Posted 11:21 PM by Floyd

The Mercury News published two items on its opinion page today that made me smile. First was Ron Unz's letter to the editor:

I appreciated your running O. Ricardo Pimentel's rather ignorant and personally insulting column condemning my efforts to eradicate bilingual education throughout America (Opinion, Nov. 20). The column effectively illustrates the severe weaknesses of my opponents.

Pimentel casually remarks that ``the facts favor bilingual education,'' but he never explains just what facts he is considering. In California, the test scores of over a million immigrant students have roughly doubled in the four years since Proposition 227 mostly replaced bilingual education with English immersion, but they have shown relatively little improvement in those districts that stubbornly kept their bilingual programs. Although this has been enough to make an English immersion convert of the founder of the California Association of Bilingual Educators, perhaps Pimentel regards these results as pure coincidence.

More troubling are Pimentel's lack of basic journalistic skills. For example, the main theme of his column is that money almost totally dominates political campaigns, with the higher spending side supposedly winning a remarkably precise 97.1 percent of the time. As his central example, he claims that our English immersion initiative campaign in Arizona outspent its opposition by about a factor of two, resulting in our November 2000 victory.

If Pimentel had bothered spending even five minutes consulting the Web site of the Arizona secretary of state, he would have discovered that we were actually outspent in advertising by about $500,000 to $40,000 in that election, nevertheless winning by a 27-point landslide.

Similarly, he fails to note that just two weeks ago a nearly identical measure won by an even wider 36 point margin in liberal Massachusetts, despite our not spending a single dollar on advertising to counter the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent by our opposition.

Opinion columnists are entitled to voice their opinions. But when the facts they cite are riddled with complete error, their apparent journalistic laziness raises serious questions about their professionalism and hence the value of their writings.

Preach it, brother!

There was also a history of how the Proposition 13 tax revolt came to pass. This article was remarkable because it criticized Prop 13, but only obliquely. Hardly a week goes by without the Merc criticizing Prop 13 for depriving the state of California of much-needed tax dollars. You would think from reading the Merc that property taxes were California's only source of revenue, and that Prop 13 allowed each homeowner to send his jar of spare change to Sacramento.

In reality California is rapacious when collecting taxes. Anyone who has bought a home in the last decade is paying 1.1% on sky-high property values. Sales taxes are the highest I've ever seen -- 8.75% in most Bay Area counties. And there is an income tax with a top rate of 9.3%. California's government is awash in money. Of course it doesn't have as much as it "needs" -- no government ever does.