I’m not sure what inspired Chutney to write a post advocating a new party in the political system. A political party geared toward towing the moderate line and structuring itself from the beginning to ward off corruption would get an awful lot of votes. Frankly, I’m a bit tired of people saying moderates don’t stand for anything. You can call it weakness all you want. I call it sanity.

Partisan bickering can too easily cause politicians to hold positions that are way too extreme for any sane person’s taste. In the book The Economics of Collective Choice, Joe Stevens took note of a couple of studies by Romer and Rosenthal on the ideological positions of voters and members of Congress. Romer and Rosenthal mapped out an ideological spectrum that ranged from -1.26 (ultra liberal) to +1.26 (ultra conservative). The ideological positions of voters formed a neat bell curve with the highest points somewhere between -0.06 and +0.06. This top of the bell curve alone accounts for 40 percent of the voter. Widening that view to the area from -0.18 to +0.18, you capture approximately an additional 25 to 30 percent of the voters.

In other words, a strong moderate candidate can capture about 70 percent of the vote.

What about the ideological positions of members of Congress? That looks a little more like a double-wave. Members of Congress tend to be the most likely to stand at -0.78 or +0.78 of the ideological spectrum.

The studies put forward by Romer and Rosenthal should stand as cautionary tales for all politicians. By “energizing the base,” you stand to leave out what becomes a silent majority. And that’s insane.

• When even one member of the MARTA board hints that next year’s budget may or may not include the possibility of a probable fare increase, THE MEDIA GOES WILD AND FIVE THOUSAND ANGRY RIDERS PACK THE BOARD MEETINGS AND THE WORLD’S GOING TO END!! AHHHH!!!! When MARTA’s budget includes no fare increase and maybe even an expansion of service, only The Story will tell us about it.
• The Alliance at Ga State applied for funding, as they do every year, from one of the student fee councils — the diversity council, to be specific. Normally, they get what they ask for, or close to it. This year, they got stiffed. While Christian organizations got a combined total of $3,225, the Alliance got $500. Keep in mind that a separate gay organization was denied funding altogether because, as far as the committee was concerned, they were duplicating services of the Alliance.
• A friend of mine commented recently that Democrats keep losing elections because they’re afraid to criticize. One moment, a Democratic strategist gets fired for taking part in the Georgians for Truth campaign. The next moment, Cathy Cox’s campaign manager is fired for adding a truthful statement to the “Mark Taylor” entry on Wikipedia. Remember how Democrats fared when they focused on not criticizing the Bush administration too much? That was two years ago. I still remember when the Labor Party in Israel announced they would take the high road and not use the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin to their advantage. Throw some punches at the scumbags, already.
• The above bullet point was really long. So I’m going to make this one really short.
• A discussion on commuter rail recently ensued on Livejournal here and here. Certain parts of the wingnut wing of the Libertarian party has always eluded my understanding. They believe in public choice theory, which vastly oversimplifies the entire field of economics. And the real world in general.
• Thank you, Jill Chambers, for extending MARTA’s 55/45 split. Whether you deserve it or not, you get some credit for making sure we don’t see another fare increase. You now may want to consider what may happen if your strategy for creating a regional transit agency backfires.
• The Inman Park Dance Festival is this weekend. I interviewed one of its organizers, Carolyn McGlaughlin, for the Atlanta Performs Podcast. Check out the April 18 episode, then check out the dance festival.
• The website Footnoted.org was recently profiled on Marketplace. One of the ways corporations try to hide wasteful spending is by discreetly placing it in the footnotes of their financial statements. This example from Atlanta-based Aaron Rents is especially entertaining. Of course, it’s only entertaining because I don’t own any shares of the company.

A recent story in the AJC chronicled the ongoing dispute between a local landscaper and GDOT:

Dennie Rennow stood her ground, stared down a backhoe and made a utility say uncle.

Rennow, a landscaper from Duluth, has been mired in a right-of-way dispute with the Georgia Department of Transportation, which is building an underpass at Pleasant Hill Road and Buford Highway, and AGL Resources, which has to move a pipeline to accommodate the new road.

She said mistakes in a transportation department survey has cost a small forest, two fences and her peace of mind. It almost cost her corgi’s grave because she had buried the dog in what is now disputed territory.

The dispute, specifically, is about the location of her property line. Where does GDOT’s property begin, and Rennow’s end?

If it were up to GDOT, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d just as soon take all of Georgia so they could pave it all. But that’s beside the point.

Buried in the article is yet another sign of GDOT’s true arrogance:

She said she has provided plats from Gwinnett County to prove her point that the DOT’s survey takes anywhere from 3 to 16 feet too much land on what she calls the 75-foot swath of destruction.

How often does this happen? You’ll never see an official investigation, and I’d be willing to bet that no advocacy group would be willing to take up the cause and start double-checking GDOT’s surveys. It would be in the best interest of Georgia’s local governments and citizens if this did happen.

The reality of road boundaries are not truly physical, anyway. When the interstate highway system first came under construction as a combination defense and urban renewal project, neighborhoods were torn up without any regard to who lived there or how the local citizens felt. Urban crime became a major problem once these highways were built. To that extent, the damage from building large highways went far beyond their physical borders.

Another recent article in the AJC chronicled the noise problem of big highways. Tell me if this sounds familiar:

“The noise is so disturbing you have to yell at each other to have a conversation,” said Joy Morrison, 48, who, from her backyard can see and hear the sea of cars swiftly moving north. “The noise just overrides everything. We had people come in and look and no offers at all.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising that a house closer to the highway typically stays on the market longer and sells at a lower price. The noise caused by highways also demonstrates their boundary problem. Wherever highways are built, they tend to depress home values due to the noise.

Even if Dennie Rennow wins her battle with GDOT, her way of life will be affected by the latest GDOT boondoggle, as will her neighbors. The good news is that this particular boondoggle, reconfiguring Un-Pleasant Hill Road to go under the railroad tracks, will help make room for an expansion of railroad service along that line — possibly even commuter rail, if the legislature doesn’t keep butting in. The intermittent noise coming from the trains, compared to the constant noise of cars, will be more tolerable.

Road boundaries exist far beyond their physical layout. With their myopic view of transportation and land policy, I’m afraid GDOT will never truly understand that.

A few months ago, Rusty and Amber began working on a new podcasting project focused on Georgia.

Well, that project is now coming to fruition. It is the Georgia Podcast Network, which includes its own podcast feed, plus a feed of other podcast feeds.

Check it out! You can find my voice lurking on the Atlanta Performs Podcast, and the GA Politics Podcast.

The other network programs are worth a listen, too. Soon, there will also be an episode featuring the North Fulton Drama Club.

So at the moment I’m going through a redesign of the Atlanta Performs website. Nothing major for now, I’m just changing the look of the site.

The current site design is made of nested tables and all sorts of fun elements like that. The new design I’m going for will, I hope, be bulletproof. Props to Amber for recommending a fabulous set of essential books to accomplish bulletproofness.

But I have a challenge.

There is one element of the old design we’d like to keep: the sidebar on the right that displays random images. If you look at the current design, you’ll notice those five images on the right change every time you reload the page. This is clearly a design element, but who would have thought someone would want to do something like this as part of the design of a web page?

To start, through this page describing a CSS trick, I found a really neat randomizer.

To summarize the trick, whereas you would normally define an image (JPG, GIF, PNG) as a background in the CSS file, the trick is to define a PHP script, instead:

div#header{
height: 100px;
border-bottom: 1px solid black;
background: url(../headers/rotate.php) #000 no-repeat center top;
}

Very cool. However, the script is meant for a page header.

The challenge here: Create a bulletproof sidebar of multiple random images. Since the images are meant to be part of the design (not the content), it is assumed that the images should be defined in the CSS file, not the PHP file.

Ideas are welcome, and highly encouraged.

Check out Rusty’s column in the Georgia Political Digest. For those who don’t follow the link, I’ll provide a brief synopsis:

The GA GOP decided they wanted to ask Cathy Cox and Mark Taylor five questions clearly related to important issues for the GOP. Just in time for Passover, Rusty whipped up four questions clearly related to some of the more relevant issues that Georgians face in their daily lives. (Why is this column different from all other columns?)

Rusty’s conclusion:

I am convinced that the Georgia GOP is operated by children who have no understanding of problems that real people face on a daily basis. Instead of solutions, it gives people bogeymen. Only children are scared of bogeymen.

I couldn’t have said it better, myself.

Of all the areas of study children go through in their formative years, the creative arts carries high benefits for future achievement. These facts come from Americans for the Arts:

Longitudinal data of 25,000 students demonstrate that involvement in the arts is linked to higher academic performance, increased standardized test scores, more community service and lower dropout rates (see chart above). These cognitive and developmental benefits are reaped by students regardless of their socioeconomic status.

Research conducted between 1987 to 1998 on young people working in the arts for at least three hours on three days of each week throughout at least one full year, demonstrated the following:

• 4 times more likely to have been recognized for academic achievement
• Being elected to class office within their schools more than 3 times as often
• 4 times more likely to participate in a math and science fair
• 3 times more likely to win an award for school attendance
• 4 times more likely to win an award for writing an essay or poem

In spite of all the benefits of arts education, this area of study tends to be the first to go when education budgets get tight and conservatives complain that we can’t throw money at education.

Case in point:

The Fulton County School Board recently decided they needed to eliminate all band and orchestra programs from elementary schools. Once again, dwindling education budgets mean eliminating the highest-impact education programs in public schools first.

Passover begins in about a week. It’s a time to reflect on our freedom of commerce:

There are enough pages out there for me to fill a whole screen with links about these two stories. It’s only appropriate that these two things happen at the same time.

Two extremist demagogues in Congress are in trouble this week: Tom DeLay and Cynthia McKinney. One resigned, and the other may have an arrest warrant out for her before long. The difference between them: one rose to remarkable power within his respective party, and other has never gained any influence beyond her loud little niche.

Two lessons should arise out of this saga. First, never vote for a demagogue. That much should be obvious, but there are still stupid voters everywhere who mistake the appearance of confidence as strength, and righteous indignation as righteousness. Second, never vote for people who have two capital letters within their last names. They clearly take themselves way too seriously.

Recently, the near-simultaneous rejection of Atlanta’s NASCAR bid and acceptance of Georgia’s Kia bid sparked a brief debate for the attention deficit masses on whether governments should engage in economic development initiatives. It’s primarily for the more extreme sides of the aisles to say “no,” though for different (and purely ideological) reasons:

• Some conservatives say government should not get involved in manipulating the economy.
• Some liberals say government should be redistributing money to help the poor, not lining the pockets of the rich.

A more moderate position would be to state the case that economic development initiatives strengthen the local tax base and local economy, and that benefits everyone. I’m not going to try to justify the case here. But I thought that would make for a nice introduction because I’m just opinionated that way.

There are many ways of thinking of economic development. I’d like to take a moment to point out one particular way of thinking about the subject. For a more substantive view, Don Iannone has organized an excellent reading list for beginners. Just reading his blog can also be an enlightening exercise.

Following NASCAR’s rejection of Atlanta’s bid, a storm of suggestions ensued on what to do with the money that would have gone to that initiative. They have included

• A new Atlanta Symphony Center
• A Civil Rights Museum
• Turning the Coke museum into a center for the performing arts
• A state museum for Georgia

The list goes on, I’m sure.

What differentiates all the items on the list from the NASCAR and Kia bids is the focus. Again, this is one particular way of looking at economic development. Some money for economic development initiatives focuses on importing jobs, talent or money. Some is focused on growing talent from within. While the two approaches are not mutually exclusive, it is important in the public debate to differentiate between the two.

In the case of NASCAR, the hope was to import new tourist dollars to the local economy. While tourism dollars tend to be a very effective means of boosting the local economy (PDF), quite a bit of money would still have flowed straight to Charlotte. More to the point, much of the money would have gone to the France family without much benefit to either Atlanta or Charlotte.

In the case of Kia, the intent was to import jobs, which is not an entirely bad idea, even given the subsidy the state is paying to import those jobs. When new jobs enter a local economy, the dollars imported into the economy get circulated several times. This is known as the local multiplier effect. (Slightly more technical explanation) (And a slightly more substantive discussion). The public money spent to import jobs presumably has a net benefit to the local economy.

Many of the alternative proposals stated above have more to do with developing and nurturing local talent. A new symphony hall would be a new landmark born, bred and raised right here in Georgia. A civil rights museum and a state museum would both acknowledge Georgia’s (and Atlanta’s) rich, under-appreciated history. A new center for the performing arts with a more local focus than WAC would enrich the local cultural heritage and benefit the local economy.

The typical top-down approach to economic development is the import approach. Political leaders get to claim their little trophies that brought jobs and money to the local economy. Fostering the more grassrootsy approach by supporting more local approaches would strengthen the local economy. The Boston Foundation, for example, found that every dollar given to arts service organizations have a high impact in supporting the local arts community. (My guess is that supporting existing arts service organizations would also be more effective than reinventing the wheel.)

Supporting Community Development Corporations would also carry a higher per-dollar impact in developing the local economy.

Perhaps rather than boasting about big trophies and bowing to the corporatist way, our state and local leaders would be better off by connecting with their local constituencies through these local initiatives.