Former Green Party assemblywoman Bock to run in recall Former state assemblywoman Audie Bock today announced that she will add her name to the ballot in the recall election. As the first Democrat to break ranks with the party, Bock will go up against a slate of Republicans should Gray Davis be recalled in October. … Continue reading “Audie Bock is in the race”
Former Green Party assemblywoman Bock to run in recall
Former state assemblywoman Audie Bock today announced that she will add her name to the ballot in the recall election.
As the first Democrat to break ranks with the party, Bock will go up against a slate of Republicans should Gray Davis be recalled in October.
Audie asked me to be her policy advisor in her run for the Congress, so maybe I should sign up to serve the next governor. Sweet.
Link via Cal. Insider.
California has adopted some truly loony measures through the initiative process, not the least loony of which was Prop. 13, the measure that sets property taxes at sharply different levels for houses in the same neighborhoods depending on when they were last sold. But by far the worst such measure was the term limits law … Continue reading “Why there’s a recall”
California has adopted some truly loony measures through the initiative process, not the least loony of which was Prop. 13, the measure that sets property taxes at sharply different levels for houses in the same neighborhoods depending on when they were last sold. But by far the worst such measure was the term limits law limiting members of the Assembly to six years in office and senators to eight.
The main effect of term limits was to make the executive branch stronger, as well as to amp-up the power of un-elected lobbyists and staffers. With so much riding on the governor, we can’t afford to have a slacker like Davis on the throne when the state’s in trouble, hence the recall.
Recognition that term limits have hurt us is not a partisan issue, as my friend Ray Haynes explained to the Chronicle reporter Mark Martin:
Lack of leadership in the Assembly is so bad that one of the most conservative members of the Legislature, Assemblyman Ray Haynes, R-Riverside, longs for the days when San Francisco liberal Willie Brown ruled the Assembly as the always-in-charge speaker.
“Today the Assembly is out of control,” Haynes wrote in an opinion piece for the North County Times in Escondido (San Diego County) in which he noted how much better the Assembly ran when Brown was in charge. “It is in serious need of adult supervision.”
When Ray Haynes is publicly yearning for the return of the Ayatollah of the Assembly, you have to know things are bad. But the trouble is that term limits remain popular with the political outsiders who make up the vast majority of the electorate, because of their low confidence in politicians generally and the dearth of good news coverage of state government.
If I had my way, we’d recall term limits right after we recall The Invisible Gray.
Link via Rough and Tumble.
The Register reports: Chipmaker Agere Systems today announced plans to integrate wireless LAN and VoIP technology on a single integrated chipset. Agere’s wireless VoIP phone technology offers the promise of making low-cost, mobile phone calls over the Internet more widely available once the chips become available from September. So once again, the bar gets raised … Continue reading “It’s about time”
The Register reports:
Chipmaker Agere Systems today announced plans to integrate wireless LAN and VoIP technology on a single integrated chipset.
Agere’s wireless VoIP phone technology offers the promise of making low-cost, mobile phone calls over the Internet more widely available once the chips become available from September.
So once again, the bar gets raised higher for WiFi chips, but this is an 802.11b-only chip, with no .a or .g support. So there’s the next opportunity.
The Mercury News reports: The election to recall Gov. Gray Davis will be held on Oct. 7, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante announced at a Sacramento press conference Thursday morning. Bustamante also said voters will get the opportunity to select a new governor from a slate of candidates at the same time, should Davis lose the … Continue reading “Mark your calendars”
The election to recall Gov. Gray Davis will be held on Oct. 7, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante announced at a Sacramento press conference Thursday morning.
Bustamante also said voters will get the opportunity to select a new governor from a slate of candidates at the same time, should Davis lose the recall election.
So there you are, California voter, able to recall the governor you just elected nine short months ago. Will you? I don’t know. Should you? Of course, and here’s why:
With all that going against him, Davis could very well survive the recall and emerge stronger, because the California Republican Party has such a strong death wish. Their best shot at removing Davis is to have Dick Riordan in the race rather than Arnie Schwarzenegger, but the Hollywood charm factor may prevent that.
Davis’ biggest challenge is that his well-honed campaign technique — sliming the opponent — really only works in a head-to-head contest. With a number of Republicans and Greens in the race, Davis would have to tout his own accomplishments, which are meager to say the least. So sign up Dick Riordan, Darrell Issa, Bill Jones, Tom McClintock, and Peter Camejo and lets see the fur fly.
If nothing else, it should be entertaining.
A friend asked me what I thought about Doc Searls’ latest essay on the evolution of the Internet and as I happened to be reading it already, I’ve written a few disjointed notes. The short version of my reaction is that it’s sad that everybody with an axe to grind about technology, politics, or business … Continue reading “Symmetry, Control, and Progress”
A friend asked me what I thought about Doc Searls’ latest essay on the evolution of the Internet and as I happened to be reading it already, I’ve written a few disjointed notes. The short version of my reaction is that it’s sad that everybody with an axe to grind about technology, politics, or business these days seems to think that the Internet has an immutable, Platonic form that’s somehow mystically responsible for all that’s good in the technology business for the past twenty years, and any alteration of this form will screw it up. According to this way of thinking, stuff like Napster that exists solely for the purpose of illegal activity is good (even though new), but DRM (which isn’t really a Net deal anyhow) would be inscrutably bad.
This is sort of a “natural law” argument that’s supposed to persuade business and government to turn a blind eye to abuses of the Net, leaving its regulation to self-appointed do-gooders free of commercial interest. It’s a flawed argument that ignores the fact that the Internet is actually a tool and not a spiritual essence from a higher reality, which like all tools adapts to human needs or is discarded. The strongest proponent of this view is Larry Lessig, whose book “The Future of Ideas” I’ve just read, and the others who argue this line (Searls, Weinberger, Gillmor) take their lead from him. I’ll write a review of Lessig’s book in the next few days, and it’s not going to be pretty. But back to Searls, and the theory of immaculate conception:
The Internet is not simply a network, it’s a means of interconnecting networks. It won out over competing technologies because it was heavily subsidized by the government and more simple than the alternative, the ISO/OSI protocol suite. OSI was a complicated set of international standards devised by committees with membership as diverse as the UN but in some ways even less rational. It contains a myriad of options, many non-usable, and is hard to understand, let alone to implement. In the heyday of OSI, we had a series of “OSI Implementors’ Workshops” to hash out subsets of the protocols to implement for purposes of demonstration, and even that was very painful. Internet protocols weren’t designed by committees, but by individuals paid by ARPA to keep things simple. OSI was intended to take the place of proprietary protocols from IBM, Xerox, and DEC, providing end-to-end applications, whereas the Internet was simply intended to interconnect diverse networks with a basic level of end-to-end capability.
Make a side-by-side comparison of any early Internet protocol with the competing ISO candidate and you see that the Internet offering can be implemented in tinier memory and fewer CPU cycles and with less man-hours of programming effort than the alternative. As if that weren’t enough to ensure victory, the government paid contractors to write reference implementations of Internet protocols and then gave them away for free.
Continue reading “Symmetry, Control, and Progress”
Expressing dismay about falling contributions, Howard Dean shrugged-off the deaths of Qusay and Uday: Questioned about the deaths of Saddam’s sons, Odai and Qusai, in Iraq, Dean dismissed suggestions that it was a victory for the Bush administration. “It’s a victory for the Iraqi people … but it doesn’t have any effect on whether we … Continue reading “Thug deaths anger Howard Dean”
Expressing dismay about falling contributions, Howard Dean shrugged-off the deaths of Qusay and Uday:
Questioned about the deaths of Saddam’s sons, Odai and Qusai, in Iraq, Dean dismissed suggestions that it was a victory for the Bush administration.
“It’s a victory for the Iraqi people … but it doesn’t have any effect on whether we should or shouldn’t have had a war,” Dean said. “I think in general the ends do not justify the means.”
As we all know, Howard Dean is a man with great compassion for the downtrodden masses. OK, maybe not for those in who don’t vote because they’re foreign, or, maybe, dead, at the hands of a couple of torturing butchers, but for everybody else, certainly. Except all Republicans and those Democrats who approved of the liberation of Iraq, and his rivals for the nomination, and members of Congress, and a few million others, but he’s still a great guy, for sure.
According to Yahoo finance, markets rallied on news of that the pig-latin boys, Uday and Qusay, are toast: Close Dow 61.76 at 9,158.45, S&P 9.31 at 988.11, Nasdaq 24.61 at 1,706.02: The death of Saddam Hussein’s two sons helped the stock indices post gains across the board…a modest up open quickly gave way to continued … Continue reading “Hussein boys die, markets rally, Iraqis rejoice”
According to Yahoo finance, markets rallied on news of that the pig-latin boys, Uday and Qusay, are toast:
Close Dow 61.76 at 9,158.45, S&P 9.31 at 988.11, Nasdaq 24.61 at 1,706.02: The death of Saddam Hussein’s two sons helped the stock indices post gains across the board…a modest up open quickly gave way to continued profit-taking such as occurred yesterday…the Dow and S&P quickly sank into the red…the Nasdaq held up better, helped by an upgrade to the semiconductor equipment maker sector by Lehman…then came word from Iraq that Saddam’s sons were probably either captured or killed…that proved the stimulus stocks needed to break the lethargy that had set in and the indices all went solidly positive…
In related news, Howard Dean’s fundraising numbers are likely to decline, for two reasons: an improving economy is bad for Democrats, as is improving cooperation between Iraqi civilians and the Coalition. The pig-latin boys were knocked off on a walk-in tip.
Do the math, you can bet Saddam’s done it, as have the celebrating Iraqis:
Baghdad, Iraq — Red and yellow tracer bullets scythed through Baghdad’s sky in celebration Tuesday night when U.S. officials announced that Uday and Qusay Hussein were dead.
Two down, one to go.
California Insider Daniel Weintraub points to a remark by Gray Davis’ creator, DemOp Garry South, on Total Recall, the Election: Let’s say you run and you win: what have you won? You get no transition period. You take over a staff appointed by Gray Davis. There are seven constitutional officers who are Democratic — all … Continue reading “The Prize”
California Insider Daniel Weintraub points to a remark by Gray Davis’ creator, DemOp Garry South, on Total Recall, the Election:
Let’s say you run and you win: what have you won? You get no transition period. You take over a staff appointed by Gray Davis. There are seven constitutional officers who are Democratic — all of whom can investigate you, audit you and have press conferences on the steps of the Capitol against you. The budget deficit doesn’t go away. Not one more job is created. It doesn’t bring the economy back. It doesn’t pay back the millions you’ve lost in homeland security. Except now the gum isn’t on Gray Davis’ shoes — it’s on yours. The highlight of your career will be the day you are elected. It will be all downhill from there.
Let’s look at it another way: the economy is improving, tech companies are starting to hire again (I’m getting a face-to-face interview every week now), everybody knows the Dems are responsible for the budget mess, and a smoking gun shows they’re doing their best to make it worse instead of better. You have line-item veto power over the budget, and you can therefore shape the direction of state government in some very significant ways, while credibly being able to blame all the problems you face on your predecessor. So what do you have to lose?
Michael J. Totten surveys a number of classical liberal blogs, and finds a mass exodus from the Democratic Party. The issues: national defense, free speech, and the failure of Democratic Party leaders to grow up. It’s a good survey, check it out.
Michael J. Totten surveys a number of classical liberal blogs, and finds a mass exodus from the Democratic Party. The issues: national defense, free speech, and the failure of Democratic Party leaders to grow up. It’s a good survey, check it out.
Re: the following story on Sacramento shenanigans by far-left Dems, see Dan Walters on the locational element to super-majority vote requirements: It is, proponents of the change argue, inherently undemocratic to allow a legislative minority to dictate fiscal policy for the state, noting that California is one of just a handful of states requiring supermajority … Continue reading “Sauce for the goose”
Re: the following story on Sacramento shenanigans by far-left Dems, see Dan Walters on the locational element to super-majority vote requirements:
It is, proponents of the change argue, inherently undemocratic to allow a legislative minority to dictate fiscal policy for the state, noting that California is one of just a handful of states requiring supermajority votes on budgetary matters.
The argument may be valid, but it is more than a bit ironic that the same political interests that want to eliminate supermajority votes on budgets in California are very supportive of the Democratic filibusters on President Bush’s judicial appointments in the U.S. Senate. It takes a supermajority vote of 60 senators to break a filibuster (ending otherwise unlimited debate), so on highly controversial matters of any kind, 60 votes become the threshold in the Senate.
What’s undemocratic in Sacramento, those on the political left seem to be saying, is quite appropriate in Washington. And with a vote in the state Assembly on Monday, they seem to be saying that undemocratic supermajority vote requirements should become a legal mandate in local government, at least when it pertains to police and fire labor contracts.
Dan Walters is always worth reading, of course.
