos of the candidates' heads were computer-pasted onto animated bodies, and the men traded singing-and-dancing insults to the tune of "This Land Is Your Land," with Bush calling Kerry "a liberal wiener" and Kerry branding the president a "right-wing nut job."

"We've created a monster," said 34-year-old Gregg Spiridellis, co-founder of JibJab Media of Santa Monica, Calif.

A monster indeed. Better send wacky Jack to defend America's children from the inevitable second, er, third, Pearl Harbor: criminal use of anime/manga on behalf of a federal candidate.

Nota bene

By Jim Dallas

I hate zombie movies. I hate zombie movies because every reasonable person, whether fans of the genre or not, knows that the only thing you can do with a person whose been bit and is in the progress of zombifying is to shoot them in the head and destroy the brain. Really, why are we supposed to have any sympathy for a protagonist who doesn't understand this simple fact? That is all.

All I Really Need to Know I Learned in High School Journalism

By Jim Dallas

Today's Philadelphia Inquirier (via Atrios):

Biggest story - three people killed in Bucks County accident.

Smallest story - five young people killed in Iraq.

The proximity rule strikes again!

(Granted, both are tragedies, but teens dying in car accidents is a story almost as old as soldiers dying in wars -- it's all about proximity. The classical definition of this rule is something to the effect of "a cat meowing at city hall is bigger news than all the foreign wars ever fought." Someone correct me if I'm getting the quote wrong.)

P.S. In a bolder statement of media criticism, Ezra over at TAPPED mentions Rick Perlstein's unpublished (but not unwept) op-ed on how the media blew Katrina coverage.

Conservative Voices Rally Against Leadership

By Phillip Martin

It's been a week since the end of the Second Special Session, and while the Leadership is pointing fingers at each other, there's a whole lot of conservative voices pointing at them. Here's a look at what some newspapers are saying:

Houston Chronicle: An absolute must-read, former Lieutenant Governor Bill Ratliff -- considered to be one of the best legislators this state has ever seen -- states in an interview that the problem isn't with Robin Hood: "What's wrong is that today the state is paying only 37 percent of public education costs. It may be even lower. If the state were paying near 50 percent, there wouldn't be a crisis."

Tyler Morning Telegraph: Refuting many conservatives' claims that we should blame the education lobby, this editorial states that, "There is no question that lobbyists and lobbying groups can put a lot of pressure on individual legislators...But in the end, only members of the House or Senate have a vote, and that is where the ultimate responsibility lies."

Bryan-College Station Eagle: Want to know what those folks near Texas A&M thought about the leadership refusing to work with anyone on the education bill? Their editorial reads, "Gov. Rick Perry and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst decided to keep trying, but at some $60,000 a day in costs to taxpayers, we have to wonder if it was worth it."

Wichita Times Record News: (Registration required). An editorial titled "ripping off students" chronicles how Perry's latest PR stunt and failure to fund textbooks for classrooms adds the word "dishonesty...to the long list of other words that could be used to describe our House and Senate leadership, another of which is incompetence." Even Wichita knows that this was the leadership, and not the Legislature, that screwed this up.

That's what conservative voices are saying about the Republican (lack of) leadership. And I'll bet you guys thought I was harsh.

Air America Texas

By Karl-Thomas Musselman

Just a reminder for those of you who want to know if Air America has a dial near you. The following are the current Texas Station, for full listings across the country go here.

Austin, TX - KOKE-AM 1600 AM

Corpus Christi, TX - KCCT-AM 1150 AM

Dallas-Ft. Worth, TX - KXEB-AM 910 AM

San Antonio, TX - KRPT-FM 92.5 FM

Vatican Coverage Atrocious

By Andrew Dobbs

I've had a passing interest in the selection of the new pontiff over the last couple of weeks as it is an incredibly important process that I've never had the chance to witness in my lifetime. Unfortunately for me the quality of news coverage of the event has been truly awful.

The biggest problem seems to be that the media seem to regard the process as something akin to American politics, and their mindset is so skewed towards covering American political processes that they shortchange both the conclave and the expectations that people have. Want proof that they are completely clueless? How about this article from the Christian Science Monitor which has the title "Benedict XVI will test religion's 'red-blue' divide" and this quote:

Supporters welcome a global figure unwilling to water down his faith. Others see his election as widening the global religious "red-blue" divide between conservative moral absolutists and liberals of all faiths who say religion must be more inclusive.

I suppose that the idea is valid, but the rhetoric of a "red-blue" divide is so inane as to immediately cause severe nausea in conscientious readers. The fact that the colors chosen by network news broadcasts during the 2000 elections are now being applied to theological debates among the world's oldest Christian church is idiotic at best and downright blasphemous at worst.

And the media's conception of this divide is also completely wrong. The fact of the matter is that if you let Michael Moore and Gloria Steinem pick the most liberal cardinal in the entire conclave, the person would still be against abortion, gay marriage, female ordination, allowing priests to marry and contraception. In any system, including ours, there are things which are so bedrock that nobody within respectable discourse questions their value. Nobody in American politics wants to get rid of the Senate or elect the President for life or legalize child pornography. Those things are so basic as to be unquestionable. In the same way, Catholic teachings on the sanctity of human life, the sexual purity and patricarchal nature of the clergy (and I don't use that term in a derogatory way, simply descriptive) and traditional family strucuture are so basic as to have very little opposition in the mainstream of the Church's hierarchy. To call Benedict XVI or any of the cardinals "conservative" because they support the traditional values of the Church is like calling Ted Kennedy a "conservative" because he doesn't want to legalize heroin.

The American media are forcing American political debates and American political processes on a system that is almost 10 times as old as our Republic and operates on a completely different plane. To define Catholic "liberals" and "conservatives" by the issues of gay marriage, abortion and women's liberation is to ignore the truly salient discussions in the Church- local control versus centralization, liturgical reform, political economy, etc. We need some intelligent discussion on these topics, and God knows (I mean that in the most literal sense) that it won't come from CNN and the Christian Science Monitor.

The New Republicans strike again

By Jim Dallas

I was pretty revved up about the newest edition of TNR, which has a cover story on health care.

It also sports an otherwise commendable review of Roy Moore's new book by Richard Just, which comes to an enlightening conclusion:

Admittedly, among the reasons to bring freedom to the Muslim world, disproving Roy Moore ranks low, to say the least. But Moore, however zany a character, does speak for a well-organized, if extreme, wing of American politics. Alan Keyes, Zell Miller, Richard Shelby, Oliver North, James Dobson, and Ann Coulter all endorsed his book; one can assume they accept Moore's central argument about the necessary link between Christianity and American freedom. As Moore himself points out, a statewide poll taken at the height of the Ten Commandments controversy showed that 77 percent of Alabama residents supported his decision. Presumably many, if not most, of those 77 percent accept the underlying logic of Moore's argument. We liberals can deride Moore as a nut; but we cannot pretend that he is an isolated nut. An empirical blow to the logic of his view that America is a Christian country would not end the debate over separation of church and state. But neither would it be irrelevant to that debate.

But just as it looks like we're going to get through more or less free of wankery, Just goes and takes an un-necessary gratuitous swipe:

There's a larger point to be made here. It's no coincidence that the spread of freedom in the Muslim world would undermine the arguments of right-wing Christians here at home. The struggle to spread freedom isn't a theological crusade, as the illiberal denizens of the Democratic Party's left-wing have convinced themselves; it is a liberal fight, and it always has been and always will be, no matter the party or the considerable shortcomings of the president who at the moment has managed to make it his own. The success of that fight will undercut the logic of religious fanatics everywhere--in the Middle East, in other regions of the world, and, yes, even at home. Is Roy Moore concerned about the prospect of a liberal, democratic Iraq? Somehow I doubt it. Should he be? If he believes what he argues in So Help Me God, then yes.

There really is no end to this nonsense, is there? For the last time, most everybody on the anti-war left is in favor of more freedom in the Middle East. The only person, of the hundreds of people on the left I've ever met who would be against that proposition is an avowed Maoist, an he hates Democrats for being part of the "capitalist system."

What left-wing Democrats are against is military acion for which "expanding freedom" is only a pathetic post hoc justification.

It is sad that the writers of a national magazine take so much pleasure in beating up straw-men. Maybe when The New Republic is "liberated" by a new editorial staff (one that can make a simple point without trying to knive the "democratic wing of the Democratic Party"), I'll reconsider my animus towards that publication.