This is the kind of shit that makes people think that liberals are idiots and people out here are the kings of the idiots. I get the reasons why the policy are in place, but you’ve got to wonder if the people who implement policies like this ever stop to think about whether the totality of consequences from implementing them might do more to harm their goals than help in the long run.

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.

It will be interesting to watch whether the legal argument being put forth by the San Francisco City Attorney against Prop 8 holds sway with the court. I haven’t been in California long enough to know the history of the court or much about the individual justices, so I’m not going to take any guesses on whether the argument will win out with them. It’s a simple argument. It’s one that I think logically applies to this case. It’s about the difference between an amendment to the constitution and a revision of the constitution. A revision changes the underlying principles of the constitution. An amendment doesn’t. Based on nothing other than the logic of the case that allowed gay marriage, the court would seem inclined to buy that Prop 8 changed the underlying principles by denying previously held rights.

What I can say with a lot of certainty right now is that we don’t want this thing to go to the U.S. Supreme Court. We’ll lose. Maybe in a court that’s been shaped by a two term Obama presidency we would be better off. If you look at the court and modern life spans, though, Obama is likely to be replacing liberal justices. That’s good in that it keeps the court from turning further to the right. It keeps Roe alive. It doesn’t do much to help us reverse the trends of recent years, though. Our best chance for replacing a conservative is Anthony Kennedy. He’s the swing vote of the conservatives and has a pretty good record on gay rights. He (as a single example among many) wrote the opinion in Lawrence v. Texas that overturned the sodomy law in Texas.

A two term Obama presidency has an outside chance of replacing Scalia. Scalia and Kennedy are the same age, but Scalia seems like the type to hold on until he dies or just before. In interviews, it is clear that he absolutely lives for that court.

Clarence Thomas is twelve years younger than these two.

Alito is two years younger than Thomas. Chief Justice Roberts is only fifty three!

Any of y’all know any thirty year old pinko judges we can get on the nomination list?

I’m so damn disappointed in the voters of this state. It looks like Prop 8 has passed. We voted to put discrimination right into the state constitution. It really puts a damper on the Obama win and the rest of it for me. I’m just hoping that, as the mailed in ballots and provisional ballots get counted, Prop 8 ends up with less than 51% of the vote. If that’s the case then we can take a shot at repealing it in near future.

The more I’ve thought about it over the last few days, the more I feel like Gavin Newsom deserves a big kick to the nuts for that “whether you like it or not” quote that the Prop 8 folks ran in most of their ads. You just don’t gloat like that on any issue where a simple majority can tell you you’re wrong.

If you are going to vote in person at a polling place tomorrow, make damn sure your vote counts. A few weeks ago I said that if we had a free, fair election without a staged terrorist attack, coup, or other extreme circumstance that Obama would win this thing. I believe it.

Don’t for a second think that Republican operatives aren’t trying their damnedest right now to steal this election. We know that tens if not hundreds of thousands of voters have been purged from the rolls this year by Republican secretaries of state or equivalent Republican elections officials all across this country. We know that they have done this in spite of laws that forbid them from doing it. They don’t care about the law. The “this time only” decision in Bush v. Gore shows that even at the highest levles, they only care about power. They don’t care about democracy. They don’t care about seeing that votes are counted and the will of the people is respected.

If anyone tries to give you a provisional ballot, fight that like hell. Most of them are never counted in the total. If anyone tries to stop you from fighting, fight that like hell. If you think the touch screen voting machine that you find yourself using is playing loose with your vote, you raise a stink.

If all the votes are counted tomorrow, Barack Obama will win this thing. Let’s hope the margin is so large that they can’t steal it.

I recieved a request to chime in on the other ballot props. So, here we go.

Bond Measure Proposition 1A– Safe, Reliable High-Speed Passenger Train Bond Act.
Weak No.I was convinced by a friend who knows more about these things than I that this ballot measure would do little more than subsidize business travel for a largely white, affluent class. It would serve my interests nicely. However, the structural issues in our statewide public transit systems mean that the people who really need good public transit wouldn’t benefit from this. I voted no, but came close to voting the other way.

Initiative Statute Proposition 2– Standards for Confining Farm Animals. Initiative Statute.

Yes. Factory farm conditions are deplorable. This statute would introduce a bare minimum standard for how the animals we consume would live their lives. The people opposing this are large, factory farms.

Initiative Statute Proposition 3–Children’s Hospital Bond Act. Grant Program. Initiative Statute.
I don’t have a strong opinion on this one, but voted yes based on the research that I did. There are some problems with the proposition, though. The most worrisome is that there appears to be a bit of a grey area as to what constitutes a “children’s hospital”. This could potentially be a giant bit of corporate welfare for a few heath care companies. Still, my first instinct is to want to see public money going for health care, especially children’s health care.

Initiative Constitutional Amendment Proposition 4–Waiting Period and Parental Notification Before Termination of Minor’s Pregnancy. Initiative Constitutional Amendment.
Strong No. This is a favorite tactic of the anti-choice bible thumpers. Parents like to think that they should be involved in these decisions. They don’t think about the cases where a teenager may be the victim of rape, incest or both. They don’t think about the abusive homes where revealing a pregnancy may get you a beating. They don’t respect the idea of “my body, my choice”.

Initiative Statute Proposition 5–Nonviolent Drug Offenses. Sentencing, Parole and Rehabilitation. Initiative Statute.
As I wrote two posts back, this one’s a definite yes.

Initiative Statute Proposition 6–Police and Law Enforcement Funding. Criminal Penalties and Laws. Initiative Statute.
Strong No. This is an awful, awful bill. It pushes us further toward being a police state in all sorts of ways. It builds the harassment of poor people that this and other states already do into the law. It diverts funding from schools and health care into building prisons. It’s just awful.

Initiative Statute Proposition 7–Renewable Energy Generation. Initiative Statute.
Weak No. This was another hard one for me. I like the goals of the bill, but the implementation was wrong. It mandates some things that help large scale generators of “green” power at the expense of small scale producers. It puts some seriously difficult requirements on municipal power plants.

Initiative Constitutional Amendment Proposition 8–Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry.
Strongest possible No. I think most folks know this one by now, especially if you’ve been reading my blog. This writes anti-gay discrimination into the California constitution.

Initiative Constitutional Amendment and Statute Proposition 9–Criminal Justice System. Victims’ Rights. Parole. .
No. More police state stuff, more attacking the poor.

Initiative Statute Proposition 10 Alternative Fuel Vehicles and Renewable Energy. Bonds. Initiative Statute.
Weak No. Again, I like the goals, but not this implementation. I think the government has a strong role to play in incentivizing the move away from traditional oil/gas fueled vehicles, etc. I don’t think that role has to include giant giveaways to the people funding the intitiative. In this case, that would be T. Boone Pickens and other corporate supporters of “The Pickens Plan”.

Initiative Constitutional Amendment and Statute Proposition 11–Redistricting. Initiative Constitutional Amendment and Statute.
Strong Yes. This would take re-districting out of the hands of the legislature and put it into the hands of a citizen’s board. That board would consist of Democrats, Republicans, and independents. One of the worst things in our political system is the process whereby legislators draw their own districts.

Bond Measure Proposition 12–Veterans’ Bond Act of 2008.
Strong Yes. This would provide a fund from which veterans can borrow money to purchase farms, homes, or mobile homes. California has done this exact same thing more than 25 times over the last 85 or so years. The fund is generated by selling bonds. The repayment of the loans pays for the bonds.

I have been a little surprised to find out the extent to which the statewide Democratic politicians in California seem to be completely in the pocket of the prison guards union. It helps to explain why a state with so many progressive ideas floating around seems to be so insanely regressive on crime and criminals. If the supposed liberals in your state aren’t going to provide leadership, no one else will. You can generally expect the Republicans to call for public stoning and witch burning and little else on the topic of crime. Prior to last weekend when I filled out my ballot, I knew damn little about Prop 5. I had only seen negative ads where Dianne Feinstein and Jerry Brown call it a “drug dealer’s bill of rights” and otherwise bash it.

Based on what was in the ballot, I couldn’t see why they were treating it that way. It seemed like good policy to me. Sometimes these ballot initiatives have some fatal flaw that makes an otherwise good bit of public policy into an absolute terrible implementation of it. When I did my research, I couldn’t find a fatal flaw. This bill would greatly increase the number of non-violent drug offenders who get a shot at treatment instead of going to jail. This would mean spending less money on building new prisons and reversing the ugly trend in this state toward putting huge chunks of our population behind bars. This is a good idea. It’s a damn shame that the prison guards’ union can’t see past their own immediate pocketbook interest on this one. This is the equivalent of corporate CEOs who only look at this quarter. Ultimately, the prison guards themselves will be better off if we can reduce the number of people going into prison for non-violent drug crimes. We might someday be able to afford to restore the programs that actually rehabilitate other offenders. That would make the day to day job of prison guards a safer, better job and it would make the communities where they live safer, better communities.

If you’re in California and haven’t voted yet, I urge you to vote yes on 5.

In the last few days, the No on 8 forces have started winning the money game again. KTVU-TV reports that No on 8 has raised about $32 million, while the Mormons Yes on 8 people have raised about $28 million. Starting at least six weeks ago and as recently as ten days ago, the Yes forces were out-raising us. General, the side the raises the most money wins these California ballot props. Let’s hope our money has come in (and keeps coming in) in time to win this thing.

One development that has been interesting to note in this election vs. 2004 is just how much better organized the online presences of the various interest groups are. I have received voter guides from a bunch of the various groups that have my email address. Some provide both candidate and ballot prop recommendations, others just do the ballot props. Most of them do unsurprisingly similar recommendations for or against various measures. It’s interesting to see where they’re different or where the various groups may choose not to make a recommendation at all.

I think this is the kind of thing my poli sci student self of 15 years ago would have been ecstatic over.