Category: Politics

— Lou Papan has declared war on Sheila Kuehl – this is gonna be good. Link: Bill Is Political Payback Over Papan Defeat

— More Than Zero says what everybody is thinking:

It is time for the government to step in. I call for immediate takeover of Microsoft by the federal government. I believe this could resolve both the impending social security crisis and my XP installation.

Amen, brother.

— High among the reasons Californians are the laughing-stock of America is the talent of our state legislators for pushing ridiculous agendas to absurd heights, as John Vasconcellos did with his silly self-esteem program. The latest example of this remarkable exercise in unintentional reflexivity is a bill by one of the most rotund members of the legislature to tax soft drinks as a cure for teen obesity (Senator’s bill calls for levy on soda)

SACRAMENTO – With obesity increasingly becoming a problem for California’s schoolchildren, one state lawmaker is proposing a tax on soda to discourage consumption and pay for programs intended to guide kids to healthier living.

Sen. Deborah Ortiz, D-Sacramento, said her legislation will help highlight the growing trouble children have controlling their weight while at the same time offering schools an incentive to drop lucrative contracts to sell certain brands of soda on their campuses.

“All I’m saying is let’s have them (soda drinks) made available in other places than schools,” Ortiz said. “Our children are there six and eight hours a day. They are a captive audience there.”

Ortiz is regarded by her peers in Sacramento as the dimmest of the many dim bulbs beneath the dome, and she’s also one of the heaviest and most acne-ridden. There’s a personal reason behind each of Ortiz’ bills, many stemming from her childhood with a single mother on welfare. In her forties and still unmarried, she wants to raise all the children of California as if they were her own. No thanks, Debby.

Google “Ortiz soft drink tax” and you’ll see a nationwide sneering campaign already in progress from New Mexico to New York.

My daughter who lives on Long Island asked me how people like Ortiz get elected, and I had to tell her the story of term-limits and its many consequences. Ortiz was first elected to the Assembly seat formerly held by Phil Isenberg, one of the brightest lights in the Democratic Party, and she subsequently ascended to the Senate seat formerly held by Leroy Greene, the most common-sense member of the legislature and its only engineer. While nobody would ever argue that former Isenberg aide and city council-member Ortiz can’t fill a seat, she’s all calories and no nutrients, as are so many of the ersatz citizen-politicians who’ve gone to Sacramento since term-limits passed.

— My old buddy Sen. Ray Haynes describes Gray Davis’ approach to solving major public problems in an editorial titled: Error of our ways in the OC Register.

It is not a difficult strategy. The first step is to come up with several solutions. The second step is to test those solutions with focus groups to see which solution is the most popular with “the people.” The third step is to market the solutions with the special interest groups in Sacramento to see who will get the angriest. The fourth step is to throw out all the first solutions and start with step one again. This process is repeated until all time has run out and something has to be done.

He nails it.

— A couple of issues have been brought to my attention recently that will be of interest to those divorced fathers and mothers paying child support who’d like to get involved in the California political process. First, Assemblyman Rod Wright (D, Los Angeles) has a bill that will make it harder for the wrong man to be identified as the father of a child born out-of-wedlock. This ensures that the appropriate party can participate in raising the child, and with supporting the child and its mother. The bill is AB 2240 Paternity Testing. Here’s the summary:
AB 2240, as introduced, Wright. Paternity testing.

(1) Existing law provides for a voluntary declaration of
paternity. Existing law requires that declaration to be executed on a
form developed by the Department of Child Support Services
containing specified information, including a statement by the mother
that the man who has signed the voluntary declaration of paternity
is the only possible father.
This bill would require the Department of Child Support Services
to consult with father’s rights advocacy groups upon further
development of that form.

(2) Existing law authorizes specified persons to bring an action
to declare or determine the existence of the father and child
relationship, as specified.
This bill would require specified persons who bring an action
pursuant to that provision to sign a declaration under penalty of
perjury that the defendant is the only possible father.

(3) Existing law authorizes a local child support agency to issue
an administrative order requiring the mother, the child, and the
alleged father to submit to genetic testing to determine paternity in
any civil action or proceeding in which paternity is a relevant fact
and a contested issue.
Existing law authorizes a party in a civil action to make a motion
to vacate a judgment within a specified period of time.
This bill would set forth procedures whereby certain persons may
move to vacate a judgment establishing paternity entered by a court
of this state after the expiration of the period of time in which a
party may generally move to vacate a judgment, as specified.

The other thing concerns an advisory panel of fathers who will meet with the state’s Department of Child Support Services once a quarter to provide input on the operation of the child support collection system.

If you’re interested in either of these things, drop me an e-mail and I’ll tell you how to get involved. You can comment on the bill by simply clicking “Comment” at the link provided.

Note to the squeamish: People bring these issues to me because there was a time when I was a fathers’ rights activist, but I’ve retired from that avocation. So if you’re an affected party and you think you can sit back and let somebody like me perform your citizenship duties for you, you’re mistaken. Either you do it yourself, or it doesn’t get done.

— Here’s a nice synopsis of where the parties stand (In the Political Party Ring, It’s Fearless Frodo vs. Pathetic Piggy)

It’s not as tangible an asset as money or good poll numbers. But for a political party, confidence–in its message, its ideas, even its mission–is usually a critical ingredient of success in an election year. Right now, the confidence gap may be the biggest difference between the parties. Just over seven months before the midterm elections, Republicans are swaggering. Democrats look lost.

There you have it.

— The historic welfare reform of 1996 was a smashing success from the standpoint of taking welfare recipients capable of working off their couches and into the labor force, but there’s more to be done (Welfare reforms facing their toughest challenge)

A new University of Michigan study shows that while the welfare population is shrinking, those who remain have a greater concentration of social problems. Its examination of 2,000 women found that those who had been on welfare longer were 41 percent more likely to have no job skills, 67 percent more likely to have no car or driver’s license, 56 percent more likely to have mental health problems, 53 percent more likely to have physical health problems, almost three times as likely to have children with health problems and 67 percent more likely to have substance abuse problems.

The debate in Washington over welfare re-authorization seems to be shaping up between a faction that wants to stay the course while adding some minor tune-ups on the marriage promotion side and a faction that wants to restore the old system that provided the Democratic Party with a steady stream of new voters dependent on hand-outs from the government.

The question that the old welfare system raised for me was why we insist that people who aren’t capable of holding down even a menial job should be raising children in the first place. Don’t we all believe that raising children is the hardest job there is, and don’t we all believe that doing it “for the children” is the essence of sound social policy? There needs to be a set of alternatives to biological mother-custody in cases where mom can’t perform basic self-maintenance tasks, and they need to be as kind as possible. But this debate was poisoned by Newt Gingrich prattling on about orphanages last time around, so we’ll only get there years from now. In the meantime, the administration’s marriage-boosting proposals are a step in the right direction.

— Chronicle legal affairs writer Harriet Chiang outlines the grounds for appeal in the dog-mailing case.

Questionable calls by the judge, ineffective assistance by Knoller’s lawyer and prejudicial evidence involving the couple’s ties to the Aryan Brotherhood are likely to be the primary defense arguments, veteran lawyers said yesterday.

It’s pretty much what I suspected, plus that Aryan Brotherhood business which sticks out like a sore leftist.

Mercury News legal affairs writer Howard Mintz supports Chiang’s findings.

A defense lawyer, handling her first murder trial, who got down on her hands and knees to argue her case, and who at one point was threatened with contempt of court. An untested legal theory that produces the only second-degree murder conviction for a fatal dog mauling in the state’s history. Glaring publicity and a host of contested and potentially inflammatory evidence, including links to a notorious prison gang.

The dual conviction – for both murder and manslaughter in the same death – is also questionable.

— Andrew Sullivan drives the extreme left insane, because he’s one of those Oppressed People who’ve wandered off the thought plantation, like Ward Connerly and Nora Vincent, and actually has the nerve to criticize Conventional Totalitarian Thought of the sort typified by The Nation. Thus Sullivan a constant target for abuse by the belligerosos.

Sullivan’s decision to do some Shakespeare (he’s playing Benedick in Much Ado) provided the opening The Nation’s Eric Alterman needed to brand him a drama queen. Silly Alterman, you don’t even warrant a link.

— Roger Gay comments on recent court decisions shutting down child support formulas (Men’s News Daily)

The judgment states three requirements for constitutionally acceptable child support decisions. Both parents have an equal obligation to support their children in accordance with their relative means to do so; regardless of their gender and custodial status. The amount awarded as “child support” must be limited to address only the need for financial support of dependent children. Child support awards must be rationally related to the relevant facts and circumstances of each case.

This is a good step in the right direction, but it will take 10 or 20 years before this kind of thinking comes to California.