To the news:
• Just because it’s cool: OC Progressive asks John Wesley Harding 5 questions.
• More celebrities: Pierce Brosnan is hosting a fundraiser for AD-35 candidate Susan Jordan. Jordan is an environmentalist, and is also married to the current Assembly member, Pedro Nava. There’s going to be an interesting primary in the race. The seat is a safe Dem seat.
• CalBuzz takes a look at the Prop 8 Ruling and the Guv race. Meg Whitman once again sounds ridiculous by hailing the decision in terms of grand freedoms. What a joke. Dan Walters kind of echoes eMeg. Walters completely fails to understand how completely flawed our initiative system is. It has never worked, and the system needs overhauling.
• Speaking of eMeg. She’s about to get McCain’s endorsement. Oooh, yippee. That’s sure to be worth a ton here.
• Former Assemblyman Paul Koretz has claimed victory in the 5th City Council District in Los Angeles over neighborhood activist David Vahedi.
• Sign of the times: Nearly 1 million Californians seek medical care in Mexico annually. And of course, if we destroy the health care social safety net for low-income Californians and push 2 million more off of insurance, that number will rise. Our health care system is completely broken.
• CalSTRS needs more money, lots of it. They will be asking for several billion more. Teriffic, that’s what we need to hear right now.
• The pundit class, such as Tim Herdt is following the grassroots. They’re seeing the fact that the system is in need of reform.
• As for the SF Bay Guardian, they’re looking into the background of the notion of splitting the state. While there would be some positives, notably that the Coastal, populous counties would produce some of the nation’s finest schools and services, it creates a whole slew of problems as well. Beyond the politics, it’s not clear if a Central Valley based state has the tax base to sustain itself. And there are the water issues, which would be massive.
I just got a truly weird email. It smells of astroturf after a horse race, and I’m wondering if anyone can tell me WTF these people are:
The site is http://www.SaveMySoftener.com, which I suspect has to do with water softeners, rather than some other product like, say, exlax or similar.
Anybody know who these clowns are, and what exactly they are trying to pull over on the public?
else gets how it’s cool! Wes is amazingly approachable and was kind enough to answers these questions in the middle of a tour, etc. Thanks so much for linking to it!
when prop 2 passed up and down the central valley, in liberal bastions such as fresno and redding. i suspect coastal papers give them credence because it feeds into this myth that inland californians are all reactionary farmers, when the reality is that they’re mostly urbanites and suburbanites, and more of a swing area than a base.
In the rare event that California does split up, especially on a coastal-inland divide, I would force myself to move to the bay area or somewhere around CSU Monterey Bay. I can imagine Inland California as one of the worst states in the union.
I don’t think most people realize just how much infrastructure links north to south, the coast to the inland. I’m also unconvinced that a supposedly liberal coast can hold off the downward pressure on taxes that would come from just over the Coast Ranges (the proximity of Sacramento, Fresno, Bakersfield and Riverside to the coastal “state” is totally different than Nevada or Arizona).
The problem really is the 2/3 rule and our broken constitution. Fix that and there’s no need to split a damn thing.
But really, California is California. A better idea would be, as described, to recognize that California is a nation within a nation and provide regional governance (Massachusetts does so, effectively abolishing counties, but obviously Massachusetts is much smaller). Furthermore, any proposal for division that splits Orange County and Los Angeles shows a preference for numbers over facts on the ground. Yes, Orange County is a conservative county overall, but it is inalienably part of the Los Angeles area.
It’s important to note that this is not a magical solution to everyone’s problems. Prop 2 (the animal rights one) passed in agricultural counties as well, and Prop 8 passed in Los Angeles by a small margin. It’s more complicated than that. Large states are not inherently ungovernable – New York gets by, despite even stronger tensions between the City and Everyone Else. But large states require appropriate systems of governance, which California lacks presently. Populism might work in Vermont, but in a large state like California it just creates chaos.