Daily Score Blog

[Note: This is part of a series.]

I've suggested before that the so-called "property rights" initiatives in the Northwest are not exactly a grassroots movement. They're ordered and funded by reclusive networks of donors and directors, many from back east, who prize their anonymity. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're bad policy. But it deserves, I think, the skeptical arch of an eyebrow.

Enter a fascinating bit of investigative journalism from... Nebraska (free registration req'd). The Omaha World-Herald attempts to unravel the tangle of front groups and psuedonymous funders behind a proposed amendment to Nebraska's constitution. That task leads the reporters to at least 9 states and a welter of organizations, many of whom are also behind the property initiatives in California, Idaho, Montana, and Washington.

You've got to read the article (and accompanying flow chart) to really get the gist of the tangled web. It's a bit like reading Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. You'll be scratching your head and re-reading it if you want to make any sense of why a New York developer is heading up three different organizations that dump money another organization that is in turn funding initiatives in places like Nebraska and California.

Why all the secrecy? And shouldn't voters have a right to know who, exactly, is funding ballot initiatives in their states?  

Anyway, the World-Herald article is helpful, but it's much too short to do justice to its subject matter. Over at the Boregasm blog you can find more than enough well-research investigation to make your head spin. Personally, I'm about ready to put on a tinfoil hat and start muttering about who really shot JFK.

I can't help thinking that I just made a mistake.  A 15 ton mistake, to be precise.

Let me explain.

My older daughter is about to start kindergarten next week.  And for a variety of reasons that I won't get into here, we've chosen a school for her that's about 5 miles away from our home.  The other alternative was our neighborhood school, which is a little under a mile and a half away.

When I look at my family's anticipated commute, our choice of schools will add at least 15 extra miles of driving each and every school day.  (By the way, that's more than twice as much as Alan's family drives, total, in a typical day.)

Now, if we wind up sending both our kids to that school until they're out of 8th grade -- which is a distinct possibility, if we like the school -- we could be stuck with those 15 extra miles per day, 180 days per year, for the next 12 years.   We'll carpool with other families if possible; but we'll have to drive if it's not.

So in the big picture, one single decision -- sending our daughter to a school we really like -- could increase our family's overall oil consumption by about 40 barrels over 12 years, and our climate-warming emissions by at least 15 tons. 

But it gets worse.