Arnold’s Agenda: Healthcare, Redistricting, Deficit

Arnold Schwarzenegger has an agenda!  Well, it’s really not that specific.  Basically, he wants to continue being a Republican Democrat or a Democratic Republican or one of the two.  He plans on focusing on Healthcare, Redistricting, and the Deficit, although not particularly in that order.  How he plans to pay for any service improvements is beyond me.  Here’s more:

Energized by this month’s landslide victory, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is assembling a wide-ranging 2007 agenda – hoping to help millions of Californians without health care, trying again to redraw the state’s legislative districts and fixing the dysfunctional prison system.

Some proposals could emerge soon after the new two-year legislative session begins Dec. 4. Others may come into focus in early January when Schwarzenegger delivers his State of the State address. Many details of the governor’s plans – particularly health care – are still in flux.

But the style in which he will pursue them appears clear.

{snip}

The dynamics this year, however, could make achieving his goals more difficult. Windfall revenue won’t be sufficient to close a looming $5.5 billion budget gap, let alone create more programs. And with no statewide election scheduled next year, Schwarzenegger has no motivation to notch accomplishments fast, and Democrats have no incentive to extract policy wins while the governor is amenable. (LA Daily News 11/25)

Well, I guess we shouldn’t actually expect anything out of our government for another 15 months.

Some new tools for Democracy from Debra Bowen

Cal-Access was a great campaign finance tool…if you were living in 1997.  The site still looks like it’s from the late 90s.  Debra Bowen has promised to update the site to make it more accessible:

The knock on our democracy is that it’s too much like an auction. Incoming Secretary of State Debra Bowen said she wants to counter pay-for-play government by making campaign finances as easy to search as eBay.
Bowen is planning major improvements for the Cal-Access Web site. While she has yet to set a timetable, she did say the redesign will focus on factors like standardizing the formats of names, having late disclosures cataloged more quickly and making it easier to search for information around independent-expenditure committees. There are also plans to make it easier to find trace which committees are being controlled by particular politicians.
“My goal is to create a system that’s as easy to use and provides as much information in a user-friendly format as possible,” Bowen said. (Capitol Weekly 11/23/06)

For the time being, I would highly recommend Maphlight.org, a great campaign finance tool that was started this summer.  Cal-Access isn’t really all that bad now, but it’s just not that easy to search.  For better or worse, money is at the heart of our democracy.  It’s up to us to see what’s going on there.