Today is the last day for Denver’s Rocky Mountain News. The paper won four Pulitzers in the last eight years. The paper would have celebrated its 150th anniversary in April. It was the oldest continually run business in the state. This is its own self obituary. Who knows how long that’ll remain online, though.

I expect I’ll make a bunch of posts like this in the next year or two. The owners of 33 different daily papers have gone into Chapter 11 since December. This is a big deal, people. Daily newspapers have been the only real brake on corruption in huge chunks of this country for much of its existence. A good newspaper is beating heart of its local community. It’s true that the same economics that are closing newspapers right now have forced a decline in their quality over the last decade. Newspapers are not what they once were, but they’re still important.

Denver still has The Post. The two papers have been running under a joint operating agreement for a while. Many of the cities that will lose their newspapers in the next year or two won’t have another daily. We may soon see major cities without a daily newspaper. That is sad and frightening.

I probably shouldn’t allow myself to watch any national TV news in the morning. It makes me cranky. We usually watch a local channel. That channel has genuine, if sometimes odd personalities instead of the usual plastic news people. They’re so unlike typical large city local news that we’ve taken to calling the broadcast “the island of misfit news”. I woke up this morning, made my coffee, etc then turned on the TV. It was still on MSNBC after last night’s post speech coverage. I watched Monica Novatny play a clip where Obama pledges to cut the deficit in half during his first term. She and an analyst then proceed to do an SNL style “Really?!” segment where they rant about how he can’t possibly cut the debt in half.

The federal debt and the federal deficit are not the same thing. How does someone without a basic understanding of our decades long political debate make it as a news anchor?

On the topic of the speech itself, I don’t have much to say. It was an okay speech. The novelty of having a president who is well spoken and knows what he’s talking about hasn’t worn off yet, but I’m sure it will. The news of the night should be that Bobby Jindal all but killed any chance he had of being president in 2012 last night. His speech sounded like he was reading a children’s story to a room full of kindergartners. Beyond the incredibly poor delivery, though, it was the same generic speech that every Republican has given for twenty years. Please let them continue to be just that politically tone deaf for the next four years. We just might increase our majorities in 2010 and 2012 enough to undo some of the damage that’s been done to this country since 1981.

I read a good, if too short, article in the Monitor today that looks at some of California’s serious structural governance problems. I think they mention what I think are the biggest ones. It’s heartening to see that there’s a movement afoot to fix some of this stuff.

In my couple of years here, I’ve come to wonder whether this state is structurally broken to the point of needing to scrap its constitution and start over. I had actively started looking at California’s dreadful ballot initiative system years before I moved here after reading a David Broder book that looked at ballot initiatives generally, but that gave a lot of focus to California because of how prominent they are here. I want to like the ballot initiative system here because it seems so democratic on its face. In practice, though, it is almost always the side that raises the most money that wins regardless of how voters feel about the issue weeks or months before the election. I warned a bunch of people about this in relation to Prop 8 last year. Prop 8 was an almost perfect example of the problem. In the months before the election, polls indicated an electorally solid lead in favor of allowing gay couples to keep the rights they had. But after a massive influx of money for the Prop 8 supporters, much of it from people who do not live in this state, they were able to flood the airwaves with scare ads and turn the tables. Even though the emotions over the issue and the stakes being played for were much higher than normal, this was a text book example of how ballot initiatives work in this state.

Year in and year out, for decades, the voters of this state have said to its government “you can only tax X so much” and “you have to spend Y on Z every year” or sometimes just said “you have to X” with no provision for how it will be paid for. Each time the people add these new tax restrictions and spending mandates, they seems to do so with no regard for what they have mandated in years past. Most ballot initiatives don’t stick with people the way Prop 8 did and will. These conflicting priorities have left a state that is nearly ungovernable in good times. With the kind of economic crisis we’re facing now, even the horrible budget compromise that was just passed is going to have to go before the voters. In order to solve the 48 billion dollar shortfall, California has to borrow money from sources that have been mandated by ballot initiative for other purposes. All of this is exacerbated by the terrible, reactionary term limits stuff that California helped to pioneer. The people we elect simply don’t have the experience to tackle the problems we’re facing. They don’t spend enough time in the legislature to build the relationships with the other side that are necessary to effective compromise.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes California to recover from the current crisis. I hope we’re able to stay here to see it happen. I honestly don’t know how anyone who isn’t a venture funded high tech startup ever manages to start a small business in this state. My wife and I have tossed around ideas for a handful of different business ideas we’d be interested in picking from and starting someday. Every time we talk seriously about it, we look at the barriers that California puts up to actually hiring anyone else and always end up saying “we’d have to move back to some place cheap” to do it. I haven’t become one of those deregulation freaks. I think regulation, in the long run, is better for business itself and better for the society as a whole. California does a bunch of stuff the wrong way, though. First and foremost is the lack of rationality in the system. Too many regulations appear to overlap and contradict each other. Some regulations keep people from starting businesses all together. The mix between where regulations and taxes go after big business vs. where they go after small ones is way off.

I don’t like the budget deal that the legislature struck. I realize, however, under the current system that California has, it was the best and perhaps only option. I’m a little annoyed with the groups that are protesting the governor’s signing of this thing. I’m annoyed because it shows how fucking ignorant even the leaders of some community groups are about how the system works. If you don’t like this budget, don’t waste your energy protesting the governor’s signature. Put your energy into changing the process that requires the senate to approve budgets by a 2/3rds majority. That’s the reason that a small minority of zombie Grover Norquist Republicans can hold the whole state hostage.

I just saw a commercial during Countdown with Keith Olbermann for a global warming denier business group. In plain text on the screen, one part of their message was “Global warming is the hoax”. This group’s ad was every radical fringe of the chamber of commerce cliche you’ve ever heard: the only green in green energy is the money Washington is taking from us, etc. Their goal appeared to be trying to stop the stimulus bill. It’s far from a perfect bill. Hell, I’m not sure it’s a good bill, but the arguments they were trying to use are not going to get much traction with Olbermann’s audience.

…is the best way that I’ve ever heard anyone say that right wing economics is full of shit.

I woke up this morning and turned on MSNBC. President Obama was about to make his speech at the national prayer breakfast. I watched the first few minutes before getting in the shower. I was really pleased that he took yet another high profile opportunity to acknowledge Americans of “no faith”. I have never in my lifetime been acknowledged as a part of the national community in that sense. I have never been acknowledged as someone who might be a good, thoughtful, committed person who wants good things for the world and community he lives in. It’s a powerful thing that really placates my sense of disappointment in some of the other things he’s doing. He also said that when he, later today, makes an announcement about his office of faith based and community programs that this office will not privilege one religion over another nor privilege religious groups over secular ones. Win.