poker 413

poker 753

testanchor817

X, I would have supported 77 if it didn’t demand such rapid implementation — county registrars are terrified of this, with good reason. Why not wait until 2010?

I’m sure you’ve heard the one about the boy who murdered his parents and threw himself on the mercy of the courts because he was an orphan. That’s basically the situation we have here. Prop 24 was supposed to go on the March, 2000 ballot, leaving plenty of time for a normal implementation, but its opponents sued to keep it off the ballot. Now that it’s back on the ballot half a decade later, after we’ve had enough election cycles to see how bad the existing districts really are, they complain that it’s poorly timed. Go figure.

Besides, if Prop 77 is defeated it will be widely regarded as a repudiation of the idea of legislative district reform, not as a mandate to try it again when the timing is a little better. In fact, opponents of this much-needed reform will use its 2005 defeat as an argument against the next attempted reform, no matter when it is brought. Need proof? Just read the ballot argument, It’s right there, in the first paragraph of the rebuttal to the Pro-77 argument:

Every time they don’t get their way, politicians cook up new schemes to change the rules. They’ve tried sneaking redistricting schemes past voters four times over the last 25 years, and each time, VOTERS SAID NO!

Just in case you didn’t get their dishonest message the first time, they repeat it in the anti-77 argument as well:

Politicians have tried to sneak redistricting schemes past
voters four times in the last 25 years. VOTERS SAID NO . . . all four times.

Note that while they say “four times over the last 25 years,” they actually mean zero times over the last 15 years, and twice in the decade that preceded that (Prop. 14 in Nov., 1982; Props 118 and 119 in March, 1990). How do they get from “twice” to “four times,” you ask? Well, you start by counting the dueling 1990 initiatives as “two times” even though both appeared on a single ballot (and only one, Prop 119, was all that much like Prop 77 anyway). Counting a single election as “two times” gets gets you from 2 to 3; to get 4 you have to lie outright and claim that voters, not the courts, rejected Prop 24 in 2000.

That’s their argument today, on an initiative voters have not been allowed to vote on in more than 15 years. What do you think the argument will sound like in 2010, when voters have actually gone and voted it down as recently as 2005?

I am still very much consistent-life. I just don’t want to use the power of the state to coerce women into choosing life; I want to make life the best choice through spiritual and communal means, not legal ones.

You gave up that kind of consistency a long time ago, when you opposed the U.S. war to topple a state that has murdered at least 300,000, or possibly upwards of 1,000,000 of its own people. Also, I have a hard time believing you’d support a death penalty law in which the state technically does not kill anyone, it merely “does not coerce” the victim’s friends and family members to refrain from doing so themselves.

I am still very much consistent-life. I just don’t want to use the power of the state to coerce women into choosing life; I want to make life the best choice through spiritual and communal means, not legal ones.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for an explanation as to why one argument in favor of Prop 77 (your alleged aversion to district gerrymandering) and zero arguments against it add up to “a close call” rather than an easy endorsement of a “yes” vote.