President Moonbeam, Part IV
Attorney General Jerry Brown’s nomination for governor is now certain, and given the rapid Republican decline in California, he has to be the odds on favorite for November. So it is time to concentrate on Brown’s next campaign for president.
President you ask? Well, each time he has been elected governor (1974 and 1978), he has immediately begun running for president (1976 and 1980). He even ran when he was not governor, in 1992. So a fourth campaign for president should not be totally dismissed, even if, as is likely, Brown denies it.
Additionally, there is a logic for another quixotic run in 2012. Brown always runs for president from the left, and the left wing of the Democratic Party is increasingly disenchanted with President Obama. He has betrayed them on public option health care, on withdrawing from Afghanistan, on closing Guantanamo. This is the fodder Brown has used in his past campaigns; there is no reason he cannot reprise this strategy again.
George Washington Was Sterile, And Other Notes From Prop 8 Trial
I had been planning to spend part of the week in a federal courthouse in Pasadena, where a special broadcast had been arranged so Southern Californians could watch the trial in the legal challenge to Prop 8 without having to go to the courtroom in San Francisco.
But the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling that seemed based on a sort of “Wizard of Oz” logic (even the most important trials shouldn’t be hidden behind the curtain), barred the federal district judge’s plan to broadcast the trial to Pasadena, other federal courts, and over the Internet. The court’s decision, which makes me wonder if the five conservative justices have some sort of deal with Southwest Airlines, forced me to fly to San Francisco to see what I was missing.
Here are a few notes from the civil trial, in which two couples are challenging Prop 8’s ban on same-sex marriage as a violation of the equal protection clause of the U.S. constitution:
Hey, wow, dude … I’m confused
A state Assembly committee on Tuesday approved legislation to legalize the possession, sale or cultivation of marijuana by adults. (The bill later died when a separate committee refused to hear the bill.) A ballot measure is circulating to accomplish the same goal.
But just last June, the state’s official risk assessment agency, the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, officially added marijuana smoke to the “Proposition 65 list,” determining that “marijuana smoke was clearly shown, through scientifically valid testing according to generally accepted principles, to cause cancer.”
Therefore, marijuana smoke has been placed in the same category as second-hand tobacco smoke.
So which is it, people? Legalize and tax it? Or label it and banish the stuff from polite society?
Don’t Let the Pension Time Bomb Explode
Last spring, I wrote about the municipal atomic bomb that threatens to decimate L.A.’s treasury and potentially lead to bankruptcy. The City of L.A.’s public pension crisis continues to grow, but fortunately our leaders are now prepared to act. Difficult decisions must be made to pull us back from the brink.
By 2015, Los Angeles will need $2 billion every year to fund its public employee pension plan, five times as much as the $400 million budget deficit the City faced this year. Unless action is taken soon, these pension contributions will consume the money the City needs to hire more police officers, respond to fires, repair our streets, pick up our trash, mow the grass in our parks and maintain our other municipal services. The good news is that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the City Council are now focused on this crisis.