Unclear on the Concept

The California voters, in their usual good sense (this is what democracy looks like!), refused to raise taxes or borrow money from Wall Street in order to close the state budget deficit. The arc of tax cuts is long, but it bends towards bankruptcy.

This is a direct result of Ye Olde Voter Referenda, a direct democracy project that really sounds a lot better on paper than in practice. Prop 13 effectively froze property tax rates in California, so many people living in Malibu, for example, are still paying the same amount of property tax as they were in 1980. This is nonsense. People have therefore abrogated their responsibility to the community--and yes, I do believe that taxes are a civic responsibility. Prop 13 means that California is disproportionately dependent on income taxes and sales taxes for revenue, which in turn means that when the economy gets flushed down the Toilet of Capitalism everyone gets hit with the shit.

So now The Governator is going to cut...wait for it...food for children, health care for children, education (again!) for children. You know, because those mouthy little brats should really pull themselves up by the bootstraps and get to work already. No one is saying word one about cutting the budget for prisons, which is the state's largest expenditure other than education and social welfare. The Governator (and the Legislature) pushed through a bill for a $12 billion prison expansion--when? oh, in January. Interestingly, while crime rates overall have been declining dramatically, the California prison population has exploded. I'm sure that there are no significant campaign contributions coming from the people who benefit from the prison industrial complex to anyone in California state politics. Oh, my, no. So fuck the children. They don't pay for media buys.

Also, really really charming comments on the San Jose Mercury website. Just lovely thoughts like:

• "By eliminating CalWorks and other welfare to work programs, it will force Americans to finally do those jobs that they have turned their noses at. It will force many illegal workers to return to their country of origin as welfare recipients are forced to finally do the work that is available for them. Remember that Americans were those workers that worked in hotels, did construction and performed janitorial services, but welfare and workfare programs made too many lower income Americans lazy and it resulted in expanded welfare roles and induced illegals to come her to work these jobs."
• "We cannot afford to support the losers who cannot hold a job; and we shouldn't have to educate their loser children." [because an uneducated populace is good for everyone! and certainly won't hurt our competitiveness in the global market.--Ed.]
• "What about the laid off workers?" you ask? Try moving to another state. Or another country. The real question to be asked is:"What about the 90% of the people who have job(s), pay their debts and are being taxed to death to support lazy welfare queens and even lazier state employees feeding from the public trough?" [Why, I pass dead people on the streets everyday, done to death by taxes. I can't believe more attention has not been paid to this pandemic.--Ed.]

There are more. Enjoy.

New Theory: The Onion is Running the Republican Party

What else, really, could explain the hilarity of "Teabagging?" And this:

And then we have peerless reasoning like this, courtesy of the NYTimes' new Bill Kristol (apparently not an improvement, but with a funnier name) Ross Douthat. In his "column" he writes about how the tricksy tricksy left, led by Obama, is going to Gay Marry everybody after everyone gets Free Abortions (and a lollipop! This is socialism!). See if you can follow the reasoning here: "But as Peter Berkowitz noted in a prescient essay for Policy Review in 2005, the gay marriage movement is working with the grain of American political history, in which the expansion of rights 'steadily erodes the limits on individual choice established by law and custom.'" I see: giving people more rights destroys other people's ability to make choices. Interesting. So, for example, when African-Americans won rights, that just totally destroyed the individal choice that individual white people were making to enslave them. What a bummer.