Thanks to the power of twitter, we have some real-time reporting from this afternoon’s “debate” between Tom Campbell and Steve Poizner. They each came kitted out with props. Campbell apparently is a fan of whiteboards, and Poizner brought massive copies of the current California budget. Ooh, fun!<\/p>\n
But neither actually addressed the real problem: the economic crisis in California. Instead, they choose to address the symptoms by cutting spending from the California budget. Robert described<\/a> Campbell’s “plan”, but Poizner is even more ludicrous. Apparently a “process” makes massive cuts palatable<\/p>\n Poizner says it’s “distasteful” to talk about cuts without a “process.” LAT’s George Skelton says “process doesn’t solve budget problem.” (John Myers twitter<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And despite any stories about tea bags in the ballot<\/a>, the plural of anecdote is not data. (My apologies<\/a> to Raymond Wolfringer<\/a>.) Is the symbolism more robust with a teabag in the ballot? Sure, but symbolism alone does not and should not drive the narrative.<\/p>\n The narrative is this: Californians are sick and tired of a dysfunctional government. They want quality schools and services that work for California. And while some taxes aren’t all that popular, there are a lot of taxes that could pass provided that the Governor provided some real leadership. Rather than just sitting behind a podium trying to scare people, we need a leader that is willing to go to bat for Californians.<\/p>\n Tea bags are a distraction from what is the sad fact facing California: we are about to Hoover our economy, and the Republicans are cheering it on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Thanks to the power of twitter, we have some real-time reporting from this afternoon’s “debate” between Tom Campbell and Steve Poizner. They each came kitted out with props. Campbell apparently is a fan of whiteboards, and Poizner brought massive copies of the current California budget. Ooh, fun!<\/p>\n But neither actually addressed the real problem: the economic crisis in California. Instead, they choose to address the symptoms by cutting spending from the California budget. Robert described<\/a> Campbell’s “plan”, but Poizner is even more ludicrous. Apparently a “process” makes massive cuts palatable<\/p>\n Poizner says it’s “distasteful” to talk about cuts without a “process.” LAT’s George Skelton says “process doesn’t solve budget problem.” (John Myers twitter<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And despite any stories about tea bags in the ballot<\/a>, the plural of anecdote is not data. (My apologies<\/a> to Raymond Wolfringer<\/a>.) Is the symbolism more robust with a teabag in the ballot? Sure, but symbolism alone does not and should not drive the narrative.<\/p>\n The narrative is this: Californians are sick and tired of a dysfunctional government. They want quality schools and services that work for California. And while some taxes aren’t all that popular, there are a lot of taxes that could pass provided that the Governor provided some real leadership. Rather than just sitting behind a podium trying to scare people, we need a leader that is willing to go to bat for Californians.<\/p>\n Tea bags are a distraction from what is the sad fact facing California: we are about to Hoover our economy, and the Republicans are cheering it on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[32,117],"tags":[770,60,7296,840],"class_list":["post-8899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-32","category-117","tag-770","tag-60","tag-7296","tag-840"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pvhz-2jx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8899\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}