School Choice, Drug Testing, and Santorum

Well, there's a lot going on, so this blog post presents a trifecta of insight:

First and foremost, school choice. I've been in favor of competition in schools, and have openly stated on more than one occasion how I am in favor of school choice vouchers, provided the religious institutions are kept out. The reason is basic, and fair: tax dollars should not be spent on indoctrination of a child into a particular religion on the pretext of basic education. Especially on the pretext of basic education!

But now, the numbers are in. After all its haughty promises, the school choice program has produced even lower test scores than MPS!

That's like a recently signed free-agent NFL quarterback actually under-performing Ryan Leaf!

Perhaps the private schools were under-prepared, and their teachers too little paid, to deal with the sudden influx of inner city students needing to play catch-up with the private school kids, and so the voucher students were simply ignored in favor of those parents who were paying out of pocket. This explanation makes the most economic sense. It's a little bit like low-rent housing having buildings that are treated worse than high-rent housing. You pay attention to that which you actually pay for. Conversely, you care more about those who actually pay. Or, perhaps after the vouchers were given, the parents chose the school, and then figured their job was done, problem solved, and went back to their old habits of apathy. Or, perhaps because the suburban schools were not a part of the program, the only private schools willing to take voucher students were institutions such as Messmer High, which frankly sucks.

A combination of all these factors is likely to blame, and maybe a few others. But whatever the reasons, one thing is clear: School choice is a failed experiment. It's been tried here, Boston, and D.C., and it has never worked. Pushing the poverty-stricken student into a private school where an under-paid administration hasn't the experience, skills, or willingness to help simply isn't the solution.

So why violate the separation between church and state for this failure?

You'll find that many politicians will remain firmly committed to school choice anyway, because more tax dollars spent on indoctrinating kids into Catholicism or Lutheranism translates to more votes for their variety of politician tomorrow. It's an investment in tomorrow's political economy.

Which brings me to my second rant: Rick Santorum.

In a recent trip to New Hampshire (Oh please run for president you fool! Please, please!) the former Senator from Pennsylvania stated that much of our Social Security woes can be blamed on abortion. The problem, he says, is that there aren't enough people being added to the population to sustain the retiring old people, and this has made the system unsustainable. We need less abortion, and more people, to save Social Security.

Of course! It's abortion's fault! What better to take the focus off of government overspending on entitlements and the military?

I shouldn't even need to deal with the logical fallacy of designing a system to be dependent upon worsening the looming population crisis. And if we really need more people to save Social Security, we can do that tomorrow by providing a fast-track for Mezzo-American immigrants and undocumented workers to become U.S. citizens. Of course, Santorum won't hear of that, so he blames responsible contraception.

Here's the economic reality: More teenage pregnancies means more mothers and kids living below the poverty line, which means less tax revenue for Social Security. On the other hand, fewer children, born later in life, means their parents are more economically secure, and can pay MORE money into the Social Security kitty!

An investment in proper birth control is an investment in the economy and Social Security of tomorrow, every bit as much as investing in childhood religious indoctrination is an investment in the Republican party of tomorrow!

It's pretty simple economics, really. Santorum's logic might work if every kid, unwed mother or not, were guaranteed an equal, and equitable, income as an adult. But, of course, that sadly isn't the case. Incomes are unequal, and an unplanned pregnancy is a virtual guarantee of permanent exile to the lowest rung. Unless Santorum wants to tax the poor, that's no solution to Social Security.

But some politicians actually do want to tax the poor! It comes in the form of drug testing.

What some supposedly small-government politicians want to do is drug test all welfare recipients. Never mind the fundamental right to be able to put anything one wishes into one's body, or the failed prohibition of cannabis which is every bit as idiotic as the one-time prohibition against alcohol. These geniuses would withhold welfare recipients any payments if they test positive for drug use.

In Florida, state employees are already undergoing mandatory drug testing.

Now, the 4th amendment strictly prevents unreasonable searches and seizures, and blanket drug-testing would certainly qualify. We're supposed to have probable cause before a drug test is done, which is why nearly all companies only require drug testing at time of hire, or if an accident on the job has occurred. (They know random tests can be legally challenged.) But somehow, enough legal wiggle-room has been found to test people and violate their rights anyway.

George Orwell would be proud.

All that would be enough to oppose this shit even if drug testing worked, which it doesn't! Case in point: Let's say a drug test were 95% accurate. Out of a population of 10,000 employees, let's say that 5% of them actually do drugs, that is, 500 people do drugs, and 9,500 do not.

Of the 9500 who do not do drugs, a 95% accurate test will test 9250 as non-using, but 475 will test as users (5% of 9500), even though they're clean. Of those who do do drugs, 475 will test as users, and 25 will test as non-users and get away with it.

Final score:

True negatives: 9250

False negatives: 25

True positives: 475

False positives: 475

Of those who test positive, 475 are really doing drugs and 475 aren't really doing drugs. That means the chances of a positive-test result being actually guilty are no better than 50-50!

A critic might say, "Well, just use a more accurate test." But if the test results are raised to, let's say, 98% accuracy, the results fare little better.

New final score:

True negatives: 9310

False negatives: 10

True positives: 490

False positives: 190

The above results indicate that almost 39%, or two in five, would be innocent, but presumed guilty. I don't like those numbers!

And what if, because employees fear the drug test, none of them uses drugs? That means that, no matter how accurate the test, 100% of all false positives are innocent!

A critic might say, "Well, just do the test again. 5% of 5% is only .25%, and that's way more accurate."

Wrong. The false positives come about because someone's body chemistry is different, regularly eats poppy seed rolls in sandwiches, or had an over the counter medication in their fatty tissues, or something similar. In other words, the false positive comes by biochemistry, not statistical variance. The repeated test would likely have the same results, would still be wrong, and the innocent would still be punished.

So why, oh why, do politicians still insist on drug tests when they're no better than lie detectors?

One can only assume they came out of the school voucher program.

Eric

Pan-Arab Revolt

Tunisia, you've started one hell of a domino effect!

First you, then Egypt, then Yemen, Libya, and now, we hear, Syria is experiencing pro-democracy riots.

Now we're helping to make sure that this pan-Arab revolt for democracy doesn't reverse itself in the form of mass-genocidal repercussions by Ghaddafi, which would almost certainly ensue if were he to beat back the revolution in Libya.

It's a damn good move.

Seriously, for those bitching about Obama going ahead and committing to air strikes in Libya, can you guys truly say that any, and I mean ANY Republican president wouldn't have done EXACTLY the same, damned thing?

Of course any Republican would have done this. It's straight out of the Reagan/Bush Sr. playbook.

But there are legitimate concerns about whether this is the right time to be spending billions on another war in another Arab country. I think those concerns are well-founded, but entirely misplaced.

Instead of being concerned about spending money on a conflict in Libya, why aren't we being concerned about spending less in Iraq and Afghanistan?

If we were offsetting our military spending in Libya by scaling back in our earlier, ridiculous conflicts, we wouldn't be having a debate about spending more money, would we? With the new unrest in Syria, they won't be worrying about attacking Iraq any time soon. In fact, the Sunnis may want revolt in Syria so that they can take Western Iraq and make it part of the new Syrian democratic system. After all, they might as well, since the new Iraqi government is underrepresented by Sunnis. (Remember, the Sunnis were forced to boycott the 2005 elections because Bush fucked up the P.R.) And haven't we wasted enough time and money pretending Bin Laden isn't dead? I was in favor of Afghanistan before, but it's time to get the fuck out of there now, I say.

Besides, we seem to have a new policy of letting the Arabs fight for their own democracies. We already know that the second we're gone from Iraq, the Kurds will try to establish their own government. Why not let them?

Here's what I say: Instead of fighting over whether we should spend more on Libya, let's debate on spending less in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sure makes more sense to me.

Eric

Budget-Balancing Compromises

The argument is being made, not unfairly, that since the United States has essentially run out of money, and so certain programs need to be cut. Unsurprisingly, Republicans instantly put PBS and Planned Parenthood on the chopping block. Faced with the consequences of cutting these, the counter-argument is, "Yeah, but we're just plain out of money!"

Well, okay, how about we meet you Republicans half-way on things?

You're gonna cut Planned Parenthood? Okay, but you have to cut funding to all your religiously motivated abstinence-only programs and efforts designed to "counsel" women into not getting their proper birth control. Yeah, I know, you want to tell women what they can do with their own reproductive organs, but as you already pointed out, we don't have the money anymore.

You want to cut PBS? NPR? Okay, fine, but you have to stop funding the F.C.C. The Federal Communications Commission is a dinosaur anyway, daring to censor the media that uses towers and antennas while leaving all other media uncensored. No censorship on cable TV, no censorship of the internet, no censorship of satellite radio. So what's the point of funding the puritans of 1950's media? I know, I know, you want to keep on restraining American free speech, but we just don't have the money, right?

You want to cut environmental programs? Okay, fine, but you have to stop subsidizing Big Oil. I know, you're worried about poor little Exxon and Royal Dutch Shell getting by on slightly smaller mountains of cash, but like you said, we just don't have the fucking money.

You want to cut medical benefits to the poor? Okay, but you're going to have to stop spending money to oppose medical marijuana. While you're at it, de-fund the entire so-called drug war, too.

You want to stop funding clean water? Well, then stop funding Blackwater.

You want to stop funding welfare programs? Well, you'll have to stop giving money to faith-based initiatives.

And hell, since you're so willing to wage war upon the American poor, for Christ's sake stop spending so much money waging wars in other nations! It's bad enough our government attacks its own people, much less people abroad!

Hell, with compromises like these, we might just balance the budget yet!

Eric

Why I Support Chris Abele

My support for Chris Abele for County Executive is based upon the nature of the attacks directed against him. The Jeff Stone camp is big on playing up some of Abele's past indiscretions, but those indiscretions are really not all that bad. Abele's closet skeletons are little more than a discarded chicken-bone.

Abele pays no taxes because he donates so much money to the poor it offsets the taxes that would be placed upon his trust-fund-baby income. He has apparently once been a reckless youth, however. In addition to throwing his wealth at the poor, he also had the occasional night drinking, and once did so before driving recklessly in his sportscar. He's completely ignored putting a quarter into parking meters because, to him, 25 cents is little worse than 25 bucks for a ticket. But he's always paid the fines. And now, he's apparently once had a lien upon him from the IRS when they weren't too sure he truly didn't owe any taxes to them. This, from today's edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which made that a headline story.

To all this, I say, that's it? That's the best ya got?

We've all had our mistakes. We've all had our indiscretions. I'm frankly surprised that Abele hasn't gotten into more trouble in his youth. Even I certainly would have gotten into more trouble if I'd had that kind of money when I was in my 20's. The fact that he's only had one drunk driving incident and a bevy of immediately-paid parking tickets is impressive. This is a guy who, as County Exec, would never be tempted by dirty money. He's already rolling in it.

And he certainly wouldn't be the first young, rich man who didn't get his shit together until later in life. His past doesn't rule out his present, nor erase the fact that he stands for everything I stand for, so far as I can tell.

Yes, Stone appears to be the candidate with a cleaner record and greater integrity. If only he stood correctly on one, damned issue. Unfortunately, he doesn't, and that means I'd have to see Abele do something seriously lecherous before I'd consider holding my nose and voting for Jeff Stone this election cycle.

Frankly, I'm getting tired of the standard that a politician can't have done any little thing wrong. I was already sick of it back when Clinton's attorney general nominee got ruled out in 1993 because he'd paid his neighbor kid to mow his lawn without paying his FICA, and payroll tax. And the political candidate who's so clean he squeaks makes me worry. It makes me think this guy was the high school hall monitor who spent the last 20 years being a misanthrope before deciding he'd go into politics to finally make friends. Okay, maybe that's a bit harsh, but it's certainly easy to keep your nose clean when you're a hermit with his head in the sand, isn't it?

But buried in the headline that Abele was hit with an IRS lien, is an even more interesting story. Apparently, John Barrett, the brother of Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, and the clerk of circuit court, spotted Tim Russell (not the piano-playing politico formerly on PBS), digging through Abele's divorce file and other records at the Milwaukee County Courthouse. This guy, Russell, is a former staff member and campaign worker for Scott Walker. He has done volunteer work in Stone's campaign.

So he was digging for dirt on Abele, why? He says, it was out of personal curiosity.

Riiiiiight....

You know, those attacking Abele, nearly all of them one-time supporters of a cocaine-head of a former U.S. President from Texas, have done their best to find anything substantial, and all they've been able to find is that he's a recovering playboy. Well, good for him. He's got my vote.

By the way, did you notice that there's an all-important Wisconsin Supreme Court election coming up in less than two weeks? Yep! April 5. Prosser vs. Kloppenberg. Remember to vote!

Eric

Pro-Life? Well, Try ME!

Oh, no, anything but another abortion debate!

Well, don't worry. There won't be a debate. Because the debate is over. Because it's a scientific fact that the brain, not conception, defines the being, and that means that the pro-life side, which married itself to conception as the place to draw the line, ended up hanging a millstone about its neck and throwing itself into the sea -- for causing so very many little ones, in this case teenage girls, to stumble.

The debate is over. The pro-life side lost, and I can prove it.

For my complete expose on the proof of the brain defining the line at which a fetus has rights, visit my free online book, which I'm working to release as a podio-book, and a free Kindle release:

http://www.carlsaganjr.com/Its_The_Brain_Stupid.htm

In the meantime, Republican legislators are publicly raping their own principle of less government by blocking the rights of those women who have been raped. In South Dakota, women now are required to undergo a 72-hour wait while going to a "pregnancy crisis center" first. This quack-infested "counseling" center is where those seeking abortion get subjected to as much pro-life indoctrination as possible before getting their medical care. It amounts to a government endorsed picket-line, where pro-lifers may harass women going to get an abortion all they want. That's certainly one way to get around being required to be 100 yards away from the entrance! It is yet another government-funded religious initiative, instituted at a time in which we are oh, so concerned about religion in the potential new government of Libya. Oh, the irony! This while the house votes to de-fund the drop in the ocean of government funding which is Planned Parenthood's meager support. That's right, fuck the cancer screenings. Fuck the education programs. Fuck the contraception to keep the abortions from being necessary in the first place. And then, fuck the women a second time after they've been raped. Oh, how stupid religious bias makes otherwise smart people!

Speaking of which, I defy any religious leader to show me ANY proof that God, that gratuitous slayer of post-born children in the Old Testament, of all people, actually disapproves of abortion. Go ahead!

God never said anything about abortion in the Bible, because abortion didn't exist then. It is only the tradition, invented by male clergy, that dictates that abortion is a sin. In short, when you were told that abortion was contrary to God's will, you were LIED to.

Were I God, I'd have a special place in hell for those who dared to put words in my mouth.

I have seen the future. The truth of the brain defining the start of a living being is simply not going to remain the elephant in the room everyone refuses to talk about. Sooner or later, people will wake up to the fact that early-term abortion is very, very, VERY ethical. And that means rape victims have a -- yes, I'll say it -- God-given right to their care, as do teenage girls looking desperately to avoid having their young lives ruined.

Republicans WILL loose massive numbers of elections if they do not remove anti-abortion from their political platform -- IMMEDIATELY.

And now I challenge you, my dear seven readers. Do you feel you can take me on? Are you passionately pro-life? Do you think you can defend your position? I challenge you! Go on! Debate with me! See if you silliness can hold up to science.

I triple-dog dare ya!

Eric

Attacking Gaddhafi.

Well, it's official. We're launching surgical strikes against Libyan dictator Mommar Gaddhafi, with the full blessing of a U.N. security council resolution, and with the French on our side (for once). It's interesting how, in this time of an un-winnable military action in Afghanistan, Obama has initiated a very winnable one in Libya. We have a clear-cut definition of victory, namely, the insurgents win. We're spending small amounts of resources in conjunction with an international force to impose a no-fly zone. We're not putting boots on the ground. This isn't costing us a trillion. In short, we're doing this right. And it's in the finest Republican tradition of what the GOP expects from a President. At least, for once, the political right won't be able to criticize our Obama for...

What? They're criticizing him for it anyway? Oh, hell! What's the problem this time?

Well, they're saying how strange it is that the left, which opposed the invasion of Iraq so harshly, is now so much in favor of this action. This amounts to a way of disapproving with Obama without overtly opposing that which they know every Republican president would certainly do in his place.

Interesting. Okay, I, for one, am a slightly left-of-center person who did not oppose the war in Iraq. Hussein was a bad man with a long list of prior offenses. And I don't take silly positions such as it being wrong to oppose the removal of a brutal dictator. But there are some important differences in this case. For one, Bush used an expired UN resolution to invade Iraq, claiming it still held. Even those on the right agreed that was rather shirt-tail, but the UN held its tongue, because it was starting to feel rather toothless at the time. Second, we put our own troops on the ground without a clear plan for winning the peace. We're not screwing up THAT way again, are we? Third, we have an actual coalition of allies instead of us, and Great Britain making up the other 25% our forces didn't.

What really scares republicans is Obama getting his military stripes. If Gaddhafi falls, and I think he will, then Obama becomes unassailable as a liberal peacenik who would misuse our military. That makes him a 2012 shoo-in, and there goes the right-wing Supreme Court: which, of course, is the primary goal of this entire Rupert-Murdoch-fed and Christian-extremist fueled media machine.

It all boils down to Roe v. Wade on whether or not Obama's dealing with Libya is a good idea. Fuckin' A.

Hey, I'll give the Right credit. They're asking what kinds of people these insurgents are. They're wondering what kind of government Libya will have afterward. In short, they're asking all the questions they were too busy kissing Bush's ass to ask back at the onset of the Iraq invasion. And, once again, we must welcome back the Republican pennitant sinner with open arms, while asking where the fuck their common sense has been all this time.

We don't know what kind of government Libya will get. But at least our boys aren't in harm's way when the dust settles. And a democracy isn't even possible unless the dictator first falls, so whether the dictator should fall becomes moot. Libya may end up worse, but it deserves a fair shot.

Strike while the iron is hot.

Eric

Crisis In Japan

Few words can capture the tragedy in Japan. The loss of life, the devastation of swaths of countryside... A great nation, once our enemy and now our dear friend, has taken a blow to the jaw from the hammer of Vulcan. It's in times like these that we're reminded why nature is referred to as a 'mother.'

But in the wake of the tragic tsunami, a handfull of idiots are actually surfing it. Not the least of these is Glenn Beck, who, learning nothing from Pat Robertson's hideous gaff over Hurricane Katrina years earlier, has declared this a possible message sent by God that maybe we ought to do things differently. The implication behind this is that the Shinto religion, practiced by the majority of Japanese people, is inadequate for them.

Fuck you too, Glenn.

Okay, there's Mommar Gadhafi, Charlie Sheen, and Glenn Beck. They're all mentally too far gone to sustain their careers. 'Nuff said. Unfortunately, it will be some time after Gadhafi's inevitable fall that Beck will finally topple. His followers will drink his Kool-Aid to its bitter dregs.

But I will say this: TEPCO, the company screwing up the relief efforts of the nuclear disasters in the wake of this devastation, is the new BP. Over and over now, they've said that the fires have been under control, only to have another explosion follow. It's track record was poor even before this point, and now it's even worse. Three Mile Island has been buried in this event's wake. Soon, it will overtake Cernobyl. And it's perfectly clear that the lies told by the corporate leaders of this company are partly responsible -- one does not deal with a crisis by being in denial about it, and trying to pass that myopia on to a public that's dying of radiation poisoning is just plain evil.

This does bring up a crisis about energy that I wish to say something about. It's not quite like the BP oil spill, where the same people who only two years earlier were crying, "Drill, baby, drill!" at McCain rallies turned around and tried blaming Obama for irresponsible deep-water drilling practices. But there are similarities. The BP spill made us look at our energy needs and ask if what we're doing to meet them is really the right course of action. Is it responsible to drill for oil so deep out in the ocean if we can turn to solar, wind, coal, natural gas, and nuclear fuel as alternatives?

Now the debate includes nuclear power.

I've been in favor of nuclear power in the past. I still remain so now. I'm not going to go so far as to say that this tragedy should cause us to abandon nuclear power plants altogether, but I think it's fair to say that we should now avoid putting nuclear plants near coastal areas prone to tsunamis, or near earthquake zones. We should also put in new safeguards in place, learning from what's happened in Japan, and avoid the same conditions.

But let's not go back to excessive or unsafe drilling for oil, or increase our dependency upon the oil of angry Arab despots who are finally beginning to fall from power, just because we've had another nuclear disaster in our lifetime. Let's not fail to lock up fissionable materials behind the heavily-bolted doors of power plants, thus keeping such weapons-grade material away from terrorists, just because one Japanese company has mishandled one disaster. The number of massive oil spills far outstrips the number of nuclear disasters, and the human cost of a nuclear meltdown pales in comparison to the loss of all human freedom if terrorists and extremists continue to get funded with Saudi oil money.

Go solar, go wind, go nuclear. And go, Japan! Let's everybody chip in to help our friends out over there!

Eric