McIlheran Watch: Silence of the Beaver

by folkbum

I had presumed, from the lack of blogging and Thursday columns, that nemesis and calumnist Patrick McIlheran had been enjoying a well-deserved vacation. After all, one can only do so much chewing and regurgitating of talking points for so long without a break to recharge the ol' Evereadys.

As it turns out, though, he's apparently been scouting inside-the-beltway housery for this lateral move.

Interestingly, he now qualifies as one of those public-employee thugs we hear so much about; in addition, he'll be working as a staffer on the committee that oversees the federal workforce--all those unionized folk working for Uncle Sam.

Best of luck to him in the new digs, and better luck to the federal workforce who, I fear, needs it more than McIlheran. In the meantime, the McIlheran Watch is, pending whatever mess may appear as his final Sunday column, now retired, full pension.

McIlheran Watch: Vacation's over, time to start up the hypocrisy machine again

by folkbum

You know how it is: You come back from vacation, and the grass is up to here, weeds all over the place, papers piled up on the porch because you forgot to put it on hold. Patrick McIlheran, serial calumnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, finds a similar situation upon his return. See, the Republicans, the party for whom McIlheran usually shills, did something anathema over his vacation--they raised taxes!--and he needs to justify it, which he did both in print and on his blawg. (For a description of why the legislative action is a tax increase, read the news story.)

But it's okay, people, he tells us, that the GOP is cutting the Earned Income Tax Credit, a tax credit designed, as McIlheran freely admits, to encourage poor people to work more by offsetting their payroll or other taxes.

Why is it okay? Because of all the tax cuts in the budget. No, really, he says this. From the Sunday calumny column:

Walker and the Legislature, short of money, decided to cut by 15% one work-inducing incentive and to increase another they reckon will be more effective.

And what was that other tax cut work-inducing incentive? Elimination of taxes on certain capital gains for businesses. I'm actually quite surprised that McIlheran didn't go on about the other business tax breaks the GOP has included in its budget, like the one slipped in Friday night that gives businesses a dollar-for-dollar tax break ... just because. At least with the cut in reinvested capital gains, the GOP is pretending to pick breaks that sound reasonable to your average person. But so many of them are just give-aways to corporate donors.

This is your modern GOP in a nutshell: In a time of deficit, tax breaks for the poor are simply impossible to maintain. But tax breaks for business can continue, and we'll throw in new ones, too.

McIlheran Watch: Is he innumerate, too, or still just being deceptive?

by folkbum

(Unrelated but kind of update: Tom Foley picks liar.)

One of the most dishonest things anti-tax folk deliberately do to fuzzify the debate over tax rates is to conflate marginal tax rates with effective tax rates. For example, when long-time rich-folk defender Patrick McIlheran retweets (or whatever it is that you call the conservative tendency to "heh indeed" someone else's hard work with a slight smug comment) the Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore's complaints that Democrats in Congress may be thinking about taking 62% of people's income in taxes.

Moore's op-ed is disingenuous in a number of ways besides blurring the lines between effective and marginal rates--which I'll get to in a moment, I promise--such as blending some Democrats' proposed federal income tax changes with actual state and local taxes to inflate his number, and comparing the cumulative effect of all taxes with the income tax rate at some cherry-picked point in the past. And McIlheran adds additional disingenuity too, which I will also get to in a moment. But let's hear from Moore first:

Media reports in recent weeks say that Senate Democrats are considering a 3% surtax on income over $1 million to raise federal revenues. This would come on top of the higher income tax rates that President Obama has already proposed through the cancellation of the Bush era tax-rate reductions.

If the Democrats' millionaire surtax were to happen—and were added to other tax increases already enacted last year and other leading tax hike ideas on the table this year—this could leave the U.S. with a combined federal and state top tax rate on earnings of 62%. That's more than double the highest federal marginal rate of 28% when President Reagan left office in 1989. Welcome back to the 1970s.

Here's the math behind that depressing calculation. Today's top federal income tax rate is 35%. Almost all Democrats in Washington want to repeal the Bush tax cuts on those who make more than $250,000 and phase out certain deductions, so the effective income tax rate would rise to about 41.5%. The 3% millionaire surtax raises that rate to 44.5%.

Moore goes on to add additional numbers, sometimes falsely, to get to 62%. And you'll notice Moore actually uses the words effective income tax rate, which is a bald-faced lie. Let's pretend someone is a millionaire, earning, let's say, $2,000,000 a year. With no deductions except the personal deduction for the millionaire and her husband--no mortgage interest, no charitable donations, no contributions to an IRA or other tax shelter that millionaires tend to access--that couple under Moore's conditions would pay about $765,000 in federal income tax. This makes the effective tax rate, actually, 38.3%, not 41.5%.

This happens because not every dollar you earn is taxed at the same rate. The first $8,500 you earn ($17,000 as a couple) is taxed at just 10%. This is as true for you at whatever crappy low-paying job you tolerate as it is for our millionaire earning $2m. The rate at which additional income is taxed increases at intervals; every dollar from $8,501 to $34,500 is taxed at 15%, from $34,501 to $83,600 is taxed at 25%, and so on. In addition, letting the Bush tax cuts expire on upper-income earners only increases the taxes paid on income above $250,000, and the proposed millionaire surtax (which I bet you a dollar will never pass anyway) will only increase the rate paid on income over $1m.

You may say the difference between 38.3% and 41.5% is small, because either way you're talking about a whole lot of money. Well, yes, when you talk about millionaires, any one percent of their income is in fact going to be $10,000 or more. I would hate to have the kind of life where that were true! The thing is, we're talking about a very small number of earners here, about 1/10 of one percent; Moore and McIlheran want to give the impression, though, that this sort of thing will affect you, too, average taxpayer, and therefore you should be outraged. But less than 3% of all earners (and, I would be bet another dollar, none of either my or McIlheran's audience) make more than $250,000, the ones most affected by the proposed changes. And at those numbers, the difference between marginal and effect rates is huge. Someone earning $300,000 a year pays an effective rate of just 23.4%, even though they're in the 33% bracket. (If the Bush tax cuts expire on them, that $300,000 earner's effective rate would slip upward to barely over 24%.)

And conservatives need to lie to to spread this impression, as noted. Here's another bit of Moore's mess:

Now let's consider how our tax system today compares with the system that was in place in the late 1980s—when the deficit was only about one-quarter as large as a share of GDP as it is now. After the landmark Tax Reform Act of 1986, which closed special-interest loopholes in exchange for top marginal rates of 28%, the highest combined federal-state marginal tax rate was about 33%. Now we may be headed to 62%.

This is the sort of BS anyone with basic numeracy or reading comprehension skills--such as an opinion columnist at Wisconsin's largest daily newspaper--should be able to see through. Moore compares his pile-everything-on imaginary rate to a number that excludes much of what he contorts to include in his figure. His 33% rate doesn't include, as his 62% does, any payroll taxes, for example, making this a massive apples-to-binder clips comparison.

McIlheran himself, not content merely to let Moore's abuse of math slide, offers his own disingenuous comments. He rounds Moore's 62% up to "two-thirds," for example, and again drops his favorite stat: "[T]he top 10% of earners," he says, "pay about 45% of all federal taxes." Which is bad math, again, because McIlheran doesn't give you the context that these same top 10%-ers also earn more than 40% of the income in the US, so that 45% is hardly as shocking as it sounds.

All of this is ginned up to disguise a fact that explains more of the current deficit morass than almost anything else: Federal revenues are lower than they have been since Truman's days. Period. To bemoan the present day--or some imagined future when rates might nudge up slightly--as somehow hellish compared to the good old days of the Reagan years is utter crap. It is a fundamental and deliberate misreading and misrepresentation of the data. No single year of the Obama administration to date has seen more revenue than the lowest year of the Reagan administration.

At the same time as they try to convince us that we can't afford to fulfill the promises of Medicare or Social Security, they also insist that the tax burden is impossibly high already. Neither of those things is remotely true, and it frustrates the hell out of me because a bunch of these liars are, apparently, being paid to peddle those fictions to you.

McIlheran Watch: Lyin' for Ryan

by folkbum

So earlier this week, a heavily Republican Congressional district somewhere in New York elected a Democrat. The dynamics of any one local race* are seldom indicative of any greater theme, despite everyone's best attempt to say, see, this proves what I've been claiming all along! There are always local issues to consider, individual dynamics of the race and, in this case, an utter wingnut tea-party candidate who may have been a spoiler. But one thing is certain: The DCCC, Democrats' House election arm, did everything it could to make the election about Paul Ryan (R-Galt's Gulch) and his plan to destroy medicare, because the Republican in that race voiced her support early and often for Ryan's plan.

Right there, what I just did, saying that Ryan's plan would destroy Medicare, is what those who have always wanted to destroy Medicare (except in election years, when in a fit of black-is-whiteism the GOP asserts it's Democrats who will destroy Medicare) would call a "mediscare tactic." Funny, eh? But please, recall that since Medicare's inception, the Republican Party has stood for its end, with St. Ronald de Tampico even making a record--yes! a record!--in 1961 opposing the plan and claiming that within a generation the federal government would be telling doctors where they could live and what kind of medicine they could practice. Like Harold Camping's predictions of Armageddon, Reagan's opposition to Medicare seems laughable now.

Except not to Paul Ryan. As we have discussed before on this very blog Ryan is not afraid to invoke Reagan's rhetorical style when it suits him, and for basically the same purposes. So let's be clear: Ryan's plan does destroy Medicare. This is not an exaggeration designed to "scare," but an accurate description of Ryan's plan to institute a completely different system under the same name. (Politi"Fact" finds the semantics of the argument--Ryan still calls his plan Medicare, they say--persuasive enough to call honest opposition to the idea false, which is just mind-boggling.)

And this is where Patrick McIlheran comes in: He blogs to throw out the "mediscare" label and defend Ryan's plan. But he can't do that without lying, because, let's be honest here, a whole lot of Ryan's plan is indefensible. McIlheran:

As Ryan has endlessly pointed out, his plan leaves Medicare completely unaltered for anyone now on it or who is now 55 or older. It manages this feat [. . .] by changing the deal for people 54 or younger into a subsidized selection of insurance plans more or less identical to what Congress gives itself as coverage. This is an “end” to Medicare only if you imagine that our lawmakers have left themselves destitute and tubercular in a gutter when it comes to their own health care.

Of course Ryan's plan doesn't touch the Boomers' and the WWII generation's Medicare; those people vote and they really like Medicare, giving it just about the highest satisfaction rates of any insurance provider in the country. But the next part, about giving everyone else the same health care coverage that Congress gets? That's baloney:

In many ways, the federal plan works a lot like the run-of-the-mill employee-sponsored health insurance plan. The bulk of the costs are picked up by the employer--in this case, the government--with the employee contributing his or her share according to a set or negotiated rate. Under a 1997 law, the government pays a set rate of 75 percent of the costs of the health plans selected by federal employees and members of Congress. The employee (and members of Congress) pick up the other 25 percent. [. . .] The Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan arm of Congress, analyzed Ryan’s plan and estimated that, by 2030, the government would pay just 32 percent of the health-care costs, less than half of what it currently pays. The other 68 percent of the plan would have to be shouldered by the retiree.

That just-like-Congress tale ends up a two-Pinocchio lie. But happily spread by local huckster McIlheran. Who goes on:

And since the alternative, according to Medicare’s own accountant, is leaving things alone until it all goes bankrupt in 2024 and doctors stop seeing recipients, then Ryan’s plan is “immoral” only in the way that it’s somehow wrong to disturb a drunk’s calm by telling him he’s driving onto the wrong-way off-ramp of a freeway.

This is what we call a false dichotomy (and the word false, you know, tells you McIlheran is lying again). This is the new Republican tactic, seen all over the place lately, which is to pretend that Democrats don't have a plan. They do. It's called Medicare--you may have heard of it, and it's a pretty awesome deal.

But not merely the unaltered Medicare that will, indeed, drive federal debt ever higher. Rather, Democrats have been trying to build on Medicare's signature strength, which is that it holds costs down better than private-sector insurance; over the years, Medicare inflation has been significantly lower than inflation in the health-care market as a whole. Ryan's plan, on the other hand, holds payments down, which does nothing to control costs. Indeed the CBO's analysis is devastating:

[T]he CBO conclusion is shocking: The plan would not only fail to decrease health-care costs per beneficiary, it would increase them–-by an astonishingly large amount that grows over time. By 2030, health spending on the typical beneficiary would be more than 40 percent higher under the Ryan plan than under existing Medicare, according to the CBO report.

The short version is that the end of Medicare as we know it under Ryan means an end to the government's ability to make big deals with doctors and hospitals and other providers: When you're on your own with a voucher, you do not have the negotiating power of 40 million other patients behind you. Just you. So where Ryan's plan allows actual costs to skyrocket (but not the size of your voucher), Medicare as is holds actual costs down.

But there's more: Democrats want to further bend that cost curve downward, and the Affordable Care Act starts that process. The ACA establishes an Independent Payment Advisory Board, which is all about finding the most effective and most cost-effective treatments to pay for instead of expensive stuff that doesn't work. However, there's a giant obstacle to this board, and if you guessed the House GOP you'd be right: They want to abandon the additional cost controls that the IPAB would bring in favor of, as we've seen, destroying Medicare instead.

The truth of the Ryan plan and the destruction it would bring to one of the most important entitlement plans we have today is what's really scary. And that's why Ryan and his media enablers like McIlheran have to lie to you in order to sell the plan.

* Steve Benen argues that this is not an isolated case, and that Democrats have been making significant gains, including flipping Mike Huebsch's GOP-heavy Assembly district here in Wisconsin a few weeks ago.

McIlheran Watch: Playing Dumb

by folkbum

I wasn't going to do this--it's spring break, I already have borderline high blood pressure, my internet has been down on and off all weekend--but since MJS calumnist Patrick McIlheran was kind enough to drop by in the comments to the other day's post, I will, indeed, draw a giant circle around a steaming pile of his blog that I was going to just let lie without comment.

That steaming pile? This--1100 (exactly!) words playing dumb about why teachers, in particular, are upset about the recent efforts of Governor Walker.

Uh, duh, is it because there are so many teachers? he dumbly asks. Or, uh, durm, is it because people hate teachers more than garbagemen? he goes on. Maybe, uhhhhh, it's the pittance we pay them--not! he opines. In the end, and here I am not paraphrasing, he asks, "So why are they upset? The short answer is that I don't know."

Which is either a lie or deliberate ignorance. From the time the first UW Madison TA sat down in the Capitol on Valentine's day, this was not about pay or pensions or insurance or halos. This was about the right to bargain collectively, about the right to belong to a union that represents me, protects me, and keeps my working conditions such that cuts in pay or pension or insurance--all of which we did, in fact agree too--are manageable and not enough to make me pack in my dream job for something more rewarding like, for example, garbageman. What's disgusting? we chanted in Madison. Union busting. Not, notably, a $7,000 pay cut.

The reason why we know McIlheran is lying or is deliberately ignorant is that over and over his own newspaper has reported on this, from the big fat liar rating Scott Walker got for trying to say he ran for office on a platform of killing unions and collective bargaining and busting unions, to the very article that stoked McIlheran's fire and repeats over and over that teachers are upset about losing collective bargaining rights.

And, apparently, he reads this blog, where I have made it clear over and over and over and over that this is not about a pay cut, but about the hundreds of other ways that I am protected because of my collective bargaining rights.

McIlheran Watch: Busting his own myth

by folkbum

I'm still lucky enough to get an email once or twice a week from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's serial calumnist (so many thanks to iT for coining that) Patrick McIlheran. One was in my inbox this morning, regarding Sunday's column (not yet online as I write this here). The subject line was "The bargain that taxpayers may be about to lose," and if you know McIlheran's habits as well as I do, you probably have already speculated that the "bargain" has something to do with the Milwaukee Parental Choice (i.e., voucher) Program. And you are right!

McIlheran is the Milwaukee media's leading proponent of the "half-price myth," the canard that whatever the results produced by voucher schools, they're worth it because a voucher is worth half what the Milwaukee Public Schools spends on a student. This is a myth I have dealt with before (with graphs!), but the conclusion is worth repeating: MPS is mandated or obligated to spend money that voucher schools are not, and it is this unlevel playing field--the way voucher schools, for example, do not have to provide special education services--that creates a half-price appearance. When you examine what MPS considers that base cost of educating the average child, it is nearly identical to the cost of a voucher.

So what's McIlheran's plaint this week? Oddly, that voucher schools aren't getting enough taxpayer money:

Choice schools’ funding had been rising, too, until in 2009, Gov. Jim Doyle actually cut it by $165, from $6,607, per child, even as spending overall rose by about $3 billion.

There it stays, too, and that has consequences. Paul Bahr, principal at Milwaukee Lutheran High School, where about half the 681 students attend on vouchers, says the school had to cut back on spots for poor students. This year, it could only afford 59 choice freshmen.

The problem is raising enough money. It costs the school about $3,000 more per child than the voucher brings, “and that would be significantly higher if our teachers were paid what they’re worth,” said Bahr. It charges about $7,300 a year for children from tuition-paying Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod congregations, and those churches kick in another $1 million or so in subsidies to cover the school’s losses. Other choice schools must do similar fundraising, if they can.

My best response this is simply punctuation: !!!!

The second-largest agglomeration of voucher schools--the Lutherans--can't educate a voucher student for the voucher price. Lutheran schools are subsidized by the donations of church congregations to make up the loss.

Indeed, adding the "about $3,000 more" to the voucher's about $6,500 value gives us a total of about $9,500. How much does it cost to educate a child in MPS? McIlheran helpfully includes that in his piece, warning that if the inadequate funding continues for vouchers, "[t]axpayers statewide then will pay more. Children may instead go to charters, at higher price, or into MPS, where finance officials have said the cost of an added student is at least $10,000 per year" (my emphasis). I'm not a math teacher, but my basic cyphering skills suggests that $9,500 is not significantly different from $10,000.

Now, the "MPS finance officials" added an "at least" qualifier, given the added costs of special education and such. Much to the Lutheran schools' credit, they do provide special education services. (Most voucher schools do not; there are more identified special-education students at a single MPS school, Hamilton High School, than in all of the voucher program combined.) But MPS is also required by law to do a whole slew of things the Lutheran schools are not--including not limiting how many students it takes in in a year.

The voucher program was sold to us on promises that it would provide better achievement for poor students in the state's worst district. When that didn't pan out, we were told that it's a bargain, providing equal achievement at half price. And now, we're told it's not a bargain, but rather too too lean--voucher schools are going to start packing it in unless we pay them more. With the state's Republican Party prepared to approve a major expansion of vouchers in the coming budget--beyond Milwaukee and beyond poor students--any pretense that this is some great public good is now gone.

McIlheran Watch: Patrick McIlheran's Irrelevant Burst of Distraction

by folkbum

All day yesterday I waited for Patrick McIlheran's response to the news that students in Milwaukee's voucher schools didn't perform better on the state assessment in 2010 than students in the MIlwaukee Public Schools generally, or even than MPS's economically disadvantaged students--the ones who, based on income, would qualify for the voucher program.

The reason I was waiting is that McIlheran is a voucher dead-ender. Whatever the news about vouchers, he has an excuse ready to go if vouchers seem to be losing or a snide remark about the public schools if vouchers seeming to be winning. He regularly stammers out that voucher schools are of course teaching special ed students (They can't turn them away!, he blubbers) without ever acknowledging that MPS has seventwelve times as many--and qualitatively more challenging--special ed students (or that the voucher schools that do really well with special ed students seek out extra funding). And, most gallingly, McIlheran was a pioneer of the "half-price" myth--a bar-lowering of epic proportions that I'm sure embarrasses the hell out of all the people who honestly believed that Milwaukee's voucher schools would be the shining stars in a galaxy of school-choice programs around the country. That galaxy never materialized, and the sad "they do just as sucky but at half the price" I'm sure spins Milt Friedman's corpse like a top.

Now I know what the wait was about. McIlheran blogs today and implies a conspiracy that Wisconsin's Department of Public Instruction timed its release to pre-empt the release of another annual installment of results from the School Choice Demonstration Project, which was revealed today. As far as I know, there was no conspiracy, and schools like mine--a public school (whose results were uniformly up over 2009, thankyouverymuch--had been looking forward to yesterday for months as the day that the figures would become public and go live on DPI's website.

As I was saying, McIlheran implies--no, wait, he doesn't imply. He comes right out and says it's a conspiracy:

On Wednesday, results come out from the fourth year of the long-term study comparing children in choice schools to those in Milwaukee Public Schools. If the results are similar to what’s happened in the past, they’ll probably show that there’s not a great deal of difference between the two groups as a whole, at least on the basic reading and math scores.

Which doesn’t quite do the trick for the anti-choice lobby, which is most likely why state schools superintendent Tony Evers, long an opponent of choice, released figures Tuesday that he claimed were an “apples to apples” comparison of choice and MPS, ones that he said showed MPS outperformed choice schools.

McIlheran goes on to complain that a release of test data, like DPI's yesterday, is worthless: "[T]he numbers simply compare how children in choice schools and those in MPS as a whole did at one particular moment. It’s a snapshot of where the children are, no matter where they started." Welcome to the anti-testing movement, Pat! We're glad to have you aboard. But then he gets absurd: "This [i.e., where they started] is, broadly, not the same place for choice schools and MPS." His reasoning? That the parents who choose voucher schools know their children are already way far behind. He claims. His evidence for that is nowhere.

But it's an insult to suggest that the students I teach in MPS aren't way far behind, and that somehow I'm lucky to get to teach such smart kids. That my colleagues whose students start out far behind, whose class sizes are swelling, who don't have the ability to expel the troublemakers (as Brother Bob Smith, a voucher stalwart, put it, “make the right decisions, or make them somewhere else"), whose very rights are being assaulted in front of their eyes, are on easy street. That MPS doesn't have to take all comers, even those whose voucher schools closed mid-year because the teachers quit when they stopped getting paid, or whose voucher school lied to them about what special education services would be available and had to leave, and educate them.

But the biggest kicker of all is that McIlheran is completely wrong about what the two sets of results show. The Demonstration Project's report (available here, see report 26) shows that, as McIlheran predicted, matched samples of voucher and MPS students achieve about the same. But the fact is that the report there uses fall 2009 test data. DPI's results from yesterday, which include a low-income (i.e., voucher-eligible) student sample from MPS to compare, uses fall 2010 data. The Demonstration Project's data are a year old already. MPS, under new leadership and with a new literacy plan (and in the thick of a successful new math plan) made gains. Period. And voucher schools did not. Period.

So McIlheran's anti-DPI screed is worthless. It's distracting. It fails to address the facts at hand. Kind of the way you might expect from a dead-ender.

Quickly Noted

by folkbum

Further to the complexity of teacher evaluation.

What, you mean Patick McIlheran is a liar? I am shocked, just shocked.

Speaking of shocked: The Journal Sentinel's editorial board continues today with its series of disappointed editorials lamenting the fact that the candidates they endorsed are pursuing exactly the policies they promised to pursue. Buyer's remorse does not look good on you, guys.

McIlheran Watch: Affordable Care Act votes and Dems' fates

by folkbum

I am still blessed/cursed with being on Patrick McIlheran's email pimp list, so in my inbox this evening was a preview of his gloaty McGloat-gloat column running tomorrow. It includes this stupid paragraph:

Nothing was so fatal to House Democrats, especially newbies, than to have voted for Obamacare. Dozens fell, including Rep. Steve Kagen (D-Appleton). The one Republican who favored it lost.

The last part of the paragraph is true--Anh Joseph Cao* in Louisiana, an R in a deep blue urban district lost, and Kagen, a D in a district held by Rs for something like 90 of the last 100 years, lost, too. But he blames both losses on votes for a single bill, not the much more weighty evidence of demographics and history. Which is lazy, if not totally stupid. (*Cao did not vote for final passage in March 2010, but he did vote for an earlier version in December 2009.)

What is totally stupid, is the first part--the suggestion that uniformly a vote against the Affordable Care Act was a killer for Democrats. To show the stupidity of that statement, let me offer you some, you know, evidence:

• Democrats who voted for ACA: 202 (17, including Wisconsin's Dave Obey, retired not counted)
• Democrats who voted for ACA and lost: About 40 (some races undecided)
• Pro-ACA losing percentage: 20%
  
• Democrats who voted against ACA: 31 (and 3 who retired not counted)
• Democrats who voted against ACA and lost: 18 (Ben Chandler may lose in KY, but is presently winning)
• Anti-ACA losing percentage: 58%

Now, clearly, there are demographic and historical factors at play here, too; I mean, Gwen Moore wasn't about to lose to Dan Sebring no matter how many empty commercial buildings and crack houses sported his yard signs, period. Even considering all the flipped house seats--about 65, including three R to D switches--the whole House turnover rate was less than 15% this year, so incumbency, period, is a boon to a electoral chances.

But if we're playing by McIlheran's stupid rules--it's his column I'm playing with, so his rules!--that means it was three times more likely that Democrats opposing the ACA would lose. McIlheran needs to rewrite that first sentence of his, then, to be more accurate: "Nothing was so fatal to House Democrats, especially Blue Dogs, than to have voted against Obamacare."

That's an accurate statement, and much less stupid, based on the facts, than the crap McIlheran is dropping.

McIlheran Watch: Watching YOU, that is

by folkbum

Big Brother is alive and well in the conservatives watching your bedroom:

The reason some people insist on redefining marriage to include gay couples, writes philosophy professor Stephen J. Heaney in a brilliant piece of work, is because so many of us misunderstand what marriage is in the first place. [. . .]

[B]ecause it leads to children, sexual intercourse has extraordinary public consequences. It is not, as we might like to think, a purely private act. [. . .] In marriage, the couple promises before the community to fulfill this project through vows of fidelity and permanence, joining their bodies and their lives to make the project work. The community promises to give the couple the privacy to perform their sexual acts.

In other words, if you're not a married hetero couple planning children, then "the community" apparently has not just the right but the responsibility to get all up in your business. Open up those shades, people!

I have to say it's nice to see a conservative admit out loud what is usually something they try to avoid making plain.

McIlheran Watch: Ignorance of the Dumb

by folkbum

I thought perhaps we could just play "simple answers to stupid questions":

My Sunday Journal Sentinel column looks at all the excuses the left is offering to let the term-limited 2001 and 2003 tax cuts expire.

Mainly, I write, it comes down to wanting to increase taxes on some people--the ones they think have too much money. Only, just where in the constitution does it say our leaders have the right to decide who has too much money, much less to, um, remediate that?

Um, Article 1 section 8? "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes." Done, right? No, sadly, he doesn't stop there where the simple answer would suffice.

Let's kind of give McIlheran credit, though: Those paragraphs offer the correct implication, that while Democrats will let Republican policy take effect and sunset the Bush tax cuts, they will offer new tax cuts for those earning less than $250,000 a year--those who in his parlance are the ones Democrats think "have too much money." I prefer of course to think of them as "the only people who have seen growth in their income in the last thirty years," but he makes the big bucks down there to the newspaper and I'm just a schlub with access to google, so he gets to define the terms.

McIlheran can't bring himself to say that explicitly, that the only people who will see their effective federal taxes increase are the ultra-wealthy. He can't do it because he needs to play ignorant, and keep his readers ignorant, to make the remainder of his points. First, majorities of Americans are in favor of letting all the tax cuts or the tax cuts for the wealthiest expire on schedule. It's hard to gin up populist anger when the popples are not on your side, unless you play ignorant.

Second, the rest of that blog post is all about "how the repeal of those Bush tax cuts would hit middle-income families." In reality, the Democrats' proposals would have zero hit on middle-income families. Period. There would be no change. So the whole rest of that post is worth exactly nothing. Every word of it is moot, every sentence is a lie.

Is that something McIlheran will ever admit? No. See, the right is counting on you to stay ignorant, because if you knew what you were really getting with a Republican agenda, you'd never agree to it.

(Updated to add the graphic again that originally appeared here in this post.)

(Updated again with mad props to JimSpice, who comments here often, too: "Why on earth would a conservative try to sway the opinion of liberals by sending them to the Heritage Foundation. That's as useless as convincing a conservative by quoting a scientific journal.")

McIlheran goes Galt

by folkbum

Journal Sentinel calumnist finally does something right.

McIlheran Watch: The McAdams pre-buttal

by folkbum

As I have noted previously, I am among an oh-so-super-lucky group of punditerati that gets an email preview a couple times a week of what Milwaukee Journal Sentinel calumnist Patrick McIlheran gets up to in print. So no surprise when my inbox dinged this morning with a McIlheran missive:

Don’t worry, says the state agency that’s running radio ads about how you can get a home with (almost) no cash. This time, they’ve got it all figured out.

Sure about that?

The money window’s back open, no place sooner than in Wisconsin. . . . The federal Treasury gave federal mortgage reseller Fannie Mae billions, so Fannie lent $325 million to WHEDA, which is passing it through banks to you if you haven’t owned a house in three years and have managed to save up pretty much nothing. All you need is $1,000 for closing costs and a middling credit score. No mortgage insurance needed, either.

McIlheran is referring to the WHEDA Fannie Mae Advantage program, run by the Wisconsin Housing and Economic and Development Authority, and apparently he doesn't like it.

I am certain a lot of that has to do with the continued insistence by those on the right that the present economic crisis is the result of abuses by Fannie Mae and ACORN intimidation of banks to lend to poor people and the Carter-era Community Reinvestment Act. It grates on many conservatives (though not all) that the wealthy and successful could possibly be responsible for messing up anything. After all, their success is the market's success, and the market is infallible.

That is pretty clearly wrong, and WHEDA's own track record proves it. WHEDA ran for many years a similar Zero Down program, and--

You know what? I'm going to turn this over to Marquette Professor John McAdams--make note of this, as I will never say it again--who is right about WHEDA and actually took this on two weeks ago*:

[R]easonable concessions to allow people with modest assets to buy a home make good public policy sense.

But what concessions are reasonable?

Letting people with poor credit get a mortgage? Certainly not. But the WHEDA program requires a 680 credit score to qualify, and the average credit score of people who get mortgages is 732. That’s credit worthy.

How about employment and income? Under the WHEDA program, employment and income are checked. Too low an income or a spotty employment record can get you rejected. [. . .] WHEDA claims that historically its default rates have been low.

On that last point, WHEDA offers McAdams some specific stats in an email (pdf):

WHEDA and other Housing Finance Agencies around the country were never part of the sub prime mortgage problem thatplagued the housing industry in recent years. Quite the opposite--our 35-year track record of safe, responsible lending is what has resulted in a foreclosure rate of only 1.25%--far lower than the state's average of 1.82% for similar "prime" fixed-rate loans, according to the latest data reported by the Mortgage Bankers Association. During the height of the foreclosureepidemic, WHEDA's rate remained at less than one percent for several months. Moreover, the WHEDA foreclosure rate is miniscule when compared with the Wisconsin foreclosure rates for FHA and subprime loans, which are 4.30% and 11.31%respectively.

And note that none of the conditions for the WHEDA program under discussion here--or any WHEDA program, ever--come close to the greatest abuses of private mortgage brokers making subprime loans, like the infamous NINJA loan. And as we learned last week, wealthy homeowners (at least, those owning million-dollar homes) have defaulted at nearly twice the rate of middle-class and poor homeowners.

McAdams concludes, "[O]n a public policy landscape littered with outrages, this falls far short of being an outrage. In fact, it’s probably an outright good thing." And I agree. McIlheran, indefatigable defender of the upper classes, does not deem the working poor worthy of this assistance.

* Indeed, this WHEDA program was apparently a Charlie Sykes talking point and McAdams stood up for the program then. I'm surprised McIlheran didn't see the McAdams pre-buttal and leave this thing alone.

Have I mentioned that I read it for the comments?

by folkbum

This morning McIlheran rehashes one crazy conservative myth that we've already dispensed with here, but it only took one comment for more of the crazy myths to appear: "Today we also learn approximately 50% of the US household will not pay a dime in taxes," writes this poor deluded man. Which, of course, is not true: Everyone who works, buys anything, or lives anywhere pays taxes. They may not pay income taxes, which are progressively structured such that the greatest burden falls on those with the most income to spare.

Here's a previous post of mine on the subject, complete with pretty graph; but even the right-wing Tax Foundation notes (see the chart on page 5) that the lowest quintile of households by income still pays about a fifth of their income in taxes at some level.

McIlheran Watch: Actually half-right on Harry Reid

by folkbum

Credit where credit is due: Patrick McIlheran demonstrates some solid reading comprehension today and notes what Harry Reid actually said, as opposed to what a lot of Republicans and the local rightblogerati wish Harry Reid had said. Whereas the afore-mentioned are somehow insisting that Reid is racist*, despite a long history of supporting civil rights and no history of making racist remarks, McIlheran explains that Reid was, in fact, noting the the US has a history of racism:

No, consider what Reid was saying: That because Obama’s skin wasn’t so dark and because of how he spoke, he’d go far for the party. He’d be marketable. He’d go over well with the American voter. In short, Reid was presuming that the electorate consists of bigots who’d be put off by a darker skin or a stronger accent.

There is, of course, nothing inaccurate about that. Quiz: Before Barack Obama, how many black presidents have we had? Speakers of the House? Majority Leaders in the Senate? All zero.

Black governors? Okay, a little better: David Patterson, currently governor of New York--for about thirteen more seconds--is the fourth African American to rise to that title in this nation's history. Deval Patrick, currently gov in Massachusetts, is the third. Only two of the four have been elected to the office--Patrick and Virginia's Doug Wilder. Think about that--in all this nation's history, only two black men (and no black women) have been elected to lead a state.

The US Senate's history is a little more colorful, sure; six African Americans have served in that body. The one currently serving black senator--Roland Burris, of Illinois--was appointed by a governor (it was a bleeping golden thing), and two were appointed by the Mississippi legislature during reconstruction. So in all of US history, only three African Americans have ever been elected by the people of a state to the Senate. (Interestingly: Six black senators out of--if teh Wiki is to be believed--1818 in US history is a total of 0.33%. That means there have been, proportionally, more black presidents--2.2%--than black senators. Hm.)

That sounds to me like we live in a country reticent to elect African Americans to state-wide or higher office, if only six have ever achieved it (counting Obama).

Now, McIlheran's problem with Reid--and the reason why he's only half-right here--is that McIlheran is offended that Reid noticed this country's history of racism. Now, if the global warming denial nonsense has taught us anything, it's that accurately describing the world around you is a cardinal sin for McIlheran and his ilk. It is no wonder, then, that Harry Reid comes in for criticism from those who may just be a little too accurately described in the remarks.

UPDATE: The Brawler documents my last sentence for me!

* Compare, of course, to Trent Lott, whose history of racial insensitivity and actual nostalgia for the days of segregationist candidates made his remarks about a brazillion times worser.

McIlheran Watch: The wronger he digs, the deeper he gets

by folkbum

I am not a scientist. Patrick McIlheran isn't, either. But I read and check my sources carefully. For example, today in a blog posting, McIlheran cites energy-industry spokesman climate scientist Patrick Michaels to try to claim that peer-review is a bit more like Heathers than like Real Genius. Michaels has an op-ed in the Murdoch Finance Daily Wall Street Journal. I'm quoting the op-ed; the part McIlheran also quotes is in bold:

Messrs. Mann and Wigley also didn't like a paper I published in Climate Research in 2002. It said human activity was warming surface temperatures, and that this was consistent with the mathematical form (but not the size) of projections from computer models. Why? The magnitude of the warming in CRU's own data was not as great as in the models, so therefore the models merely were a bit enthusiastic about the effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Mr. [Michael] Mann called upon his colleagues to try and put Climate Research out of business. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," he wrote in one of the emails. "We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board."

After Messrs. Jones and Mann threatened a boycott of publications and reviews, half the editorial board of Climate Research resigned.

Michaels establishes a clear timeline: He published in Climate Reearch -> Mann raised a stink about his paper -> Mann organized a boycott of CR -> the editors quit because Mann intimidated them. It fits the "climategate" narrative neatly and thoroughly reinforces McIlheran's deny-a-riffic worldview. It is, however, wrong.

In January 2003, Climate Research published a literature review by Drs. Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas (working at the Harvard‑Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, not a climate-research outfit). Almost immediately, the people who wrote the literature reviewed by the Soon and Baliunas--and a host of others--started noticing things that weren't right, and writing to the journal. Other editors of the journal also complained (the duo submitted to the most overtly anti-global warming editor). In March 2003, Mann wrote the email in question; no boycott ensued, and, in fact, Mann also said, "the last thing we want to do is bring attention to this paper, which will be ignored by the
community on the whole." Sure, Mann's email also mentioned Michaels, but in passing--the conversation is clearly sparked by and about Soon and Baliunas. In May 2003, Cox newspapers--now McClatchy, one of the few purely journalistic endeavors left in publishing--dug deep to find that the paper had funding from the American Petroleum Institute and oil companies like Exxon, which raised more questions with the editors. This was followed in July by a statement from Mann and a dozen other scientists in another journal. Finally, at the end of July, a bunch of the editors resigned from CR because the publisher refused to let them respond without the consent of the one hinky editor, who of course refused.

Notice, none of the hubbub was instigated by anything from Patrick Michaels. The resignations and furor had nothing to do with any kind of bullying from Michael Mann, at least according to the contemporary accounts and the first-person accounts of the editors involved.

(Michals keeps writing, and McIlheran keeps quoting, to blame Mann and others for the resignation of a skeptical editor at Geophysical Research Letters, a resignation that had nothing to do with pressure from anyone: "I stepped down as GRL editor at the end of my three-year term," the guy wrote. "My departure had nothing to do with attempts by Wigley or anyone else to have me sacked.")

Now, I'm willing to cut McIlheran a little bit of slack, here, because one would like to think that Michaels knows his own biography well enough to, you know, write honestly about it. But here's Michaels, exaggerating his own role as Defender Of The True Discourse despite, of course, his own tainted past and his willingness now to play fast an loose with documented fact.

But that doesn't mean that McIlheran doesn't owe us another retraction and correction. Given that it took him two weeks, and an uncorrected-in-print-or-online op-ed in a Sunday paper, before he admitted he was wrong about one fundamental aspect of "climategate" (it was a "subtlety" that "slipped past" him), I expect this big fat error will go unmentioned, too.

McIlheran Watch: Behind and not quitting

by folkbum

Perhaps to avoid the buyout, Patrick McIlheran accepted a rewrite to his contract that requires him to dig deeper when he's wrong about something, as he keeps doing on the SwiftHack--"climategate," as the kids are calling it. (See 1, 2.)

Today he's at it again, talking up F. Jim (before he F's you!) Sensenbrenner and the Congressman's plan to swoop into Copenhagen and Save Humanity From The Scientists. F. Jim feels empowered to jet off (I wonder who's paying for it?) because someone's been feeding F. Jim the same lies about those stolen emails that McIlheran has been eating:

The e-mails, Sensenbrenner wrote, "demonstrate that a cabal of supposed 'cream-of-the-crop' climate scientists were indeed successful in getting editors of journals that had published contrarian views fired and that they conspired to boycott journals that did not bend to their wishes--therefore ensuring that such views would not be adequately represented in IPCC Assessment Reports."

McIlheran is quoting from a--wait for it--Fox News report about F. Jim's upped dander. Sadly, McIlheran, who claims to be a journalist and claims to have actual experience journalisming and indeed works at the largest purveyor of journalism in the state, fails again at Step One: Checking the Facts.

Start, for example, with the fact that none of the email writers successfully canned a single journal editor. There is the case of Hans von Storch, who resigned in protest from the journal Climate Research when ExxonMobile managed to plant a paper denying global warming, and von Storch was not allowed to write an editorial noting the errors in that paper. (An assistant editor went with him, too.) Sensenbrenner clearly is wrong, and McIlheran just lets it fly.

Move on, for another example, to the fact that the email writers did not keep anything out of the IPCC report. That's two in one sentence that McIlheran doesn't bother to check. Or maybe, as he tried to claim the other day, this is all just a "subtlety" that "slipped past" him.

The rest isn't any better; that McIlheran is offering the same lies under other people's names doesn't absolve him of the responsibility to get the basics right--especially when the facts are easy to find.

Factless McIlheran update

by folkbum

That is, McIlheran's the factless one, as we saw this morning.

To bring you up to speed: Yesterday, weeks after the facts of the matter became widely available, McIlheran runs an op-ed that gets a bunch of stuff wrong related to what the kids these days are calling "climategate," including the falsehood that the original data that the Climatic Research Unit used was all gone. The topper, of course, was that McIlheran claimed that head of the CRU, Phil Jones, explained--or perhaps predicted--in 1999 how to explain the "decline" in temperatures observed between 1999 and 2009.

In a blog posting today, McIlheran retracts some of that. Well, he doesn't retract it. He doesn't even bother to note that he was, you know, wrong about it. He says his lie was a--cough--"subtlety" that "slipped past" him. Seriously! Here it is:

Marc Sheppard at American Thinker points out a subtlety (one that had slipped past me) about the “hide the decline” imperative that researchers, trying to salvage the idea of catastrophic man-made global warming were under:

It wasn’t the decline in global temperatures over the past 10 or so years that needed hiding, Sheppard points out. “The decline Jones so urgently sought to hide was not one of measured temperatures at all, but rather figures infinitely more important to climate alarmists--those determined by proxy reconstructions.”

The Sheppard piece linked to proceeds to post graph after graph, produced by the scientists in question that show the proxy data next to the recorded temperatures for all to see! I think we should all want to play hide and seek with these guys, they're so bad at hiding.

And McIlheran repeats the other claim, too, that there's no way to check the data. At least, I think that's what this sentence is supposed to say: "And, now, the Climategate scandal--in which scientists at the forefront of the supposed “consensus” precluding further debate turn out to have manipulated data, suppressed contrary findings and in general behaved like activists rather than scientists--suggests that their predictions now are uncheckable, unfalsifiable--in short, not science but faith." Help me out if you can suss some sense into that. "Hide the decline" in grammaticality, if you will. (I loves me some dashes, but my general rule is no more than a pair in any given sentence.)

Or maybe the grammar checker is just a "subtlety" that "slipped past."

McIlheran Watch: Fact-checker needed, PLEASE!

by folkbum

Yesterday was Sunday, which means calumnist* Patrick McIlheran's op-ed tripe ran in the paper. As usual, it's cringe-worthy in its denial of reality and bending of facts.

McIlheran, like much of the wingnut contingent, is still going on about the thieved emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. To remind you all, the CRU is just one collection of scientists doing climate research, and even if everything they ever did turns out to have been cooked up in a late-night, pot-induced "wouldn't it be funny if ..." kind of scenario, there are still literally tens of thousands of other scientists doing independent research with their own observations and data in other parts of the world whose work still points in one, incontrovertible direction: Human activity affects the earth's climate.

But the emails are shiny and the new-scandal smell hasn't yet worn off, so McIlheran isn't ready to put them down. No matter that he seems to have absolutely no sense of what the science discussed in the emails means, he's willing to misread them and take phrases out of context to justify his pro-corporate, anti-Algore world view.

For example, he has repeatedly blogged in the last couple weeks about the jacked emails, and repeatedly gotten stuff wrong. He's written at least twice, for example, that "[t]he British center admitted it threw out its original data on which it pinned its predictions of disaster." Which is true--at some point in the 1980s the CRU moved from one office to another and opted not to haul its paper copies in the process. But McIlheran claims that means "other researchers, thus, cannot check the claims" of the CRU. Which is false, as the CRU does not do its own data collection, and all the paper it tossed 25 years ago was merely copies of data that exist other places and that, if you want, you can get for yourself.

McIlheran's falsity was corrected by commenters at his blog, but it doesn't seem to have helped, since he drops it into Sunday's column anyway: "Lest you think we can sort this out by re-running the numbers, it transpires that the center discarded its original data. Their predictions now are uncheckable, unfalsifiable--in short, not science but faith." Apparently it's McIlheran who's holding on to faith over fact--the faith that his preconceived prejudice against science outweighs the truth that the data are not missing at all.

And in Sunday's column he also includes this doozy:

The e-mails, leaked or hacked by unknown parties but acknowledged to be real, do not in themselves disprove man-made global warming. They do reveal these researchers, the experts who wrote the doom narrative, discussing among themselves how to manipulate data to make observations fit their predictions. One telling message from the unit's head is about how to "hide the decline" in observed temperatures, as global warming seems to have halted about a decade ago, something their models are unable to explain.

Leave aside for just a moment the fact that McIlheran doesn't know what "hide the decline" was actually referring to--or rather, he chooses to misrepresent what it means, because the accurate interpretation is not just all over the internet but also in the comments to his blog posts where he initially offered the bad reading of it.

Instead, consider that McIlheran chooses to apply "hide the decline" to the notion that, in his words, "global warming seems to have halted about a decade ago." I've included McIlheran's own links so that you can see for yourself just how baldly misleading McIlheran is being here. Really, there's no other way to describe it--McIlheran is blatantly lying to push his agenda (shocker!). How can you tell? The second of his two links notes that "the world grew warmer by 0.07 degrees Celsius from 1999 to 2008 [. . .]. And, say the British experts, when their figure is adjusted for two naturally occurring climate phenomena, El Niño and La Niña, the resulting temperature trend is reduced to 0.0 degrees Celsius--in other words, a standstill." So temperatures overall have flatlined since 1999 (in some places, temps are higher, of course, and in some places, they're lower, but we're talking global average.)

Now check McIlheran's first link, the one to the email from Phil Jones at the CRU. Note the date: "Tue, 16 Nov 1999." That's right, ladies and gentleman, Patrick McIlheran, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's "Right Wing Guy," just accused Phil Jones of describing a method for "how to 'hide the decline' in observed temperatures" since 1999--in 1999. How does McIlheran explain this? Is Phil Jones a witch, maybe, and McIlheran would like to throw him in the lake to be sure? Or maybe Phil Jones got a fortune cookie in 1999 predicting flatlined temps. Magic eight ball? ESP? Time machine? What? I really want to know!

I realize that the Journal Sentinel is getting down to a bit of bare-bones staffing, but is there not one single person there responsible for checking facts? Surely someone clicked on the links McIlheran included in his own submitted op-ed and saw the absurdity of this. How does something that obvious get through?

* coined by iT

More on mayoral control of MPS

by folkbum

So I'm sitting in the mandatory professional-development-on-your-prep-hour session last week at school, where we're being presented with this year's iteration of the "school improvement plan."

"It's important that you know about this plan, that you know the data," our trainer said, "because big changes are happening. The mayor just took financial control of our district away from the superintendent!" Cue the facepalm.

Reality, of course, is that two weeks back the Milwaukee Board of School Directors created a new Office of Accountability, sort of shifting a layer of the bureaucracy up a little bit in the org chart so that many of the financial services, including the auditors, report directly to the Board, instead of through the superintendent. The mayor, you'll note, does not appear in the story; this change is a long-term goal of takeover opponent and Board President Michael Bonds, who would have done it mayoral threat or not.

Now, I don't want to generalize to the whole district or the whole city based on one moment of (albeit significant) misunderstanding that I encountered from a central office employee--who, I will say, seemed grateful to be corrected on the matter. But I do not doubt that the stepped-up talk of mayoral takeovers is leading to far too many conversations like that one. And it is not helpful.

It's also not helpful, as Lisa Kaiser points out, that the leading news organization--whose editorial board is firmly in the takeover camp--is not offering an accurate picture of the, you know, news. Kaiser notes that the Journal Sentinel's story on Rep. Gwenn Moore's rally against the takeover leaves out salient facts, like how mayoral control is not one of the criteria for federal "Race to the Top" funds that the idea was hatched to pursue.

(Kaiser also wonders why the JS gives more space in that story to suburban Republican Leah Vukmir, rather than to the Democrats representing Milwaukee--and holding the legislative majorities in Madison--who were at Moore's rally. Um, duh--Vukmir's running for State Senate! Watch the endorsement page next October.)

The notion that this controversy is all Dem-on-Dem action (it's not; conservative business forces in the city and state are driving a lot of it) is the theme of Alan Borsuk's story this week. Wresting control of MPS away from an elected board is not a new idea, of course, or an exclusively Democratic one; former Governor Tommy! Thompson was all about taking over MPS for a few years back in the last century. And Dem-on-Dem action regarding reform in Milwaukee is not new, either; it was State Rep. Annette Polly Williams, Democrat of Milwaukee, who made the Milwaukee Parental Choice (voucher) Program happen, along with other Good Democrats like Howard Fuller--though the voucher program has since been perverted and owned (literally, bought and paid for) by conservative interests.

But intra-party fights are always good for ratings, or something, and Borsuk delivers. He also tracks down a group called Democrats for Education Reform that is generally promoting mayoral takeovers. He notes, for example, that DFER is trying to organize in Milwaukee, holding a luncheon last week. I hate this: When your goal is to talk education reform and you hold a lunch meeting, guess who's not going to be on board? Teachers. Principals. Most parents. Students. Seriously: If you want to make me automatically oppose what you're asking me to support about education reform, invite me to a lunch meeting I can't attend because I'm busy, you know, educating children at the time.

Moreover, looking at DFER's "What We Stand For" page, it seems that of all the bullet points listed, the only thing we're not already doing in Milwaukee is mayoral control. I have said this over and over--if there's something worth trying, MPS has already tried it. Go ahead, name something--we're doing it, or have done it. Do you really think this one more thing will be the magic bullet? (Hint: It won't.)

DFER seems to be very much in favor of the New York model, noting that since Mayor Bloomberg's takeover (Bloomberg, although not technically at the time, was a Democrat, too [CORRECTED]), New York City Schools have seen some improvement. But New Yorker and education curmudgeon Diane Ravitch offers a hint as to why: "Under N.Y. Mayor Michael Bloomberg," she writes, "spending on education has increased from $12.5 billion annually to $21 billion, or nearly $20,000 per child." That's an increase of two-thirds; it would be the equivalent of taking MPS's budget and adding $800 million, or about $10,000 per student, annually. If the state or the city or feds were willing to offer us, long-term (not one-time stimulus or "Race-to-the-Top" infusions) an extra $10k per child, I guarantee you the district would improve no matter who was in charge--the Board, the mayor, an inanimate carbon rod--as long as we could put that money toward things we know work. Things like intensive home interventions, smaller class sizes, one-to-one tutoring, and so on.

To date, of course, Mayor Tom Barrett has offered no such carrot. Or any plan at all, for that matter. The lack of a plan is just one problem with the takeover described by Charlie Dee and Michael Rosen here--it's a long piece, but well worth the read.

Finally, Patrick McIlheran--yes, again--writes in today's opinion section that a mayoral takeover is no big deal, because even though the people who will be running the schools day-to-day will be appointees, rather than directly elected the way the Board is now, people still vote for the mayor. That's pretty pedestrian, but he does make enough other stunning statements to make it worth looking at.

For example, this: "The Milwaukee teachers union, which now overwhelms any other organized interest in School Board races with its money and manpower, will immediately become the giant in mayoral elections." There are nine members on the Milwaukee Board of School Directors. Care to guess how many of those nine were supported by the union in their last contested election, with our "overwhelming" money and manpower? Two--Peter Blewett and Terry Falk. All hail the overwhelming power of the union!

And note his use of the word "now": A few years ago, when national pro-privatization groups targeted Milwaukee, including endorsements on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and big dumps of cash from the Joyces and Waltons, he couldn't have said that. In recent years, those forces have moved on to other things, leaving only the locals--like us teachers--worried about the elections.

Also: "Concentrating power hardly seems a solution. A more promising idea, as long as we're speculating, is breaking up the district into manageable pieces, each large enough to feed one high school, like most Wisconsin school districts. Whether this will work is unclear, but it may bring the decision-making closer to families that schools serve."

I'm guessing that a lot of us--I mean, it's true for myself--grew up in places where there was one high school, one or two junior highs, and a smattering of elementary schools in one district. That's the non-urban model of education all across the country. But MPS currently has about 26,000 high school students, and the large high schools serve on average about 1500 students. (Hamilton, the district's largest, serves 2200.) That would be 15 or 17 "districts" in McIlheran's plan, at current capacities. If we wanted something closer to eight districts with one high school in each--blowhard Milwaukee Alderman Bob Donovan floated that one last year--it would take a massive (read, expensive) effort to get high schools up to where they could handle 3000 students again, though some did in their distant pasts.

In either case, what will happen is that Milwaukee would go from the one worst district in the state to the worst six or seven or 13 districts in the state: "Small" is no more a plan to change what happens inside the classroom (and outside it, to better prepare students for inside) than "mayoral control" is. Same students, same parents, same teachers, same principals, same pressures of poverty and unemployment and poor health and violent crime and addiction and unstable families and .... well, you get the idea.

The chorus, as everyone knows by now, is fix Milwaukee first.