Tax Reform Commission Chairman John SharpIf you think the upcoming Special Legislative session will be short, sweet and productive – think again. Republicans are split and Democrats are happy they are and not inclined to save the GOP's bacon.

It appears a majority of GOP lawmakers want nothing to do with their own governor’s school finance plan whipped up by Democrat John Sharp and a band of Perry’s largest contributors. Why? That plan calls for new taxes (business activity), higher taxes (cigarettes), and partial use of a surplus. Worse, they say, the new tax will fall wholly on business and therefore be ripe for regular increases because the average Texan won’t know they are paying it (they hold that businesses don’t pay taxes they either pass them on to consumers or owners eat them).

Many Republican activists are appalled by the Sharp plan. Their preference is to use the projected $4.3 billion general revenue surplus (and growing) to replace local school district revenues raised from property taxes. This would lower the space between what school districts raise and the state’s cap on what they can raise. (The Texas Supreme Court has ruled that the cap creates a de facto and unconstitutional state property tax.) They would leave the fundamental Robin Hood system alone, but no one would have to defend new and higher taxes.

Many Democrats counter there is no surplus and to a point they have a point. The liberal Center for Public Policy Priorities notes that of the $4.3 billion surplus $1.8 billion is already earmarked for education and another half billion comes from gubernatorial vetoes of money the legislature wanted to spend elsewhere. They also note state appropriations usually come up short in areas like Medicaid and prisons, that the “Rainy Day Fund” is virtually exhausted, and that the Bush Administration has failed to deliver compensation for hurricane related expenses and that according to Gov. Perry himself these could cost $2 billion or more.

Where they may not have a point is their desire to restore what they see as “devastating” cuts to fundamental services since Republicans took control in 2003. These cuts can also be seen as adjusting spending to match revenue and trimming past waste but that’s another debate.

There is the problem of the future. Many GOP legislators say that if the current tax system is producing surpluses those should be spent on education or returned to the people. Democrats counter that increases to cover only increased population and inflation for the next budget cycle will consume virtually the entire surplus or at least require a tax increase if it is spent.

The biggest problem is that spending the entire $4.3 billion on property tax reduction won’t even hit the goal of a one third cut in property taxes and would leave nothing for reform. It would likely be a one-time fix not a permanent solution and that too could defeat a lot of incumbents.

[What I find amazing is the refusal of conservatives to follow their own reasoning: if you agree businesses don’t pay taxes, people do, and that a tax solely on business is too easy to raise then a flat rate personal income tax constitutionally dedicated to public education is the obvious answer. A low rate could cut school property taxes all the way to zero and take that funding source off the table for general government forever. Polls clearly show voters would buy this.]

The choice is between the Sharp/Perry plan and using the surplus.  Using the surplus is not a solution it’s a dodge and maybe a fiscal disaster.  It may be the Supreme Court won’t even buy it.  It is far from perfect but at least the Sharp/Perry plan is a real solution.

A story in the March 15^th edition of the Ft. Worth Star Telegram entitled "UNT professor, students believe contact with dead can aid healing" describes how a tenured professor at the University of North Texas Jan Holden holds seances and tries to conjure up the dead with her "graduate students" at UNT. Ms. Holden is the coordinator of the counseling program at the University of North Texas College of Education. Thus, she teaches future educators who counsel students in our public school system. According to the article, the UNT professor and her graduate students "believe that ghosts don’t haunt, they heal".

When asked by the reporter whether this was an appropriate area of research by a Texas university, Professor Holden responded as follows: "There is just no basis to say this is not a legitimate area of research. Thousands of people have had after-death communications, and probably what’s most hurtful is a culture that doesn’t prepare people for these experiences. I have no reason not to believe it’s real." Holden has been a professor at UNT since 1988.

UNT Professor Jan Holden facilitates these "induced after death communications" or IADCs. Ms. Holden is quoted as saying that the UNT group uses a technique called "eye movement desensitization and reprocessing" as a "steppingstone into an IADC".

The Telegram story says Ms. Holden and her graduate students traveled to Chicago last year to study under Allan Botkin, a "pioneer" and "contact-the dead guru".

The UNT professor will hold her next "induced after-death communication workshop" in April at the Denton Unitarian Universalist Fellowship church.

It is incredible that someone with these bizarre beliefs is a tenured professor at one of our leading state universities and is teaching young people (who will be future counselors in our public schools) such nonsense. All of this is being done at taxpayer expense at a time of the declining quality of education in our public school system. Surely, the administrators at the University of North Texas should have better sense than to have education professors at their University promote such dubious propositions to the students they teach – paid for by the taxpayers of Texas.

To read the entire Ft. Worth Star Telegram story, link here. (Registration required)

Democracy is the product we’re marketing around the globe, under Bush administration auspices. Not without some sales resistance.

Take Baghdad. Around and around the customers circle, kicking the tires, giving each other the evil eye; if not blowing each other up -- the ultimate act of mistrust.

The reputed blessings of government of the people, by the people, for the people make less impression there, it seems, than many Americans had hoped or expected.

Should Americans really wonder? For more than two centuries we've been in the democracy business. To say the least we haven't worked out all the kinks. You know as much by reading or watching the news. Nothing in our public affairs right now seems orderly or tidy or moderate or measured.

On Monday, Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin called for Senate censure of President Bush, who says Feingold, broke the law by allowing security-oriented eavesdropping on certain telephone calls. If censure fails, there's always impeachment, a process being mulled by Congressman John Conyers of New York.

Earlier a deal to allow a Persian Gulf company's involvement in the running of key U. S. ports set off political explosions. Right off the bat, commentators called the deal a threat to U.S. security. Democrats and Republicans alike seconded the motion. So how did they know the deal was a threat to security? They -- um -- inferred it. Arabs plus ports equals terrorism.

Never mind that these particular Arabs were proven friends of the U.S., or that port security was to remain in American hands, or that no one had had time or opportunity to hear the deal explained in detail by those who negotiated it. The First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution guarantees the right to express the most irrational opinions, rationality being something the free marketplace decides for itself. You acknowledge as much even while watching the Arabs pull out of the port deal rather than submit to continued battering by those (e.g., Lou Dobbs, Michael Savage, John Kerry), who seemingly knew all they cared to know about the deal.

Meanwhile the Katrina backlash continues A force of nature wrecks an American city, not exactly for the first time. (The centennial next month of the San Francisco earthquake may refresh recollections about Mother Nature's mean spells.)

Precisely what the White House should have done to avert, or now should do to repair, this disaster matters less to an army of critics and commentators than that all this stuff happened on George W. Bush's watch, when Iraq wasn't going very well. How, please, could Bush not be to blame? Or, as Tim McGraw, the country music plunker and noted constitutional authority, informed us last week, "There's no reason why someone can't go down there who's supposed to be the leader of the free world ...and say: 'I'm giving you a job to do, and I'm not leaving here until it's done...and if it's not done by the time I get back on my plane, then you're fired..." Right -- tell that to the guy tasked already with fending off censure and knocking heads together in Iraq.

Sound and sounder seems Winston Churchill's trenchant witticism concerning democracy: the worst form of government except for all the others. Personal expectations can foul up the process. What? My viewpoint doesn't override yours? Why, you scum-bum! Take off those glasses and let's settle this...! A point we regularly forget or just plain ignore about democracy is that democratic success depends on habits like individual self-restraint, a certain civic spirit, and comparative unity in times of challenge and danger.

Time like these? Certainly life hasn't always seemed this hard. What irony! Even as we merchandise democracy to the newly liberated, the liberators show themselves less and less adept at use of the product. We fight, we fume; we slam, we slime. It's enough to make certain people think Mr. Hussein probably had something going for him, before the American warmongers so rudely took the bullets and butcher knives away from him.