Judge Rosenberg claims my column was “full of misstatements and misconceptions.”

In the April 26 edition of The Davis Enterprise, an op-ed penned by Yolo County Judge David Rosenberg will be published. Judge Rosenberg’s piece, which is now available in the online edition of the newspaper, is an attack on my April 13 column which questioned whether now is the right time to be spending $5 billion on 41 courthouse projects, one of which will be built in Woodland.

New Yolo courthouse will benefit residents
By David Rosenberg

Under the headline “Courthouse plans straining budget,” your columnist Rich Rifkin (April 13) challenged the new Yolo courthouse project. His column is so full of misstatements and misconceptions that I felt compelled to respond.

As a public service, I will count up every misstatement and every misconception I made.

In fact, a new courthouse project was approved (years ago) for Yolo County, costing about $173 million. The land already has been identified and acquired, the design phase is now under way, leading to the start of construction, hopefully, at some point next year.

So far, Judge Rosenberg has failed to point out a single misstatement or misconception of mine.

However, even the headline of Rifkin’s column is inaccurate.

The judge should know that I have nothing to do with the headlines. Those are written by the editors. That qualifies as the first misconception in this exchange.

Rosenberg 1-0 in misconceptions.

This project is not straining any budget — state, county or local.

I never stated in any way that this project is straining any budget. That counts as a second misconception for the man who worked so hard to get a public skate park built in Davis.

Rosenberg 2-0.

Not one penny of taxpayer money is used for the courthouse project.

I never said the 41 courthouse projects would be funded by a tax. I explained carefully in my piece how a new fee would be attached to all parking tickets, moving violations and other criminal convictions in which the convicted is not sent to prison.

I won’t charge Judge Rosenberg for a third misconception, here. Rather, I will charge him with a blatant deception. His effort is to mislead his readers, making them think I wrote incorrectly how the funds for his courthouse will be generated.

Rosenberg 2-0 in misconceptions plus one deception.

No state general fund money is used for the project.

Again, I never stated that any general fund money would be used. That counts as deception number two for Dave.

Rosenberg 2-0 in misconceptions plus two deceptions.

The project is completely funded by a statewide surcharge assessed against everyone convicted of a violation of the criminal law.

I think this statement qualifies as deception number three and misstatement number one for Yolo County’s presiding judge. He misleads his readers with “a violation of the criminal law,” because almost all of the money will come from traffic offenders and parking violations. And because, when a person is sent to prison (see EDIT 1) he normally does not pay the fee but works it off, Judge Rosenberg knows that it is not “everyone convicted” who will pay this surcharge.

Misconceptions: 2-0; Deceptions: 2-0. Misstatements: 1-0.

Rifkin’s column asserts that the money for the new courthouse could better be used elsewhere.

It could be better used elsewhere at this time. What I wrote was that until we are out of the economic and budget crisis, we should put off funding luxurious courthouses like the one planned for Woodland.

He says “with that much largesse, Yolo County could pay off almost all of its $175.5 million unfunded pension liability to the miscellaneous employees.” Interesting theory.

Thanks for your interest in my theory, Dave.

But Rifkin ignores several facts.

Let’s hear your facts, your honor.

First, to do so would violate state law, which requires that the money collected from people who violate the law should be used for court facilities.

I did not ignore that “fact,” Davey! I suggested that the Legislature change the law. I noted, “…there is no reason SB 1407 could not be temporarily changed.”

Misconceptions: 2-0; Deceptions: 2-0. Misstatements: 2-0.

Second, to do so would ignore the constitution, which would mandate some sort of nexus between the fee and the expenditure — using the funds from those convicted of crime to pay off a county’s debt has no nexus; using the funds to pay for court facilities certainly does.

I never said these fees should be used to pay off the county's debt. I merely noted that the amount that Yolo County's pension funding for its miscellaneous employees is short is nearly identical to the amount the new courthouse would cost. In other words, if Yolo County had this money, it could pay off this debt.

It’s hard for me, a layman, to argue the state constitution with a superior court judge. However, I believe the judge knows he is being duplicitous, here. He admitted as much some paragraphs down when he wrote this:

“Rifkin fails to mention that the state Legislature last year borrowed a substantial portion of this fund for ‘other purposes’ and is poised to divert a substantial amount of this fund again this year.”

So which is it, judge? You state that the money cannot be used for other purposes, and then you state that the money is being used for other purposes. Is your left brain not communicating well with your right brain? Or are you just trying to deceive your readers?

Misconceptions: 2-0; Deceptions: 3-0. Misstatements: 2-0.

Finally, pursuing Rifkin’s “logic” to the ultimate conclusion, government should not pay for capital projects but should divert its money to pay for debt service or operations.

Once again, this public servant is trying to deceive his readers. Either that, or he just did not read my column carefully.

I never mentioned anything about not paying for capital projects. I never even said the judge’s shiny new courthouse project should be abandoned. I simply suggested that while we are in a severe budget crisis, it is questionable in my mind whether now is the best time to be spending this $5 billion it will cost to build 41 courthouse projects, 35 of which are brand new buildings.

Misconceptions: 2-0; Deceptions: 4-0. Misstatements: 2-0.

I suppose the city of Davis should not have built or repaired roads, or parks or pools, or the Veterans’ Memorial Center or the Senior Center — per Rifkin, the money would have been better spent in operations.

The judge seems to have no factual points to make. So instead he just makes up shinola like this. The fact is that I don’t object to roads or public buildings. I simply argued in my column that while the state is drowning in red ink, it would be a good idea to put off this $5 billion expenditure.

Misconceptions: 2-0; Deceptions: 4-0. Misstatements: 3-0.

The reality is that it is never easy to accommodate long-range projects such as roads, bridges, canals or buildings.

Actually, the judge is wrong here. It’s not that hard. Our state has passed scores of bond measures to fund these sorts of projects. Since 1996, we have approved more than $21 billion in general obligation bonds. For details, see what the Legislative Analyst’s office reports.

Misconceptions: 2-0; Deceptions: 4-0. Misstatements: 4-0.

The immediate demands for operations are always great. Kudos to the governor, the Legislature and the judicial branch for recognizing this and for creating a logical funding source for new courthouses in California: a fee charged only to persons convicted of crimes. Who better to pay for court facilities?

Repeating himself, as the judge is wont to do, Rosenberg states that these courthouse buildings will be paid for by convicted criminals. He conveniently fails to mention that almost all of the money will be generated by a large surcharge on traffic tickets and a smaller charge tacked on parking tickets.

Do you wonder why the judge didn’t explain that in his tirade?

Misconceptions: 2-0; Deceptions: 5-0. Misstatements: 4-0.

Rifkin goes on to say that Davis City Councilwoman Sue Greenwald mentioned to him that the price of the new Yolo courthouse is almost three times the price of the “luxurious” Mondavi Center. But surely Greenwald and Rifkin understand that a courthouse is not a theater.

A courthouse is not a theater? Thanks for letting me in on that, your honor.

A courthouse is a complex structure, unlike any other building. The current Yolo courthouse facilities see more than 300,000 separate trips of users and visitors each year.

That’s another way of saying about 1,000 people each day go into our courthouse. I wonder how that compares with the foot traffic in a typical big box store?

A courthouse has special security needs, the requirement for three separate pathways (for the public, for in-custody defendants, and for judicial officers and staff), unique courtrooms, public-serving counters, jury assembly space, holding cells, interview rooms and numerous other requirements.

Further, the new Yolo courthouse will be a LEED-certified (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) building, using the latest energy-saving technologies.

I wonder how many times in this column Judge Rosenberg will tell us that the new courthouse building will be LEED certified? I think LEED certification can be a nice thing. The new Target is LEED certified.

As an aside, there are a lot of environmentalists who are critical of LEED certifications. The famed architect Frank Gehry, who designed the purposefully weird Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, has, for example, said that LEED certification is often given for “bogus stuff.” I never charged that Rosenberg’s building will be given LEED points for bogus stuff.

Certainly, $173 million is a great deal of money — but it is what it costs to build a courthouse. The new courthouse planned for Sacramento County is pegged at about $510 million.

The judge likely read that in my column, where I noted that the “new 35-courtroom Sacramento Criminal Courthouse is slated to cost $509 million.” Maybe he wants you to think the $172.9 million project in Woodland is cheap by comparison?

The main thrust of Rifkin’s column is that in these difficult times, the money for courthouse construction could be better spent by being diverted for other purposes.

That was my main point, judge. I am glad to see you understood what I said.

Whether true or not, Rifkin fails to mention that the state Legislature last year borrowed a substantial portion of this fund for “other purposes” and is poised to divert a substantial amount of this fund again this year.

Recall that a few paragraphs up, Judge Rosenberg, who is an expert on the constitution, said this could not be done. Have you decided, Dave, which way is it?

So, clearly, the Legislature — which thrashes around for available pots of money in difficult times — has, in fact, diverted courthouse construction funds for “other purposes” already.

Good. I thought you told me that was unconstitutional. I guess you were thinking of some other state constitution when you wrote that.

Misconceptions: 2-0; Deceptions: 6-0. Misstatements: 4-0.

Fortunately, the Yolo courthouse project is so high on the list of critical projects that it will (sic) unaffected by this diversion.

It looks like no one edited Rosenberg’s writing. Not only does it have grammatical errors (“will unaffected”), but no one pointed out to the judge that he repeats his points again and again.

Rifkin’s column then goes on to denigrate courthouse projects as “Taj Mahals.” That is inaccurate and unfair.

How is that a denigration? The Taj Mahal is fabulous. Wikipedia says, “It is widely considered as one of the most beautiful buildings in the world and stands as a symbol of eternal love.”

Misconceptions: 2-0; Deceptions: 6-0. Misstatements: 5-0.

Courthouses are important public buildings that last many generations. The current historic courthouse in Yolo County has lasted almost a century. The new Yolo courthouse will be a courthouse for the next hundred years.

I have not seen any architectural renderings for the new Rosenberg courthouse. However, my guess is that it will feature a lot of high end décor. If it doesn’t, I will gladly buy Dave a coffee in downtown Woodland.

It will not be an insubstantial building — it will house 14 courtrooms, a jury assembly area to accommodate more than 300 prospective jurors, clerks’ offices and counters for the public, holding cells for in-custody defendants, security stations and many other features unique to courthouses.

Did you say it will house 14 courtrooms?

In addition, the new courthouse will be a LEED building, built to the best standards of environmental efficiency that we can muster.

Wait a minute, Dave. Didn’t you already brag that it will be a LEED building? Is it not against the law in Woodland to repeat yourself in your same column?

The Yolo court facilities are among the busiest — perhaps the busiest — public buildings in the county.

Maybe that’s because our district attorney has a tendency to bring every possible case to trial, rather than reach plea agreements with defendants? I don’t know if that is true. However, I have read that argument in a widely read Davis blog.

Rifkin’s criticism even goes so far as to challenge the five-story projection for the new courthouse.

Goes so far as to challenge? I stated its height as a matter of fact: “The five-story project will house 14 new courtrooms, each twice the size of the courtrooms in the historic edifice on Court Street.”

Misconceptions: 3-0; Deceptions: 6-0. Misstatements: 5-0.

Five stories, while clearly substantial, will not be out of place on Main Street in downtown Woodland.

I never said it would be out of place.

The historic Hotel Woodland — just down the street from the proposed courthouse — has four stories and roof facades.

As it happens, the Hotel Woodland is more than five blocks from where the Rosenberg Courthouse will be erected. Most of the existing structures adjacent to the block between Lincoln and Main and Fifth and Sixth streets, where the courthouse will be, are one story tall.

Misconceptions: 3-0; Deceptions: 7-0. Misstatements: 5-0.

The current historic courthouse on Court Street has four stories. There is a processing plant on Main Street just four blocks east of the proposed courthouse that is more than five stories in height.

The point is that the new courthouse must hold 14 courtrooms and attendant court uses.

You say it will house 14 courtrooms?

While the courthouse could be four stories, or even three stories, that would be poor planning. A shorter courthouse would have a larger footprint, taking much more of the land and thus restricting future expansion in 10 or 20 years.

The judge claimed above he is building this structure to last 100 years. Now he says in 10 or 20 years he wants it built even larger? Which is it, Dave?

Misconceptions: 4-0; Deceptions: 7-0. Misstatements: 5-0.

One problem with state buildings is that the state builds only for today’s needs, not for tomorrow’s requirements. The current needs for Yolo County are 14 courtrooms.

You say it will house 14 courtrooms?

In 10 years we will need more. By using less of the land, the court has the ability to expand on site.

Maybe instead of spending a lot more money in 10 years, we can make use of the historic courthouse on Main Street a decade from now?

Rifkin then criticizes the 14 courtrooms planned in the new courthouse by asserting that each will be twice the size of the current courtrooms.

I never criticized that. I merely pointed it out: “The five-story project will house 14 new courtrooms, each twice the size of the courtrooms in the historic edifice on Court Street.”

It is apparent that the judge has poor judgment when deciphering between a criticism and a statement of fact.

Misconceptions: 3-0; Deceptions: 6-0. Misstatements: 6-0.

It is certainly correct that the new courtrooms will be twice the size of current courtrooms.

He even agrees with me! Wait! I thought he said my column was full of misstatements. Maybe that was just the judge exercising poor judgment?

But what Rifkin fails to say is that current courtrooms are less than half the size of a standard California courtroom per state minimum standards.

This is circular logic, your honor. You and your fellow judges arbitrarily decide what the standard is, and then you declare our courtrooms fail to meet that standard. What I wonder is, what percentage of cases tried in our current Yolo County Courthouse must be moved to other facilities because the current courtrooms are too small? If it is greater than 1 percent, I will buy Judge Rosenberg a second cup of coffee in downtown Woodland.

Our current courtrooms were built in prior generations — our historic courthouse was built to house two courtrooms and we currently have eight courtrooms shoehorned into the building. We have two courtrooms in trailers, and others in rented buildings and in converted holding areas.

That’s a fine argument that at some point we need a new courthouse facility. I have not challenged that. I have simply questioned why, when the state is more than $15 billion in the red, we can’t put off this $5 billion, 41 courthouse program for a few years?

When the new courthouse is built, Yolo County will finally have standard-size courtrooms like other counties in the state.

Is that really what is bothering you? That other counties have bigger and better courtrooms than you have? Shouldn’t you be explaining how many trials had to be moved out of our county because our courtrooms are too small?

The need for a new Yolo County Courthouse is manifest. Our current facilities are scattered throughout the city of Woodland. The historic courthouse is ancient, and seismically unsafe.

You say it is seismically unsafe? Really?

Maybe you meant to say that it does not meet current seismic safety standards in California. But that certainly does not mean it is not structurally sound enough to survive the tremors that hit Woodland.(Note: there are no worrisome fault lines in or around Woodland. The closest faults are in the Capay Valley)

Misconceptions: 3-0; Deceptions: 6-0. Misstatements: 7-0.

Every single one of the existing courtrooms is substandard.

Yet they do not seem to be obstructing justice in Yolo County at the moment. As such, waiting a few more years until our economy recovers and the state’s fiscal crisis is resolved would not hurt anyone (other than a few judges who want nicer digs right away).

We have inadequate space for jurors, who often have to sit on stairways. We have no space for children. The wiring, plumbing and electrical systems are ancient. Hallways are shared by in-custody defendants, witnesses, victims, jurors, members of the public, judges and staff. It is truly medieval.

Truly medieval? Medieval times ended in the mid-1400s, before Christopher Columbus sailed to the Americas. You must have meant to say the historic courthouse is truly Wilsonian. It was erected in 1917.

Misconceptions: 3-0; Deceptions: 6-0. Misstatements: 8-0.

That’s why Yolo wound up at the very top of the food chain in terms of critical needs for a new state-of-the-art courthouse. The citizens of Yolo County deserve no less.

You don’t mean to say, the court employees and judges deserve no less?

At the beginning of his piece, Judge Rosenberg claimed my column was “full of misstatements and misconceptions.” He never once pointed out a single misstatement or misconception of mine. Yet his op-ed was riddled with errors, each of which I noted above. It is sad that a public servant like Judge Rosenberg feels compelled to attack my work with so little regard for honest argument. He restated many of his points, simply because he had so little of worth to state. He had no direct refutation of anything I wrote. I feel embarrassed for the judge for having submitted this piece of drivel. It makes him look small.
----------------------------

EDIT 1: David Greenwald of the Davis Vanguard explained to me that the fee is not waived when a person is sent to prison. Rather, he said, the criminal must work off his fee in that case.

However, some court fees may be waived by a judge due to financial hardship. See Court Rule 3.50 to 3.58:

The rules in this division govern applications in the trial court for an initial waiver of court fees and costs because of the applicant’s financial condition. As provided in Government Code sections 68631 and following, any waiver may later be ended, modified, or retroactively withdrawn if the court determines that the applicant is not eligible for the waiver.

EDIT 2: Here are the six new fees imposed by SB 1407:

1. Proof of correction fee, $25 -- This fee is now collected per citation. Effective January 1, 2009, the fee will be collected per correction. $15 on the first correction and $25 on any additional corrections on the citation are remitted to SCFCF - ICNA.
2. Traffic violator school fee, $49 -- 51% of fee collected remitted to SCFCF - ICNA.
3. Criminal conviction assessment, $35 -- $35 remitted to SCFCF - ICNA.
4. Criminal conviction assessment, $30 -- $30 remitted to SCFCF - ICNA.
5. State court construction penalty, $5 -- Increase remitted to SCFCF - ICNA.
6. State court construction parking penalty, $4.50 -- $3 remitted to SCFCF - ICNA.

One artsy gang banger ...

The people who say, "truth is stranger than fiction," just don't read much fiction. But once in a while, the truth is as hard to believe as fiction.

If I saw a crime drama on TV in which a murderer confessed to his crime by having his chest tattooed with all of the details of the murder, I would find that hard to believe.

If additionally the homicide investigator who discovered the tattooed man with all the details of his crime depicted on his chest only knew the details of that murder because before he was promoted to his new position he had been a beat cop in the exact neighborhood this strange killing took place, I would find that an incredible coincidence.

Yet apparently in the Pico Rivera section of Mexican L.A., there is just such a stupid killer and just such a lucky cop. This is from the L.A. Times story:

The process was routine. L.A. County Sheriff's homicide investigator Kevin Lloyd was flipping through snapshots of tattooed gang members.

Then one caught his attention.

Inked on the pudgy chest of a young Pico Rivera gangster who had been picked up and released on a minor offense was the scene of a 2004 liquor store slaying that had stumped Lloyd for more than four years.

Each key detail was right there: the Christmas lights that lined the roof of the liquor store where 23-year-old John Juarez was gunned down, the direction his body fell, the bowed street lamp across the way and the street sign — all under the chilling banner of RIVERA KILLS, a reference to the gang Rivera-13.

As if to seal the deal, below the collarbone of the gang member known by the alias "Chopper" was a miniature helicopter raining down bullets on the scene.

Lloyd's discovery of the tattoo in 2008 launched a bizarre investigation that soon led to Anthony Garcia's arrest for the shooting.

Teachers need to be paid based on their performance, not on seniority

The L.A. Times reports today that the L.A. Unified School District is moving in the right direction, but in my view that district still has not yet gone far enough:

In a dramatic turn for the country's second-largest school district, Los Angeles Unified released school ratings based on a new approach that measures a school's success at raising student performance — the first in a series of high-stakes moves that will thrust the district into the center of the national debate over education reform.

Next month, the district will take the more controversial step of providing thousands of teachers with confidential ratings of their performance using the same approach, known as value-added. The district is also negotiating with the teachers union to include such measures in teachers' formal performance reviews, an effort the union bitterly opposes.

Along with some peer-review and the judgment of a school principal, how much progress a teacher's students make should determine how much the teacher is paid.

The new measure of academic success has been a top priority for incoming Supt. John Deasy, who formally takes over Friday. It comes as districts throughout the country are wrestling with the reliability and the proper use of the value-added approach, which estimates school and teacher performance by analyzing students' improvement on standardized tests in math and English.

There are, of course, some subjects, like art or music, where measuring student progress objectively is difficult. In those cases, peer-review and the judgment of the principal should decide how good the teacher is.

The district has had the data to conduct its own analysis for years but had never done so. Officials have said their adoption of the approach was hastened by a Times series and database released in August that rated elementary schools and about 6,000 elementary school teachers according to their value-added scores. The paper will release an updated database with the scores of 11,500 elementary teachers in the coming weeks, and later this year plans to expand it to include middle schools.

The L.A. Times has done a great public service with its project to promote value-added measurements of teacher performance.

The Los Angeles Unified School District's new school performance measure is likely to surprise many parents, who have traditionally compared schools — and at times purchased homes — based on the state's Academic Performance Index, which rates schools on a 1,000-point index based mainly on their students' abilities on standardized tests.

One thing I have never believed is that school A is better than school B if A has better test scores. The higher test scores are mostly a function of the home environments the students come from. However, if students at school C are making significantly better progress than students at school D are, then C is a better school.

Likewise, a teacher whose students come in with scores in the 50th percentile and leave with scores in the 60th percentile deserves more credit (and money) than her counterpart whose children scored in the 60th percentile coming in and stayed in the 60th going out.

The value-added approach focuses on how much progress students make year to year rather than measuring solely their achievement level, like the API, which is heavily influenced by factors outside a school's control, including poverty and parental involvement. Value-added analysis compares a student with his or her own prior performance, largely controlling for outside-of-school influences.

Because value-added is based on standardized test scores, most experts agree it should be one of several measures to determine school or teacher performance.

One argument against using standardized test scores is they force teachers to teach to the test. I don't see a problem with that, as long as the standardized tests are asking the right question. The reform is not to get rid of the tests; it's to make the tests as good as they can be.

Some critics say the value-added approach is too volatile to be used for teacher evaluations, but most experts say it is more accurate for campuses because it is based on the performance of hundreds, if not thousands, of pupils.

If volatility is a problem, then grade teacher performance over a few years, not just one.

The district's ratings, dubbed "Academic Growth Over Time," can send parents a very different signal about a school's performance. Take, for example, 3rd Street Elementary School in Hancock Park, which has an API score of 938, putting it among the highest-scoring schools in the district. Under the new growth measure, 3rd Street is one of the lowest-performing elementary schools in the district.

"We've got to do a better job and reexamine," said 3rd Street Principal Suzie Oh, adding that she was shocked by the results.

It would not surprise me to know that some schools in Davis which are deemed very good are in fact not helping students make much progress.

Board member Richard Vladovic later said, "I think this is going to be a great tool to help parents."

But A.J. Duffy, outgoing president of United Teachers Los Angeles, said in an interview that he suspects that administrators will use the new information punitively.

Punitively? Well, yes, if a teacher sucks.

Duffy and other union leaders have said they will not agree to a new teacher evaluation system that includes student test score data because they believe it is unreliable and will narrow the curriculum.

The teachers unions, predictably, want more money and no accountability for performance.

I agree that there are many great teachers, and all great teachers are underpaid. However, unless we insist on accountability, we won't get the best efforts out of our teachers and we won't get rid of those teachers who need to be fired.

How to amend the Constitution without amending the Constitution

The San Francisco Chronicle has an interesting story today about a multi-state effort to change the way we elect the president.

Constitutionally, the electoral college chooses the president. This reform would not change that. It would alter the way most states choose their electors to the electoral college, and by doing so ensure that the winner of the popular vote would always be the winner of the electoral college vote. In effect, it would render the electoral college meaningless.

If AB459 is adopted, the 55 electors in California would no longer be determined by the popular vote in California. They would not be determined by the vote in Congressional districts or other districts. Rather, they would be given to the party whose presidential candidate won the most popular votes in the 50 states plus D.C.

This action would not be done in California alone. AB459 will only take effect if a collection of states with 270 or more electoral votes combined goes along with it. Once that happens, every state in this coalition would hand all of their electoral college votes to the plurality or majority winner of the popular presidential vote.

In effect, this is an effort to take power away from the handful of states whose popular vote for president tends to be close. New Mexico and Iowa, for example, get a lot of attention from the Democratic and Republican nominees, because the popular presidential vote in those states tends to be close. They are the swing states. A state like Texas gets no attention, because it will surely go to the Republican. Likewise, no one campaigns in California, because the Democrat will win no matter what.

But if California and Texas promise (by law) to award all of their electoral college votes to the winner of the national popular vote (instead of each state's popular vote), then every marginal vote in California and Texas will count.

In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the electoral college vote. Had the AB459 system been in place in states which compose a majority of the electoral college, all of the Texas electors would have been Democrats and Gore would have been elected president.

AB459, the legislation that (Assemblyman Jerry Hill, a San Mateo Democrat) supports, would change California's system. He said states that pass similar legislation would agree through a compact to award all their votes to the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote nationwide. The laws wouldn't go into effect until states representing 270 electoral votes, a majority and the number needed to elect a president, agree to the compact.

Illinois, Hawaii, New Jersey and Maryland - with a total of 73 electoral votes - have passed the legislation proposed by National Popular Vote, a nonprofit based in Silicon Valley and founded by Stanford Professor John Koza, who came up with the idea.

I suspect if this system takes effect in enough states, the attorneys general in the so-called swing states will challenge its constitutionality. This compact won't explicitly get rid of the electoral college. But it will implicitly make it irrelevant.

Two-thirds of the time and funding invested by presidential candidates' campaigns in 2008 was spent in a handful of swing states including Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, said Hill, while strongly Democratic California and other states where the outcome was considered predictable were left out of the mix.

Republican presidential candidate "John McCain and (Democrat) Barack Obama in 2008 both raised $150 million from California - and they spent together less than $30,000 here in the general election," Hill said, a fraction of 1 percent of their total advertising budget.

That $30,000 figure is telling. That is less money than Don Saylor and his buddies in the firefighters' union spent winning Saylor's seat on the Davis City Council.

Popular-vote supporters intend to change that in time for the 2012 presidential elections, guaranteeing that candidates would spend more time, resources and effort wooing states around the country rather than concentrating on swing states.

One thing to note is that the effort in California is bipartisan. Both Democrats and Republicans, here, understand that the electoral college math forces national candidates to ignore us, because we are now such an overwhelmingly blue state. In fact, marginal voters, Democratic-leaning or Republican-leaning, really have no reason to vote for president under the current system.

In California, former state Senate GOP Leader Jim Brulte and former Republican Rep. Tom Campbell already have joined the popular-vote effort. A 2008 Public Policy Institute of California poll showed 70 percent of likely voters support the idea.

Geraldine Ferraro: Upon her death I ask, was she the least qualified VP nominee?

Reuters and all other news services are reporting the death, today, of former Democratic vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro.

Geraldine Ferraro, the Democratic congresswoman who became the first woman on a major party presidential ticket as Walter Mondale's running mate in 1984, died on Saturday at the age of 75, her family said.

Ferraro died at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston of a blood cancer after a 12-year illness, according to a statement from her family.

Her passing reminds me that Ferraro was a nobody when Mondale chose her to be his running mate. She was a back-bencher in the House who no one had ever heard of. Her sole qualification seemed to be her gender. She was not especially bright. She was not especially accomplished. She was not a leader of a faction of her party. She was not an expert on any important topics facing the nation in 1984. She was not worthy of being one-heartbeat away from the presidency.

Walter Mondale chose Ferraro because he was desperate. He was getting wiped out in the polls to President Reagan and hoped that his choice of Ferraro would inspire independent women and moderate-Republican women to vote for him. It was a bad play and it failed. Mondale lost every single state but Minnesota in the electoral college. (He also snagged D.C.)

To know if Ferraro was the worst choice as a VP nominee since I have been following politics, I will apply four equally weighted criteria to all the nominees, judging them at the point they were selected. I will exclude all sitting vice presidents from consideration. The categories of judgment are:

1. Experience in high office;
2. Leadership of a party faction or regional leader;
3. Expertise in an important policy area;
4. Intelligence/articulateness.

Each criterion is worth up to 100 points. Going back to 1972, here are all of the Democratic and Republican vice presidential nominees with their scores:

1972 (D) Sargent Shriver 65 + 15 + 60 + 85 = 225
1976 (D) Walter Mondale 90 + 90 + 62 + 70 = 317
1976 (R) Bob Dole 60 + 70 + 50 + 60 = 240
1980 (R) George HW Bush 95 + 80 + 95 + 50 = 320
1984 (D) Geraldine Ferraro 10 + 5 + 20 + 50 = 85
1988 (D) Lloyd Bentsen 80 + 75 + 90 + 65 = 310
1988 (R) Dan Quayle 20 + 5 + 5 + 10 = 40
1992 (D) Al Gore 80 + 75 + 90 + 80 = 325
1996 (R) Jack Kemp 90 + 75 + 85 + 65 = 315
2000 (D) Joe Lieberman 80 + 65 + 85 + 83 = 313
2000 (R) Dick Cheney 95 + 70 + 85 + 78 = 328
2004 (D) John Edwards 20 + 40 + 20 + 90 = 170
2008 (D) Joe Biden 90 + 65 + 75 + 50 = 280
2008 (R) Sarah Palin 5 + 5 + 0 + 10 = 20

Of the 14 nominees, there are four categories: the highly qualified; the qualified; the unworthy; and the unqualified.

The good news is that 7 of the 14 rank as highly qualified. In order they are: Dick Cheney (328); Al Gore (325); George HW Bush (320); Walter Mondale (317); Jack Kemp (315); Joe Lieberman (313); and Lloyd Bentsen (310).

These three were qualified, but not necessarily the best picks: Joe Biden (280); Bob Dole (240); and Sargent Shriver (225).

With just his one 6-year stint in the US Senate and nothing else John Edwards (170) fits the unworthy category.

Finally, three nominees were clearly unqualified: Geraldine Ferraro (80); Dan Quayle (40); and Sarah Palin (20).




Thanks to Quayle and Palin, Ferraro no longer goes down as the worst VP nominee. R.I.P.

The day innocents won't be killed by maniacs in high speed police pursuits is not far off ...

The answer was not Toyota's electronics systems.

The mystery that the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration was investigating was "unintended acceleration" in the Toyota Prius and some other Toyota models. The NHTSA's conclusion is that the problem was "improperly installed floor mats, sticky pedals, and driver error."

Yet the unintended consequence of this inquiry will be the solution to a serious danger in all urban areas: high speed police chases.

I'll get to that in a moment. Here is what Discover magazine reports about a finding of the NHTSA:

It wasn’t too surprising when scientists first hacked into a car using its own onboard diagnostic port—sure, it’s easy to get into a car’s electronic brain if you’re already inside the car. Now the science of car-hacking has received a digital upgrade: Researchers have have gained access to modern, electronics-riddled cars from the outside. And in so doing, they’ve managed to take control of a car’s door locks, dashboard displays, and even its brakes.

Imagine for a moment the California Highway Patrol is chasing a car driven by a murder suspect. Instead of racing at over 100 miles per hour through heavy traffic, the CHP can simply take control of the suspect's car and shut down its electronics, stopping the car and locking the driver inside.

The oddest part of these findings, which were presented this week to the National Academy of Science’s Committee on Electronic Vehicle Controls and Unintended Acceleration, is that they weren’t entirely intentional: It was all part of an investigation prompted by the Toyota acceleration problems, and was meant to probe the safety of electronic automotive systems. But testing those system’s safety also uncovered some flaws.

Insofar as this gives police agencies the power to stop a vehicle without a high speed chase, I don't see this as being a flaw at all. It should be designed into every car.

Here is how they did it:

The researchers took a 2009 sedan (they declined to identify the make and embarrass the manufacturer) and methodically tried to hack into it using every trick they could think of. They discovered a couple good ones.

PC World reported this trick:

By adding extra code to a digital music file, they were able to turn a song burned to CD into a Trojan horse. When played on the car’s stereo, this song could alter the firmware of the car’s stereo system, giving attackers an entry point to change other components on the car. This type of attack could be spread on file-sharing networks without arousing suspicion, they believe. “It’s hard to think of something more innocuous than a song,” said Stefan Savage, a professor at the University of California.

Discover notes that "built-in cellular services that provide safety and navigational assistance, like GM’s OnStar, can also be used to upload malicious code."

Technology review reports:

The researchers found that they could take control of this system by breaking through its authentication system. First, they made about 130 calls to the car to gain access, and then they uploaded code using 14 seconds of audio.

The obvious fear is that some malicious outsiders could get ahold of this sort of remote control and mess with an innocent person's vehicle. However, Discover notes that is not likely:

In the wrong hands, the technology could certainly be harmful; once a hacker gains access, they can do anything from sabotage brakes to monitor car movements (by forcing the car to send GPS signals). But the engineers say the “wrong” hands wouldn’t have the know-how to undertake these complicated procedures—at least for now. As Stefan Savage, a computer scientist at the University of California, San Diego, told Technology Review: “This took 10 researchers two years to accomplish,” Savage adds. “It’s not something that one guy is going to do in his garage.”

What should we do with a perjurer whose recantation frees an innocent man?

From the L.A. Times, a story about bad evidence leading to a conviction:

A man who has spent 20 years behind bars for a murder he insists he did not commit is expected to be released from Los Angeles County Jail on Tuesday after several witnesses recanted their identification of him as the killer in a drive-by shooting.

A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge overturned the conviction of Francisco “Franky” Carrillo, 37, on Monday afternoon, finding that the recantations and other evidence undermined his conviction for the 1991 killing.

Judge Paul A. Bacigalupo made the decision after listening to more than a week of testimony from the witnesses and watching a dramatic reconstruction of the crime scene that raised questions about what the witnesses could have seen on the evening of the shooting.

My question in this case is whether the witnesses should be prosecuted for perjury. It seems like they belong in prison, and that they owe civil damages to Franky Carrillo.

The only reason I can think of for not prosecuting those witnesses at this point is that doing so would discourage witnesses who perjured themselves in the past from coming forward and admitting they were liars.

The case underscores what legal experts say is the danger of relying heavily on eyewitness testimony. Studies have shown that faulty identifications are the biggest factor in wrongful convictions and that witnesses are particularly unreliable when identifying someone of a different race. The witnesses who identified Carrillo are black, while he is Latino.

This is really beside the point. The problem in this case was not mostly that the prosecutors relied on eyewitnesses or that the witnesses were the wrong color. The problem was that these eyewitnesses were liars.

Things are looking worse every day in Japan

On a Fox News show this evening, I heard a supposed nuclear energy expert, Jay Lehr*, pronounce with conviction that there would be no health consequences in Japan from the meltdowns taking place at various reactors in that country.

Then, at the next commercial break, I turned to CNN where the scroll at the bottom of its screen read: "Japanese government expects serious health consequences from nuclear meltdowns."

I wanted to believe the guy on Fox. But it struck me that the Japanese government would not say there will be health consequences to its people if there was even a small chance the guy on Fox was correct.

Here is the latest report from the Washington Post:

Japan’s nuclear emergency turned more dire on Tuesday after the third explosion in four days rocked the seaside Fukushima Daiichi complex and fire briefly raged in a storage facility for spent fuel rods at a fourth, previously unaffected reactor.

Officials from Tokyo Electric Power Co., owner of the nuclear complex, said radioactive substances were emitted after a 6:14 a.m. explosion, which took place in the unit 2 reactor. The blast took place near or in the suppression pool, which traps and cools radioactive elements from the containment vessel, officials said. The explosion appeared to have damaged valves and pipes, possibly creating a path for radioactive materials to escape.

That sounds bad.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan told the nation Tuesday morning that radiation had already spread from the reactors and there was “still a very high risk of further radioactive material escaping.” He advised people within 19 miles of the plant to remain indoors. He urged calm.

If there were no health risks, I don't think the prime minister of Japan would be urging people who live 19 miles away to remain indoors.

Tokyo Electric, which over the weekend said it had 1,400 people working at the complex, said it was evacuating all but 50 workers. Kan hailed those workers, who he said “are putting themselves in a very dangerous situation.”

Tokyo Electric would not say this was a very dangerous situation if it were as safe as Fox News's Jay Lehr thinks it is.

Tuesday began with a fire that broke out in a pool storing spent fuel rods at the base of unit 4, which had been shut down for inspection before last Friday’s earthquake. Radioactive substances might have spewed outside from the fire, officials said, because the structure housing the pool was damaged by Monday’s explosion at unit 3.

Half an hour later, the explosion at unit 2 took place. Experts said that, unlike the two previous explosions that destroyed outer buildings, this explosion might have damaged portions of the containment vessel designed to bottle up radioactive materials in the event of an emergency.

I claim no expertise, but that sounds very bad.

The explosion — more serious than the earlier ones — was followed by a brief drop in pressure in the vessel and a spike in radioactivity outside the reactor to levels more than eight times what people ordinarily receive in a year, the company said.

I can't spend an hour in the sun without getting too much solar radiation. I cannot imagine how bad it is to get 8 years of radiation in one day.

The new setbacks came on the heels of a difficult Monday at Fukushima Daiichi unit 2, one of six reactors at the site. Utility officials there reported that four out of five water pumps being used to flood the reactor had failed and that the other pump had briefly stopped working. As a result, the company said, the fuel rods, normally covered by water, were completely exposed for 140 minutes.

Given that the Japanese are about the most competent people on earth and they cannot handle this, I wonder how much worse this disaster would be in another, less advanced country.

The string of earthquake- and tsunami-triggered troubles at the Fukushima Daiichi plant began Friday, when a loss of grid power (caused by the earthquake) followed by a loss of backup diesel generators (caused by the tsunami) led to the failure of cooling systems needed to keep reactor cores from overheating.

In hindsight, it seems like it was a terrible idea to put nuclear power plants in a zone with both earthquake and tsunami risks. In California, we have two nuclear power stations, San Onofre in north San Diego County and Diablo Canyon, near San Luis Obispo, on the coast.



I don't think either one is at risk of being flooded by a tsunami, though there is a serious earthquake risk at Diablo Canyon. When I was in college, I protested PG&E building a nuclear generating station right on an earthquake fault. It still seems like a bad idea to me, though it has operated safely for more than 20 years.

The U.S. 7th Fleet said Monday that some of its personnel, who are stationed 100 miles offshore from the Fukushima Daiichi plant, had come into contact with radioactive contamination. The airborne radioactivity prompted the fleet to reposition its ships and aircraft.

Using sensitive instruments, precautionary measurements were conducted on three helicopter aircrews returning to the USS Ronald Reagan after conducting disaster relief missions near Sendai. Those measurements identified low levels of radioactivity on 17 crew members.

What is so sad about this heightened radiation leaking into the air is that the victims of the tsunami and earthquake need hordes of relief workers to come in and help them with food, water, shelter and medical care, but it is now dangerous for anyone to expose themselves anywhere near the nuclear plants.

“Let’s hope they can get these reactors under control,” said Richard Lester, head of the department of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “They’re not there yet.”

My hope is that in the next decade we build dozens of new nuclear power plants in the United States. But we should try to learn every lesson possible from what has gone wrong in Japan, so that we don't have any such meltdowns and are as prepared as necessary for them to survive natural disasters.


---------------

*I just looked up some facts on Jay Lehr. He is not a scientist of any sort. He has a PhD in economics. He works for a conservative think tank called The Heartland Institute. He makes his living as a motivational speaker. I discovered, among other things, he is a global warming skeptic (though, of course, he has never studied climate science or any hard science). Yet he goes around preaching some crazy theory that carbon dioxide plays no role in global warming.

Mr. Lehr rejects the global consensus of the IPCC scientists which say this about carbon dioxide's role in warming our planet:

The reason the Earth’s surface is this warm is the presence of greenhouse gases, which act as a partial blanket for the longwave radiation coming from the surface. This blanketing is known as the natural greenhouse effect. The most important greenhouse gases are water vapour and carbon dioxide. The two most abundant constituents of the atmosphere – nitrogen and oxygen – have no such effect. Clouds, on the other hand, do exert a blanketing effect similar to that of the greenhouse gases; however, this effect is offset by their reflectivity, such that on average, clouds tend to have a cooling effect on climate (although locally one can feel the warming effect: cloudy nights tend to remain warmer than clear nights because the clouds radiate longwave energy back down to the surface). Human activities intensify the blanketing effect through the release of greenhouse gases. For instance, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by about 35% in the industrial era, and this increase is known to be due to human activities, primarily the combustion of fossil fuels and removal of forests. Thus, humankind has dramatically altered the chemical composition of the global atmosphere with substantial implications for climate.

Unfortunately, there is no reason to take Mr. Lehr seriously, even if he calls himself an expert on nuclear energy. The government of Japan knows much more about what is happening with its reactors than this Fox News ideologue, Jay Lehr.

Pictures from Japan

There are a great number of photographs on news websites of the devastation in Japan from the tsunami and the earthquake. Here are five images I thought were especially impressive:

This could be Japan's version of the China Syndrome

After I published a short blog entry yesterday regarding the troubles with 5 of Japan's nuclear power plants and Hillary Clinton's very bizarre account of the USAF delivery mystery coolant to one of them, a much scarier event took place--there was a massive hydrogen explosion (see photo above) outside of one of the damaged reactors.

Here is the L.A. Times account:

A day after responding to one of the worst earthquakes on record and a massive tsunami, the Japanese government sought to allay fears of a radioactive disaster at a nuclear power plant on the country's battered northeastern coast.

The outer walls of the Fukushima power plant's No. 1 reactor were blown off by a hydrogen explosion Saturday, leaving only a skeletal frame. Officials said four workers at the site received non-life-threatening injuries.

The inner container holding the reactor's fuel rods is not believed to be damaged, said Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano, and workers were cooling the facilities with seawater.

If this kind of explosion happened in most countries other than Japan, I would be highly skeptical that such a blast would not pose a great threat to public safety. However, I have faith in the Japanese. I hope what they are now saying is true. If any country could design their facilities to weather such a horrific natural disaster, it would be the highly competent Japanese.

In a press conference shortly after the explosion, which left the facility shrouded in plumes of gray smoke, Edano explained that the reactor is contained within a steel chamber, which in turn is surrounded by a concrete and steel building. Although the explosion destroyed the building, it did not occur in the chamber.

"The escape of hydrogen mixed with the air between the chamber and the concrete-and-steel building and led to the explosion," Edano said.

Hydrogen explosions tend to be awesome. Their ferocity makes me wonder if we really want to move from gasoline powered cars to hydrogen fuel cells.

"Tokyo Electric Power Co. has confirmed that the inner reactor is undamaged," he added. "There was no massive release of radiation."

Still, the reactor was already showing signs of a partial meltdown after Friday's magnitude 8.9 earthquake had prevented the plant 150 miles north of Tokyo from fully powering its water cooling system. Without it, the facility could overheat and explode, spewing radiation into the air.

If that reactor explodes, I would guess that will set back the expansion of new nuclear power plants in the United States by at least 20 years. That would be a shame, given that nuclear power is one of the only technologies which can produce electricity at a reasonable price and emits no carbon dioxide. Given the realities of global warming, we must start producing more of our power from clean sources of energy, and nuclear power should be in that mix.

People were reportedly fleeing the surrounding area and Japanese television was urging people to cover their faces with wet towels and not to expose any skin to the potentially contaminated air. An evacuation zone was doubled to a 12-mile radius around the plant by Saturday evening.

It seems like I have seen this movie before: Japanese people wearing face masks running away (from Godzilla) in a mass panic.

Japan relies on nuclear power for a third of its electricity and is said to require exacting safety standards for its plants.

I don't think Japan has ever had a better choice than nuclear power for its electricity production. The problem, though, is when you get a crisis like this and 11 power plants are shut down, you are in a serious bind. You cannot produce enough electricity to provide power for your people and industry.

That said, there are many other countries, mostly in Europe, which are even more reliant on nuclear power than Japan is.

Here are the top 10 most reliant on nuclear energy:

Lithuania 78%
France 77%
Belgium 58%
Slovakia 53%
Ukraine 46%
Sweden 44%
Bulgaria 42%
Hungary 39%
Slovenia 39%
South Korea 39%

It turns out ... I am famous ... and a winner!

Because of some family business I was attending to yesterday, I didn't get around to looking at the Friday Davis Enterprise until this morning. After reading a handful of stories in the A-section, I turned to page B-3, where the opinion Forum was published.

I scanned a guest column, which discussed the notion of government subsidies for local news reporting; the Enterprise's editorial, which dealt with Libya; and a few letters to the editor, which addressed, in order, the lack of success of a neighborhood grocery store, a "peace" march and a new recycling program.

Surprisingly, until it came up last in the letters, I had not noticed the whole time I was reading the Forum page that I was the topic which drove someone named Scott Babcock to write a letter to the editor. Here is what Mr. Babcock had to say. It gave me a nice chuckle:

The mysterious delivery of magical coolant by the USAF? Or was it just more sniper fire?

Among the thousands of tragic stories emanating from Japan today, following the 8.9 magnitude earthquake and the massive tsunami, is the scary tale of serious damage to five nuclear reactors at two sites in northern Japan. Here is what The Washington Post is reporting:

Japanese authorities declared a state of emergency Saturday for five nuclear reactors at two quake-stricken power plants as military and utility officials scrambled to tame rising pressure and radioactivity levels inside the units and stabilize the systems used to cool the plants' hot reactor cores.

Radiation surged to around 1,000 times the normal level in the control room of one reactor, Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) said. Meanwhile, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Saturday that the temperatures at two other reactors at a different power plant were rising and that it had lost control over pressure in three reactors there.

Though no significant release of radioactive material had taken place, the earthquake, which forced the automatic shutdown of 11 of the country's 55 nuclear power plants, is certain to rattle confidence in nuclear power in Japan, where people have long been sensitized to the dangers of radioactive releases, and in the United States, where foes of nuclear power were already pointing to the Japan crisis as a warning sign.

One other thing in the Post story caught my attention. The Hillary Clinton whopper:

In a statement that confused nuclear experts, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday morning that U.S. Air Force planes in Japan had delivered "coolant" to a nuclear power plant affected by the quake. Nuclear reactors do not require special coolants, only large amounts of pumped water.

"They have very high engineering standards, but one of their plants came under a lot of stress with the earthquake and didn't have enough coolant," she said, "and so Air Force planes were able to deliver that."

I was watching TV when she made that statement. I didn't know enough about cooling a nuclear power plant this morning to know she was full of shit. It just struck me as good that our military was doing some good. But it turns out Sec. Clinton was either fed some bad information or she just made the whole thing up.

An Air Force spokesman at the Pentagon, however, said he was unaware of any deliveries being made by Air Force planes related to the reactor issues.

"To our knowledge, we have delivered nothing in support of the nuclear power plant," Lt. Col. John Haynes said. "Obviously, we stand by to assist with anything they might need." He said the Air Force had received no formal request for help.

This is the second instance I can think of where Hillary was caught in a completely indefensible lie (though possibly one, in this instance, in which she was just repeating what an aide told her). The earlier lie was when she was running for president, she made up some bullshit about landing in a plane in Bosnia and saying she came under sniper fire. No aide fed her that. She just invented the situation, which every other witness who was with her on that flight said they never came under fire of any sort.

State Department officials later said Clinton misspoke.

Misspoke is really the wrong word here. It is the same word Hillary used to excuse her Bosnia lie. If Mrs. Clinton had meant this morning to say something like, "Our deepest sympathies go out to ... the people of Japan," but instead of Japan she got mixed up and said Korea or Jordan or China, it would be fair to say she misspoke. But that's not what happened here: Sec. Clinton told a huge whopper about our Air Force planes carrying magical nuclear power plant coolant, when our Air Force planes did not fly into that area, when they were not called on to fly into that area, and when this magic coolant does not exist.

That is not misspeaking. That is lying.

Why kids no longer enjoy history: the Internet

The Sacramento Bee has a very brief interview today with UC Davis professor Alan Taylor, who won fame 15 years ago when his excellent book, "William Cooper's Town" won the Pulitzer Prize.

The story notes that his current book has a chance to win another prize:

Now, the history professor at the University of California, Davis, is looking at a possible George Washington Book Prize from Washington College in Maryland – which brings $50,000.

He is among three finalists for the prize, for his "The Civil War of 1812" (Knopf, $35, 640 pages), a project that took him 15 years to complete. The judges called the book "the most original history of the conflict ever written." The prize winner will be announced May 25.

While I look forward to reading Prof. Taylor's latest book, I have a different point of view about why kids today are less interested in history. Here is what The Bee asked Taylor and his reply:

On the subject of U.S. history, are we losing touch with it?

Yes, for a number of reasons. One is the mania for testing in grades K through 12. It's well-meant, but it's undermining true teaching because teachers are required to teach to the test. As a consequence, history comes across to students as the deadly dull memorization of facts.

It is certainly possible that testing is a part of the explanation. However, my take is that the decline in interest in history is a byproduct of the decline in literacy, which is largest among younger people.

That is to say, kids no longer read very much for amusement or to pass time. They don't read newspapers, magazines or books for pleasure. They play a lot of games on the Internet, participate in social media and otherwise occupy themselves on-line in their spare time.

I'm sure many kids have history reading assignments for school. But that never inspires anyone to "love history." What inspires is taking a week or so and reading a full, well written volume like "William Cooper's Town" or any other good history book.

I suspect that the children who come through the same, heavily tested schools but happen to be the few who read books, fiction and non-fiction, become lovers of history. What distinguishes them is not that they too did not come through school systems with a lot of tests on facts. They are different because they spend less time on the computer, less time watching TV, and more time reading.

When I was in school, the Internet did not yet exist. We were not heavily tested. The schools did not push us to read good books from cover to cover. We were bored to tears by the typical textbooks which had the feel of committee work. Yet I think the same distinction existed back then: kids who enjoyed reading books on their own and who watched less TV became fans and readers of history; and those who were never introduced to books and watched a lot of TV never developed an interest in history.

The only thing which has made this disconnect from history more severe from the time I was in school is the rise of the Internet. It has destroyed an interest in reading even more than television did.

When a flawed plan meets a perverse incentive structure: the result is serious government waste

The L.A. Times has a fascinating piece of investigative journalism in today's paper. It's a long and detailed account of how a "visionary," who had hoped to save millions of dollars for the Los Angeles Community College District by installing a spectacular array of solar, wind, geothermal and hydrogen fuel cell power generating systems over and around and all about the nine junior colleges which make up the LACCD has thus far wasted $10 million in taxpayer money on his poorly thought out program.

Larry Eisenberg had a vision. "Amazing," he called it. "Spectacular."

The Los Angeles Community College District would become a paragon of clean energy. By generating solar, wind and geothermal power, the district would supply all its electricity needs. Not only would the nine colleges sever ties to the grid, saving millions of dollars a year, they would make money by selling surplus power. Thanks to state and federal subsidies, construction of the green energy projects would cost nothing upfront.

As head of a $5.7-billion, taxpayer-funded program to rebuild the college campuses, Eisenberg commanded attention. But his plan for energy independence was seriously flawed.

He overestimated how much power the colleges could generate. He underestimated the cost. And he poured millions of dollars into designs for projects that proved so impractical or unpopular they were never built.

These and other blunders cost nearly $10 million that could have paid for new classrooms, laboratories and other college facilities, a Times investigation found.

There seem to be two major lessons within the Times's story.

First, there is a lot of wishful thinking and overhype about "green" energy. Many who are pitching solar energy projects, for example, massively exaggerate how much energy will be produced from the installed solar panels. The same is true of wind power. It usually takes a few years to really know how much power you will be getting. And by the time you know, the salesman is long gone from the scene.

I don't know if the companies which are overhyping their products are liable down the road, if the panels fail to produce the promised amount of power, but they should be. There should be a government agency cracking down on anyone selling new "green" products who is making claims which are false or exaggerated. It's ultimately a form of consumer fraud.

The second lesson from the story of the Los Angeles Community College District wasting million of dollars on projects which never came to fruition is an old one: public entities never spend money like it's their own. They always waste taxpayer money when they can.

It's just so much more fun to spend money that is not yours than it is to be frugal that people will almost always spend like the spigot is never going to stop. It's a perverse incentive for government agents built into all contracting arrangements.

SPEND, SPEND, SPEND

In order to revive our dormant economy, President Obama thought the best answer was his hugely wasteful stimulus plan. In Davis, we have firsthand evidence of what kind of crap the stimulus plan was funding: sidewalk bulb-outs. Those are the silly extensions of the sidewalks at intersections, which are supposed to make a city more pedestrian friendly by shortening the distance one has to walk from sidewalk to sidewalk. In reality, they are a big load of nonsense. If we really needed them, the City of Davis would have spent our own local taxpayer money on them. But we didn't really need them. So we grabbed the "free money" Obama was giving away in his farcical stimulus plan.

The irony is that we really are short of funds for street and sidewalk repairs, but the stimulus money would not cover those expenses. So instead of repaving cracked streets and replacing damaged sidewalks, we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a very low priority item.

That is essentially what happened in the LACCD. They were sold a bill of goods that this was other peoples' money. If the people authorizing these expenses were spending their own funds, or if they treated the taxpayers' money as if it were their own, this unfortunate wastefulness never would have occurred.

In the end, it is likely that the LACCD will cover this loss by raising taxes on property owners in Los Angeles County. Either that or the students will get a much poorer education because the District screwed the pooch.

Burning the evidence: In Egypt, the secret police are trying to keep their evil deeds secret forever ...

Just because Egypt was never as bad as Libya, and just because Mubarak was never as evil as Kaddafi, does not mean that Egypt was not bad or evil under Mubarak. It was a brutal regime with unchecked state powers. It tortured and terrorized anyone who spoke up and it used intimidation tactics to make sure everyone else knew to never speak up.

Now that Mubarak is out of power, there has been an attempt among Egypt's revolutionaries to establish a truth and reconciliation commission, which would expose the horrors so many Egyptians were subject to, and then forgive the criminals who worked inside their Interior Ministry.

But there can be no truth and reconciliation without the documentation. And those in Mubarak's secret police are now trying to cover up their misdeeds.

The L.A. Times is reporting that Egyptian agents are dutifully burning the evidence of their crimes:

In an attempt to save documents that may incriminate Egypt's notorious state security services for years of torture and abuse, thousands of protesters on Saturday stormed Interior Ministry offices around Cairo as word spread that security officials were attempting to destroy files.

Witnesses and residents in 6th of October, a Cairo suburb, said protesters marched toward a state security office to prevent officials from burning documents. Protesters said they saw flames coming from near the building in the early hours of Saturday. About 3,000 protesters surrounded the building, eventually storming in and later handing it over to the army.

Witnesses claim that the majority of files, which may lead to the prosecution of state security officials for misuse of power, corruption and human rights violations, were already burned by the time protesters arrived. The documents, according to human-rights groups, would offer an intricate paper trail to former President Hosni Mubarak's reviled police state.

With the latest war raging in Libya and with the Egyptian military apparently ruling Egypt with the consent of the people, I had forgotten that there was still a great rift in Egypt between the democrats who forced Mubarak out of office and many people who still work for that government.

Later Saturday, several thousand protesters broke through barriers of the state security headquarters in the neighborhood of Nasr City. "State security obviously made an attempt to cover up or destroy implicating evidence of their horrible deeds over the last 30 years," Ahmed Raouf, one of the protesters, told The Times from inside the headquarters.

Protesters gathered documents and handed them to military officers, who in turn, forwarded files to a representative from the Attorney General's office. Another nearby state security headquarters also was successfully stormed less than an hour later. Many of the protesters were Islamists who either served time or had a member of their family detained at the underground building.

If Egypt is to become a democracy, the Islamists present a stumbling block. They were minimal in the effort to get rid of Hosni, but they might be the largest party in any democratic election. Beyond their extremism and their terrible values, the great danger of Islamists in government is if they ever take power, there may never again be a democratic election. Certainly they have no belief in elections, civil liberties or human rights. They simply want to force everyone else to live in a religious state, where they get to say what the religion is.