Don’t worry. Mormon Church will do the homework on behalf of them.

But California has a good reputation for our jury trials. Just look at OJ Simpson and Robert Blake.

California, it turns out, is ungovernable

Well said. Although the Greeks figured this out a few thousand years ago when they thought up democracy. The major issue they had was far too many stupid people and people who held sway could manipulate the system. That is exactly what has happened here. Propositions are passed around like Skittles and any doorknob with a pulse can get one started and can be guaranteed that a whole slew of doorknobs can be coerced into voting for it.

Stupid is as stupid does.

Where is our resident fecal factory hiding anyway? He seems to be very sporadic with his posts nowadays. Is the Mega Project causing him to burn the Midnight Oil?

While they’re contemplating their navels over in the other thread, the New Yorker is taking potshots at our precious state again. It’s a pretty good read:

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2009/08/24/090824taco_talk_hertzberg

one tidbit:
California, it turns out, is ungovernable. Its public schools, once the nation’s best, are now among the worst. Its transportation and water systems are deteriorating. Its prisons are so overcrowded that it has to turn tens of thousands of felons loose. And its legislature has spent most of the year in a farcical effort to pass the annual budget, leaving little or no time for other matters, such as—well, schools, transportation, water, and prisons. This is “normal”: the same thing has happened in eighteen of the past twenty-two years. But the addition of economic disaster to legislative paralysis may have brought California to a tipping point.

A good deal of the trouble may be fairly blamed on the Golden State’s tarnished initiative process, whereby laws and amendments to the state constitution can be proposed by petition and enacted by referendum. Adopted nearly a century ago as a great progressive reform—at the time, the California legislature was essentially a bought-and-paid-for subsidiary of the Southern Pacific Railroad—the initiative process began to go seriously sour in the mid-nineteen-sixties, when frightened voters nullified a fair-housing law and passed a measure, sponsored by movie-theatre owners, to ban cable television. (Both were voided by the courts.) The nadir, some would say, came in 1978, when Proposition 13 essentially capped property taxes and made California the only state that requires a two-thirds vote of the legislature both to adopt a budget and to raise a tax. The decline in public services was one result. Another has been a distortion of the state’s politics. Conservative Republican legislators have little incentive to compromise or even to broaden their appeal; to prevail on most of what is important to them, all they need is one-third plus one.

Outposts in hostile territory tend to be a lot of hard work and ultimately unsuccessful.