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December 16, 2009

The problem with California

Gerrymandering into "safe" legislative districts means that state senators and assembly members face no serious opposition and can't get voted out of office unless they're caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy. There's no incentive for them to perform, since the initiative/referendum process means they can pawn off the difficult or controversial issues onto the people themselves. Add into that the tendency of the public to vote yes on bond measures and entitlement programs while simultaneously taking away the ability to pay for such things by limiting the ability to collect taxes (see Prop. 13), and then requiring a 2/3 majority vote to pass a simple budget, and you've got a recipe for, well, the disaster we find ourselves in today.

I'm a native Californian, and I'm completely disgusted. We need to rewrite the state constitution to fix these issues, or nothing will ever change.

--My comment on Rod Dreher's blog

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Filed under  //   Blog Comments   California   California state politics   Government  

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November 23, 2009

Not exactly the People's Republic of California

Wow, what a surprise to see the town where I grew up (Thousand Oaks) and my old high school (Westlake) both featured on the Crunchy Con blog this morning.  When I saw the news article about this in the local paper, I wondered if it'd make the blogs, and sure enough, here it is...

About the People's Republic of California thing, though...this is one area of California that probably doesn't earn that epithet. From where the alleged crime took place, if you drive fifteen minutes north, you come to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library--this is the heart of Reagan Country. Drive fifteen minutes to the south (more or less) and you come to the secluded baronial estate of David Murdock, the owner of Dole Foods, which isn't far from the ranches that used to belong to Tom Selleck and Richard Widmark. Drive five minutes to the west, and you'll hit the campus of the pharmaceutical company Amgen.  Drive five minutes to the east, and you'll come to Westlake High School's rival Oaks Christian High School, which is run by the mega-church next door. They've got a hell of a football program, and it wouldn't be out of place in Texas.

This is a place where you'd better have decent car insurance with fairly high liability limits, because the car you hit in the Carl's Jr. parking lot just might be a Bentley or Aston Martin.  At Westlake High, there are teachers driving Toyotas and students driving Lexuses.  And while the local Chevy and Dodge dealers folded, the BMW dealership just opened a brand-spanking-new facility right along the freeway, and the Mercedes-Benz dealer is finishing a major remodel.

Finally, as for the pervert in question, he had the bad judgment to do his thing in a county with a very effective district attorney, who has a high conviction rate, and judges who are not particularly sympathetic to anyone who gets convicted.  If you're guilty, you don't want to have your case heard in Ventura County Superior Court.  The People's Republic of California? Not so much.

--My comment on Rod Dreher's Crunchy Con blog

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Filed under  //   Blog Comments   California   Thousand Oaks   Ventura County  

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