Hold Your Nose and Vote

It’s not exactly an inspiring election day. There six measures on the ballot, and not one of them deserves to be there. They are ugly comprimises dreamed up by a dysfunctional legislature.

So, Californians, probably very few of us, trudged to the voting booth, and not very enthusiastically.

I voted yes on all ballot measures. Why? Not because the legislation proposed represented competent lawmaking, but because they were the best on offer for a bad situation.

I have no doubt that the measures will go down in flames. They were written by an unpopular legislature and supported by an unpopular governor. 

Furthermore, the few who cast their ballots today were probably predominately out-of-sorts voters fed up with bailouts and recession, not willing to spend a dime. You know, the tea party types.

California voters are a fickle lot: we want all our services, but don’t want to pay for them. Republicans block raising taxes, but are unwilling to make unpopular cuts.

So I voted today in what must have been the most uninspiring election day of a lifetime. Quite a downer compared with November.

And what will tomorrow bring? A huge deficit, and more bad budgetary news.

We Californians must fix our budget, and we should start with reform of the state’s government. We should remove the gerrymandering that elects extremists from both parties. We should remove the absurd two-thirds requirement to pass budgets and the requirement for a two-thirds vote to raise taxes.

The time for reform is now, while the dust is settling. Maybe we won’t have to hold our noses for the next election.

The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party

“At any rate I’ll never go there again!” said Alice, as she picked her way through the wood. “It’s the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!”

And so it was. Just when we thought the Republican Party could not embarrass itself any more than it already has, it did.

They were called tea parties.

Fancying themselves patriots, Republicans, mad as hell that they lost the presidential election after having squandered the last eight years, held tea parties throughout the nation this week.

Brian Dennert, brave blogger that he is, waded into one yesterday, armed with his intellect and a video camera. Here are the results:

On one hand, it is good to see that there are people who care enough about public policy to take to the streets in protest. These ladies are charming in their earnestness, in their friendliness to the interviewer, and in their willingness to speak their minds.

On the other hand, it is appalling to see such a display of uninformed right-wing paranoia. The common thread of all these tea party events was this feeling of persecution on the part of Republicans. They posed as the afflicted minority, asserting that they were deeply offended by all of this taxation.

One cannot help but point out that we can thank the Texan-in-chief, former president George W. Bush, for much of the deficit we currently have. He left office with a $482 billion deficit under his oversize belt buckle.

Speaking of Texans, no tea party can be complete without its Mad Hatter. This is where the new Texan-in-Chief, Governor Rick Perry, steps in. Did people really vote for this guy?

Apparently so. He’s continuing the Bush tradition of all-nonsense politics admirably.

The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, incidentally, is this:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

These lines are, along with the Second Amendment, conservatives’ favorites. The Tenth Amendment was used to justify segregation during the 1960s. Hitch your wagon to a star, Governor Perry.

Governor Rick Perry of Texas holds forth on the virtues of the Tenth Amendment.