Mountain Views News          Saturday, September 25, 2010

11

LEFT/RIGHT

Mountain Views News Saturday, September 25, 2010

GREG Welborn

Clarifying The Election

 Most writers feel 
complimented when able 
to inspire a reader to do 
further research and learn 
more about a topic. I 
hope Greg feels that way, 
as his column last week inspired me to do 
further research and learn more about an 
opinion survey figure he cited; “poll after 
poll” showing “a nation split 70% toward 
conservative principles and 30% toward 
liberal principles”. 

 It took some searching, but I finally 
found in the CBS News / NY Times poll 
released September 15 that indeed, only 30% 
approved of the job Democrats were doing 
in Congress. The same poll showed 20% 
approved of the job Republicans were doing.

 

 I didn’t find that “70% of Americans are 
appalled by the failed economic policies 
of this administration and this congress.” 
I did see that registered voters consider 
Democrats better than Republicans in 
helping the middle class (55% to 33%), 
helping small business (49% to 41%) and 
creating new jobs (44% to 38%). 39% agree 
that President Obama has “a clear picture 
for solving nation’s problems”. 18% think 
Republicans in Congress do.

 

 Much has been made of an “anti-
incumbency fever”, but there’s an important 
difference between today and 1994 - the last 
time voters gave Republicans a majority in 
Congress. Then, it had been forty years since 
Republicans held a majority in the House. 
Now, it’s been only four years - and voters 
remember. As for who’s to blame for the 
current economic mess, 5% say President 
Obama and 11% say Congress. 21% put the 
blame on Wall Street, and the largest number, 
37%, blame the Bush Administration - with 
all the Republicans who followed in lockstep 
right over the cliff.

 

 According to Greg, “70% . . . does not 
want Obamacare and will vote to have it 
undone.” According to the CBS/Times poll, 
28% say they’d be more likely to vote for a 
candidate who supported the Affordable 
Care Act, 28% would be less likely, and for 
the rest, it wouldn’t matter. Current opinion 
on the act is split, with slightly less than half, 
49%, voicing disapproval. As when the bill 
was being debated, people will say they don’t 
like it, but they like what’s in it. Of those 
49% who don’t like it, 82% said it should 
be repealed. When informed that it would 
remove the prohibition against insurance 
carriers dropping enrollees who get sick or 
upon discovery of a pre-existing condition, 
the number then drops to 48% who’d be 
willing to see it actually repealed, among 
those 49% who’d said they don’t like it.

 

 There might indeed be an “enormous 
upheaval” evidenced by the turnout at the 
Glenn Beck rally in Washington last month; 
a turnout comparable in number to those 
who showed up for HempFest 2010 in 
Seattle around the same time. (And where 
were you, Dude?) Evidence of support for 
the Tea Party is less clear. 14% of registered 
voters said they’d be more likely to vote for 
a Tea Party candidate, while 28% said they’d 
be less likely (half said they wouldn’t care). 
The number who said they’d be more likely 
to vote for a candidate boasting a Sarah Palin 
endorsement was 12%.

 Greg writes of “70% of Americans . . .sick 
and tired of being denigrated, mocked and 
belittled”. Okay, but c’mon; look at the 
candidates they’re coming up with - and they 
expect to be taken seriously? I devoted half 
my column last week to Christine O’Donnell, 
Tea Party candidate for the U.S. Senate (U.S. 
Senate!) from Delaware - and that was before 
video made the rounds of her admitting to 
have “dabbled in witchcraft” (“One of my 
first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, 
and I didn’t know it.”) That doesn’t bother 
me as much as when, at a forum aired on 
CNN in 2006, she informed a University of 
Tennessee professor of evolutionary biology 
that there’s “just as much, if not more, 
evidence” that “God created the Earth in six 
days, six 24-hour periods.” Had enough? 
How about this from a discussion on 
cloning from a November, 2007 broadcast of 
“The O’Reilly Factor” on Fox: “American 
scientific companies are cross-breeding 
humans and animals and coming up with 
mice with fully functioning human brains.” 
(U.S. Senate!)

 There’s Tea Party U.S. Senate candidate 
Joe Miller from Alaska with impressive 
credentials (Gulf War vet, Yale Law School) 
who, when asked how he’d address the 
concerns of the one-in-ten Americans 
without a job and without a way to support 
their family, responds by expressing his 
view that unemployment benefits are 
inherently unconstitutional. And, there’s 
Tea Party U.S. Senate candidate Sharron 
Angle of Nevada. As mentioned above, 
under the Affordable Care Act, insurance 
carriers are prohibited from dropping 
enrollees who get sick or upon discovery of 
a pre-existing condition. Candidate Angle 
asserts insurance companies wouldn’t be 
doing it anyway if only they were allowed to 
operate under the “free market”. Do these 
people have a clue, and is it any wonder why 
supporters are being “denigrated, mocked 
and belittled”?

 Greg also complains about “name calling 
and smears”, mentioning “racism”, “bigotry”, 
“homophobia” and “Islamophobia”. It 
reminded me of the incident involving radio 
personality Dr. Laura Schlesinger, when 
she suggested to a black caller she’d made a 
mistake by “marrying outside your race”, and 
it was illogical to be “sensitive” about racial 
matters with a black man elected president. 
Dr. Laura, and right-wing talkers, became 
indignant when others had the nerve to call 
the remarks what they were: racist.

 If someone claims their relationship 
is more entitled to the term “marriage” 
than another’s merely because of sexual 
orientation, I will call that person a bigot. 
If they warn of a “gay agenda”, I will add 
homophobic.

 As for “Islamophobia”, Robert Kuttner of 
The American Prospect suggests we “Force 
major Republicans to choose between siding 
with Jefferson and religious tolerance or 
Hitler and book-burning.”

 I know where I stand on that, and I’m sure 
(at least) 70% of Americans stand with me.

.

HOWARD Hays 

As I See It

 
(Part 3)

 As the countdown to the mid-term elections 
grinds on, I fear that too much attention is 
being paid to the national implications of 
the projected Republican victories in House, 
Senate and gubernatorial races. Especially 
for those of us in California, the identity of 
our next governor, congressman and U.S. 
senator may not be as important as who takes 
up residence in our state’s assembly and 
senate. For those who may have forgotten, 
California is broke, it’s getting worse, and, 
as Governor Schwarzenegger’s experience 
has shown, the governor can only do so 
much. If we don’t get our act together and 
send some reasonable adults to Sacramento, 
we may quickly follow Greece into eventual 
bankruptcy.

 The California budget still faces a $20 
billion deficit. This budget problem cannot 
be solved without addressing government 
employee benefit packages, and to do so 
will take more political courage than the 
liberals have ever shown themselves capable 
of. Not that I really expect all that much. 
The California Democratic Party long 
ago sold their collective soul to the public 
employee unions, received massive amounts 
of campaign contributions, won elections 
across the board with false promises of 
social nirvana and promptly repaid the favor 
by voting in benefits that can’t possibly be 
justified or paid.

 Even former Speaker of the Assembly, 
Willie Brown, commented that 80% of 
every tax dollar now goes to employee 
compensation and benefits and can’t be 
sustained. Spending on state employees 
has risen three times faster than the rate 
of revenue growth over the last 10 years. 
Most of that has gone into promises for 
future retirement benefits which have 
to be immediately funded or booked as 
liabilities on the state’s balance sheet. 
Because politicians never really like having 
to face the truth, they opted not to increase 
taxes to meet the new spending promises, 
they simply booked the new promises as a 
liability. The plan was to avoid telling the 
voters in past elections that taxes would have 
to go up because of what they agreed to pay, 
and the hope was that somehow the issue 
would simply disappear and they wouldn’t 
have to tell voters in future elections that 
taxes would be rising. Unfortunately, the 
problem is now so large that tax increases are 
not going to solve the problem. The benefits 
will have to be cut. There just aren’t enough 
potential new tax sources to make up the 
deficits and meet these pension liabilities.

 Consider the fact that California, which 
faces a $20 billion annual deficit for 2010-11, 
is saddled with $500 billion in retirement 
debt obligations. Kind of makes the $20 
billion look manageable, doesn’t it? The cost 
of servicing that debt is increasing at about 
15% per year. Other government programs 
are having to be cut, and the state is driving 
out its most productive and wealthiest 
citizens. When taxpayers have the option 
to move out of state and thus avoid the tax 
burden, it is insanity to think we can make 
up the deficit by simply taxing even more 
those who remain. 

 There is also a strong moral component to 
this. Liberals are so often the ones who preach 
equality of outcome, not just opportunity. 
They look at disparities of income and 
scream about the perceived immorality that 
some have more than others. And yet, the 
system they have implemented has created 
a very wealthy minority at the expense of 
an increasingly impoverished majority. At 
the same time that government employee 
benefits have been going 
up, private sector workers 
have seen their income and 
benefits decrease. Since 
2007, one million private 
jobs have left California. 
For the last 10 years 
median income for private sector workers 
has decreased. And those same private 
sector workers have seen their retirement 
plans decrease by at least 20%. 

 Governor Schwarzenegger’s office recently 
reported that the average 55 year old public 
employee who was eligible to retire was 
entitled to receive a $3,000 monthly check, 
which would grow with inflation over the 
remainder of his or her life. Given today’s 
life expectancy, that equates to a retirement 
benefit of more than $1 million. The average 
private sector worker’s retirement benefit is 
nowhere near $1 million, and yet they are the 
ones who pay the taxes which are supposed 
to fund the public employees’ retirement 
benefits. If that’s not immoral, I don’t really 
know the meaning of the word. I’m all for 
paying people what they are worth, but I 
just can’t wrap my brain around the concept 
that the average public employee is worth 2 
or 3 times a private sector employee. That’s 
how imbalanced these public benefits have 
become.

 Year after year, the current governor has 
asked the legislature to rein in this spending 
bonanza. They have always refused. The 
governor also took the issue directly to the 
voters with some proposition initiatives, 
only to see them defeated. But we can’t hide 
from the truth forever. Really, we can’t even 
hide from the reality for another year. We 
have to act now. In 10 years, public employee 
retirement costs are projected to reach $30 
billion per year. Our current deficit is $20 
billion, and we’re struggling with that. How 
does anyone think we can nonchalantly add 
another $24 billion to that deficit?

 The answer is we can’t. The other part of 
this reality is that we, the voters, are partially 
to blame. While I lay most at the feet of the 
legislature – they have hidden the truth for a 
long time with lies, distortions and sketchy 
accounting practices – we have been put 
on notice for at least as long as the current 
governor has held office, and we still send 
the same people back to Sacramento.

 So, as we focus on the upcoming elections 
and who will represent us in D.C. and in the 
governor’s mansion, we desperately need to 
choose wisely who will join the new governor 
in the state legislature and senate. We must 
reform the system now. We cannot rely on 
increased tax rates on an ever-decreasing 
number of successful entrepreneurs and 
business owners. They will simply leave this 
state for one more hospitable to business and 
more realistic in their budgetary decisions. 
We also can’t rely on some federal bailout. 
The growing Tea Party movement and the 
increasing dissatisfaction of the independent 
voters have been driven largely by the 
realization that Washington is out of control 
and driving us off the budgetary cliff. We 
need to understand that the same problem 
exists right here in the Golden State. Come 
November, we have a lot more choices to 
improve things than we ever imagined. 

 About the author: Gregory J. Welborn is 
a freelance writer and has spoken to several 
civic and religious organizations on cultural 
and moral issues. He lives in the Los Angeles 
area with his wife and 3 children and is active 
in the community. He can be reached at 
gregwelborn@earthlink.net.


Dates to 
Remember

October 18, 
2010

Last day to 
register to vote

October 26, 2010

Last day to apply for a

vote-by-mail ballot by mail

November 2, 2010

Election Day


CALIFORNIA GENERAL ELECTION 2010 - The Race For Governor

A Word From The Editor: The Mountain Views News will continue in its tradition of providing readers with as much unbiased information as possible regarding the issues and candidates on the General 
Election Ballot in November. The series will run for the next seven weeks and will include coverage of all Propositions, The U. S. Senate Race, The California Governor’s Race, all other Statewide races, and the 
California Legislative Races. Please remember that the opinions of ALL columnists are not necessarily the position of the paper, but rather, those of the individual author. Those opinions will NOT be a part 
of our General Election Coverage. The official position of the Mountain Views and its’ Editorial Advisors will be clearly stated prior to the election. We do encourage readers, however, to submit their views as 
Letters To The Editor. The more we communicate with each other, the more informed our decisions will be. -Susan Henderson, Publisher/Editor Mountain Views News


JERRY BROWN Democratic

291 3RD ST OAKLAND, CA 94607

(510) 628-0202 (Business)

(510) 628-0909 (FAX)

WEBSITE: www.jerrybrown.org

E-MAIL: info@jerrybrown.org

Attorney General of California

MEG WHITMAN Republican

20813 STEVENS CREEK BLVD 
STE 150 CUPERTINO, CA 95014

(408) 400-3887 (Business)

(408) 404-3826 (FAX)

support@megwhitman.com

Businesswoman

CHELENE NIGHTINGALE 
American Independent

PO BOX 901115

PALMDALE, CA 93590

(310) 237-5590 (Business)

(310) 237-5590 (Residence)

www.nightingaleforgovernor.com

chelene@nightingaleforgovernor.com

Business Owner

LAURA WELLS Green

PO BOX 10727 

OAKLAND, CA 94610

(510) 225-4005 (Business)

(510) 225-4005 (Residence)

WEBSITE: www.laurawells.org

E-MAIL: info@laurawells.org

Financial Systems Consultant

DALE F. OGDEN Libertarian

3620 ALMERIA ST

SAN PEDRO, CA 90731-6410

(310) 547-1595 (Business)

(310) 547-1595 (Residence)

(310) 547-2831 (FAX)

WEBSITE: www.daleogden.org

E-MAIL: dfo@dalefogden.org

Business Consultant/Actuary


MEG WHITMAN Republican

JERRY BROWN Democratic

LAURA WELLS Green

CHELENE NIGHTINGALE

American Independent

DALE F. OGDEN Libertarian

 I have lived in California all my life, and 
I have devoted a large part of my life to 
public service. 

 I was governor from 1975-83. On my 
watch, we built up a huge surplus by 
holding spending down. Taxes were 
reduced by $4 billion. We became the 
world leader in wind and renewable 
energy. And we created 1.9 million new 
jobs.

 I am running for governor because I know 
how to get California working again. 
First, we must put out the welcome mat 
for jobs. China and Texas have replaced us 
as leaders in alternative energy. I will put 
California again in the forefront.

 Second, I promise a budget that is 
transparent and honest. There will be no 
tax increases unless voter approved.

 Third, We must – whenever possible – 
shift authority away from Sacramento and 
instead give local governments and school 
boards. But let’s be clear. None of this will 
be easy. The next governor must have the 
preparation and know-how to get the job 
done. That is what I offer. (partial)

Meg Whitman traveled the nation 
and spoke with voters. During these 
campaigns, she saw a critical need for more 
focused problem solving in government 
by those with the tools to lead and the 
willingness and independence to challenge 
the status quo. Her decade at the helm of 
eBay came to a close just as California’s 
growing economic crisis was unfolding. 
Job losses, undisciplined spending and 
the declining performance of California’s 
schools were deeply troubling to Meg and 
she thought carefully about how she could 
lend her experiences to help. In February 
2009, she announced her candidacy 
to become California’s next governor. 
“We’ve got to focus – we’ve got to create 
jobs, cut spending, and invest in fixing our 
educational system,” Meg says.

 Meg has committed her energy, her 
trademark optimism and her belief in fiscal 
restraint to the challenge of rebuilding 
California. “If we let California fail, we 
all fail,” she says. “And we love California 
too much to let it fail. We have to work 
together to make it the place of our dreams 
again.” (partial)

There are solutions! For great 
schools, health, environment, 
jobs, and justice. We can stop 
coddling mega-corporations 
and billionaires. They’ve gotten 
filthy rich, and left California 
flat broke and unemployment 
sky high. We can create a State 
Bank and invest in California 
not Wall Street. Let’s expand 
the good parts of old Prop 13 
to keep people in their homes, 
and fix rotten parts like the 
1/3 minority that has veto 
power over taxing the rich. 
Let’s implement fair taxes, and 
give ourselves and our kids a 
chance. See LauraWells.org.

As Governor, I will restore fiscal 
responsibility and financial solvency 
to California using every tool at 
my disposal, such as the line-item 
veto and ballot initiatives. We need 
to rollback spending, lower taxes 
significantly (especially income 
taxes); abolish harmful, useless, and 
overlapping regulatory agencies; 
and permanently limit future 
spending. A business-friendly, 
low tax environment will attract 
businesses and millions of jobs to 
California. Additional tax revenue 
from economic growth should be 
used only to retire debt, improve 
infrastructure, and lower taxes 
further. I support Proposition 19 
to legalize marijuana; Help make 
California the great state it once was. 
Vote Libertarian. (partial)

As a homeschooling mother, 
concerned citizen, and independent 
businesswoman, I believe it’s time to 
save our state! “We the People” are the 
solution to restore our Golden State 
and I’m honored to help represent 
us live our dreams. My promise is 
to govern with you in order to help 
lead us back to a constitutionally 
sound California! The solution to our 
economic crisis is our own creativity, 
thus I will enact the “We the People” 
contract. We will unite the brightest 
and best to work together as our 
Founding Fathers intended. We 
will secure our borders, support 
the free market system, bring back 
jobs, protect individual rights, and 
improve our education to pave a 
better future for our children. I ask 
for your vote so that together we can 
enjoy freedom in California.