Mountain Views News          Saturday, October 30, 2010

10

LEFT TURN/RIGHT TUURN

 Mountain Views News Saturday, October 30, 2010 

GREG Welborn

HOWARD Hays 

As I See It

The Finale....Clarifying 

The Election

 I’ve written a lot about 
candidates over the past 
few weeks, but perhaps 
readers haven’t yet 
completed marking their 
sample ballots because I 
haven’t offered my views 
on the propositions. 
Perhaps not, but sometimes my son asks me 
what I think. When he does, it’s probably 
just to make me feel good. Then he goes to 
Jon Stewart and Bill Maher for real guidance. 
Anyway:

 With Proposition 19, the issue isn’t whether 
smoking pot is a good thing or not, but whether 
state and local resources should continue 
being used to criminalize those who choose 
to partake. Back in the mid-1930s, the drive 
against marijuana was backed by Hearst and 
DuPont, who feared that competition from 
hemp products would devalue their lumber 
and chemical holdings. As far back as 1944, 
a commission headed by former New York 
Mayor Fiorello La Guardia concluded that 
reports of marijuana leading to “addiction, 
madness and overt sexuality” were largely 
bogus.

 Continued criminalization is backed 
primarily by those who profit from it (like 
private prison operators) and who look for 
excuses to bust people. Analysts say any effect 
on Mexican drug cartels would be minimal, 
unless legalization spreads nation-wide. Let 
California lead the nation.

 Proposition 20 is a welcome follow-up 
to Proposition 11 which passed in 2008. 
Prop. 11 took the job of redistricting state 
legislative districts from the legislators and 
turned it over to an independent, bi-partisan 
commission. Prop. 20 will do the same for 
congressional districts, which are still drawn 
by the legislators. The intent is to protect the 
“geographic integrity” of neighborhoods and 
communities, not the interests of a particular 
incumbent, candidate or political party.

 Legislators draw districts to protect their jobs, 
and those of their buddies in Congress. It 
might not be in their interest to have to face 
voters in truly competitive races, but it would 
certainly be in ours.

 In Proposition 21, I find myself in opposition 
to a laudable goal. Our legislators should 
allocate sufficient funds in the budget for state 
parks and wildlife projects, rather than having 
voters do it for them, while even defining a 
specific funding source (increased car license 
fees). It’s such “ballot box budgeting” that 
legislators often use as an excuse for their own 
failure to do their jobs. 

 With most propositions, I try to determine 
what’s in it that would justify the considerable 
time and expense somebody invested to get it 
on the ballot. With Proposition 22, it didn’t take 
long. A good chunk of property taxes goes to 
local redevelopment agencies, and from there 
to prominent supporters of local politicians. 
Prop. 22 would make it unconstitutional to 
divert taxpayer funds intended for some well-
connected real estate developer to go instead 
to something less worthy, like schools or 
health clinics.

 Proposition 23 is an attempt to kill AB 
32, the Global Warming Solutions Act 
passed in 2006 to spur California into the 
21st century. In a sad irony, as our nation 
turns to wind farms and electric vehicles, 
we turn to Germany for turbine parts and 
China for next-generation batteries.

 California has traditionally been at the 
forefront in new technologies, such as 
computer and software development twenty 
years ago. Now we can look ahead to estimates 
of a half-million new jobs and $10 billion in 
private investments in the field of clean energy. 
This might cut into oil profits, though, so Texas 
companies Valero and Tesoro have invested 
heavily to put Prop. 23 on the ballot and take 
us backwards. There’s also the threat of “. . 
. more air pollution that would lead to more 
asthma and lung disease, especially in children 
and seniors”, according to the American Lung 
Association. This, however, is of little concern 
to the Big Oil supporters of Prop. 23.

 Proposition 24 deals with taxes. Personal taxes 
have gone up. Small businesses taxes have gone 
up. There’s a humongous budget deficit, and 
services are being cut. Meanwhile, legislators 
met behind closed doors with lobbyists from 
some of the largest corporations and came up 
with $1.7 billion in tax loopholes to benefit 
less than 2% of companies doing business in 
California. Prop. 24 won’t increase taxes, but 
will stop a $1.7 billion giveaway (most going 
out of state) that the rest of us would have to 
pay for.

 Proposition 25 tells our legislators we expect 
them to act like grown-ups when passing a 
budget. The way it works now, Democrats 
propose a budget and Republicans kill it, 
since it takes a two-thirds majority to pass. 
Republicans say it’s the Democrats’ fault, 
because they’re the majority. Democrats then 
have to bribe Republicans with expensive and 
unnecessary pork in order to peel off the few 
votes needed to get something passed.

 Under Prop. 25, a budget is passed with 
majority vote. If it’s not passed on time, 
legislators don’t get paid. If it has problems, 
legislators will answer to voters - and not be 
able to say it’s somehow the other party’s fault.

 Proposition 26 is another one where the 
purpose becomes clear when you look at 
who’s behind it. If an oil company pollutes 
our environment, they should pay to clean 
up the mess. If, as they hope under Prop. 26, 
such an assessed “fee” would instead be called 
a “tax”, then it could only be assessed with two-
thirds approval of the legislature. Backers of 
this measure are confident of being able to buy 
off the third of the legislature necessary to kill 
such assessments and pass those costs onto us 
taxpayers, instead.

 Finally, there’s Proposition 27. As discussed 
under Prop. 20 above, next year new 
legislative districts will be drawn by an 
independent commission. Prop. 27 is a last-
ditch effort by legislators to kill the commission 
and preserve their ability to draw their own 
districts, so they’ll never have to answer to 
voters in a real contest.

 These propositions will have a great impact 
on the future of our state, though admittedly 
not as much fun as hearing Jon Stewart and 
Bill Maher talk about the Tea Party.

Mountain Views

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 At this point, it is no secret that even 
the most dutiful of Democratic loyalists 
expects the Republicans to win lopsided 
victories and a majority in the House, 
if not in the Senate, but the reasons for 
this turnabout may not be so obvious. 
President Obama has even weighed in, 
claiming that because of panic and fear 
people aren’t making wise decisions. In 
all honesty, I don’t sense panic in the 
electorate. I do sense fear, but it is an 
entirely rational, legitimate fear of what 
the future may hold for America if our 
current direction isn’t changed and 
changed quickly. Likewise, I sense anger, 
but it too is rational, even appropriately 
righteous.

 Simply put, Americans are justifiably 
angry about massive unemployment, 
excessive taxation and unfathomable 
deficits. The elections of 2006 and 2008 
were likewise manifestations of a public 
mood turned sour by the imperious 
actions of a President and Congress. In 
2006, both were Republican; in 2010 
both are Democratic. So the party has 
never really been this issue. The public 
was furious with President George Bush 
because he watched over and blessed 
several large deficits that appeared 
astronomical in their day. These were 
supposed to be the Republicans of fiscal 
restraint and small government. They 
turned out to be politicians as capable of 
spending money which they didn’t have, 
just as well as Democrats have always 
been able to do. The voters tossed them 
out and turned to a young idealist who 
seemed to get it.

 I even wrote an article about our 
then-new president, reciting the very 
commonsense, middle ground and 
seemingly fiscally prudent statements and 
promises he made. It was an article built 
on hope as much, if not more than, the 
voters’ sense that he was different. I, as 
did the electorate, hoped that President 
Obama would be the Obama of his 
moderate speeches and not the Obama of 
his liberal Senate days. All of our hopes 
were misplaced.

 Barack Obama just didn’t get it. He 
possessed both a golden tongue and 
tin ear. He didn’t understand that the 
voters were clambering for a reduction in 
the size and scope of the over-spending 
which had taken place under the old 
guard. Voters did in fact want a new way 
of conducting business in Washington. 
Instead, President Obama jumped to the 
helm of our ship of state and full throttled 
his way toward the rocks of financial 
disaster, never even pausing to take in our 
concerns and fears about this course. We 
had been on it before, and wanted off. We 
wanted someone to turn the ship around. 
Obama was not the man we had hoped 
him to be. $500 billion deficits (Bush’s) 
quickly turned into $1.3 trillion deficits 
(Obama’s), and the economy went further 
south.

 Americans now have a sense that as 
a nation we are broke. This is a new 
feeling. We’ve had deficits before, and 
we’ve complained about them before. 
But we’ve always had the sense – even 
in the midst of those complaints – that 
disaster could be avoided, that the fiscal 
problem was solvable. We don’t have that 
sense anymore. There is a tipping point, 
a point at which we cannot return 
without losing 
the America 
we know and love. 
We’ve never really 
been at the point 
where we risked 
handing to the 
next generation a 
standard of living 
lower than the one 
we were enjoying or 
handing them debt 
that they would never be able to repay. 
We are at that tipping point today.

 The despair is real and legitimate. We 
are not sure that simply increasing taxes 
will balance the budget and then retire 
the debt. We doubt that there is enough 
income to tax, even at confiscatory 
rates, to generate the revenues needed 
to match the expenditures which have 
been promised. At least with the tax 
rates of President Clinton, we were able 
to balance the budget for a year or so. 
But even those rates today wouldn’t meet 
expenditures, let alone put a dent in the 
national debt. $20 trillion in debt is a lot 
of debt!! Seeing how we got here has left 
most Americans with a deep aversion to 
increasing taxes on anyone – even the 
rich – because there is a sense that more 
revenue would only beget more spending, 
so the deficit wouldn’t go down.

 It is this sense of doubt and mistrust of 
the Congress and President that forms the 
real backbone of voter sentiment today. 
We feel betrayed. Arrogant politicians 
blithely spend money they don’t own 
and fail to acknowledge that it is ours 
to begin with. We are told that we are 
being stingy, greed and down right mean-
spirited because we don’t want to give 
up more of what we’ve worked hard to 
generate. Because we won’t trust them to 
spend the money, because we question the 
earmarks and sweetheart deals they make, 
because we don’t want to bail out banks, 
car companies or any other corporation, 
we are the bad guys. The communal 
arrogance of those we entrusted as our 
servants in public office reached the point 
where the Speaker of the House told us 
on public television that a bill had to be 
passed first BEFORE we would be allowed 
to see what was in it. Perhaps this has 
always been the case, perhaps these career 
politicians we’ve sent to do our business 
have always voted first and read what 
they did afterwards. But until now, they 
had the good manners to keep that fact a 
secret. Today, they simply told us that we 
have to accept it with no questions asked.

 The politicians forgot we live in a 
democracy and that while Abraham 
Lincoln did tell us all of the people can 
be fooled some of the time, he never ever 
said, nor is it true, that all of the people 
can be fooled all of the time. Americans 
aren’t buying the lies anymore. We’re no 
longer so impressed with title, degrees 
or purported expertise that we believe 
the promises from Beltway elites that 
another billion or so is going to stimulate 
the economy or that the previous billions 
have already saved millions of jobs. We 
see the truth with our own eyes, and it is 
an ugly truth – ugly because it stands in 
stark contrast to the reality that is playing 
out in every village, town and city across 
this great land and because our elites 
knew it to be a lie (cont. page 9)


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OPINION

My Turn

STUART Tolchin..........On LIFE 

HAIL Hamilton

Jerry Brown and Meg 
Whitman On The Issues


THERE STILL IS A PLACE FOR US

 Last week I went in 
for an eye examination 
at the fancy new 
Kaiser Offices 
devoted to assessing 
the need for glasses. 
I spoke a little to the 
optometrist about 
why she would want to 
be an optometrist rather than something 
impressive like an ophthalmologist or 
surgeon or something. She took the 
time to explain that as a child one of 
her eyes did not move to focus and was 
pretty useless. She was taken to doctors 
who informed her parents that surgery 
was going to be necessary. She was 
very frightened at the thought of some 
doctor cutting into her eye and pleaded 
with her parents to visit another doctor. 
Her parents consented and took the 
child to see a plain old optometrist. The 
optometrist diagnosed the problem and 
explained to the family that if the child 
followed a specific regimen of exercises 
the problem would correct itself and 
no surgery would be necessary. The 
child followed the exercises and in a few 
months her eye moved perfectly. She 
was so grateful to the optometrist that 
she decided right then and there that she 
would become an optometrist so that she 
could help people help themselves.

 I was moved and immediately had 
great respect for this doctor. When 
it came time to evaluate my eyes to 
determine the exact visual prescription I 
was absolutely amazed that the method 
used was almost exactly the same as 
the methods used over fifty years ago. 
Which is better 1 or 2? Most of you, 
I’m sure, have gone through the same 
process—comparing two highly similar 
corrections and choosing one or the 
other without ever being really sure. I 
felt free to tell my new friend the doctor 
that this method seemed imprecise and 
archaic fifty years ago and the fact that 
it was still being used at this modern 
facility astounded me.

 Well, my friend the doctor really 
surprised me. She explained that medical 
science has found no method more 
reliable than the subjective evaluation 
by the patient as to his or her own 
individual preference. It’s all in the eye of 
the beholder I guess. This need to rely on 
an individual personal preference, upon 
some reflection, made me very happy. I 
had been ready to think that one’s own 
experience meant little to anyone and 
that science now could find out more 
about us than we could ever learn by 
ourselves. Tell me doctor, am I going to 
live? Tell me if I’m happy. Tell me if I’m 
really in love?

 This new issue of the Atlantic Monthly 
(November 2010) contains an article 
describing how falling in love with the 
wrong person is misery - and isn’t much 
fun for the wrong person either. It seems 
to me that probably the greatest stress 
in life is connected to the realization 
that one has become involved in a 
relationship that is absolutely making one 
(or generally two) miserable. I consider 
it a real miracle that I am celebrating my 
fourteenth wedding anniversary today 
and am really unexpectedly happier 
than I ever imagined possible. How did 
my wife and I do it? Picking the right 
person is harder than even picking the 
right corrective lenses. Really, I don’t 
think any computer dating service 
would have ever matched us up. We 
are of different generations more or less, 
different religions-she’s a believer and I 
think all religion is nonsense; different 
ethnicities-Jewish and Mexican. She 
hates arguing and I love confrontation. 
She loves gardening and was an art major 
and kisses dogs. I don’t like gardening 
because it’s related to dirt and I have 
no visual artistic ability; I like dogs but 
believe in only cross-specie relationships 
involving gestures and speech; no hugging 
please. All right I might be exaggerating 
a little but not much—my wife and I are 
really different. A final big difference is 
that I love talking to strangers and she 
considers such behavior to be intrusive.

 So what’s the point? Simply put it’s 
possible to actually sometimes make 
the right decisions. Sometimes we, 
as individuals, can see through all the 
smoke and games and falseness and 
even see through our own prejudices. 
Sometimes we can actually be in touch 
with our better instincts and pick the right 
eyeglasses and pick the right life partner. 
You probably know what I’m getting 
at. Even in these ridiculous midterm 
election when we are all bombarded with 
media ads that tell us absolutely nothing 
about the true nature of a candidate or a 
ballot proposition, it really is possible to 
make the right decision and sometimes 
the decision will be a surprise. Maybe 
the decision isn’t as important as picking 
the right mate but it is easily as important 
as picking the right eyeglasses. 

 Good luck and I hope we all make the 
right choices! 

 Not 
surprisingly, 
Jerry Brown, 
a liberal 
Democrat, 
and Meg 
Whitman, a 
conservative 
Republican, differ greatly on the issues 
most important to California voters. 

Creating jobs:

 Jerry, whose four-decade political 
career includes two prior terms as 
governor, plans to create more jobs for 
California by investing in infrastructure-
-such as such as safe and sufficient water 
supplies--and creating more construction 
and manufacturing jobs to improve 
roads, highways, airports and public 
transportation.

 He also proposes a reduction of taxes 
on manufacturing equipment, along with 
a plan to stimulate production of clean 
energy, localizing electricity generation 
and requiring more energy to be derived 
from renewable sources.

 Meg’s plan for job creation includes 
giving small businesses a break by 
eliminating the $800 start-up fee to 
encourage entrepreneurs, and reducing 
a variety of other business taxes to 
prevent companies from moving to 
other states. She says taxing businesses is 
nothing more than eliminating jobs.

 She also says she would increase the 
research and development credit, promote 
investments for the agriculture industry, 
and eliminate the state tax on capital gains.

Solving the state budget deficit crisis:

 Jerry’s approach to the state’s budget crisis 
includes reform of the budget process, 
pension and MediCal reform, reducing 
prison costs and collecting unpaid taxes. 
His emphasis his on eliminating fraud and 
abuse rather than cutting programs.

 Meg promises to reduce the state budget 
by $15 billion by placing a strict spending 
cap, solving the pension crisis, bringing 
about welfare reform, and improving the 
efficiency of state government. 

Improving education:

 Jerry’s plan for education focuses on 
community colleges, provides extra 
funding for English language learners and 
low-income families, and overhauls the 
state testing program to improve career 
readiness.

 Meg plans to fix the school system by 
ensuring more money reaches classrooms 
instead of bureaucrats, rewarding 
outstanding teachers and grading public 
schools.

Proposition 23:

 Jerry has railed against Proposition 
23, the oil-funded initiative that would 
effectively halt the state’s landmark global 
warming law, known as AB 32. The 
measure “would deal a crippling blow to 
California’s pioneering efforts to control 
greenhouse gases and build a clean energy 
economy,” Brown says in his environment 
plan.

 Meg delayed taking a position on 
Prop. 23 for weeks, finally stating that 
while she opposes the initiative – which 
would stall implementation of AB 32 
until unemployment steadies below 5.5 
percent for a year – she wants to postpone 
the law for one year. This would give her 
an opportunity to “fix” the bill, she said, 
which she has labeled a “job killer.”

Cracking down on employers who hire 
illegal immigrants: 

 Jerry, the state attorney general, says 
punishing employers on this issue is 
not the state’s job. He says he is strongly 
opposed to state police, state sheriffs, 
or the attorney general’s office going 
after undocumented people. He says 
this is a federal government problem, 
and the federal government ought to do 
something about it.

 Meg says employers should be punished. 
She says we need a better e-verify system, 
but that employers that do hire illegal 
workers should get fined, and if they 
persist, lose their business license. She 
argues that if we do not hold employers 
accountable, we will never solve the 
problem of illegal immigration.

 She also wants to eliminate sanctuary 
cities, if necessary by cutting state aid and 
other state programs that benefit these 
cities.

California Dream Act:

 Jerry says he supports federal legislation 
that would allow children brought here 
illegally to become legal U.S. residents 
after spending two years in college or the 
military. Brown also says he would sign 
state legislation that would make it easier 
for illegal immigrants to receive financial 
aid from California’s public universities 
and colleges. 

 Meg says the act wasn’t fair to legal 
residents. She says our resources are scarce. 
She says we are in terrible economic times 
and many slots have been eliminated at 
the California State University system. 
She says the same is true at the University 
of California system. She says California 
citizens are been denied admission to 
these universities. 

 She also says the Dream Act favors the 
children of illegal immigrants over legal 
residents from other states who wish to 
attend California public colleges and 
universities. 

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