Make Your Vote Count

Accusations of voter fraud have dominated the news cycle as of late, with groups such as ACORN going as far as to register 7-year-old girls to vote alongside Mickey Mouse, members of the Dallas Cowboys (in Arizona) and a particular teenager who is set to vote 73 separate times.

The fact that such a story has received so much coverage as of late is indicative of the Media’s bias in favor of conservatives – this is just another blatant Rove/Cheney/Fox News/Diebold attempt to see that individuals are denied the right to vote!

In fact, we have obtained the agenda of the radical right, no doubt personally drafted by the evil forces of Donald Rumsfeld and Newt Gingrich, detailing their plans to deny true social justice in this coming election. Here are just some of their evil plans:

Check out the Fox&Hounds Ballot Endorsement Grid

With twelve different measures on the California ballot for the coming election, things can get a bit confusing. In an effort to make this process easier for our readers, Fox&Hounds has put together an Endorsement Grid, listing the positions that a number of California Advocacy Groups have taken on the various ballot measures along with links to their respective websites for further information if available.

If you don’t see your group listed and you would like to be, please feel free to Contact Us with your list of positions.

Odds and Ends – September 23, 2008

A few Odds and Ends from the past week:

  • Congressman Darrell Issa comments on the proposed Federal Bailout of Wall Street at FlashReport
  • In a brief but particularly interesting quote, Senator Hillary Clinton appears to have called for a second coming of the New Deal in response to the current financial crunch in an interview with CBS New York.
  • A new clean-air energy technology that’s been in the works for years has seen a successful debut, as Germany fired up the world’s first Clean Coal power plant this week.
  • New University of California President Mark Yudof has wasted little time in determining the state of the UC system. The University recently released its ‘accountability framework’, a compilation of statistics relating to all UC campuses intended to provide a better understanding of the University as a whole. An article in today’s San Jose Mercury summarizes some of what the report found.

NFL Football in LA next season?

In June, I wrote about Los Angeles developer Ed Roski’s effort to lure an NFL team to Los Angeles, centered around a plan to build a state-of-the-art, 75,000 seat outdoor stadium in the City of Industry.

The promise of the NFL’s return to the Los Angeles market has been fleeting since the tandem departure of the Rams and Raiders in 1994 (coincidentally, due to the fact that neither team was able to secure a proper venue in the Los Angeles area at the time despite assurances to the contrary),

In 1999, Los Angeles even managed to fumble away the rights to an expansion team that had been promised to them by the NFL, due in no small part to that same inability to construct a suitable stadium – that expansion team was quickly lost to Houston, who jumped at the chance to steal away the would-be LA franchise and quickly built Reliant Stadium, one of the world’s finest sports venues, for the team that would become the Houston Texans.

In my earlier post, I wrote that “Several proposals for new football stadiums in the greater Los Angleles area have come and gone over the past twenty years, but none has appeared to be quite as refined or thought out as that put forth by Roski.”

Perata’s refusal to compromise devolves to immaturity

What’s Don Perata’s answer for Republican opposition to a temporary sales tax increase – just make the tax increase permanent!

Sacramento’s budget gridlock still seemingly has no end in sight, with the budget now 60 days overdue. The compromise proposal of a temporary sales tax that Governor Schwarzenegger put forth last week has drawn criticism from both sides of the aisle, but at the very least has provided a starting point for some type of compromise between the tax-and-spend philosophy of the Democrats and the Republicans’ concern that tax increases would only further harm California’s struggling economy.

I find it unlikely, however, that ‘compromise’ is a part of Perata’s vocabulary. His attempt to force permanence upon the Governor’s proposed tax increase shows about as much maturity as Karen Bass shoving Nicole Parra into a closet across the street.

Odds and Ends – August 15, 2008

A few odds and ends from the past week:

A Guide to Web 2.0 for Business

Amid the rapid growth of online social media over the past handful of years, many small businesses have been left out of a medium that has been used very effectively by big business to target and interact with a key youth demographic. For those of you still wondering how to get started with Web 2.0, the E-Commerce Times published a guide this morning — Where There’s a Web, There’s a Way: A Business Guide to Getting Social.

It’s not the most comprehensive reference on Web 2.0 out there by any means, but the guide does a good job of explaining on how many tools can be integrated from the prospective of a small business, and it should provide a great starting point for those looking to get their feet wet with the social media phenomenon.

Maybe Chiang should switch to Mac?

State Controller John Chiang, who last week announced his intent to ignore the Governor’s Executive Order reducing the salaries of state employees to the federal minimum wage during the budget impasse, issued a new statement this morning — he claims that even if he wanted to comply with the Governor’s order, the ‘antiquated’ computer system used by the state to manage and issue payroll would not allow it.

I don’t ever recall reading about the payroll system causing a 6-9 month delay in processing wage and salary increases for the state’s workforce — maybe the delay only occurs in one direction?

Nonetheless, I do understand how such a change could be so complex. Sure, updating 200,000 database records is considered a fairly straightforward function in the technology world and likely requires so little processing power that your average Blackberry, iPhone or graphing calculator could accomplish the task within the requisite timeframe, but we must be careful not to expect too much all at once.

Here’s a suggestion for the Controller – maybe it’s time to switch?

Odds and Ends – July 31, 2008

Here are some articles in the news today that are worth a look:

iTunes and Text Messaging? That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

In retrospect, it seems absolutely deplorable – as new technologies continue to popularize and grow, improving the way we communicate, live and interact, the government has been deprived of its fair share. High-Speed Internet Service, Text Messages, iTunes Music and Video Downloads – yes, they all may seem like cutting-edge innovations that are helping bolster California’s economy by creating jobs and encouraging investment, but truly, all they’re doing is cheating the government out of valuable tax revenue.

For shame! Thank god that Progressive cities like Los Angeles and Sacramento, along with equally progressive legislators like Charles Calderon are there to put a stop to such an injustice and help the government get its fair share – after all, all those environmental impact reports aren’t going to pay for themselves.

But let’s be honest – taxing Music Downloads and Text Messages is a nice start, but if California is ever going to live up to its true tax potential, we’ll have to start getting more serious about taxing early and often. How long have iTunes and Text Messaging been around? We can’t afford to waste future tax revenue by sitting around waiting for the next big thing – it’s time to get proactive!

Here are some ideas for current and future innovations that we can tax immediately to make sure the government gets its fair share: