Stewart - The Rise of the Political Machines

[realFedUp]

-I hope some California writers send their
letters to the Times regarding Ms. Stewart's
lack of knowledge and insight on certain
points she made in this op-ed column. If
Ms. Stewart is the best California political voice for
the NYTimes, no wonder they don't understand
our issues.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/20/opinion/20stewart.html

June 20, 2005
Rise of the Political Machines
By JILL STEWART
Sacramento — Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, may have electrified his supporters by deciding to hold a special election in November on his reforms for electoral redistricting, the state budget and teacher tenure. The trouble is that Mr. Schwarzenegger may have electrified his detractors even more, and his needless rush to enact his worthy measures through a $45 million electoral circus may doom them in the end.

snip

Another proposal is a budget-cutting tool that prevents spending from exceeding the average of the preceding three years. In lean years it will prompt modest, budgetwide cuts rather than the usual automatic growth. Known as the Live Within Our Means measure, it is vociferously opposed by the education lobby. The state schools superintendent, Jack O'Connell, a serial exaggerator, insists that it would eviscerate school financing.

snip

Mr. Schwarzenegger's third reform, and the one that seems most likely to get voter approval, would give teachers tenure after five years on the job rather than the current two years. While this is sensible enough - most teachers with only two years of experience are probably just learning how to control their classes - it isn't real reform. It avoids the real problem with "certified" teachers: far too many get useless degrees with little useable knowledge, leaving them incapable of teaching math, history, reading or writing. If Mr. Schwarzenegger wants better quality tenured teachers, he will have to take on California's dismal teacher colleges.

continued

[robertarctor]

1. Jill Stewart is in the New York Times?!?

Yikes.

I'd never heard of Stewart until four and a half years ago, when she was hired by the incoming editor at the Sacramento News & Review, who wanted a more "counter-intuitive" point of view than the one provided by longtime state-beat political columnist Bill Bradley, whom the editor axed when he brought Stewart on board. The editor was prone to snark in editorial meetings on "lefty-left conspiracy theorists," and Stewart's GOP-friendly biweekly column was just the ticket to provide a more fair-and-balanced slant to that particular weekly.

Stewart's slightly disingenuous shtick seems to be to start her columns with a caveat along the lines of "I'm a registered Democrat, but I'm so fed up with the lefty-left conspiracy theorists that are turning my party into a gaggle of Bolsheviks," before proceeding to lay out whatever the week's official California Republican Party talking points might be. This, of course, is quite okay, provided you have no problem with, say, laws that allow corporations to write their own pollutant-emission rules being called the "Clear Skies Act," or laws that relax rules against clear-cutting National Forest land being labeled the "Healthy Forests Initiative."

Stewart's columns often resemble those from San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders, and it's weird to see Stewart in the Chronicle alongside Saunders in sort of a one-two punch of "registered Democrat" wingnuts, which probably wouldn't have happened if the De Young family still owned that paper.

Here's an index of Stewart's columns at the News & Review: http://www.newsreview.com/issues/sacto/authors/jillstewart.asp

Does Stewart have the same relationship with the CRP as Armstrong Williams had with the Bush Administration? You be the judge.

[realFedUp]

2. well, somehow she fooled someone at the Times

after fooling many on the West coast.

[FrannyD]

3. Saw that too.

I, too couldn't believe that hack was in the NYT. Just shows how downhill they've really gone.