I said yesterday that David Chastain earned my vote, and he did. There is, as always, a caveat.

At some point in the ALL-GA forum, Chastain touted his credentials as a real estate person knowledgeable in the field of Urban Economics. He pointed out that school systems depend primarily on property taxes for their revenue, and that the coming real estate bubble is about to burst — pulling the rug out from under school systems. He’s likely leading to the usual Lib drivel touting the FairTax fraud.

First, real estate is primarily a locally driven economy. If there is a housing bubble in Georgia, it’s very slight. Thanks especially to the continuing growth of the Atlanta region, it’s unlikely that property tax revenues are on shaky ground. Chastain’s real purpose was to conjure up a boogeyman, which tends to be a winning strategy for Georgia politicians.

The reality of local taxes is that there is a danger in relying on any single tax. In Palo Alto, the local government has been trying to attract more car dealerships, which seems like a bizzare thing to do (as discussed: Smart City, October 10 edition). As it turns out, more than half of Palo Alto’s tax revenue comes from sales taxes. A car sale, it turns out, carries a great deal of sales tax. Portland, in contrast, does not have a sales tax, so the city’s land use policies are driven by how much property tax revenue they can generate.

This goes to show that the way a community structures its tax base will strongly influence how the community shapes itself. With sales taxes, there will be more retail. With property taxes, there will be more high-value usage of the land. With payroll taxes, there will be more office space.

The primary reason why so many Libs choose property taxes as one of their boogeymen is they know that property taxes are the number one most hated tax, and sales taxes are the least hated. Having said that, in light of Chastain’s position on the tax base for public schools, there is a serious caveat to consider. Do we want more car dealerships, big box retail and sprawl, or should local communities carry a mixed tax base — and therefore exercise their right to define their local character with more care?

I went to ALL-GA’s forum for School Superintendent candidates last night. It was just as much a chance for the audience to learn more about the candidates as it was a chance for the candidates to learn about the importance of arts in education — and Georgia’s currently dismal record as an arts educator.

After the primaries, Kathy Cox confirmed she would show up at the forum. On Friday, she notified ALL-GA that due to an “emergency” at the Department of Edcuation, she would have to cancel. You have to wonder what sort of “emergency” could not be taken care of over the weekend.

Here are a few things talked about last night:

• Georgia is only one of ten states that does not have a senior-level staff position at the state level to focus on the arts in education
• Georgia is one of a handful of states that consider the arts to be “extra-curricular,” an option, not an essential part of a well-rounded curriculum
• Georgia currently ranks 43rd in per capita spending for the arts
• 90 percent of the school dropout rate is not attributed to failing in schools — that dropout rate is attributed to boredom in the classroom

Between David Chastain (L) and Denise Majette (D), Chastain did a much better job of connecting with the audience last night, though there was a lot he admitted not knowing about the office of State School Superintendent. For the most part, he came across as a bit naïve. That gave Majette a lot of room to come across as a technocratic, know-it-all lawyer — and she did a good job of using the room she was given to come across exactly that way.

In general, I can’t stand the Libertarian Party. Under the two-party system, politicians don’t do nearly enough to earn the votes they get. The Libertarians tend to go the wrong direction in understanding the role that government plays in having a civilized, prosperous nation — with freedom and opportunity as bedrock principles. So, I tend to vote for the person, not the party. It’s far more rewarding for me to be active than to throw my hands up and give in to apathy.

Having said all that, despite Chastain’s unfortunate ideological connections, he earned my vote last night. Majette lost my vote entirely — she has too much of a sense that she was ordained by god to be a politician, a trait she shares with George Bush. Kathy Cox lost my vote a long time ago when she tried to introduce her personal religion into the science curriculum — she cannot be trusted. By not showing up at last night’s forum, Kathy Cox solidified my vote of no confidence.

A recent issue of the journal Policy Review has a brillian essay by Peter Katzenstein and Robert Keohane: Anti-Americanisms. For those who view anti-Americanism as a single philosophy, hell-bent on destroying America, this essay will help clear things up a little. Is anti-Americanism a reaction against what the United States does, or what the United States is? The answer: it depends on the particular form of anti-Americanism.

Katzenstein and Keohane are careful to note that part of their argument involves a distinction between opinion and bias:

Some expressions of unfavorable attitudes merely reflect opinion: unfavorable judgments about the United States or its policies. Others, however, reflect bias: a predisposition to believe negative reports about the United States and to discount positive ones. Bias implies a distortion of information processing, while adverse opinion is consistent with maintaining openness to new information that will change one’s views.

As Jeff Stein recently noted in his New York Times article, Can You Tell a Sunni from a Shiite, it helps a great deal to know your enemy, and many of our top foreign policy lawmakers don’t. How much Middle Eastern anti-Americanism is rooted in bias (and, therefore, a much more complex problem to deal with), and how much is rooted in opinion (and, therefore, open to change)?

Anti-Americanism is not the story that the cultural warriors on the Right would like you to believe. With a few extremely rare exceptions, it turns out not to be a threat toward the United States. To deal with the issue with any bit of effectiveness, it helps to understand that there are different policy implications for each type of anti-Americanism.

The folks I’ve spoken with in the last week didn’t believe me when I said I was starting a new book. I had neglected, of course, to mention that I started reading another book, not writing one. And that book is The Power Brooker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. When Jane Jacobs began her famous The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she hit the reader at the start: “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.” While her attack was leveled at the whole field of planning at the time, her primary target was Robert Moses.

In these days and times, if you ask people to use single words they associate with “the city,” they’ll come up with words like, “crime,” “traffic,” “poverty,” “skyscrapers,” and so on. Some of these associations can be credited to Robert Moses, the man who built highways, parkways, bridges, playgrounds, and slum housing that even to this day resembles Pruitt-Igoe — only taller. He built the Long Island Expressway, also known as the world’s longest parking lot. He built the Cross-Bronx Expressway, which was followed almost immediately by the complete social breakdown of The Bronx — a phenomenon from which the community is still trying to recover, half a century later.

This book I’ve started (reading, that is) is a long book — more than 1000 pages — so it will likely be a while before you see another book review from me. I’m only 80 pages into it, but I’m hooked. It was recommended to me by so many people that I couldn’t ignore it. And so far, I’m happy to have gotten those recommendations.

There’s an interesting comment made in the AJC story, One crash every 2.8 minutes. The article talks about a recent ARC report on the safety (or lack) of Atlanta’s roads. It comes as no surprise that Atlanta is not a safe place to drive. After all, the prime goal of GDOT is to get traffic moving as smoothly as possible: treat drivers like children by making the roads “easy” to drive, remove trees that sit close to roads, widen the highways, play the constant game of bottleneck police, and so on. Traffic engineers are good at what they’re trained to do, even though they typically provide counterproductive results. They make it easier to drive faster, with more recklessness.

In comes a sliver of wisdom in the AJC article, though the wisdom is ignored everywhere else in the article — and in the attitudes of those interviewed for the article:

When it comes to injury and fatality rates, though, it’s rural counties such as Spalding and Walton that drift to the top. Safety officials say that rural crashes can be more serious because there’s less congestion and traffic lights to keep people from gaining speed.

The solution, you would think, would be to implement traffic calming measures in both urban and rural areas. Complete the streets! Instead, Georgia officials would rather repeat the mistakes of the past:

Cobb officials said that two of the five Cobb County intersections on the list had turn lanes added in 2005, and there should be fewer problems there now.

Apparently, Cobb Commissioners also could not foresee the consequences of building the East-West connector and flodding the corridor with single-use zones:

With his [Sam Olens, Cobb Commission Chairman] county’s growth — and the region’s — unforeseen problems are inevitable, he said, noting that East-West Connector was expected to carry up to 15,000 cars a day, but now carries about 50,000 in spots.

The Art Leadership League of GA will be presenting a forum for this year’s candidates for GA School Superintendent. It will take place this coming Monday, October 23, 7:00 p.m. at GA Tech’s Ferst Center for the Arts.

The facts about the benefits of arts education are well-documented. Show up and show your support for arts education in Georgia’s public schools!

It took me a little over a month to finish reading Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show by Geoffrey Nunberg. In many ways, this book deservedly gets placed in the same category as Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant! Both books are essentially about the ways the English language has itself changed over the past forty or so years to the benefit of conservatives (or, false conservatives, or neo-cons, or whatever label you want to slap on today’s politicians in power).

The bulk of Nunberg’s book is what the title says it is. He effectively breaks down how language changed over the past half-century:

After conducting focus-group studies among rural voters and disaffected Bush voters in several states in 2005, the Democracy Corp’s Karl Agne and Stanley Greenberg concluded that while voters see Democrats as being more on the side of the middle class and working Americans, they “only see this manifested in costly government social programs or political alliances with labor unions and minorities.”

Then too — and these are by no means mutually exclusive — a lot of voters simply find cultural issues more compelling than economic ones. That isn’t necessarily the same thing as being determined to vote one’s social views come hell or high water: these people simply find one set of issues more stirring or infuriating than the other.

The issue of culture comes up again and again throughout the book. The issue isn’t whether Americans are divided by culture. The issue is how conservatives tend to divide America by focusing on cultural issues — and by bribing voters with the promise of lower taxes.

Despite the promise of lower taxes, conservatives tend to promise a government that costs more — thanks to defense:

You can see the difference in the changed meaning of “support the troops.” During World War II, that means buying war bonds or going on scrap drives; since Vietnam it has required only backing the administration’s policy or wearing a lapel pin. Patriotism has never been as low-maintenance as it is now.

That doesn’t mean that the word patriotism has no content, but it’s not simply a question of devotion to one’s nation anymore. If that were all there was to it, it wouldn’t be a contested notion. What passes for “patriotism” these days is really a matter of values and style, of conveying “toughness,” and of subscribing to a particularly combative view of America’s role. In that sense, it’s merely another aspect of the familiar cultural politics of the right.

Somehow, a warped view of “culture” trumped substance. And the higher cost of combative patriotism only means higher taxes down the road. The promise of lower taxes for the sake of lower taxes can only be described as bribery.

In the final chapter, Nunberg wraps up with a brief prescription for some of the linguistic problems that currently plague the party. He recommended David Kusnet’s Speaking American as “required reading for liberals.” When Bill Clinton said, “I’m tired of seeing the people who work hard and play by the rules get the shaft,” it was the beginning of a story that more Democrats should be tellling. Rather than acting as a party centered around issues (”tax fairness, the budget deficit, health care, homeland security, corruption and electoral reform, education, Social Security and pension protection, energy, corporate power, and generic Republican incompetence”), Democrats can take those issues and wrap them in a neat package — a narrative.

If the Republicans can craft a narrative that referrs to the made-up culture wars, the conflict between “regular Americans” and the “liberal elite,” Democrats can craft a narrative, too — but one that is a little less disingenuous than the so-called culture wars.

A recent report by the American Academy of Pediatrics tells the story of increasing levels of stress among today’s teenagers. Too many kids in high school are too worried about getting into college — the “best college” — without first taking into account whether it’s the best college for them. One of AAP’s publications associated with the report explains the underlying cause and effect of the pressures laid upon today’s teenagers:

The most worrisome thing about this generation of driven students may be the fear of imperfection that’s being instilled in their psyches. This fear will stifle their creativity, impede their ability to experience joy, and ultimately interfere with their success.

Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the college experience, The Conference Board reports that today’s graduates are not ready for the workplace. The report makes a distinction between skills (Reading, Writing, Math, Science, etc.) and the ability to apply those skills (Critical Thinking, Teamwork/Collaboration, Leadership, Creativity/Innovation, etc.). The typical high school graduate is, according to the report, “deficient” in basic areas like Writing, Comprehension, and Math; “deficient” in important applied skills like Critical Thinking and Written Communications; “deficient” in the area of professionalism; and “adequate” in Technology, Diversity, and Teamwork.

College graduates, meanwhile, are slightly better prepared than high school graduates. The typical college graduate, however, remains “deficient” in Writing and Leadership.

Is this generation going to hell, or what?

Last week I was randomly approached by an employee of ABC News. She was filming for their Seen and Heard segment, a segment that gives viewers the opportunity to submit their own videos to offer their opinions on all sorts of different subjects. I have no idea whether anything I said aired, but some of the questions were extremely odd. The last question, “Who is the laziest person you know?” came entirely out of right field — as offended by the question as I was, I played it cool and said, “I can’t think of anyone.”

In any case, one other question posed to me was wrt the recent incidents of school violence that have been plastered all over the airwaves lately. “Will new security measures make schools any safer?” In the course of my answer, I conveyed that security measures by themselves would not make schools any safer. We need a more comprehensive solution that focuses on the whole experience of the public school. If we can begin to answer the question, “What will high school graduates have accomplished by the time they receive their diplomas?” we’ll be a large step toward increasing both the quality and safety of the public schools.

Would that experience involve attending some classes at a local college or univeristy? participating in community service? spending a month as an apprentice in a work environment? participating in a collaborative research project?

I recently interviewed Jim Hammond at the Gainesville Theatre Alliance for the Atlanta Performs Podcast. He offered a very interesting viewpoint. GTA is an alliance between two local colleges and the local community. Part of the program involves bringing professional actors and directors for the productions. In one particular case, a professional actor was brought in for a role in one of GTA’s major productions — this actor was off-book on the first day of rehearsal. By the next rehearsal, all the students were also off-book — not because it was required, but because they were inspired by the example set by the professional actor.

The experience gave these students hope.

While the “No Child Left Behind” program focuses on punishing entire schools for being unable to make their students pass a set of standardized tests, the real example set by the program is a negative lesson. While the intention of the program is to “make schools accountable,” the program also teaches a lesson to the students of public schools: fear failure. If you pass the tests, you get a pat on the back and no punishment. If you fail, you get punished.

In an environment of testing and learning “by the book,” there is no hope.

If current trends in public education are to be reversed, there are lessons to be learned in all these reports. There’s a certain age when children should no longer be treated like children — that happens when positive examples to follow (and chances to follow them) are in greater abundance than lectures and “accountability.”

Our public schools need to be places of hope and experience, not fear and testing.