Category Archives: Pedantry

Obamameter

Cabinet Full of Cleaners

Most reasonable people that I know, including a couple of online acquaintences like Meesha and Prairie Flounder, have a healthy skepticism when it comes to campaign promises. You may have noticed that the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States of America did not include the return of Jesus Christ, a spontaneous global relapse of all cancer cases, or candy raining from the sky. Of course, these aren’t things that Obama actually promised to deliver.

Politifact’s Obameter has compiled a list of 510 promises that Obama made publicly between announcing his candidacy and his inauguration. So far they have him listed as already having kept six of them, has 18 of them “in the works,” has made serious compromises on one, is stalled-out on another, and have outright broken one promise.

I take some issue with them presenting compromises and stalled attempts as being somehow bad, though. Our governmental system, as I understand it, was intended to bring conflicting interests together to work out compromise solutions that everybody can live with.

To Play

My three-year-old son love airplanes. He also loves trains, but that’s beside the point. This isn’t a post about my son, it’s a post about my son’s new toy airplane. It was packaged in an open-face box with a prominent “try me!” label that encouraged shoppers to interact with the cockpit/button, which makes the propeller spin and a speaker to make a crude approximation of engine noises.

When we got out of the store I tore into the cardboard, at the boy’s insistence, and handed him his new biplane. In the process of disentangling the plane from its tie-downs, some paper fell to the pavement. Didn’t want to be a litterbug, so I picked them up. One was a warranty of some sort that I dismissed out of hand. The other was instructions. This is where I figured it would tell me that I needed a screwdriver to access the batteries, and hoped there might be a mute switch of some sort.

Indeed, it laid out how to unscrew a panel to replace some button batteries, and there is no mute button aside from removing said batteries. But lo! There were additional instructions. Behold, gentle reader! How to play with a toy plane:

How to play with a toy plane

Thank God the folks at Mattel thought to explain the process.

Constitutional Convention

Governer Schwarzenegger

Something I’ve been hearing recently that used to just never come up in polite conversation is a constitutional convention to overhaul California’s founding legal document. The Golden State’s constitution has been so severely modified over the 130 or so years since its last overhaul that it requires a search engine to consume the darned thing.

CALIFORNIA CONSTITUTION
ARTICLE 18 AMENDING AND REVISING THE CONSTITUTION

SEC. 4. A proposed amendment or revision shall be submitted to the
electors and if approved by a majority of votes thereon takes effect
the day after the election unless the measure provides otherwise. If
provisions of 2 or more measures approved at the same election
conflict, those of the measure receiving the highest affirmative vote
shall prevail.

This means that 50% plus one voters during a primary election (when very few people show up to the polls) can trump the Governor, Assembly, Senate, and State Supreme Court. This is all very democratic, of course, but also leaves a nasty situation when a poorly-conceived proposition goes through that seemed like a good idea at the time. Compare this process to that used for the United States Constitution, which sets a much higher bar, and has only resulted in a couple of totally boneheaded revisions.

Our legislators complain that their hands are tied by too many spending formulae, leaving only a handful of big-ticket items in the budget to fiddle with. A couple of examples of government reveue sources that are strictly limited in their reallocation off the top of my head:

  • Property taxes
  • Tobacco taxes
  • Vehicle licensing fees
  • Gasoline taxes
  • Lottery revenue

I propose that we cut them loose. Drop the restrictions on what kinds of government revenue can be put to what purposes and let our legislators legislate. If they do poorly, their challengers in the next election have a stronger argument that we should kick the bums out.

Since we can’t count on the critters in Sacramento to call for a constitutional convention on a 2/3rds vote as currently required, we introduce a ballot proposition to introduce a provision allowing for constitutional convention by popular referrendum. Put said popular refferendum on the same ballot as a separate measure and let the ad war begin!

Who’s with me?