Voting in California today

There are elections today in California. Some of them are the regular assortment of scattered special elections, runoffs, etc. Those are all location-specific; no statewide offices are at stake. There are several propositions, however, 1A through 1F. They are mostly dealing with the budget - that would be the dysfunctional California state budget that is a huge mess in many ways.

I am a hardcore political junkie, but I have been trying to avoid this one. The cause is not hard to figure out; California law requires a two-thirds majority to pass the budget. Republicans, who are in the minority and probably will be for the foreseeable future, dig in their heels and resist any kind of compromise on cutting spending and/or raising taxes. It doesn't help that our governor is a Republican; there is very little love lost between him and the Republicans in the legislature. Most of them consider him a RINO (Republican In Name Only).

We have a massive budget deficit that I have been trying hard not to think about. Most of the propositions are band-aids over this mess. I voted for most of them, because we have to fund certain things. But I really didn't want to.

Democrats and Republicans are basically playing chicken. Neither wants to blink first. Democrats don't want to cut spending, and Republicans don't want to raise taxes. Republicans think they can win this because they hate government already, so they figure if the state goes off a cliff, they will be proved right.

I, of course, think Republicans are being stupid. A large majority of Californians are Democrats; this sure ain't gonna make them feel better about the Republican party. Republicans probably think that they're well-positioned to hold onto the governor's office in 2010, because they have a couple of very rich candidates running. But Arnold is only there because of a quirk of history. He won election because Gray Davis was one of the least charismatic politicians in California. Then Arnold won reelection because his next competitor - I don't even remember the guy's name - was even worse. Arnold is not just the most famous Republican governor in the country, he is one of the most famous Republican governors in the history of the country. If these initiatives fail, which it looks like they will, he will look even more like a failure than he already does, and he ain't doing well. This will be yet another black mark on the Republican party.

I think the Republican Party has miscalculated what will happen if too many things really do get cut. I think a lot of anger is going to boil over, and it is going to be directed at them.

Polls close in less than 10 minutes. Turnout is expected to be extremely low. We live in interesting times. I think I'm going to be checking out Calitics.com a little more often for the next few months.

California Has A Budget - Barely

The state of California finally passed a budget a couple of days ago. It's not a pretty sight; there are lots of cuts, and some increases in taxes. Republicans fought the taxes very hard, and demanded cuts in social services and education. For example, the California State University system (which is the second-tier system, below the University of California, but above community colleges) is going to lose 10,000 students. That's just mind-boggling.

Apparently the Democratic leaders in the Assembly and Senate worked together well, which is good. Arnold did a reasonably decent job, but he's also part of the problem; he slashed the vehicle license fee when he came into office, which is part of why we're in the mess that we're in. Arnold has a seriously dysfunctional relationship with most of the Republican party. He doesn't like them, and they don't like him. He's very much a RINO (Republican In Name Only). I think could have been a very good governor if he had had political experience before he was elected. As it is, he's been learning on the job, which has not been an entirely positive experience for the citizens of California. He also doesn't really have a base to mobilize.

Republicans hate paying taxes because they don't see themselves as getting anything in return. They see taxes as going to support poor people in the inner cities. They see money for education going for liberal professors who are critical of Republicans. They see money for drug rehabilitation going to criminals who threw away their chances to be good citizens, and now only deserve jail.

Not all Republicans think this way, obviously, but enough of the ones in the California legislature do to wreak havoc on the state budgeting process. These idiots even negotiated some tax cuts for businesses. That's just absurd. Tax cuts for businesses when we are cutting education? If I were a responsible business owner, I would be furious. I would like a tax cut to hire new people, but what I really need are educated employees. And educated customers who have enough money to buy my products.

A big part of the problem is that the state has become almost ungovernable. A two-thirds majority is required to pass the budget. There are some good leaders in the legislature, but they're very new; Karen Bass, the Speaker, has only been in that position since May. Why? Because of that utterly idiotic idea, term limits. I think term limits is one of the stupidest ideas in the history of politics, but we're stuck with them for now. We don't have the leaders that we used to, guys who had been around for a long time and who could broker deals quickly. Term limits become a self-fulfilling prophecy; voters are angry at their legislators, so they impose term limits, which limits their legislators ability to do their jobs, which makes the voters even angrier. Someone needs to put a stop to this madness.

There may be some good things to come out of this. As Rahm Emanuel says, "Never waste a good crisis." One of the reasons this was finally passed was that one state senator, Abel Maldonado, traded his vote for a promise to open up primaries. It would mean that the top two vote-getters in a primary, regardless of party, would face off in a general election. This takes the power out of the hands of the parties, and puts it in the hands of voters. The hope is that it will reward more moderate candidates, because independent voters would be more likely to vote for them. The parties, of course, hate it.

This is yet another - how many more of these do we need? - example of Republicans failing to come to terms with the exhaustion of their anti-tax ideology. Republicans used to be the party of good management. They have long since abandoned that. They aren't managing, they aren't governing, they're just reacting. Our next governor, let us pray, will be a Democrat with even bigger Democrat majorities. Never waste a good crisis. Particularly if the crisis is in your opposition's electoral strategy.

Great stuff in the LA Times

I have a backlog of very cool articles that I found in the LA Times over the past couple of weeks. Instead of posting about them individually, I'm going to put them all in one post. Hopefully this works.

First, some nostalgia for the Baseball Encyclopedia, published in 1969. An effort to set the record straight about history and records, it wasn't entirely successful; some things are lost to history. The book itself, however, made a bit of history: it was "the first American trade book to be typeset entirely by computer." This review also resolved, for me, the question of asterisks next to records: no. Moral debates and records should be kept separate for their separate purposes:

It is the job of the scholar, not the record keeper, to provide context to the game's narrative; an unadulterated statistical register is critical to that task.

On the Op-Ed page a couple of days ago, our erstwhile governor, Arnold, wrote about why he opposes a bill imposing restrictions on some California state pension funds. Apparently the bill would prohibit investment in some private equity funds that do business with selected sovereign wealth funds. This sounds like an obscure issue, and it is, but it's also fairly wide-ranging. It could affect hundreds of millions of dollars and relationships with a number of foreign countries. I haven't heard from the other side, but judging from this essay, I agree with Arnold. Sounds like a good idea going too far.

George Skelton, who covers Sacramento and therefore is in a position to be continuously disillusioned, yet continuously entertained, has a wish list for spring cleaning in the California legislature. It's not people that he wants to get rid of, although I'm sure he could think of a few, but structural and legal impediments to getting things done. The absurd two-thirds majority required for passing money bills, term limits, gerrymandering, closed primaries, initiatives. Get rid of them, or dramatically change them. Ain't none of it gonna happen for a while, but what's politics without impossible dreams?

Gregory Rodriguez, one of the only pundits I would describe as a radically centrist Democrat, spoke at a college in Mexico. The title of his column says a lot: "A 670-mile-long shrine to American insecurity." Attempting the very difficult task of bridging the cultural barriers, he tried to answer this question from a student:

"How," he said politely in Spanish, "could such a rich and powerful country be so self-centered as to build a wall on its border to keep people out?"

That's a good question. Rodriguez uses it to dive into the contradictory impulses of America, at once powerful, belligerent, arrogant, and yet insecure. One of the best pieces on immigration I've read in a while.

One of the things that the editors of the LA Times understand is that in this town, coverage of the entertainment industry better be first-rate, or at least better than most of what else is out there. Carina Chocano is an excellent recent addition to the movie reviewing team, and a great replacement for Manohla Dargis, who wrote for the LA Times for about a year before landing at that other Times, on the East Coast. Chocano is one of my favorite reviewers in the country. She had a particularly eloquent appreciation for Charlton Heston and the meaning of his career:

To behold Heston in chains, behind bars or even in a morally compromised situation was to behold the classical ideals of moral clarity, youthful vigor and civilization oppressed by the depraved, the primitive, the corrupt. He stood, he observed, he suffered. Heston's muscular body and hard, determined jaw were made to endure injustice, to absorb and transform it into virtuous action.

She manages to appreciate him for what he was way back then, nostalgic without being maudlin. And I think she got it exactly right.

Finally, from the human interest department, comes a story about a guy who served some serious time in prison, got out and turned his life around, but still struggles every day to stay on the straight and narrow. He developed a specific "convict code," sort of the ultimate tough-guy philosophy. But then it broke down, and he had to relearn how to live a normal life. It's almost like a Russian novel. But without the aristocracy.

Arnold subbing for McCain at Log Cabin Repub meeting

John McCain isn't going to the meeting of the Log Cabin Republicans this weekend. No surprise there! But he did ask his good friend, endorser, and occasional fellow moderate Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger to attend for him. Arnold agreed. Good for him. Andrew Sullivan approves, marginally, and sees it as a "small, slender reed of hope." It's always nice to see John McCain living up to his reputation as a maverick willing to challenge some of the more tolerance-challenged members of his party.