Mr. Newsom Goes to Santa Monica
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom said he would be the “worst advocate” for measures on the special election ballot. Speaking to about 500 people at a town hall meeting in Santa Monica High School’s gym last night, Newsom said he supported the idea of a rainy day fund but would not be a champion for the ballot measures. He singled out Proposition 1C, the lottery modernization measure, saying it was bad policy to encourage gambling as a way to pay off the state’s debt. However, he said, he recognized that if the measures did not pass, the budget situation would be worse.
Newsom, however, was a strong advocate for a constitutional convention to deal with California’s dysfunctional government. On his list of reforms was Proposition 13 and the two-thirds vote to pass the budget and raise taxes.
Declaring that unlike Warren Buffet, who was warned away from a discussion of Prop 13 by then candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger, Newsom said that Californians needed to have a conversation about Prop 13. He backed off a little and said that at least there should be a conversation about property taxes on commercial property. Newsom told the audience members they were paying for Proposition 13 in the highest income taxes in the nation and the high and regressive sales tax.
Sabotaging the Move for Marriage Equality
There’s been plenty of praise and attention for the two young students who have filed a ballot initiative that would remove the word marriage from state law and replace it with domestic partnership. In other words, the state would be out of the marriage business. Churches could still bless marriages. But that’s it. The fact that so many liberals have embraced this idea demonstrates how little the left understands about same-sex marriage and marriage itself.
Getting the state out of the marriage business is a truly terrible idea in every way. Worst of all, it will cause great harm to the cause it’s ostensibly supposed to support: marriage equality. In fact, until I read the news coverage showing that the sponsors were sincere, I had suspect that they were secret opponents of same-sex marriage who want to sabotage the effort to repeal Prop 8.
If you’re a liberal who can’t see beyond the facile argument that “the law should be equal, you might not understand how this initiative plays into the hands of same-sex marriage opponents. How’s that? Those opponents are always at pains to try to describe how expanding the right to marry to consenting adult couples is a threat to marriage.
America’s Largest Creditor is Nervous
Despite last week being Wall Street’s best so far in this still-new year, China signaled its anxiety about its $1 Trillion-dollar investment in US Treasury bonds and perhaps opened a new chapter in Sino-American relations. Last year, China passed Japan to become the largest holder of US Treasuries.
No less a personage than China’s Premier, Wen Jinbao, at the National People’s Congress in Beijing at the end of last week, made statements which were instantly picked up worldwide by the ever-hungry Media and that are now being studied the way the former Fed Chief Alan Greenspan’s comments used to be scrutinized every which way to find tea leaf readings and other cryptic messages.