Surf Putah

Dear Arnold,

2009-06-02T10:16:00.000-07:00

Voting down a spending cap is not a popular cry for massive spending cuts, and proposing the same failed forced austerity plans and shell game funding gimmicks is not "thinking outside the box."

When the people of California reject your special election scams this many times in a row at the ballot box, perhaps it's time to ask yourself whether we need more "leadership," or whether the state would be better served by your resignation.

-surf putah

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Any Democrat treating this sad joke like a "leader" needs to have their head examined. We already know what the voters want, all we're waiting for is a party willing to stand up and fight for us when the chips are down.

The solution to the 1996 federal budget showdown wasn't giving Gingrich what he wanted. It was calling his bluff.

Kids! What The Heck's The Matter With Kids Today!

2009-05-30T07:02:00.000-07:00

And people wonder why the newspapers are all going broke. Exempli gratis, the New York Times on the disturbing phenomenon of teenagers hugging one another. Clearly the collapse of Western Civilization as we know it.

Back in my day, the suburban PTA mom busybodies got hysterical about drunk driving, teen pregnancy, drug use, and gangs (seriously, bandanas and headbands were banned in DHS sports pictures because of Davis High's huge upper-middle class suburban gang problem).

Either the kids these days are all incorrigible goodie two shoes, or the New York Times is writing their articles by mad libs.

Decision Day Marriage Equality Rally Tomorrow

2009-05-25T20:34:00.000-07:00

No matter what happens, tomorrow's California Supreme Court decision on whether it is constitutional for Prop. 8 to strip gays and lesbians of the right to marry, or dissolve already-married same-sex couples of their legal marriages will be big news. Whether you're mourning another setback, or celebrating another step forward, the place to be doing it will be Central Park in Davis from 6pm to 7:30pm. If you want to go further afield, Marriage Equality has a list of Decision Day rallies all over the state.

Either way, we will eventually roll this thing back. It is absurd for 50% of the voters to be able to strip their fellow citizens of their rights but require 66% to pass a school bond, but that's where we're at right now. The winds of history are at our backs on marriage equality, and if we fall short tomorrow, than we'll try again at the next election cycle, and so on until this is set right. Our gay and lesbian friends, neighbors, and family deserve to be treated with the same dignity and equality under the law as anyone else. In time, I believe they will.

Blow Up The Boxes

2009-05-25T09:51:00.001-07:00

In the spirit of everyone calling for budgetary "savings" by cutting various government services and departments to the bone, and of the potential new constitutional convention that the Bay Area Council is working on, here's one modest proposal for the Gubernator:

Eliminate the state senate and office of the Governor.

That's right, go to a unicameral parliamentary system, with the necessary executive branch stuff vested in the speaker of the state legislature, same as in England. To get better representation, we could double the size of the body, either making smaller districts, or allotting half of the seats by proportional representation, as a hedge against gerrymandering and a way for minority voices to squeeze themselves into the debate.

I mean, the state senate more or less duplicates the functions of the assembly but with even more absurdly huge districts, and since everything goes through a 2/3 vote anyways, the same margin to override a veto, there really is no point in having a governor. Move everything to a majority vote, and the drive to appeal to a majority of Californians will very quickly train both parties to pay attention to public sentiment, or risk being left in the dust.

How's that for streamlining? Think of the money we'll save! Objections?

What Californians Want

2009-05-21T18:42:00.000-07:00

It is to be expected that Arnold and his right wing fellow travelers in the Republican Party would immediately claim that the vote to reject his crappy initiatives was proof that the voters wanted to do what the GOP wanted all along, namely an all-cut drown-the-government-in-the-bathtub budget. They've done it every time they've lost an election so far, why would this time be any different?

And yet when you actually ask the voters, the picture that emerges is quite different:

Why Prop 1A Lost Powerpoint -

Voters are infuriated with the state government, but not out of some anti-tax fervor. Rather, we're sick and tired with these lame budget crises that always use expensive short term solutions and gimmicks that cost us more in the end. People are willing to pay for a whole range of taxes, and 65% understand that to get out of this hole, we'll need to raise revenues to fill the gap.

Increasing tax on alcoholic beverages - 75% (62% of NO voters)

Increasing taxes on tobacco - 74% (62% of No voters)

Imposing an oil extraction tax just like every other oil producing state - 73% (60% of NO voters)

Closing the loophole that allows corporations to avoid reassessment of new property that they purchase - 63% (58% of NO voters)

Increasing the top bracket of the state income tax to 11% for families of over $544,000 - 63% (51% of NO voters)

Prohibiting corporations from using tax credits to offset more than 50% of the taxes they owe - 59% (55% of NO voters)

Likewise, voters rejected huge cuts to education and health services by wide margins:

Oppose cutting public schools spending by $5.3 billion - 76% (58% of NO voters)

Oppose cutting funding for state colleges and universities by $1.2 billion - 73% (58% of NO voters)

Oppose cutting the state's health care funding by $1.1 billion - 68% (55% of NO voters)

Oppose cutting the state's funding for homecare services by $494 million - 62% (54% of NO voters)

What boggles the mind is not that the permanent minority Republicans make shit up to try and pretend like they've got their finger on the pulse of California (as opposed to the reality that their very raison d'etre is to explicitly obstruct what most Californians want), nor that the pathetic media parrots those Republican falsehoods.

What boggles is that so many elected Democrats are so out of touch with their constituents that they're following the GOP in their talking points.

The people of California voted for no more of the same. There was not a tax-n-spend option in this election. Until they actually give us one, they have no grounds to claim that this was a cry for a slashed budget.

Why is Our Budget So Dysfunctional?

2009-05-20T18:57:00.000-07:00

This short video by Assemblywoman Noreen Evans lays it out pretty well. All that blather about state workers and out of control spending rings hollow when the vast majority of the spending increases we've seen are due to population increase, inflation, demographic changes, and the "Tough On Crime" fixation of the 80s and 90s.

One area I wish she'd mentioned is the increasing rise in health insurance fees paid to pad Health Insurance Corporation profit margins, which have raised at a rate far outstripping the rate of inflation, even. If we had passed SB 840 a couple of years ago, we would have been able to curb that wasteful spending by just not paying that ransom to corporations for every public employee.

A lot of people are going to be screaming about "cuts, cuts, cuts" and "living within our means" this week, but that totally ignores how we got to this point.

So What Does The Election Mean?

2009-05-20T02:30:00.000-07:00

No doubt the spin doctor wing of the political consultancy will be working overtime tomorrow morning to try and "explain" what actually happened today, why people voted the way they did, and what signal it supposedly sends to the state government as it tries to pass some semblance of a state budget in the months to come. Already the Republicans (who can't seem to win more than just over a third of the state in presidential, senatorial or legislative elections) are claiming that this is a mandate for cuts, cuts, cuts, and no new taxes, even though there was nothing remotely close to either an "all-cuts" or a "tax-n-spend" alternative on the ballot. Elected Democrats are a bit less clear, message-wise, although the smarter ones are belatedly focusing their message on the need to fix the budget by going to a majority rule on budget and taxes. Schwarzeneggar, who has been an utter disaster even by his own standards, skipped town and hid behind Obama's skirts, pretending vainly like Californian environmental standards were somehow his idea, and not an existing political movement that he sort of posed next to when the cameras were rolling.

So why did the measures fail, what does it mean, and what do the voters of California want?

1. The measures failed because anti-tax Republican voters in exurban and rural California were fired up to vote against them while pro-establishment Democratic voters in the Bay Area and LA voted out of resigned obligation; because anti-establishment Democratic voters and several important unions such as SEIU, AFSCME, the Nurses and several of the teacher's unions didn't buy the hard sell from the Democratic Party; and because the initiatives themselves were complicated, opaque gimmicks that didn't provide any kind of a clear way forward for the state. There was very little argument FOR any of them; in essence, the Yes campaign was more of an Anti-NO campaign that scolded rather than sold. In many ways, this felt a lot like the abortive attempt to ram term limit extensions down our throats during the special presidential primary last spring. Voters are exhausted by this chain of special elections, and the options were so disheartening and complicated to sort out that the majority of voters just shrugged and sat the thing out.

2. What it means, given the weird constellation of interests on both sides of the vote, does not translate at all to any partisan or even ideological agenda. On the NO side were the crazies in the Howard Jarvis/Grover Norquist camp, lots of unions, most liberal bloggers, and a fair number of those of us who actually read through the fine print. On the YES side were all elected Democrats, a ton of powerful corporations, the Chamber of Commerce, the Farm Bureau, and the CTA teacher's union. The divide here is between the bipartisan establishment consensus on cobbling together the status quo a bit longer, and people on both ends of the spectrum that want a break from the Grey Davis/Arnold Schwarzeneggar consensus of service cuts, tuition hikes, a few regressive tax hikes, raiding local government, and a perpetually stalemated state government.

What makes it confusing is that now that these initiatives have gotten shot down, the former allies on the NO side will now be at each other's throats, as both try to define the way forward, now that the status quo has, once again, lurched towards outright failure. This was a battle between the present and the future; the next step will be a battle between two different ideas of a future California. And of course, there's also the great muddled public, who mostly took a rain check on this election; who they side with, if at all, remains to be seen, but they sure as heck haven't been willing to vote for the establishment "solutions" we've seen in the past several elections, any more than they've sided with the various radical solutions proposed by either left or right. It will be interesting to see how the potential default and bankruptcy of the state affects the alignment of the state electorate; at any rate, the present cannot continue.

3. Expanding on the last point, it isn't really possible to say what the voters of California want, because the state doesn't think with a hive mind; we are as divided as any society, along various political and regional lines. More accurate, perhaps, is to say that California's political debate is divided three ways right now, with no one side capable of gaining enough power to rule the state government outright, especially given the 2/3 rule to pass taxes, budgets, and override Gubernatorial vetoes. Even if we were to go to a majority-vote system (which I believe is the only way out of our mess), it would still fundamentally be a matter of grand coalitions and deal-making.

And yet, while the electorate is only really allowed to speak through periodic binary votes on messy initiatives and flawed politicians, the message that the voters (well, a majority of them, at least) seems to be sending, if you look carefully, looks a bit like this:

a. They want the state government to do its job, pass budgets on time, and generally leave them the hell alone. The more of these special elections we've gotten, the more exhausted everyone has gotten, except perhaps for political consultants and talking-head commentators, for whom Arnold's permanent revolution since 2003 has been a full employment program.

b. They are not thrilled with taxes in general, but are more than willing to pay them in specific, especially if it's tied to programs or state services they like. A lot of the ballot box budgeting via initiative is basically a frustrated electorate trying to go around a state legislature held hostage by the Republican party and the 2/3 rules. The fact that 1d and 1e went down hard, while 1b did the best of the budget-related initiatives can be interpreted as a statement against service cuts and the establishment's desire to run things from the center.

c. They're absolutely fed up with politicians, all of them. 1f is basically a giant middle finger to Sacramento from voters across the political spectrum. There is tangible anger out there, and the party that credibly taps into that may well win the next round of battles.

The Republican party has realized that it has no hope of ever actually getting to that 2/3 consensus supermajority point, and so has resigned themselves to just shooting down everything else in hopes of denying control of the state to either the establishment Democrats or the emerging Democratic left. The Democratic establishment hasn't quite grasped that while they currently control the Democratic party majority in Sacramento, they can't work with Republicans and can't just count on the emerging Democratic left to go along with everything they propose by saying "Ooga Booga Republicans!" The Democratic left isn't going to be a dominant force in Sacramento for another couple of election cycles, but we're tired of following the lead of establishment Dems who have proven themselves unable to chart a way forward.

What will determine the next stage of budget battles is who will be able to change the rules of this stalemated game, and what coalition will ultimately rule the emerging consensus that comes out of the collapse that's staring us in the face. The strategy of the GOP is clear: prevent the crisis from being resolved, and try to tap into the rage of a frustrated electorate by pretending that the government's failure to pass a budget is the fault of the (impotent) Democratic majority. Noone knows WTF the establishment Democrats are thinking, they've been very very quiet about how in the world they'd respond to the $15 billion shortfall staring us in the face, much less a defeat at the ballot box that increases that already huge sum. What those of us on the Democratic left tried to do, and what we hope the establishment Democrats eventually join us in doing, is to call the GOP's bluff, show the voters of California that they have, essentially a choice between bankruptcy, default and the end of the services that they want and have repeatedly voted to preserve through initiatives on the one hand (the GOP way), or else we can end the 2/3 rule and remove the GOP obstacle so that the state government can fully fund those services that people want.

I believe that the promise of a majority budget, and the ability for voters to throw out whatever party cuts too much or taxes too much, will restore a needed dynamism to the sclerotic, dysfunctional state government. Right now, noone is in charge, noone can be held responsible, and nothing can actually get done. It is time to cut Prop 13's gordian knot, and restore our state to a full democracy again, that rightly self-corrects with the shifting of the political winds and the will of the electorate. If Democrats can successfully make the case that ending 2/3 is a solution to the status quo that the voters so clearly hate, and a vehicle to protecting education, fixing roads, environmental protection, and preserving a social safety net i the midst of a depression, I think they'll be able to set up a new ruling consensus to replace the prop 13 one.

But we'll see.

County Supes Short-Sightedly Cut Medical Services for Poor, Undocumented in the Face of a Flu Pandemic

2009-05-19T21:52:00.000-07:00

To take a break from the election madness, I was saddened but not surprised by the 3-2 vote to eliminate medical service to Yolo County's poor and undocumented, and extremely disappointed by my supervisor Helen Thompson's vote. Rexroad I get - he's a small government conservative, and has been itching to cut things for years now. But Thompson knows better.

Mark my words, the County will regret this vote this fall, when the flu season comes back to slam us hard, having just cut medical services for a potential disease vector. If it goes to a full pandemic, with a more deadly mutated H1N1 flu, it will cost the county far, far more than this saves. Dissuading people from getting basic care, and from bringing their kids - American citizens, many of them - in when they run a fever or get sick, is not only morally wrong for a county with so many rich people living in it (and don't give me that blather about being overtaxed, I see the luxury cars driving around Davis), but devastatingly stupid for a county facing a pandemic that disproportionately infects children and young adults, who are disproportionately represented in the demographic that will get kicked off these services.

Penny-wise, pound-foolish, ton-cruel.

Predictions

2009-05-19T20:00:00.000-07:00

1. Everything but Prop. 1f goes down to defeat.

2. Turnout sets a record low (I'm guessing 20-25%).

3. Due to the turnout, combined with the budget crisis, Freddie Oakley finally moves Yolo County to 100% vote-by-mail.

4. We get either a new special election or a recall election for Schwarzeneggar before the 2010 primary.

Ballot Recommendations - Meh on B, NO on Everything Else

2009-05-19T08:41:00.000-07:00

Ballots like this drive me crazy. In many ways, this is like a laundry list of all the sorts of things that have already messed California up, made manifest in a single list of ballot initiatives. If only there had been some misguided "Tough on Crime!" one thrown in the mix, we'd have had a perfect commemorative set of late 20th century California malgovernance.

Complex, trojan horse antigovernment budget "reform" bill? Check.

Impenetrable legalese sold by loud, vague emotional sloganeering? Check.

Borrowing from the near future to plug holes in the present made by previous too-clever-by-half budget tricks? Check.

Obligatory self-back-patting anti-politician initiative that doesn't actually accomplish much of anything? Check.

Spending cuts and tax hikes carefully calibrated to avoid inconveniencing any of the powerful interests in the state? Check.

Huge problem looming around the corner that goes utterly unaddressed by any of the proposed initiatives, even as it provides the boogeyman for the "YES" campaign? Check.

What a mess. And yet, these are the items on the ballot, like it or not. So what to do?

Well first, I suggest you read through the bills themselves before you vote, just to get a sense for how absurdly convoluted they are. This is not stuff they should be forcing us to puzzle through, we don't have staffers and legal advisors to sort this out. And then, check out the Courage Campaign's voter guide.

As for me, I recommend voting:

NO on prop 1a, because it would make our annual budget crisis worse and not better. California's budgetary levees are already bursting at the seams, and they want us to divert MORE money into a rainy day fund for the future? A terrible trojan horse posing as a solution to the problems created in large part by the last generation's trojan horse, Prop 13.

Meh on prop 1b. I read this thing through about a zillion times, and even the state analyst can't say what the result of this passing would be for sure. It doesn't even go into effect if 1a gets shot down, and the money it would supposedly secure for education is already legally owed to schools anyway, and hopefully a pending lawsuit will solve that problem soon. On the one hand, I want to vote this thing down on the merits, as an impenetrable mush of legalese that at best restores what was already owed schools in the near future, but doesn't do anything to help with the 15-20 billion shortfall right now. On the other hand, I am a Davis liberal, and voting against schools is up there with kicking puppies and throwing cigarette butts out the window. So ultimately I rationalized voting for it to "send a message" lamely to Sacramento that I really don't want schools slashed in the post-May 20th budget Ragnarok, but I'm mostly disgusted with the whole process.

NO on 1c, 1d, and 1e, because they raid next year to try and pay for this one, which just makes this whole bullshit thing happen again next year, and because the voters initially voted those funds out there because we wanted those services provided for and uncut. Besides, it's far from enough to solve the budget this year anyways.

NO on 1f, because it's cheap, do-nothing faux-populism that cuts an insignificant amount out of the budget to punish all legislators just because the California GOP likes to block budgets from passing because it's the only thing they have the votes to actually do anymore. That, and because Abel Maldonado extorted this prop out of the last state budget crisis cycle, so that he could look good for the cameras. If we want the budgets to be on time and balanced, we need to restore majority rule to the tax and budget processes. Let whoever can win a majority pass the budget, and if the people don't like that, let the people vote their sorry asses out of the majority the next election. But enough of this cutesy stuff.

Our state is in a serious crisis, that part I am in total agreement with. But none of these ballot measures do much to solve that crisis or bring much relief even just this year, and 1a has the potential make things far worse for years to come. This election has been a waste of everyone's time; send the legislature back to the drawing board, lock them in, and don't let them go on any lobbyist-paid junkets until they produce a budget that funds the services that a majority of Californians have showed time and again that they both want and need.

VOTE!

2009-05-19T08:16:00.000-07:00

First of all, for voters in Yolo County, click here to find your polling place, and then thank your lucky stars Yolo County has Freddie Oakley as our County Clerk. Seriously, for such a little county, she really makes the elections website work incredibly well. Thank you.

If you have voted absentee, but haven't mailed the ballot yet, DON'T MAIL IT TODAY, it's too late. Instead, you can hand it in at the Yolo County Elections office at the County Courthouse in Woodland, or at any polling place on election day, before 8:00pm. Any later, and you're out of luck. If you can't hand it in yourself:

If you did not mail your voted vote-by-mail ballot and you are unable to return it to the Yolo County Elections office or a polling place in person, only your spouse, child, parent, grandparent, grandchild, sister or brother can return your voted ballot for you.

The name of the person returning the ballot for you must be printed and the relationship must be circled. You still must complete and sign the appropriate sections on the vote-by-mail ballot return envelope.

Turnout's projected to be abysmally low, but the initiatives on the ballot will still become law (or not) even if you don't vote on them, so you might as well have your say. 12 elections in 7 years has gotten a bit out of control, however.

Some Ideas for Greening Davis

2009-05-15T22:40:00.000-07:00

Davis used to pride itself on being rather creative and far-thinking when it came to environmental issues, particularly with regard to solutions that improved our quality of life while also saving energy and helping the environment. We've largely lost that IMO, but there's no reason why we can't turn things around and get creative again. Here, in no real order, are some ideas I brainstormed., but if you have your own, please bring them up in the comments.

1. Expand Unitrans bus services throughout town, both in terms of frequency, weekend service, and routes. Make buses free for riders under 18, and subsidize it through general fund fees. If we had a city charter, we could add a gas or carbon tax and subsidize it directly. If you really wanted to go crazy, you could even throw some electrical lines overhead and run the buses on electricity.

2. Replace the long-defunct solar water heater panels in Community Park with actual functioning solar panels. Put solar panels on all city buildings, schools, etc. This not only gets us using less fossil fuel-produced energy in general as a community, it also potentially gets us savings over the medium run because of excess production running the meters backwards. If successful, we could then start putting solar panels over parking lots that don't already have lots of shade, or even do what Berkeley did with their solar panel subsidization plan.

3. Allow backyard chickens (but no roosters) as long as the scale is within reason and not an actual health hazard. The City of Davis' low carbon diet points to going vegetarian for a few meals a week as a way to cut carbon, but it isn't the chicken or egg so much as the energy intensive manner of raising it that creates the excess carbon. Allowing those who want to to raise chickens out back within city limits, feeding them with table scraps as well as feed, would use far less energy than store-bought eggs, as the transportation cost from chicken to table is essentially nil.

4. Rip up all non-used grass landscaping and replace it with xeriscape or native plants that use a fraction of the water. I'm not talking about parks or sports fields, but all those lawns and median strips that don't get sat upon or played upon.

5. Improve bike paths between Davis and its neighbors. This is already underway with Woodland, but it needs to actually go through.

6. Look into connecting a grey water landscaping reuse of water to the larger water treatment + surface water project.

7. Shift from peripheral sprawl to transit-oriented densification, both downtown and near the university campus. there is no reason why the entire downtown couldn't be 4 stories with shops downstairs and housing above, and still be a wonderful downtown. Include both rental and owner-occupied apartments, and the city would be far more efficient with energy, both heating/cooling and transportation.

8. Make sure the neighborhoods have their local amenities so they don't have to crowd downtown for everything. Local grocery stores, local restaurants, local pubs, local schools right near where you live makes it far easier to walk or ride a bike or do a short drive instead of a cross-town trip.

9. Devote a portion of both school grounds and parks to student/community gardening plots. Fairfield school out in the county rocks because of the experience the kids get with gardening, and the rest of the city's students would benefit as well.

10. Look into setting up a biodiesel-from-waste oil operation using Davis restaurants' waste oil, and then dedicate that to City of Davis diesel vehicles (off the top of my head, I would assume that's mostly fire trucks, anyone know?). Since you can mix diesel and biodiesel at whatever proportion you want, any shortfall due to restaurants going under (a strong possibility in an economy like this) or greater private demand for the oil won't end up costing the city if the plan doesn't pan out. You would just be out the retrofit costs, which aren't huge.

The Way Forward After May 20th - A Response to the Davis Vanguard

2009-05-11T21:28:00.000-07:00

While I agree strongly with David Greenwald about both the immediacy and the danger of the budget crisis that will hit us on May 20th - quite regardless of how the votes on all the props but 1c go - I don't think that "cuts, cuts, cuts" are the best way to go, much less the only way to deal with things in the short term. While I understand that a lot of livelihoods - my own and several members of my families' included, I have skin in the game here, and this is not abstract to me - stand to be hurt by yet another budget standoff and the accompanying brinksmanship, the fact of the matter is that we cannot continue going on doing this. The state is cut to the bone from a decade of these sorts of crisis budgets with cuts that are never restored or paid back, no matter how many times they get called "temporary."

So what's my short-term strategy/solution here? Unfortunately, I don't think we keep our heads above water without brinksmanship. Ultimately, the way out rests upon the state coming to the brink, and making it clear to everyone involved what happens if taxes are not raised, if Republicans refuse to raise taxes or fees and stop anything from passing, as they've done every budget negotiation for a while now. The electorate doesn't like the idea of taxes in the general, but things change when the choice is between a bankrupt state and higher taxes on the wealthy, or oil severance taxes, or what have you. What I'm saying is that it's time we make them blink. Call their bluff. Because if we do what they say, we'll be back in the hole anyways.

So, proposals for the short term:

1. Pass another majority vote fee increase, as the Democrats did in November, and which the legislative analyst found to be constitutional. Schwarzeneggar vetoed that budget, but if he's under the gun for a full default, and tired enough of the legislative Republicans, he may blink.

2. Strip out all the new tax breaks that got put in the last budget to buy off Republican votes. They actually dug the hole deeper as they bargained by cutting more revenue out of the budget. Make the Republicans defend every single item, in the papers as well as in the legislative chambers.

3. Put budget options for all those things I proposed earlier as potential long term solutions - legalized taxed Marijuana, higher income taxes, splitting the Prop. 13 rolls for corporations, raising the car license fee, an oil severance tax, letting non-violent drug offenders out of prison, etc. - and make the Republicans and the Governor shoot them down.

4. Be willing to go to the press early and often, taking out ads if necessary, explaining clearly that if the GOP does not vote these budgets through, that the state will shut own, that schools will be closed, that the services people expect will not be there. Explain that this is not a game, and that the choice is passing the budget with fee/tax increases, or else complete collapse.

5. Finally, make it beyond clear at every opportunity that this is due to the 2/3 rules in budgets AND taxes, and that if voters want an end to this cycle of crisis and shutdown, they need to get rid of that obstacle.

There is not enough left to cut anymore, we've done it to the point where we're ultimately losing money by the problems that the cuts create, and the federal stimulus money may be in jeopardy if we cut much further. It is time to make the choice clear, and let the people of California know what's at stake. Because the fact of the matter is that the Republican party depends on Democrats caving and pulling the state out of the fire at the last minute, and the electorate's assumption that they'll do it no matter what.

It's a horrible road forward, and any state shutdown will hurt me personally, but it's time to deal with this once and for all. Trying to squeeze one more crisis all-cut budget out won't get us through this crisis, there isn't enough left to cut.

[edited to fix typos]

No on Prop 1a

2009-05-08T08:11:00.000-07:00

Prop 1a is a poorly-timed con job and anti-government power play wrapped in a misleading wrapper of OMG DO SOMETHING! On pretty much every set of criteria I can see, it fails, and deserves to be shot down as a popular rebuke to the people who cooked this one up and foisted it upon us, hoping noone would read the fine print.

In essence, Prop 1a does 3 major things to our already absurdly mangled budget process, none of which make anything better:

1. It diverts a huge chunk of money away from the general fund into a rainy-day fund for future economic downturns, expanding it from 5% to 12.5%, which can not be used this year. Apparently $42 billion in the hole does not count as a rainy day.

2. It limits the amount of general fund spending to the previous year's spending, indexed to inflation and population growth. Anything that comes in on tax day that exceeds that level, be it due to a recovering economy or higher taxes, would not be allowed to be spent, but would be diverted into the aforementioned rainy day fund. Like the current budget? You'd better, because it'll be the set-in-stone model for all subsequent ones if 1a passes.

3. It aggrandizes and expands the executive powers of the governor by allowing him (via the Director of Finance, an appointed position) to disperse rainy day funds, make emergency cuts unilaterally between legislative budget cycles, and spend the emergency rainy day funds.

So let me get this straight: we have a huge budget deficit right now (even if prop 1a an all the other ones pass, we'll have at least a $20 billion shortfall on the day after the election), a governor that repeatedly tries to just go over the legislature and dictate how the state spends its money (this is the second special election he's called, at significant taxpayer expense, in addition to the 2005 one that the voters rightly shot down), a budget held hostage by Republicans who refuse to allow any tax increase past their 2/3 threshold de facto filibuster (but whose 1/3 filibuster-capable rump days may be numbered), and a state in economic collapse in desperate need of countercyclical Keynesian spending, and they propose what?

Why, to freeze this awful budget in perpetuity, take even more out money for some "rainy day" years from now, and put it all under the control of the governor's office, while it's occupied by a guy who has shown himself quite determined to run the state like it was his own personal fiefdom, with voters, judges and legislators as mere uppity subjects?

Even with a Democrat in the statehouse in 2010, this would be a terrible change to an already wretched budget process, and the potential for governors to use that rainy day fund to reward friends and punish enemies throws the whole balance of powers thing sorely out of whack. This is not a solution to our current crisis, this is a classic shock doctrine attempt to use cover of crisis to push through something else that people already wanted to pass. Tying it to school funds was unbelievably cynical.

No on 1a. Send them back to the drawing board until they come up with a decent budget. If they can't come to a decision on a budget yet again, the Democrats should call the CA GOP's bluff and put forth a bunch of ballot initiatives to get rid of the asinine 2/3 requirements for both budgets and taxes, raise taxes on those making millions even in today's crappy economy, strip commercial and corporate real estate from prop 13's rolls, legalize pot and tax the heck out of it, and put a severance tax on oil like they do in liberal states like Texas and Alaska so that the state of California gets some benefit from the lucrative natural resource that gets pumped out from beneath our soil and then sold back to us.

And if Schwarzeneggar tries to veto that, then force a recall election with those initiatives on the ballot. After all, it was good enough for Gov. Grey Davis, with a budget with a fraction of the service cuts or revenue shortfalls as the last several budgets under Arnold.

But for God's sake, people, don't make things worse just because they threaten to cut everything. I've been through this game before, and I'm getting tired of it.

No on Props C, D, E

2009-05-08T08:00:00.000-07:00

All of these three propositions are essentially the present borrowing from the future, gutting a bunch of money the voters previously set aside for specific goals with dedicated revenue streams, so as to try and fill the gaping hole in the general fund. Unlike borrowing money through bonds for, say, High Speed Rail, or a new college campus, there will be nothing created by those borrowed funds that would expand the revenue available to the government to pay that money back in the future. It's just grabbing funds to fill a hole elsewhere and leaving a new gaping hole for someone else to deal with two years down the road.

Prop C essentially sells off the state lottery's future income to investors in exchange for getting that money up front. On the "bright" side, it would actually get some money immediately help with the current budget. On the down side, it creates a shortfall in a couple years that we'd have to find extra money then to patch. Fail. From a more ethical point of view, I find Prop C's setting aside funds for better marketing of the lottery to try and maximize revenues to be pretty messed-up, given that we're essentially talking about running more ads for gambling in the middle of a depression and housing bust that is ruining a lot of families. Selling more lottery tickets to desperate people so that we can patch a budget hole because just over a third of the state leg. don't want to raise taxes? Pretty low-down IMO. Honestly, I don't know what the heck we're doing even having a state lottery. As an aside, reading the text of the bill is hilarious, with all of the "California cannot promote gambling (except in this one exception; and this other one too)" lines.

Prop D raids 1998's prop 10 fund for Children's Health, funded by tobacco taxes. It's the same basic story as Prop C, although it adds an insult to voters who set those funds aside thinking that they weren't going to get taken and put somewhere else. Ballot box budgeting is already a pretty screwy affair, but robbing Peter to pay Paul just makes a mockery of people even bothering to vote to set up those dedicated funds in the first place.

Prop E does the same thing but cutting into 2004's Prop 63 money for mental health community services, especially to the poor, as well as prevention and early intervention for mental health problems. Doing that in the middle of an economic free-fall, when the state budget that this is being raided to backfill is also cutting back on social services? Communities will see direct consequences of this, just as they did when then-Gov. Reagan slashed mental health funding, and turned them out on the street. Penny-wise and pound-foolish as well as ton-cruel. This will seriously stress law enforcement down the road.

So in sum, if all you care about is balancing this budget this year, and don't really care about what props. 10 and 63 funded, and you're expecting magic fairy dust to get us a chunk of future revenue in a couple of years to pay this all back, then it might make sense. Personally, I can't see that any of it makes much sense from even a short term standpoint. No on C, D, E.

Today is the Last Day to Register for May 19th Special Election

2009-05-04T10:05:00.000-07:00

If you have moved since the last election you voted in, you need to re-register with your current address. The CA Secretary of State's website has lots of good information on how to register.

For Yolo County residents (UCD students living on-campus are still in the county, even though they're not in the Davis city limits), you can check to see if you're registered with this link. If you're not registered, or need to re-register, you can either go to the County Courthouse in Woodland, to a Yolo County Library, or to the DMV. Fill the form out with your new information, and then turn it in at the Yolo County Clerk's office in person, or make sure that if you mail it that the postmark is on or before May 4th (ie. TODAY). The Clerk's Office is in the basement of the Yolo County Administrative Building, on Court Street right next to the courthouse building.

View Larger Map

For people registered for permanent absentee ballots, you can check whether it's been sent to you yet, or whether they've recieved it if you've already turned it in at this link from the Yolo County Clerk's office.

Good News - Holmes Suspected Swine Flu Cases Turn Out Negative

2009-05-03T22:30:00.001-07:00

The Vanguard has the full text, if you're interested. I would just like to praise the DJUSD and Yolo County health officials for doing the right thing and closing the school until it was clear that there were no Swine Flu infections. Hopefully the district has learned a bit from this test run about how best to respond quickly and release information, since it is very likely that this will not be the last time they'll have to respond to a potential flu case.

Unlike the regular old flu, H1N1 appears to spread more quickly, and infects young adults much more readily. While the mortality in this flu does not YET appear to be greater than the common flu, it could end up giving the school district and local hospitals a real headache just by infecting a greater proportion of the population at once in a wave of infections, stressing our ability to care for it while also dealing with everything else that comes through an ER. And given the tendency of influenza viruses to mutate extremely rapidly, and go from being relatively benign to very dangerous in a matter of weeks or months, it is absolutely the smart thing to do to send everyone home for a couple days and slow the potential rate of transmission.

Does it inconvenience people? Yes, but being wrong about a potential case by closing a school that didn't turn out to have a case is far, far better for everyone involved than if the school district errs in the other direction, and fails to stop the beginning of an outbreak in its early stages. The cost of the first is an irritant, the cost of the second is potentially lots of kids in the ER.

There will likely be a lot of criticism of the school district because this turned out negative, but in fact it is exactly what we need to be ready to do, if we are to successfully get ourselves through a real outbreak. Given the genetic similarities between H1N1 and the 1918 Spanish flu, it would be terribly short-sighted to assume that we're out of the clear after one case. The trick is to avoid panicking unproductively without falling into the trap of the overreaction overreaction.

May 19th Special Election - No on Everything

2009-05-03T09:43:00.000-07:00

I'll write up a more detailed initiative-by-initiative analysis later this week, but but my basic position on these "EMERGENCY!" initiatives is that, much like the 2005 special election that Schwarzeneggar tried to ram past an exhausted electorate in a low-turnout election, they simply aren't worth voting for, regardless of the severity of the crisis in front of us.

California is both broke and broken. We are in a crisis of both fiscal and economic nature that has been several decades coming, and we do, in fact, need to do something fast if we are to keep our state from completely falling apart. I do not disagree with the elected Democrats in the Yes on Everything crowd on that basic point.

And yet, as we have learned so many times in the past decade of perpetual OMG CRISIS!!!, it is not enough to simply throw any solution at a problem, and not everything called a "reform" is actually a change for the better. For it to make sense to vote an initiative into law, it has to a) solve the problem, or failing that, b) at least make things better in both the short and medium run.

On those grounds, the slate of initiatives that we will vote on in a couple of weeks fail the test. The Davis Vanguard wrote a couple of days ago that "Local Schools Poised to Take Huge Hit if Propositions Do Not Pass." While that is true (as long as we assume for the sake of argument that the state government then does absolutely nothing but cut services), it is also true even if those propositions pass, because even given all the terrible long term structural messes they lock in, they still will fall short and leave us with a huge deficit this year, and then the Governor will have new powers to declare emergency budget cuts to boot.

The fact of the matter is that these initiatives will not deal with the crisis we find ourselves in, in the short or the medium term, and 1a in particular will cripple us over the medium-to-long term. The only one that's even in the vicinity of benign is 1f, but cutting pay for legislators won't do a damn thing to actually balance the budget, because legislator pay is a drop in the ocean of the Calfornia annual budget. 1f is just Abel Maldonado trying to look good for the cameras to draw attention away from his selling his vote after holding the state hostage on the budget for weeks last time around.

These bills are neither effective relief nor needed reform, and on that alone are not worthy of a yes vote. We are in a deep crisis and need both relief and reform, but this package of initiatives are not going to do the trick. Back to the drawing board, and hopefully a frank discussion about majority rule on taxes and budgets, as well as on the #1 reason why govt. costs keep rising: health care premiums paid to for-profit health insurance corporations, rising at a rate far faster than inflation or government spending.

Suspected Swine Flu Closes Holmes Jr. High

2009-05-01T23:19:00.000-07:00

Here's part of the official announcement from the DJUSD:

The latest information, as of Friday May 1, 2009, 9:00 pm PDT, applies:

Holmes Junior High School is closed to students for a period of fourteen calendar days as now recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and the California Department of Public Health and directed by the Yolo County Health Department. This is an extension of the time period originally announced.

Your Holmes Junior High student(s) must remain away from campus and are highly discouraged from congregating in groups.
All Holmes students are prohibited from attending any District sponsored activities (i.e. All-City Band, All-City Orchestra, Chorus, Athletics, etc.)

The following new information applies to siblings of Holmes students:

Healthy siblings are expected to attend school.
Healthy siblings have no restrictions. They may participate in all school-related activities.

Please continue to monitor the health of your child. In addition, please review this entire communication, especially the information directed for Community Members as it relates to preventative measures.

Information for Community Members

Holmes Junior High School is closed to students for fourteen calendar days (14 days) as recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and the California Department of Public Health and directed by the Yolo County Health Department. This is an extension of the time period originally announced.

Students that do not attend Holmes Junior High School have no restrictions and will continue with their regularly scheduled activities.

Keep in mind that this grows out of a suspected case, not a confirmed one, so it is very possible this is regular old flu. An interesting take on the similarities and differences between H1N1 and the 1918 pandemic flu virus can be found in this LA Times article today.

It should be interesting to see how this affects the hearing at the Yolo County Supervisors this coming Tuesday on whether to cut back on health services. Sick people turned away from or dissuaded from taking their sick kids to health clinics is about the worst possible thing that can happen in a potential pandemic. This is unlikely to be the last case in Yolo County.

UPDATE - Another great article on the flu from Effect Measure, The Overreaction Overreaction:

It's not just the current reputation of local officials that concern me, however. If this virus does wane with the summer months (something we expect to happen), it's current mildness and its disappearance may lead citizens and decision makers back into the kind of reckless disregard of public health facts that has produced our current weak and brittle health infrastructure. But flu season will come again next fall, and it would be no scientific surprise if this strain is part of flu's repertoire. Most of the world would still be unprotected unless we spend the interim preparing for the possibility it will reappear in a more serious clinical form (flu viruses are notorious for that kind of change). When I say prepare, I am not just talking about a vaccine, although that will be an important, but difficult part. We will also need to invest urgently in a health care, public health and social infrastructure to absorb the consequences of potentially large scale absenteeism. We will also need to work out policies that will allow social distancing measures to work (child care, sick leave policy and other issues).

Cutting County Health Services is Penny Wise and Pound Foolish

2009-04-29T09:48:00.000-07:00

So now it's going to a hearing: Yolo County Supervisors will discuss cutting community health services by $1.5 million, in an effort to make up a huge deficit. Among those cuts is an insanely shortsighted cut in health care services to undocumented immigrants, considered in the context of a potential influenza pandemic centered in Mexico, which has already spread to other parts of California, including Sacramento.

The thing is this: whatever short term savings the county might see from denying care will be dwarfed by the cost - both fiscal and human - of intentionally leaving holes in public health care services during a serious outbreak of a deadly communicative disease. For god's sake, people, disease does not refrain from passing between people just because they have different nationalities or visa status.

Times are hard, and the economy that pays the tax revenue to the county is collapsing. I get that. But to cut something as basic as this in the face of a possible pandemic is mind-bogglingly dumb.

The Board of Supervisors will conduct a public hearing on the proposed cuts at its meeting Tuesday, sometime after 10 a.m. The board meets at the County Administration Building, 625 Court St., Woodland.

Bathrooms

2009-04-28T09:01:00.000-07:00

Totally random, but I couldn't resist. So the SF Chronicle is claiming that some online poll named a Nashville bathroom as the best in the country. So, being curious, I check out the pictures, and I've gotta say, while shiny art deco fixtures are nice enough, it's no Madonna Inn. I mean, seriously, how do you compete with a rock waterfall urinal?

Public Health is National Defense

2009-04-26T20:37:00.000-07:00

So with the recent evolution of Swine Flu in Mexico to a potentially virulent new form (yes kids, evolution is very real, and will affect you regardless whatever silly stuff you believe about either God or Darwin) getting back in the headlines, it is about time to revisit the very real consequences of both conservative politics and a terrible for-profit healthcare system that leaves millions uninsured and forced to use emergency rooms for their health care.

Back during the stimulus bill debate a couple of months ago, there was actually $900 billion of funding for influenza pandemic preparedness, that would have been really nice to have right now, but $850 million of that was stripped out of the bill by the Republicans because, you know, government spending is bad (when it's not for war), with the lame justification that pandemic funding had nothing to do with the economy. Now, facing a depression and possibly a pandemic on top of that, we'll get to see whether not having that funding will make the economy better or worse off. And on top of that Republican senators have fillibustered the confirmation of a Secretary of Health and Human Services because she is pro-choice, which would be really helpful to get filled since that's the federal agency that's supposed to handle things like disease outbreak response. And they wonder why they lost the last two elections.

On a smaller but no less important scale here in Yolo County, Republican 3rd district county supervisor Matt Rexroad has been making it clear that he sees health and human services as less critical than law enforcement (what he calls "public safety," although I do not see how that term could logically exclude health services), and generally has taken the approach of 'we need to cut everything down to whatever funding levels we get, ASAP.' This is what, by his own admission, he is running for reelection to do: cut Yolo County's government down to size. The fact that raising taxes to pay for sustained or even expanded services doesn't even factor into his thinking is a symptom of why conservatism generally fails when it is tested by anything other than the peak of a boom economy, because the "you're on your own" approach utterly fails when things go bad. To his credit, Rexroad is transparent about his approach and what motivates it, and appears to be legitimately pained over the impact of the cuts, but it's still a bad approach IMO, and I cannot understand for the life of me why Yolo County Democrats are rolling over and endorsing a guy who stands at odds with most political positions they hold. Cutting health services in the middle of an epidemic or (God help us) pandemic will do us far more harm than finding the money to respond effectively. It's not as if Davis and Woodland don't still have a ton of very rich people who could afford to pay a bit more in taxes than they do right now.

Finally, it is worth pointing out that America and California are in a far worse position to deal with any public health crisis because of our utterly dysfunctional for-profit health insurance system. Disease does not discriminate between people who are rich and people who are poor, people who have jobs with good benefits and people who have inadequate coverage or no insurance, it cuts across all of our silly little social divisions and kills at random. It is a clear and present danger to everyone in our society for anyone to go without access to a doctor, for any family to hesitate to take their kid coming down with the flu to a doctor because they can't afford the bill, for communities to go without local clinics that can treat and alert the state and federal disease control centers to new outbreaks in new places. It puts all of us at risk when our health care is used not as a public system to ensure better public health, but instead a resource extraction industry mining people for profit, and denying care based on ability to pay the ~~protection money~~ copays.

We need a public health system where everyone who wants or needs basic and critical care can get it without going bankrupt. We are put in greater danger, individually and collectively, because of our lack of such a system, both at the national, the state and the local level. Decades of conservative opposition to providing universal public health care has cost us dearly already, and if this becomes a major pandemic, will make things far worse than they need to be.

Like it or not, there are things in which we rise and fall as one, as a people. Public health is one of those things.

(For less sensationalistic information on Swine Flu than what you get from the broadcast media, make sure to bookmark the Center for Disease Control and the World Health Organization)

Interesting Conference this Saturday - Living in the New Economy

2009-04-24T10:46:00.000-07:00

This should be good, it's about time we started reflecting instead of just reacting.

The website has more, but here's an outline of what's going on tomorrow from 9am until about 4pm at Davis Community Church:

Since September we have all been living in the midst of a new economy, one that has been felt differently by each of us depending on our circumstances, but one that is already directly affecting each of our lives and the lives of everyone around us.

This one-day conference is intended to paint as vivid a picture as possible of the effects the new economy is having on the home front: not on wall street or even on main street, but in our home lives, where we live.

• What IS this new economy and what DOES it mean for the way we live?

• What IS happening to people when they face losing their homes? Do they move in with others? Rent a room in someone else’s house? Take in borders?

• What DO people who have been laid off actually DO? Put out lots of resumes? Look through want ads/surf online? Sit home in despair?

• What happens to retirees who’ve seen significant depletion of their retirement/nest eggs? Move?: out of retirement homes, in with children? choose?: between medicine and food?

• What is happening to people losing health insurance along with their employment? What happens when illness occurs?

• How are we all dealing with the anxiety, sadness, anger and fear that comes along with the new economy? How could we help ourselves do better?

The new economy will continue to bring changes: to our living arrangements and to how we think about living arrangements; to our working lives and to how we think about our means of making a living; to our expectations of the world and how we think and feel about ourselves and others.

What’s going on? What can we expect? What are we up against? What can we do? What does coping look like for each of us? How can we most gracefully adapt to the changing times?

We will hold a daylong conference featuring presentations by financial experts, social workers, health care professionals, psychologists and spiritual leaders all addressing the changes to our lives being brought on by the new economy.

(registration is free but required, you can do so online by clicking here)

In these times of panics, crises, and the insatiable conservative demand for cut after cut to our social safety net, it is worth thinking over what our options really are, and what our community can do to help one another through this trial. In addition to the various experts, State Senator Lois Wolk and County Clerk Freddie Oakley will speak.

Bush Used Torture To Fabricate Iraq Casus Belli

2009-04-21T21:58:00.000-07:00

This is not really a surprise, but just so it's clear to all the 24 fans, the only thing that torture is good for is extracting false confessions. I'd be willing to bet that every one of those orange alerts that popped up every time the Bush administration wanted to change the subject or get a bill through congress was the product of waterboarding some random guy in Guantanamo until he sang the required tune.

From McClatchy:

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. No evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.

The use of abusive interrogation — widely considered torture — as part of Bush's quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.

They tortured in our name, used torture techniques that we hung Japanese and German soldiers for doing to our troops in the Second World War, and set up a whole host of twisted legal arguments to try and justify the unjustifiable, so that they could cook up a needless war on false premises.

"Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."

Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said.

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.

"While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

There were no ties between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. So they forced some guy to say there was.

There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So they forced some guy to say there were.

And to make it worse, most of the guys in Guantanamo weren't even in al-Qaeda, but were random Afghanis and others sold to the Northern Alliance or American military forces because we had put out a lucrative bounty on any al-Qaeda people could turn in. So people accused old enemies, kidnapped random passers-by, or whatever, and told the gullible Americans that they were al-Qaeda, collected the bounty, and walked away. We then imprisoned these people, tortured them, and got nothing at all from their forced confessions, because most of them didn't know anything to begin with. But that doesn't really matter, since the Bush administration wasn't looking for the truth.

The Bush administration committed war crimes in your name so that they could sucker the American people into believing that they were in danger from Iraq when they weren't, so that they could go after a country that had not attacked us while doing nothing to actually bring the non-state terrorist organization that did attack us to justice.

Torture works, if all you need are lies for soundbites on cable TV.

It remains to be seen if any of the people who gave these orders to torture, who wrote the legal justification for them, who cooked up the policies, will stand for their crimes, or whether they'll just try a few low-level interrogators as scapegoats.

Garamendi for the 3rd CD?

2009-04-16T22:42:00.000-07:00

OK, I'll admit, I haven't heard anything about Lt. Gov. John Garamendi actually considering running for the 3rd, (although there have been rumors that he's considering the recently-vacated 10th, in addition to the 2010 gubernatorial race), but I caught wind of a facebook group urging him to consider the 3rd recently, and I think it's a great idea for a couple reasons.

First, the 3rd has been growing more and more Democratic over the past decade (current #s: D-38%, R-40%, DTS-18%), and Lungren's 5.5% victory over underfunded, undersupported Dem candidate Bill Durston looks a lot weaker when you figure that the Peace and Freedom candidate pulled 4% in the same race. Given the foreclosures devastating the 3rd, and the long term secular shift in the greater Sacramento area towards a left of center Democrat+Decline to State majority, a big name candidate with strong support from the party might be able to beat Lungren.

Second, Garamendi's actually from the area, unlike SoCal carpetbagger Lungren (who, to his credit, does represent a significant demographic of SoCal transplant McMansion types in the district). He knows the area and the issues pretty well, having represented it at the state level for some time. Having a congressional advocate for the delta who understands water issues would help a lot too.

Third, the sad fact of the Gubernatorial race is that the money race looms over everything, and Garamendi's said too many reasonable things of late to rake in those fundraising dollars. In the 3rd, he'd be a bigger fish in a smaller pool.

Fourth, there are already a ton of Democrats running for the 10th, and to date noone is making so much as noises for the 3rd. It would be a better allocation of candidates to force the GOP to play defense everywhere than to focus everybody on one safe seat.

Finally, from a strictly selfish perspective, Garamendi taking Lungren out in the 3rd would significantly reduce the likelihood in the post-2010 redistricting that Yolo County has to put up with some Sacramento Valley wingnut for a congressman. The 3rd has often been a sort of south Sac Valley district, and having Garamendi in that seat when the State Legislature draws up the new map in 2011 (Prop. 11 only affects redistricting at the state level, not congressional) makes it more likely that they'll draw the 3rd so that it's at least a lean Dem district.

So, John, how about it? I'd love ya for governor, but if it's looking hopeless, please think about the 3rd CD.