The Radical Moderate

Long before Acorn activists helped a fake prostitute and pimp figure out their tax situation, Republicans were screaming about how Acorn supposedly was illegally registering voters. Of course, nothing was proven, even after the Shrub administration replaced some Federal prosecutors for saying they had no evidence with which to charge Acorn.

The Washington post has an article on a California schism in the party. It seems that State legislator Anthony Adams has become a pariah to mainstream Republicans. He votes party line 95% of the time, but that's not enough. The recent fiscal crisis caused large cuts to many California services and the State was "paying" contractors with IOUs. After much thought, Adams announced he couldn't keep his "no tax increase" pledge and that he'd vote for the recent bill that did increase some in order to help the State.

A recall attempt ensued. The Republican party turned in 58,000 signatures, far more than was needed to cause a recall. All that was needed was the Secretary of State to certify the petition and the recall was on. However, the official statement from that office pointed out that samples of the petitions showed much too high an incidence of fake or incorrect signatures. Ooops.

What's that phrase again? Oh, right: Hoist by their own petards.

Two Republicans are the front runners for their party's candidate to challenge Barbara Boxer next year. She's a very liberal Senator and one of the two people to make me vote for a Third Party candidate for the first time. When she first ran for the Senate, she ran against an equally extreme Republican and I couldn't vote for either. Many folks in both parties had that problem.

It seems that, a while back, she was on a Committee that was questioning some military leaders. Usually, Senators are addressed with their title, as in "Senator Boxer". Brig. Gen. Michael Walsh decided she wasn't important enough to do so. He'd never call a male Senator "Mr." or "Sir", but referred to Boxer as "Ma'am". She corrected him and requested he address her properly.

No surprise, the Republicans think that was wrong. How dare a woman be treated equally to a man?

The most hypocritical part of the escapade is who one of the Republicans is: Carly Fiorina. She's the former CEO of HP. She left in disgrace after making enormous mistakes and using some questionable ethics. As head of HP, she made no bones about making it clear that she earned her place at the head of one of the largest companies in technology.

As the AP points out, Fiorina has decided that's it's wrong of Boxer to expect that people grant her the same respect that they grant male Senators. Fiorina has created a Web site dedicated to hassling Boxer.

I'm hoping that California's electorate hurts her for that, though it might help her in the primary. She's preaching to the choir, and the Republican choir sits on the far right of the church these days. However, the main body of Californians are closer to the center than Boxer or Fiorina's intended audience. Boxer makes no apology for who she is, she doesn't fake it and doesn't pander as much as many Senators (all do, even her...). As much as I might disagree with some of her stands, she's moved a little to the center since coming to the Senate while the Republican Party has moved further right.

If something weird happened and I moved to California before the next election, I don't think I've be voting Libertarian this time. It'd probably be for Boxer.

The California Supreme Court upheld Prop 8, banning same-sex marriage. What a shock! Alert the media. Oh, wait, they're all over it.

No, it's not really a surprise, though the far Left is shouting as if it is. Propositions are the law of the land in CA. They change the Constitution. There's no way the Supreme Court was going to say the Constitution was unconstitutional. Only idiots expected a different outcome.

I voted against the Proposition. I think it's wrong. Any consenting adult combination should be able to create a civil marriage. It's a legal contracts. However, the voters thought differently. The opponents should be working on something major. No, not another Proposition, which is what they're working on now. That'll help, but it's not big enough.

It's long past time for California to change or eliminate the Proposition system. Either a higher threshold to get on the ballot or no Props. I prefer the later. Legislators are elected to make tough decisions. The plethora of Propositions destroys, not upholds democracy. So many budget items are locked in that, even if they had the guts, legislators don't really have the flexibility they need to address the budget. The annual crisis is not as much the fault of the elected officials as of the citizens who blocked out some many spending items and screwed up the process.

However, the saying is that all politics are local. I don't expect a coalition of people from across the political spectrum to push for a major change to the system. Rather, I expect the Left and Right to continue to whine about how terrible the system is and then turn around and create yet more Propositions to "fight" the ones they don't like.

In this week's News of the Weird, there's a very funny bit, if you're an old enough techie.

"Facing a state budget crisis in July, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger fired about 10,000 temporary and part-time workers and ordered the 200,000 permanent employees to be paid only the minimum wage of $6.55 an hour until the legislature passed a crisis-solving budget. However, a week later the State Controller John Chiang pointed out that state payroll records could not be changed to accommodate the cut because they were written in the antiquated COBOL computer language, and virtually the only state employees who knew the code were some of the part-timers Schwarzenegger had just fired. [Sacramento Bee, 8-5-08]"