The news that leaked out this morning is that Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and Vice President Joe Biden made significant progress toward perhaps a deal that would prevent the so-called fiscal cliff.
Clearly patience is wearing thin on the part of the President. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that President Obama repeatedly lost patience with Speaker of the House John Boehner as negotiations faltered.
“In an Oval Office meeting last week, he told Mr. Boehner that if the sides didn’t reach agreement, he would use his inaugural address and his State of the Union speech to tell the country the Republicans were at fault,” the paper reported.
I often believe that scientific allegories give us an insight into our culture that we may lack, because ideas presented in a more straightforward way can run into opposition. For the past week I have gone to a particular episode in the TV Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
In a make-believe world of vampires and demons, the tolksfolk in the fictitious California town of Sunnydale were often immune and indifferent to killings. But a day when two young children were found dead, the town awoke to its problems and rose up in arms in a modern day witchhunt for the culprit – now, it turned out a demon had fabricated the situation to inflame the passions, but the main point is that the demon understood that the vehicle of child victims was a powerful tool that could awake even the most entrenched indifference.
While the city of Davis has made great progress in shoring up their fiscal standing in the last few weeks, the same cannot be said at the national level. The media deserves a lot of blame for overhyping the “fiscal cliff” into some sort of crisis that would doom the nation, if unresolved, by the end of the year.
The truth is that, if the tax cuts expire, we do not suddenly fall into the ocean. In fact, it is worth noting we had some of the longest peace time economic expansion with those tax rates in place. It is far from the ideal time to raise taxes, but if that’s where we head, the Republicans will largely have only themselves to blame for it.
The Brown administration Tuesday proposed new draft regulations that would require the oil industry to disclose where its California oil extraction operations are using hydraulic fracturing, commonly referred to as “fracking,” in advance of a new movie meant to bring public awareness to the environmental destruction caused by the practice.
While an oil industry spokesman says his industry is “resigned” to the long-awaited new regulations, environmentalists claim the out-of-state and resource tax-exempt oil companies largely ignore the state’s current regulations, despite earning record profits in recent years, and the governor’s proposal of new regulations will do little more than placate the public’s concern over fracking, a concern expected to increase along with awareness of the issue, once ‘Promise Land’ opens in California theaters December 28th.
As a father, I found myself, as I watched and listened to the reports, holding back tears, thankful that I knew my children were safe and sound. Realizing how precarious life really is.
National tragedies like these have a natural course. There is the shock. There is the dizzying array of reports, most of them conflicting as rumors and innuendo begin to substitute for substantiated facts. You always hope for the best, but yesterday we learned that if it was not the worst-case scenario coming true, it was its close cousin.
A new Associated Press-GfK Poll released today finds that almost four of every five Americans now believe that temperatures are on the rise and global warming will become a serious problem if nothing is done about it. The GfK Group is Germany’s largest market research institute.
The most interesting finding is within one subgroup – those people who do not trust scientists on the environmental front.
The Supreme Court of the United States on Friday did what many expected them not to do – agree to hear challenges to DOMA and Prop. 8.
The challenge to Proposition 8 has been followed closely here. Judge Stephen Reinhardt, of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, offered a very limited ruling that really only applied to California.
The news on the same-sex marriage front was a big no new announcement, with the Court declining to take action at this time. That leaves two huge issues open – the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and California’s Proposition 8.
The delay may be temporary, with the court perhaps as early as tomorrow granting review to the awaiting cases, or the Court could actually be choosing to duck the issue.
California has begun, through the long-delayed AB 32 signed in 2006 by then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, to implement a carbon cap-and-trade system that would reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.
That represents a modest but not insignificant 17 percent cut from where the state’s emission would be without the legislative action. That was the same goal that the Obama administration tried to set nationally in 2009 and 2010, prior to opposition by Republicans in Congress.
I was reading a letter to the editor of the local paper who wrote in response to the recent controversy by Davis Ace owner Jennifer Anderson – a controversy interesting enough to make the Huffington Post a few weeks ago.
It is a day hyped as the biggest shopping day of the year, but Walmart workers are threatening to use that hype to their maximum leverage, as they plan to walk out from a job at American’s largest private-sector employer, whose workers make on average $8.81 per hour with one third of their employees working less than 28 hours per week – thus not qualifying for benefits.
By Mark DiCamillo, Director, The Field Poll The 2012 elections may prove to be a turning point in California politics – one that has been many years in the making – as the political might of the expanding ethnic voter population fully exerted itself in this year’s statewide elections.
According to the network exit poll,1 Latinos, Asian Americans and African Americans collectively made up about 40 percent of the state’s voters in this election, roughly equivalent to their share of the state’s overall registered voter population. This means that turnout among the state’s ethnic voters was about equal to the turnout of their white non-Hispanic counterparts, a first in California election politics.
It is perhaps difficult to remember that California was largely a reliable Republican state. From the 1952 election of Dwight Eisenhower until the 1992 election where California went for Bill Clinton, the state went for the Republicans in 9 of 10 presidential elections.
Only in Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide did California go blue during that period. Now, some of those years it was close, like 1968 where Richard Nixon won by 3, Ford in 1976 won by 2 and George HW Bush in 1988 won by 4. Moreover, there was a Californian (Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan) on the ballot as President or Vice President 7 of those 10 years.
For years since California passed its medical marijuana law, the federal government, often to the bewilderment of many who wonder about the prioritization of resources, has battled the state on the issue of medical marijuana dispensaries, often conducting raids and arresting providers of marijuana to cancer and other terminal patients.
On Tuesday, Colorado and Washington went a step further by making marijuana legal for all purposes.
I hope this is going to be the last column on the Presidential Election. We will start with a bit of local flavor. The city of Davis went for President Obama by a whopping 81 to 18 percent margin.
President Obama received 18,397 votes to 4,284 for Mitt Romney. The county of Yolo went for the President, as well, by a more modest 65 to 31 percent margin. Without Davis, President Obama still wins the rest of the county, but narrowly, by a 20,000 to just under 15,000 vote margin.
Conservatives for weeks were convinced that there was going to be a Romney landslide, or at least victory, based on a bunch of flawed assumptions and a final decision that when science tells you something that you don’t want to hear, the science is wrong – which has some serious implications for climate change at the very least.
In turns out we can reasonably predict even close elections based on careful polling. But some did not want to believe it. After all, they would convince themselves that the economy is horrible, that President Obama was to blame for the economy, and the public would see it their way if they just repeated themselves enough.
I say “whoa Nellie” on that tune. The rhythm is off, and the melody stinks.
Human trafficking is a growing problem and Californians overwhelmingly supported the passage of Prop 35, which created harsher sentencing for those involved in human trafficking.
81 percent of the voters supported Prop 35, which will increase fines and prison sentences as well as require convicted human traffickers to register as sex offenders and disclose internet activities and identities.
For at least the past year, I have believed that this election would be a repeat of 2004 except in the other direction, and for the most part all year that has played out. Never has that been more evident than the initial post-election analysis, where we see that the Obama team utilized their ground game to perfection to do what everyone believed impossible – pull in new voters and similar numbers of blacks and youths as 2008.
In 2004, it was Karl Rove who was the master, able to rework an electorate in key battleground states like Ohio and Florida, to pull off a victory in the face of heavy disenchantment with the war in Iraq and in the fact of a 2000 election in which, not only did President Bush lose the popular vote, but many believed he would have lost Florida without the intervention of the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore.