’s the day of the recall election in California (I mention this for the benefit of future blogeologists; the rest of you may have already heard the news). What does this have to do with tax resistance? Precious little, but I’ll rant on anyway.
Over the last few days our answering machine has been host to frantic recordings featuring the voices of Bill Clinton, Joe Lieberman, and Martin Sheen urging a “no” vote on the recall. I have to admit that I don’t understand an electorate that’s on the one hand supposed to applaud a Congress and President who pass a toothless “Do Not Call” list, but on the other hand is supposed to react favorably to multiple answering-machine spams.
Meanwhile, my email inbox is full of debate one way or the other — including some debate I don’t usually see around election time: about whether or not voting is worth the time, or indeed whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing.
It looks like Davis is finished. Good riddance. He’s one of the most venal and unprincipled politicians on the stage. What I’m most pissed off at him for isn’t the budget or the power outages or even the car tax, but the fact that he enthusiastically helped preside over the great imprisoning in California which led California to have “the highest rate of drug offender incarcerations in the nation — 134 per 100,000.” In there were more people in prison in California serving sentences solely for drug possession than the total California prison population in .
Was Davis a hard-nosed drug warrior that he came into office unwilling to stop this disaster? I doubt it. I think his motivations for supporting this policy were much the same as his motivations for most everything else he did. In this case, massive donations from California’s prison guards’ union probably were the deciding factor. If the pot smokers had a union that could cough up more money, Davis would probably have worked for decriminalization, at a snail’s pace, squeezing donations from all sides and trying to put off anything decisive until the well had run dry.
The Democrats should be ashamed of the time and effort they wasted trying to bail out this sinking ship (and at the depths they sunk to in order to try to torpedo the recall).
Myself, I voted for the recall. Best vote I ever cast. If I can, I’ll vote for another recall next month, and then another the month after that. With recall elections, the more the merrier. I say we keep recalling until we run out of governors, and then recall the last one twice just to be sure.
Of course people have pointed out to me that a vote for the recall is a vote for The Governator. I’m less worried by that than they are. Bush has taught me not to underestimate a buffoon, but still, The Governator would have to work awfully hard in the time between his inauguration and the next recall battle in order to do as much rotten stuff as Davis would do if he got the green light to carry out his term.
I’ve said that the Democrats should be ashamed for backing their dead horse. Now it’s the Republicans turn.
