Abel’s To Do List
Seeking the final Republican senate vote necessary to pass the stalled budget, attention has turned to Senator Abel Maldonado of Santa Maria and what might motivate him to vote for the budget package. Uncharacteristically for the usual way budget negotiations are done, Maldonado did not, to anyone’s knowledge, ask for a benefit for his senate district or a government job for himself or anyone else. Instead, he listed four items he said would improve governance in California.
Abel’s To Do List consists of the following:
- An Open Primary in which voters can choose any candidate running during a primary election regardless of political party.
- Stop paying lawmakers if the budget is not passed on time.
- Ban legislative pay raises and per diem increases in years the state budget is running a deficit.
- Remove pork spending from the current spending package.
Maldonado indicated that while all four measures were important government reforms he was not demanding that all four become part of the budget package.
Odds & Ends – February 17. 2009
Some Odds and Ends from the past week:
- New York Governor David Patterson is proposing that his state adopt an iTax to deal with their growing deficit. You might recall that we examined this bad idea ourselves in CA not too long ago.
- Is there a bias against women in elected office among California Republicans? The SF Chronicle seems to think so as they examine Meg Whitman’s run for Governor.
- Freedom Watch, a conservative watchdog group, has in an attempt to have details of how the first $350 billion of the financial services bailout was spent.
- A UC San Diego professor has developed a new technology that might play a huge role in the expansion of wireless broadband in the coming years.
M.A.D. – Mutually Assured Destruction
During the Cold War when the Soviet Union and the United States each had formidable nuclear missile arsenals aimed at each other’s cities and military installations, there was a doctrine of military strategy called M.A.D. or mutually assured destruction.
According to Wikipedia, “The doctrine assumes that each side has enough nuclear weaponry to destroy the other side and that either side, if attacked for any reason by the other, would retaliate with equal or greater force. The expected result is an immediate escalation resulting in both combatants’ total and assured destruction”.
I was reminded of this doctrine as I read the threats from the dedicated partisans on both sides of the aisle who were apoplectic about the California state budget that is pending in the Legislature. The unions are threatening their patrons, the Democratic members, with retribution at the ballot box if they vote for this budget and some Republicans are threatening their members with excommunication from the party if they vote for it.