Month: February 2003

Cowardly Joi Ito as much as admits that his ideas about the so-called “emergent democracy” are incoherent and indefensible, and concedes defeat by banning me from leaving comments on his blog (right after I said by-bye). Read the whole thing, it’s a hilarious example of the kind of reasoning that’s very stylish in France these days.

Apparently the boy can’t control his lust for power after all.

The Sacramento Bee — sacbee.com — GOP unveils its no-tax-hike plan: “Senate Republicans unveiled their long-awaited plan Wednesday to fill California’s budget hole without raising taxes, saying they would roll over a $3 billion deficit until 2005 and slash billions from state programs.”

Jim Brulte, Senate Republican leader and likely candidate for Governor in ’06 if Schwartzenegger is terminated unveiled a plan for balancing the California budget without raising taxes or fees as the Democrats have proposed. The Brulte plan makes 7% across-the-board cuts in General Fund spending, and refrains from raising Community College fees or raping counties, the two methods most preferred by budget-balancers in the past. Brulte also plays some accounting games to comply with the state’s balanced budget law, such as using a two-year budget cycle and altering Medicaid accounting. The big question mark is how it squares with Prop 98, the law setting a floor on school spending pegged to a percentage of the General Fund, but the Davis plan has a similar exposure.

The good thing about the plan, from a bipartisan viewpoint, is that it gets the ball rolling on talks among the Big Five* that will ultimately resolve the budget impasse.

*The Big Five are the Dem and Rep leaders of the two houses plus the Governor. They traditionally do the big horse-trading that leads to a budget each year, and are very late getting started this year, which had led to fears that the Reps were going to hold out until the state couldn’t issue checks before getting down to business.

The National Organization for Women is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, an extremist organization that pretends to stand for mainstream American values such as equality and freedom of choice. While claiming to speak for women, NOW has an agenda that’s profoundly hostile to men, marriage, family life, and heterosexual women. The Supreme Court issued a stark reminder of NOW’s extremism yesterday by overturning, on an 8-1 vote (Stevens dissenting) NOW’s use of the federal RICO statute to silence protesters at abortion mills. While there’s so far been little in the way of editorial comment on this case in the Corporate Liberal Media, the Wall Street Journal had a few choice words to say:

NOW’s argument, which has been wending its way through the courts for years, was that abortion opponents were in violation of the RICO and Hobbs acts, federal statutes enacted to pursue Tony Soprano, not local church groups passing out flyers on a sidewalk.

NOW nonetheless claimed the latter was engaged in racketeering and conspiring to “extort” the “property” of abortion seekers by demonstrating in front of clinics. Since RICO violators are susceptible to treble damages, NOW had hoped either to bankrupt its political opponents or scare them away with the threat of a financially debilitating verdict. Mr. Terry, for example, filed for bankruptcy in 1998 owing $1.6 million to NOW and Planned Parenthood.

But Chief Justice Rehnquist, writing for the majority, cited NOW’s “fatally flawed” efforts as an attempt to extend the reach of these laws well beyond what they were originally intended to cover. “Such a significant expansion,” wrote Justice Rehnquist, “must come from Congress, not from the courts.” And Justice Ginsburg reiterated that the court was “rightly reluctant, as I see it, to extend RICO’s domain further.”

It should have been obvious on its face that abortion protesters are driven by fundamentally different motives than are mobsters, but it took the Supremes to sort this all out. This is because courts bend over backwards to appear fair to NOW, even when that means sacrificing the fundamental civil liberties of the majority, such as peaceful protest.

More on this case in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, and the Washington Times. NOW’s analysis from president Kim Gandy: “It’s a green light for those kingpins to start again orchestrating violence across the country.”