Sales Tax Post Mortem

Sales Tax Post Mortem

In the midst of recession, right after income tax season, and in the wake of controversial city council actions (buh-bye Mike Lombardo), the most anti-sales tax city in the state recognized the flood relief need and battled to a de facto tie: a six vote win in Iowa City and a seven vote loss in Coralville.

Expect those results to hold. The chance that outstanding absentee ballots will flip things is slim in Iowa City and only theoretical in Coralville and Shueyville. Only three came in on Wednesday (all Iowa City), and those numbers diminish day by day.

Almost all of the unreturned ballots were sent out under the The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act ("UOCAVA" in election speak.) This law requires that overseas and military voters who request ballots with a Federal Post Card Application (FPCA) are automatically sent ballots for all elections through the next two general elections.

Put more simply: expatriates in Germany and soldiers in Afghanistan who requested ballots for the presidential election got their mail one day and found a ballot for a local election they'd never heard of. A few of those came back, but most didn't and won't.

Recounts, if any, are also unlikely to change the results. Last year's conservation bond recount shifted a net six votes in an electorate roughly six times the size of yesterday's. In the last Iowa City election this close, the 1999 city council race, an administrative re-feed (not a formal recount) changed the margin from three to two in a similar-sized electorate. (Trivia: this is the closest Coralville election of any type in at least the last 30 years.)

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Direct comparisons to the 1999 sales tax vote are hard because the absentees were counted differently: six cities lumped together ten years ago, broken out by city yesterday. The best we can do is use the 1999 polling place numbers. Despite coming just short, Coralville swung even more dramatically to the Yes side than Iowa City did, from 86 percent No to seven votes short. Iowa City shifted from 31 percent Yes to 50.

It was the flood survivors themselves who put the tax over the top in Iowa City, with a three to one win in hardest hit precinct 4 (Manville Heights, City Park and the Peninsula). Lefty precincts 18 and 21 and Oaknoll-dominated precinct 1 (Save Roosevelt School) also topped 60 percent. The strongest numerically significant opposition was in the usual working class Tory southeast side belt of 12, 14 and 15, never friendly to spending issues. (Student precincts had high No percentages but miniscule totals.)

The specifics of the projects, and the lefty argument against tax regressivity that the opponents cynically picked up, likely swayed more votes than the blunt axe Taxes Suck argument. In fact, in the one place where tax cuts were specifically on the table, the rural area, the tax lost badly.

The rural county is clearly in a different place than the cities; the tax cut argument lacked credibility because everyone knows a jail is in the works. If that's ever going to happen, Iowa City and the University need to take some responsibility, both financially and with changes to their War On Young People law enforcement policies.

The Democratic Central Committee, under weak new chair Dennis Roseman, chose to be irrelevant in this election. But the legislative wing of the party, and individual Democratic activists from the prior Brian Flaherty administration, were key players. The traditional left, regressivity-based opposition to sales taxes emerged late, was not united, and was not part of the organized Ax The Tax campaign.

In the 1999 sales tax election, when conservatives joined the left in the organized opposition, the defeat was overwhelming. But in 2009, the No Regressive Taxes and the Taxed Enough Already arguments were so disconnected that the Press-Citizen ran two separate No guest opinions last Saturday: Deb Thornton from the right and Jeff Cox from the left. The Yes piece was a united and co-signed message from Yes For All co-chairs Sue Dvorsky and Steve McGuire.

I happened to travel by Cox's home over the weekend; he lives on a busy street and usually advertises his thoughts with a yard sign. But the front yard was bare. Either the No message was so clearly Tea Party that he didn't like the signs, or the No outreach didn't pull in progressive opponents.

Could a campaign where Thornton and Thayer and Cox and Carsner were on the same team, with a cohesive voice, have flipped seven votes? And how many people voted Yes just to spite `em?

Favre to Vikings?

Favre to Vikings?

It takes a lot to distract me on an election day but the latest by the drama king qualifies:

Minnesota Vikings head coach Brad Childress and quarterback Brett Favre plan to meet at an undisclosed location later this week to discuss the possibility of the former Packers and Jets quarterback renouncing his retirement from the NFL to play the 2009 season with the Vikings, according to a source with direct knowledge of discussions between the two parties...

Early Votes Down in Johnson County

Early Votes Down from `99, `07 in Johnson County

UPDATE 3: 3:00 (last turnout update before polls close) shows 4774 or 5.47%. Still in between 1999 and 2007, but edging closer to the higher 1999 number.

Coralville has pulled ahead of 1999 and 2007 in numbers (not in percentage). Iowa City's still in between. For the rural, the three years are bunched really close.
Turnout details are here, and results here after 8.

UPDATE 2: 2467 at 11:00 for 2.83%. Still ahead of 2007 and behind 1999. In numbers, today is about halfway between. In percentage, closer to the low-end `07 than the high-end `99, because registration is high in a post-president year.

UPDATE 1: 9:00 turnout 1263 (1.45%). In numbers and percentage, ahead of 2007 but behind 1999.

Between the icky looking weather and the low early voting, looks like it could be a slow day today. 3050 early ballots were requested through the end of business yesterday with 2756 returned. That's down from 3834 in the 2007 SILO vote and 3806 in the 1999 local option sales tax.

This year's numbers are a bit inflated because of changes in overseas voting law. Most people who requested an overseas ballot for the presidential election were automatically sent a ballot for this one, which wasn't the law in 1999. It was the law in 2007, but we were coming off a governor's election that year and not a presidential. Overseas ballots account for most of the 294 that aren't back. Those earlier elections were also in a smaller universe of registered voters.

So it looks like today will be decided by whichever side has the every election type of voters, and that of course could be you. As usual on election day, my thoughts will be intermittent and very late.

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Linux Monday Jaunty Reviews

Linux Monday: The Laptop and the Jackalope

After an unbelievable eight weeks and a day in repair, the laptop is back. The entire motherboard and CPU were fried, so it's basically a new computer. (The actual repairs were completed long ago; my techies shipped it to an outside vendor for a warranty-covered job and the idea I get is that they had a $$$ dispute and my machine was held hostage.)

So I did the upgrade from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04 Friday night, and it appeared to go smoothly. But as soon as I had time to sit down and try stuff I found two issues.

Problem 1) No. Sound. At. All. That's one of the raps on Ububtu setup and Linux in general: sound is tricky. And as someone with a massive music library, that matters to me. (It's worth the effort to me to avoid the DRM issues with Mac and Windows; we choose our tradeoffs.)

In an effort to solve Problem 1 I downloaded the full CD and tried to burn it when I found:

Problem 2) Intermittent recognition and burning of CDs. I wasted several blanks before I succeeded. Then the Jaunty disk worked in other computers but showed up on the laptop as a blank. So I burned another Jaunty CD, on another computer (in, er, another operating system, sorry) and this time was able to boot from the CD on my laptop.

As the CD boot completed I heard the happy drumbeat of Ubuntu, which told me that the problem was with my install, rather than my hardware (being fresh off of hardware issues I wanted to rule that out). So the next step will probably be a clean install.

Jaunty has a migration utility that will let me keep settings; I tested that on the number two machine first. It popped up, but only offered to import my settings from an old Windows install. Perhaps that was because I'd already installed Jaunty through the upgrade process. Don't know if it would have imported my settings if I'd still had 8.10 installed.

I tried to explain all this to my wife, who has a vested interest in me not banging my head, but her response was, "John, as soon as you say 'Linux' all I hear is 'Linux bla bla bla.'"



The big news in Linux Land this week is that in April's monthly Market Share statistics, Linux topped 1 percent for the first time ever. Hey, that's a bigger share of the vote than Bob Barr got... Windows has dropped to an all-time low of 87.9 percent, meaning one of eight Internet users are using something else. Lots of little systems are nibbling away, like iPhone and iPod Touch.

Other than that, the talk is still Jaunty Jackalope. Several reviews:

Information Week: "With each release to both the left and the right of the decimal point, Canonical's Ubuntu shapes up all the more as the Linux distribution for the end user. Critics are calling it as slick and seamless as the Mac's OS X, and it's come that much closer to being a one-for-one replacement for the Windows operating system as anything yet seen.

That said, Ubuntu isn't without its pitfalls and gotchas -- as well as its hidden delights..."

Tech Republic tries it on an aging machine: "It’s faster than any distribution I’ve seen. It’s more stable than any other Ubuntu release to date. Everything is exactly where you would think it SHOULD be. And it all works perfectly, seamlessly, beautifully."

PC World: Are you impatient? Do you want your computer to work when you're ready to work? While Ubuntu 9.04's no instant-on operating system, like the embedded Linux SplashTop, it is mighty darn fast.

How fast? Well, I didn't see a boot time of 17.5 seconds like some people have, but I was up and working in 41-seconds, which for a box from 2006 and a conventional hard drive is pretty darn impressive."

But Tux Radar misses an old feature: "In the old days, a tray icon would appear with a bubble telling users that updates were available. But as of 9.04, that's been dropped in favour of Update Manager automatically appearing on the screen, only to be minimised. The thinking is that this makes Update Manager harder to ignore, presumably because it's more annoying now.

If people were ignoring the system updates bubble, couldn't you just have done something with the new notifications system to make security updates clearer - something like "Critical updates are available for your computer - click here to install them now." Then don't ask any further questions: if they click that, install the updates straight away rather than showing Update Manager."

My guess is these reviews are of fresh installs, and that the problems I'm facing are by-products of the upgrade install I did. I'll let you know.

Replacing Boswell By The Numbers

Replacing Boswell By The Numbers

Congressional vote rating site Progressive Punch has added a new measurement to its cluster of counts that illustrates even more clearly why Leonard Boswell neds to be replaced though retirement or primary.

The new measure is called "Progressive Score vs. District Tilt," and it looks at the partisan leanings of a district compared to the member's voting record. It's a five star system, with more stars being better.

Progressive Punch argues that a member from a strong Democratic district should be voting progressive at least 83.33 percent of the time. The scale drops to 70% for a member from a deep red district. This give a break to someone like Timothy Bishop of New York, who has only an 85.5% progressive record but comes from a swing seat. He gets all five stars, whereas Debbie Wasserman Schultz, with a similar record but a solid Dem district, gets only three.

The scale tends to lose meaning near the top, with the usual cluster of urban districts. Only 29 members get all five stars; even Speaker Pelosi gets only four.

Things get more interesting as you move down the scale. Iowa's top member is Dave Loebsack at number 128, near the middle of the House Democratic caucus. He has a lifetime score 0f 80.25 on "critical progressive votes" from a strong Democratic district. Punch thinks he should be at 83.33, so Loebsack's score is -3.05 for a two star "tolerable."

Bruce Braley is number 154. He's at -7.28 for a one star "intolerable." A harsh description, but even Dennis Kucinich rates only an "acceptable" three stars. The number is what's significant.

And by the numbers, Leonard Boswell is near the bottom of the Democratic list, number 194 of 221 ranked Democrats (freshmen aren't listed). With a Leaning Democratic district, Boswell should be at 80 percent progressive. Instead, his lifetime record on crucial votes is only 64.06, for a score of -15.96.

But if you put Leonard into Steve King's district, where he lived before he carpetbagged into Des Moines, without changing his voting behavior (which he should), the bar for Boswell drops from the 80 percent mark to 70 percent. That moves his score up from a -16 to a -6 and his rank up to about 150th, better than Braley. Still a harsh one star, but even Progressive Punch acknowledges that “'intolerable' members from Strong Republican districts probably aren’t worth fighting with."

But intolerable members from good Democratic districts are worth the fight. Braley may just need a nudge from time to time, but Boswell is a lost cause. This measuring system, more than anything else I've found, explains plainly why Leonard Boswell needs replacement. Iowa 3 is electing a member who votes like someone from a deep red seat like Stephanie Herseth Sandlin of South Dakota or Chet Edwards of Texas. Des Moines doesn't have to settle for a Blue Dog. They should be able to sustain someone with an 80 score like Robert Wexler or Kendrick Meek of Florida or... lookee here, Dave Loebsack.

One interesting quirk of the scoring: Steve King is actually not Iowa's worst member under this system, because his district is so awful. He ranks at number 300, but Tom Latham, from a swing district, is number 368, or number 8 from the bottom, with a whopping -75 points. Latham is seen as "more moderate" because he's not prone to King's type of rhetorical excess, but his actual voting record is just as bad.

Iowa Marriage Tourism Begins

Big Gay Wedding Bus Equals Tourists for Iowa City

It's only Day Five of Iowa marriage equality (or the Gaypocalypse if you prefer) and I'm already so used to the idea that I completely forgot that the Big Gay Wedding Bus from Missouri was coming to Iowa City today.

The Johnson County recorder's office issued marriage licenses to 17 Missouri couples who chartered a bus from St. Louis. Iowa is the only one of the four marriage equality states that issues licenses to out of state couples. (Note: the New Hampshire legislature passed marriage equality this week; the Democratic governor's signature would make it the fifth state.)

The couples had sent their information to Johnson County on Monday, this satisfying the three day waiting period. They were proceeding straight from the recorder's office to a local Unitarian church for immediate weddings.

"Has everyone met their minister yet?" groom Scott Emanuel called out to the couples, gathering for a group photo in front of "The River" wall sculpture in the Administration Building lobby. Emanuel and co-groom Ed Reggi organized the bus trip.

A call to smile and say cheese for the photo was met with responses of both "cheese!" and "Iowa City!" Why Iowa City? "Who wouldn't pick Iowa City?" said local resident Joan Benson, who helped the Missouri organizers with local logistics.

"Everyone we talked to said, 'you've got to go to Iowa City'," said Reggi. "And the feeling we got, walking off the bus and being greeted by Mayor Regenia Bailey, it was way above what we had hoped."

The cloud to this silver lining is that Emanuel and Reggi's marriage won't be recognized back home in Missouri, which passed a constitutional amendment defining marriage as one man and one woman in 2004. Reggi said that could be changed if a new amendment is passed or if federal courts overturn the 2004 amendment.

(Pics later if they turned out.)

Libraries, Wiis and Pennies

Libraries, Wiis and Pennies

My boys love their Wii. They got it for Christmas of `07 and it just came back from repairs. They're playing a game that they checked out at the Iowa City Public Library. (Our family nicknames is "Füü" - pronounced "foo" as in bar or Fighters, because Koni called it that once and we thought it was funny.)

You could make fun of quality of life issues. You could say that you should pay for all that stuff out of your own pocket. Want a book? Want a game? Go buy one.

Public expenditures on Wii games have been a bone of contention for the Ax The Tax forces, but modern libraries have all sorts of non-print materials. Music, movies, computer software, artwork, toys, and, yes, games.

The games and movies pull my kids into the library, but you know what else they get when they get there? Books. My nine year old is devouring the "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" series, and I can't wait till he starts reading Harry Potter and finds out all the stuff that was left out of the movies.

Libraries were among the very first public expenditures in America. And those quality of life things like books and, yes, games, are less accessible to those with lower incomes. It's funny to hear Republicans cynically bringing up the regressivity argument while they at the same time 1) blocked action on ending federal deductibility, which would have made Iowa's tax code much more progressive; and 2) bashing the city for quality of life programs like Wii games and concerts and parks and yes, even sculptures.

Those so-called "extras" aren't what's on the ballot Tuesday. But the criticism is revealing. Conservatives would remove the great equalizers, the joys of the public square, and confine the "extras" to those who could pay out of pocket.