California Ballot Recommendations

(Originally posted 10/31, but bumped up to election day.)

Last night I decided to take advantage of early voting in Orange County, and after checking locations, headed off to the Mission Viejo Mall to cast my ballot...only to find out that they ended early voting there on Sunday. Oh well, I'm ready if I can find a place to vote.

I'm going to go ahead and give my ballot recommendations for the statewide candidates and issues in California. We have an election guide that looks like the phone book thanks to a host of ballot propositions, and I spent some quality time reading through the material, so here goes:

For the statewide offices, I noticed a trend in this year's roster of candidates. In California we have term limits on state offices, and it's become obvious that once a state officeholder is termed out, the just pick another state office and run for that. Former governor Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown, who left office in 1982, has since become the mayor of Oakland and now wants to be our Attorney General. Look out crime rate.

In other offices, current Lt. Governor can't do that again, so he's running for Insurance Commissioner, and the current Attorney General is running for State Treasurer. It's almost as though when the music stops, everybody sits down in different chairs than they had before, but nobody gets kicked out.

As far as my recommendations go, I'm voting a straight GOP ticket on the statewide offices, though in a blue state, it's likely that only Gov. Arnold will win. I'm hoping that the Governor might have a few coattails for some of the other offices, but you never can tell around here.

We have no less than 13 ballot propositions this year. My general rule of thumb is that if the measure involves a bond issue, I won't vote for it. Bonds are nothing more than disguised tax increases, and if the issue is important enough to raise our taxes, then the legislature needs to make that case or cut other spending to make room for it. With that in mind, here's how I'm voting on the propositions:

1A - Yes
1B - NO
1C - NO
1D - NO
1E - NO
83 - Sex offender monitoring - Yes
84 - NO
85 - Parental notification for teen abortion - Yes
86 - Tax on cigarettes - misleading - NO
87 - $4 billion tax on oil drilled in California - misleading - NO
88 - NO
89 - Public funding of campaigns - NO
90 - Eminent domain reform - Yes

The campaign ads, especially for Props 86 & 87 have been constant, and there's no telling how the voters will respond to seeing Bill Clinton lecture us on alternative fuels every three minutes. I'v already posted on the misleading nature of Clinton's ads. I hope the voters aren't stupid enough to believe that you can increase costs on California oil by $4 billion and not have that cost passed on to the consumer. That's the pitch from the proposition's supporters (a bunch of greenies), and it defies economic logic to believe you can expect that kind of result. However, dedicated greenies and other lefties just aren't that smart.

Whatever you do, don't play the "stupid" game and sit this election out. Nothing would please me more than to be able to watch Nancy Pelosi hand the Speaker's gavel back to Denny Hastert (or the new GOP speaker, as I suspect might happen) when the new Congressional session convenes in January.