In today's pages: Oil, menthols, polls
Columnist Tim Rutten puts bluntly his opinion of the Los Angeles Unified School District:
Every day, the Los Angeles Unified School District fails its tens of thousands of ambitious students, dedicated teachers and hardworking principals in so many ways that it's difficult to imagine how its elephantine bureaucracy could shamble into some new outrage.
Difficult, but not impossible, because the LAUSD runs this city's schools about like the generals run Myanmar.
County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky has a proposal for reviving King-Harbor Hospital. Dickinson College's Crispin Sartwell discusses the demographic tricks behind political polling. And 27-year-old Erica Sackin says tax rebates won't help her in-the-red generation.
The editorial board encourages Bush to veto a bill that would stop filling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and wonders why Congress is allowing the banning of all flavored cigarettes except the most popular kind, menthols. The board also says environmentalists have more work to do to prevent sprawl on Tejon Ranch.
On the letters page, readers question Nick Turse's Op-Ed linking the purchase of consumer products like Krispy Kreme and Pepsi to supporting Iraq war profits. Thomas J. Weiss of Ft. Hood, Texas, says, "Nick Turse's Op-Ed article has to be one of the most ridiculously alarmist articles I've ever read."
Regarding Crispin Sartwell's discussion on political polling, this is what is interesting:
Researchers have found when people are polled with the question 'are you stupid,' the results are consistently around 5% affirmative (Who are these people?).
But you look at the world and the mess we are in, you can't deny the number should be higher, much higher.
So, either people in power, thus in more powerful positions to influence the state of things, possess greater amount of stupidity, or there is something really wrong with our polling methods.
Now, the former can't be correct because worldwide, stupidity is, like fractal geometry, reproduced in similary ways at all levels, from global organizations like the IMF down to individuals in the most remote corners of the world.
So, that leaves only the validity of our polling methods themselves in doubt. Apparently, people don't tell, can't tell or don't want to tell what they really think.
Posted by: MyLessThanPrimeBeef | May 14, 2008 at 04:40 PM