Clearly, the role of Governor of California is a no-win situation.

Anyone who understands how California is impacted by the referendum process, a super majority requirement for passing the budget, term limits and our current legislative districts would know that being Governor is a sure way to add a major public failure to your resume.

Let’s start with the referendum process.  We, the people, have the ability to force the state to spend large parts of the annual budget on pet projects.  We can make this happen by getting our spending bias on the ballot by virtue of referendum.  Now, this all sounds very democratic, but the reality has proven anything but empowering to the people.  To pass a referendum in the state of California requires a ton of advertising on TV.  This is expensive.  Individual people typically don’t have that kind of cash laying around.  So, corporations are usually the backers behind these issues as they are able to pool the financial resources required to flood the airwaves prior to an election and get an issue passed.  Even better, there’s no requirement that the ads be truthful or even accurately reflective of the issue being pushed.  It could be a bill that forces the state government to spend tons of cash on highway improvements that would benefit the logging industry in some remote location….but the ads on TV could be about how the bill keeps criminals in jail or illegals aliens out…or whatever works in whatever part of the state you want to get some votes.  Logical connections between the bill and the advertisement are not required.

Over the years, this has unfortunately resulted in a majority of the state’s budget getting spent before the legislators even get to argue about what to include or exclude from the budget!  But no politician can campaign for reform for obvious reasons.  Say, I advocated reforming the referendum.  Well, my opponent would call me a marxist or something on TV and say that I wanted to remove the citizen’s right to affect how government spends money.  Yea, I’d lose that advertising campaign and then my next election.  Even though reform is necessary for our state.

Let’s move on to our crazy legislative districting.

Over the years, whatever party is in power has done whatever it could to stay in power.  One tactic has been to redraw the legislative districts so as to ensure a party loyalty per district so the person in power knows they can continue to preach to the choir of their district and stay in office.  Looking at an actual map of California state legislative districts looks like someone threw spaghetti against a picture of our state…it’s ridiculous.

On top of that is term limits.  This limits the amount of time a politician can stay in their legislative role.  Normally, you’d think a policy such as this would promote a healthy turnover of legislators which benefits the state by bringing in new people with new ideas all the time.  Well, when you have highly partisan districts, you get highly partisan representatives.  And when you given them term limits as well, you remove the need for them to ever feel like they want to build long standing relationships with legislators across the aisle.  In fact, every ideological hill looks good to die on!  There’s no personal need to compromise ever.

So, our current crazy legislative districts coupled with terms limits effectively gives us ideologically hell bent representatives with no personal inclination or professional need to compromise with their counter-parties in the government.

When you layer a super majority requirement to pass the budget on top of this crowd of folks fundamentally disinclined to compromise, you get no compromise and no smooth passing of the budget.

Every year, the budget is delayed and the state suffers a fiscal crisis.  The new person wanting to run for governor gets to blame that on the last governor….which as I’ve shown here has very little to do with the systemic problems that truly contribute to our state’s fiscal ineptitude.

So, is the new candidate for governor ignorant of our state’s management issues?  Or is the candidate aware, and just wants the sexy job of governor because it plays well to ego?

Anyone running for governor is either ignorant or an egomaniac.

Possibly more interestingly, that conclusion can be drawn from a series of negative premises regarding the legislature.

Here’s a really interesting article by Stanley Fish in NYT.com.

The malleable line between speech and action seems to be at the crux of the consternation regarding this latest decision concerning the First Amendment and free speech. It seems like the author is suggesting that the justices had it well within reason to have found a decision more unfavorable to the “corporate person” if they had the will to do so in the majority.

While I’m a fan of how the corporate personhood concept shields the individual agent from liability to a large degree, as this enables risk that I believe in as an entrepreneur, I’m pretty disappointed by the recent ruling as it makes the personhood concept seem ridiculous in it’s logical extensions.

Some common sense realism as the Scots would have considered it, or the Legal Realism of Cohen mentioned in the article, would have been nice in this case. Maybe some interdisciplinary backgrounds to future justices will help? If I remember my history correctly, John Marshall didn’t have a law degree, and that worked out ok.

How the First Amendment Works

President Obama’s recent speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize seems to have been viewed by the Right as a surprising reaffirmation of american exceptionalism.  The speech also seems to be viewed by the Left as a surprising contradiction to the idealism that supports a rigorously (and some might consider utopian) pacifist social ethic.

I can understand why the Right is emboldened by Obama’s apparent affirmation of american exceptionalism.  I heard Obama refer to America’s unique position in the world during the course of his speech.  But the notion of american exceptionalism finds its foundation in the sense that America is given by God a unique role to play and that betrothal is a reflection of our society’s unique affiliation with the Almighty.  Our dominant role is bequeathed by God…or so the adherents to american exceptionalism tend to believe.

However, Obama’s speech seemed to reflect a more nuanced historical premise.  He did not appeal to a simplistic theological justification for America’s conquests as have previous Presidents been so willing to enlist (at least for the sake of rhetoric).  In his speech, he references the blood and sacrifice of American troops as the foundation for our current role as the sole super power in geo-political affairs.  I agree.  We were in a position to defend freedom during the course of the previous century, and so we did.  As a result, we are in a unique position in the world, and this unique position enables us to further our defense of freedom for peoples everywhere.

My sense of (what I’ll call orthodox) american exceptionalism is that it finds its justification in a belief akin to manifest destiny.  I mean to say, that the insertion of God as the prime mover in our foreign policy seems analogous to the way manifest destiny was justified by a theological premise and thereby influenced our domestic policy from a century prior.

The blending of theology and politics always comes at a price.  And that price is often inconsistent policy positions across various issues at best.  At worst, the price entails the subservience of justice to a particular constituency’s moral framework.

A lot has been said about the influence of Niebuhrian realism on Obama’s foreign policy.  (Here’s a post in The American Spectator) That influence was clearly evident in Obama’s speech at the Nobel award ceremony.  Obama’s statements regarding his role involving “seeing the world as it is” showed both Neibuhr’s influence on Obama as well as the burden Obama now seems to grapple with fully.  Being President is a far cry from being Candidate.

Obama’s speech made me wonder what Reinhold Neibuhr would have thought of the Administration’s current foreign policy direction.  I wonder also what Neibuhr’s thoughts would be on the broader concept of an increasingly orthodox american exceptionalism.

Lastly, Obama’s speech made me glad.  If nothing more, it’s nice to see that a dialectic of ideas is evidently playing a role in the thought process Obama pursues as he fleshes out his worldview and how that will inform his role as leader of the free world.

I absolutely love this time of year.  Football, Thanksgiving, Fall weather, then first snows, Christmas, lots of opportunity to assess the year; count my blessings and focus on the most important things.  To welcome it in, here’s a video that cracks me up!

I love this zigzag punt return!  My favorite parts of the video: first the pose a blocker strikes after making a hit on the second zag; second, the way the player stands in the end zone looking pretty baffled by it all while he just drops the ball…hilarious!

Latoya Egwuekwe put this graphic together displaying the progression in rising unemployment rates by County across the country.  Nebraska never looked so good!  Click on the image and press play to see the graphic in action.

This has to be one of the coolest music videos I’ve seen. Totally compelling.

From Jessica Hagy

By Jessica Hagy