I'm having some computer issues, but I have been able to notice that Leon Panetta, former White House Chief of Staff under Clinton, has been tapped for the CIA Director position. Digby references this article from Panetta from this year:
Even though we now know that there were intelligence officials who questioned the assertion, few leaders were willing to challenge this argument for war because they knew it might undermine public support for the president's decision to invade Iraq.
More recently, President Bush vetoed a law that would require the CIA and all the intelligence services to abide by the same rules on torture as contained in the U.S. Army Field Manual [...]
all forms of torture have long been prohibited by American law and international treaties respected by Republican and Democratic presidents alike.
Our forefathers prohibited "cruel and unusual punishment" because that was how tyrants and despots ruled in the 1700s. They wanted an America that was better than that. Torture is illegal, immoral, dangerous and counterproductive. And yet, the president is using fear to trump the law.
I hope he gets cracking on putting the CIA under the Army Field Manual. That would be a very good start.
As a side note, Panetta has been leading one of the most insufferable organizations in California's history, a high Broderist effort called California Forward, which thinks the biggest problem in the state is that lawmakers from both sides don't have drinks together anymore, or something. At least Panetta's influence on the state will be lessened. He's not my favorite guy by any stretch, but if he can manage to not have the CIA kidnapping and torturing anymore he can hold his head up high.
"I was not informed about the selection of Leon Panetta to be the CIA Director. I know nothing about this, other than what I've read," said Senator Feinstein, who will chair the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in the 111th Congress.
"My position has consistently been that I believe the Agency is best-served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time."
There was much to like in the Governor's Weekly Radio Address this week, at least to the untrained eye. It was presented by the Governor's Finance Director Mike Genest and includes an open plea to the Legislature. It spoke of the dire situation our state is facing, in end of the world like terms. A snip:
So, bear with me a moment while I speak directly to your state legislator.
Sir or Madam, I know that you didn't run for office so you could vote to raise taxes or cut spending for vital programs. I too wish there was another way. But, we have to do what is needed to bring this state back from the fiscal brink. You are a leader. In times like this leadership requires compromise. Your state needs your help.
You can save it from disaster, but only if you reach across the aisle. Time is up. Please act now.
The problem of course? It's all propaganda that ignores the $18 Billion package that is facing his veto. While the state dawdles away its general fund, the Governor's team dishonestly ignores the fact that the Democrats have compromised, and the Republicans refuse to move an inch.
And that veto. So, Mr. Genest, if you want to point a finger, perhaps that finger should turn right back upon the current Administration.
I have it on good authority that a certain Emanuel Pleitez, a member of the Treasury Department review of the Obama-Biden Presidential Transition Team, is prepping for a run for California's CD-32, which is being vacated by Hilda Solis.
Pleitez has an interesting resume thus far in his career, though it seems unlikely that he'll be able to provide a substantial challenge to the heavyweight-laden field that the CA-32 special is likely to produce, including Judy Chu, Gil Cedillo and Gloria Romero.
My instant analysis is that the addition of yet another Hispanic candidate does little except strengthen the chances of Judy Chu's ascent to Congress.
So far I've been able to meet a ton of really interesting activists, both new and old. Every once in a while it is great just to sit down with other like-minded activists. In many ways, the educational aspect is just a great bonus.
But, that being said, it is quite a bonus. There have been discussions on engaging young voters and activists, reaching diverse communities, using the Obama training and tool set, and strategic messaging. And a whole lot more.
I'll toss in some more links later. In the interim, keep an eye out on http://equalitycamp.com
Five top Democratic governors have called for a larger stimulus package than is presently being called for in Washington, precisely to fill in the gaps created by a loss of tax revenue in the states.
To help offset state budget cuts, a group of Democratic governors urged the federal government Friday to pass a $1 trillion economic stimulus package, significantly larger than the one under discussion in Congress.
The package would help states compensate for cuts to education spending that could cause long-term economic decline, as well as bolster infrastructure projects and benefits programs for the poor, the governors from New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Ohio and Wisconsin said in a news conference [...]
The governors recommended that the stimulus plan include $350 billion for infrastructure, including transportation, wastewater and broadband projects; $250 billion for anti-poverty programs such as Medicaid, unemployment insurance, food stamps and child care; $250 billion in flexible education spending to maintain funding for programs from pre-kindergarten to higher education; and middle-class tax cuts.
The money, disbursed over two years, would offset cuts needed to balance state budgets and would serve as a "bridge" until 2011, by which time the governors hope the economy will have recovered, said Massachusetts Gov. Deval L. Patrick.
Predictably, the Republican Governor's Association called it a "bailout" of the general funds of the various states.
Well, yes. The states, by and large, did not have the ability to get out from under the financial meltdown, and the consequent economic downturn that resulted shouldn't disproportionately affect the least of their citizens. Furthermore, given that the road to recovery is massive fiscal stimulus, having states cutting back on spending at this time, be it infrastructure, education or healthcare, is completely counterproductive and will do nothing but prolong the agony.
In the future, it will take more than backfilling state budget cuts in a downturn, but a more structured system, like a "Federal Infrastructure Finance Corporation," to ensure that state assets aren't sold off to private interests during a downturn. The days of creative borrowing and the crossing of fingers are over. We need new structures to manage economic volatility and avoid fiscal traps, PARTICULARLY in California, where the tax system too closely mirrors the boom and bust cycle.
In the near term, I imagine something like this will pass. Barack Obama today put out a call for "strategic investments" to create jobs and improve the long-term economic outlook simultaneously. The question locally is whether California's plans will actually accomplish that. CalPIRG is criticizing the state's wish list, saying that it relies too much on increasing highway and road capacity and not enough on cleaner energy investments:
The California Public Interest Research Group reports that the state plans to spend 31% of road money on creating new capacity instead of addressing long-deferred maintenance and repair projects. By contrast, the group said, Massachusetts would commit 100% of its road funds to repairs.
"We can't afford to waste precious resources on new highways at the expense of ready-to-go projects to repair and maintain existing roads and bridges and expand public transportation," said spokeswoman Erin Steva.
The group also faulted the California Department of Transportation's list, saying that only 37% of the funds would flow to public transportation. The group called for a higher percentage, citing the record ridership on California's mass transit systems, which have been hit by severe cutbacks in recent years. The proposed percentage is less than what is being planned in Tennessee, Wisconsin and Massachusetts, CALPIRG said.
It is elemental that the stimulus spending cannot prop up an unsustainable growth model based on sprawl. Experts up and down the state understand this, and one of the best examples is in this Merced Sun-Star editorial, which nicely explains the tension between speed and smarts:
The problem for the planners is that the stimulus must be geared toward putting people to work as fast as possible. That, many believe, argues for the traditional sort of public works, such as highways.
In many cases, plans are already in place to replace crumbling roads, highways and bridges. By contrast, plans for urban transit systems and intercity high-speed rail are less firm, meaning it may take more time to actually start turning dirt and generating paychecks [...]
We're confident that a solution exists that puts people to work right away and also lays the groundwork for a new approach to the nation's transportation needs.
It won't be easy, but it has to happen. We can't continue to simply build more transportation infrastructure on a model that's now more than a half-century old.
A new model for transportation is part of the change we need.
Read the whole thing. One good idea calls for phased stimulus spending, giving enough for critical highway and road repairs at the start, with the bulk coming later for transit and rail projects.
Today's Paul Krugman column exploring the apparent end of Republican racial backlash politics has been getting some excellent commentary across the blogosphere, including friend of Calitics thereisnospoon's excellent take at Daily Kos:
For the longest time, the progressive economic agenda was held hostage to vaguely economically progressive but socially retrograde racist Dixiecrats in the South. When truly progressive economics required that all our nation's people have equal opportunity to share in the nation's wealth, those erstwhile allies became strained or broken. But today Democrats are no longer dependent on the likes of Zell Miller and his Dixiecratic friends to enact a progressive economic agenda. The Republicans have painted themselves into a corner as the Party of the South, and Democrats have largely cleaned our own house of the racists.
All that leaves for us is the question of whether enough of our Democratic officials will recover from their Battered Wife Syndrome and the reject the temptations of corporate corruption to truly herald the advent of a 2nd New Deal.
Krugman and spoon's points are especially applicable to California, where the Republican politics of backlash was born and perfected. From Reagan's 1966 campaign that took many white working class voters from Pat Brown and the Dems, to Howard Jarvis' 1978 Prop 13 campaign to cut taxes he argued were being misspent on people of color, to Pete Wilson's 1994 campaign won by scapegoating immigrants (also true of Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2003 recall campaign, to a lesser extent) California Republican ideologies and political success have been built on exploiting white voters' resentments. As both Krugman and spoon point out, the base wanted the Great Society undone, and the real power in the Republican Party wanted to undo the New Deal.
As the state of California enters the most serious fiscal crisis in its 150-year history, it's worth looking at how the collapse of Republican backlash politics may provide the necessary opening to fix this state and move beyond 40 years of destructive and failed conservative ideology.
The short version of what I'm going to explain below is this: the collapse of the backlash is due to a more diverse electorate and to an economic crisis that is now consuming the white middle-class, eliminating previous economic privileges they turned to conservatives to defend.
The underlying economic and demographic rationale for Republican anti-tax backlash politics in California is now gone, making multiracial coalitional politics based on expanding government in order to provide badly needed services and jobs a very real possibility, and likely the seed of a new political framework in California. More services and more spending, not less taxes, are now the overriding concern of California voters. Our politicians will have to catch up to be viable.
Lost amidst the union-busting and efforts to destroy public schools in Arnold's budget proposal is maybe the first serious, legitimate attempt to sensibly manage the prison crisis in decades, with a reform plan that would save the state $1 billion by boarding up the revolving door between jail and parole for nonviolent offenders.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's latest budget proposal would reduce by tens of thousands the number of criminals behind bars and under community supervision.
Parole would be eliminated for all nonserious, nonviolent and non-sex offenders. The proposal would cut the parole population by about 65,000 by June 30, 2010, or more than half of the Christmas Eve count of 123,144.
At the same time, the corrections plan calls for increasing good-time credits for inmates who obey the rules and complete rehabilitation programs. Combined with the new parole policies that would result in fewer violators forced back into custody, the proposal would reduce the prison population by 15,000 by June 30, 2010. It stood at 171,542 on Dec. 24.
It is insane and wrong, particularly during this budget meltdown but really in general, that 2/3 of all prisoners entering the system in 2007 were parole violators. These are minor, possibly technical offenses with little bearing on public safety that clog up the jails, creating constitutional crises. California is the worst state in the union when it comes to parole policy, and these changes would simply bring the state in line with the rest of the country, all of which are able to manage without a perpetual crime wave.
Now, it may anger tough on crime advocates, as well as those who have a self-interested stake like the prison guards, but I have to say that they are the right people to anger.
The California Correctional Peace Officers Association, still at odds with Schwarzenegger over a new contract, blasted the plan.
"What it means is residual costs to all citizens of California and higher insurance rates and more crime," said CCPOA spokesman Lance Corcoran, whose union represents about 30,000 correctional officers and parole agents. "These are individuals who do not take advantage of opportunities for change, and they are not going to change," he said of the offenders who stand to benefit from the proposals.
More scaremongering isn't going to work. There is no reason for tough on crime policies to continue to rule the day. Those days are over.
The proposals on rehabilitation and time credits for prisoners, which would accrue in county lockups and get advanced if detainees take drug, vocational and educational programs, are already in the work-around budget passed by the Legislature. Arnold could go ahead and sign that, and put us on a more responsible criminal justice path immediately.
We know that Arnold holds a grudge against unions, which he believes caused him that stinging defeat in 2005, and much of his goals on the budget lately have taken their aim at those unions. In particular, Arnold is seeking to privatize major infrastructure projects, ostensibly for the sake of "efficiency" but as a practical matter to get the jobs out of union hands. I thought that much of this was just a sop to Arnold's friends on the Chamber of Commerce and just more of the conservative mantras of animosity toward unions and privatization equaling a universal good. But there's also a quid pro quo angle involved here in the form of David Crane, a top economic advisor to the Governor, who would stand to benefit financially from any public-private projects put forward by his current boss.
As Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger demands that lawmakers allow private interests into California's huge market for public works projects, a company with close personal and financial ties to the governor's economic advisor is positioned to benefit.
The advisor, David Crane, has spent years promoting private-sector involvement in public construction projects -- one of a few issues holding up a deal between Schwarzenegger and legislative Democrats to ease the state's worsening fiscal crisis.
Babcock & Brown, the financial services firm where Crane worked for a quarter of a century, hired a Sacramento lobbyist last year to influence the governor's office on so-called public-private partnerships, records show. Since joining the governor's team in 2004, Crane has received hundreds of thousands of dollars of income from deals he made while at Babcock, a firm founded in San Francisco and based in Australia, according to financial disclosure reports.
Those deals included projects in areas such as telecommunications, in which he served as a financial advisor; personal investments in real estate from Babcock's public-private partnership projects in England; and partnerships he formed with other Babcock executives to invest in oil wells and an Italian restaurant chain.
Crane is claiming that he cannot possibly benefit financially from any future deals, but one wonders whether, even if Crane is telling the truth, it really matters. The network of friends and former business associates to which Crane's advice could directly or indirectly steer business is vast. This is how government-by-profit-taking typically works, rewarding friends and punishing enemies. Whether or not Crane gets his profit now, as an economic adviser, or later, when he returns to Babcock & Brown or some other destination, is in many ways besides the point, just a clever way to avoid violating the letter of the law.
Jessica Levinson, the director of political reform at the nonprofit Center for Governmental Reform in Los Angeles, said Crane appears to be operating within the letter, though perhaps not the spirit, of the law.
"It starts to have the appearance of doing political favors for old friends, and that is not something that I think is illegal, but it still may not be fully ethical," Levinson said. "I think it all comes down to, is he making this decision for public good or is he making it to help his old business friends?"
By the way, Crane is a Democrat, or at least that's what it says on his voter registration card. The issues are the same. He's a free market fundamentalist who probably thinks he's advocating on behalf of a good solution for California. After a while, the theft becomes so commonplace that the thieves don't even see it as stealing anymore.
The details of Arnold's budget plan are in and it is even more insane than we thought. His budget includes large cuts to public schools, which are bad enough in their own right. But the specific kinds of cuts are going to trigger a snowball effect that could destroy public schools in California - and I don't believe that's an exaggeration.
California schools could eliminate a week of instruction and increase class sizes next year under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's new plan for solving the state's budget crisis.
Vowing to give schools maximum flexibility to cut costs, the proposal unveiled Wednesday also would allow districts to eliminate one of two science courses required for high school graduation.
Schwarzenegger's plan would provide no teacher salary increases, eliminate a program providing subsidies to overhaul low-performing schools, and suspend participation in a program encouraging teachers to obtain national certification.
In and of themselves these cuts are damaging and reckless. California students need MORE science instruction, not less, if they're going to be globally competitive. Cutting instruction isn't going to help students learn more, and will lead to corner-cutting by teachers and administrators alike.
Those damaging cuts become catastrophic, however, in the context of No Child Left Behind. Arnold's proposals are likely to cause numerous schools to fail to meet federal standards set by the law, especially when subsidies to low-performing schools are cut. Because NCLB mandates the closure of low-performing schools, Arnold's budget if enacted as-is would virtually ensure the closure of numerous schools in this state.
Arnold's budget also leaves schools facing their own cash crisis during the school year (and in prime testing season):
The governor has proposed to ease the pain, in part, by accounting transfers involving state transportation funds and by deferring $2.8 billion in school payments from April to July. Wells said the state, by deferring payments for three months, would place an "awful" new burden on school districts to secure short-term loans.
It will be extremely difficult to secure those kinds of loans, but Arnold continues to delude himself into thinking the private sector is interested in lending to state government or its affiliated agencies.
There are plenty of other ridiculous elements to Arnold's budget but the kinds of education cuts proposed are a good example of just how badly Arnold has screwed up our state. One has to wonder whether this is a shock-doctrine style plan to force mass privatization of public schools in California by starving them of revenue and forcing them to close when they inevitably are unable to meet NCLB standards.
Two years from now a new governor will be sworn in. I wonder if California can wait that long.
• An interesting piece from earlier in the week on Jerry Brown's legal challenge to Prop. 8, strictly speaking the first time a state Attorney General has sought to invalidate a popularly passed ballot measure since 1964.
• In other Brown news, he's suing the Bush Administration to block one of their "midnight regulations"- this one would reduce the input of federal scientists on mining and logging projects that may threaten endangered species.
• John Garamendi is, er, a little worried about the trajectory of the state's financial prospects.
• Again, you can check out Arnold's plan to cover the $41.8 billion dollar budget hole here.
• And a Happy New Year to everyone, with hopes for a great 2009! Oh, and if you want to sue for divorce, stay at a parking meter beyond the proscribed time, or not wear a seat belt, better get it in before the end of the year - state fees go up after midnight.
The Schwarzenegger Administration unveiled a new budget plan today, calling for more tax hikes and increased borrowing. One notable omission from the plan was Arnold Schwarzenegger himself.
"We are facing a major crisis, probably the most challenging budget situation the state has ever faced," said Mike Genest, Schwarzenegger's finance director. "The governor believes in acting immediately."
Schwarzenegger is out of state and vacationing at the family residence in Sun Valley, Idaho.
That's some amusing juxtaposition from the Sacramento Bee.
On to the proposal, which is little more than just a warmed-over recapitulation of earlier proposals the Governor has made, with some new elements from right out of fantasyland.
That plan called for a temporary increase in the state sales tax, expanding the sales tax to cover some services, a nickel-a-drink alcohol tax, a new tax on oil production and a $12 hike on vehicle registration fees. It also called for $15.4 billion in spending cuts, including requiring state employees to take two-days-a-month unpaid furloughs through June 30, 2010 and give up two paid holidays each year.
The new elements include reducing the dependent care exemption on state income tax returns from the current $309 per dependent to $103; carrying over some of the deficit into the 2010-11 fiscal year; borrowing funds from voter-created programs that service the mentally ill and pre-kindergarten children's health services; changing the operating rules for the state lottery in an effort to make it more profitable, and borrowing $4.7 billion from the private sector.
If there's one thing the private sector is desperate to do right now, that's take it's carefully guarded cash and give it to the state with the worst bond rating in the country. They're really dying to get that done.
The real patterns we see here are familiar to all of Arnold's budget - a deep lack of concern for the most marginalized elements of society, and a hearty desire to break unions. Schwarzenegger's lowest point as a politician as maybe as a person was getting blown out in the 2005 special election. He still believes the ideas he put forward in that election were sound, and blames unions for his defeat. Thus you see Arnold going after union members' livelihoods, insisting on state employee furloughs and generally trying to roll back labor protections that this state has held for decades.
In addition, there's a recognition that this budget hole is impossible to fill without a magic angel. The proposal names that angel "private borrowing," but that's just not going to happen. The angel is going to have to be federal relief from a stimulus package. California reducing its public spending by $10-15 billion at a time when no other entity can pump money into the economy is counter-productive and deeply dangerous to any recovery. The feds are going to have to make up the gap.
Finally, a new proposal looking at the entire $40 billion dollar deficit suggests that the Governor isn't interested in going forward with the $18 billion dollar work-around budget which he has been negotiating with Democratic leaders. That would be a mistake, because of the exponential effect of continuing to do nothing in the immediate term. Then again, if he were interested in action, the Last Action Hero wouldn't be in Idaho right about now.
...if you want to go through it yourself, the budget plan is here.
...statements from legislative leaders on the flip.
2008 was the year change came to California. And by that I don't just mean the successful Obama campaign. 2008 was the year the 20th century model finally broke down on the side of the road, as the privatized, financialized, sprawlconomy collapsed. California has been hit harder than almost every other state by the economic crisis, which has shown Californians the desperate need to move in a new direction.
The dominant political development in the state was the battle over that future. The budget crisis, which took up all of 2008 and will likely do the same in 2009, isn't just about taxes and spending, but about what kind of state we will live in.
The one thing all sides agree is that the future will not look like the past. Arnold Schwarzengger wants to roll back 40 years of environmental and labor laws, while his Republican legislative colleagues want to go back to the early 19th century before even public schools, in their desire to destroy state government. The Yacht Party is openly rooting for a Depression, which they believe will enable them to finally destroy their liberal enemies. If that requires sacrificing the middle class, so be it - Republicans only ever saw them as easily manipulated fellow-travelers anyway.
Democrats have not articulated a future as clearly as their opponents, but Californians have done this on their own. In a year that saw some bitter electoral defeats, voters pointed the way forward by approving nearly every mass transit proposal put to them, including those that required a 2/3 supermajority to raise taxes. Whether it's high speed rail, the Subway to the Sea, BART to San José, or the Marin-Sonoma train, Californians showed that anti-tax Hooverism has its limits.
In one of the most important speeches of the year, Van Jones called for progressives to move from opposition to proposition. The only way we can defeat the New Hoovers among us, those who want to despoil our environment and make working Californians suffer worse during this economic crisis, is for progressives to clearly articulate and defend a better alternative. The successful mass transit votes show how powerful that effort can be when it is made.
It also shows that Californians are now ready to redefine the California Dream for the 21st century - they are beginning to understand that the 20th century model of an economy built on sprawl has failed them and cannot provide broadly shared prosperity. Since so much of our politics stems from that sprawlconomy, Californians' willingness to look beyond it is a much-needed shift, even if the old ways die hard.
If that better, sustainable and prosperous future is to be realized, California progressives need to be better organized. The other great lesson, and the most important single political event of the year, was the passage of Proposition 8 - which showed how totally the old ways of politics had failed.
Many Caliticians have dissected the failure of the No on 8 campaign, laying the blame at a top-down consultant-driven media-focused campaign that did not speak clearly about the issue, about who would be impacted, and did not reach out to those Californians we need to reach. When we fight this battle again we will fix those mistakes. If Obama showed how a grassroots effort can change the country, Prop 8 showed how the lack of one can hurt the state.
The battle over Prop 8 also showed the maturation of the gay rights movement, which is the direct descendant of and now the heir to the Civil Rights Movement. It showed that even California is not immune to successful gay-bashing, but also showed how wide and deep support for equal rights has become. Prop 8 has galvanized a new generation to become politically organized, has turned average people into committed activists, and has united the progressive movement around a plan to bring communities together to organize for everyone's right to marry.
2008 was not a good year for California, and we enter 2009 with enormous challenges, with at least one wheel over the edge of the cliff. But 2008 has also shown us the way forward, how a grassroots, bottom-up politics centered on full equality for all and a sustainable model of prosperity can break through the failed politics of the 20th century and renew California's promise as a progressive, free, and beautiful place to live.
(If you around you should try and make it. - promoted by Julia Rosen)
The demonstrations against Prop 8 that have been organized using Facebook and wikis are promising signs of an opportunity to build a stronger, grassroots-powered movement for marriage equality. The "Please don't divorce..." photo project is a fabulous grassroots action to help people build a personal connection to and empathy for people who are hurt by Prop 8.
As Julia Rosen, Madprofessah and others have written, one of the great weaknesses of the No on 8 campaign is that it did not take advantage of the opportunities for online organizing and grassroots organizing. Also, the campaign made a big strategic error by hiding the faces of gay people, when we know that personal heart connection is what moves many people to change their minds about supporting gay rights.
The Web has changed organizing; it will never work top-down again. The Web has shown us how to bring people together to make change. EqualityCamp is a pilot event on January 3 in San Francisco to bring together netroots organizers and Web 2.0 geeks who know the lessons of the Web well together with activists for marriage equality and equal rights for gays.
This is a major, if tentative, victory for criminal justice reform advocates.
California's three-strikes sentencing law suffered a blow Tuesday when a federal appeals court struck down as unconstitutional a 28-years-to-life sentence for a sex offender who failed to register with local police at the correct time of year.
The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case of Cecilio Gonzalez back to federal district court in Los Angeles for resentencing after finding his 2001 penalty constituted cruel and unusual punishment, which is prohibited by the 8th Amendment.
Gonzalez's harsh sentence was grossly disproportionate to his "entirely passive, harmless and technical violation of the registration law," the appeals court said.
This case represented the unintended consequence of three-strikes carried out to its most ridiculous extreme. 28 to life for registering, but not at the right time of year? Nuts. This isn't a crime in 11 states, and the maximum sentence allowed by customary law in California is three years.
In case the "tough on crime" absolutists start shieking about "activist liberal judges" overturning the will of the people, consider who wrote this opinion: Jay Bybee. Nominated by George W. Bush Jay Bybee. Writer of the fucking torture memo Jay Bybee. Even a guy who justified the torture of prisoners considers this cruel and unusual punishment. There is no indication whether or not Jerry Brown would carry this to an appeal, but considering the opinion of this very conservative jurist, I would imagine the US Supreme Court would at least potentially rule the same way, although they struck down a similar challenge to three strikes in 2003 on a 5-4 vote. Put it this way, I don't see Bybee as more conservative than Anthony Kennedy.
This does not invalidate three strikes entirely, but it certainly gives a ray of hope to those locked up for a minor third crime to challenge their sentencing. And it provides a framework to show how unjust and counter-productive these stringent mandatory sentences are. Three strikes is more of a symptom than the entire problem - the legislature has approved over 1,000 higher sentences in the past 30 years. But this is an important start, to end the tyranny of "tough on crime" absolutism that has contributed to busting the state budget and making this the worst state in the union when it comes to the corrections system.
Because the state simply doesn't have the money to give it back to you. But you will get a shiny new IOU note from Controller John Chiang. And you'll be in good company, the Legislators will be the first to get the IOU notes from the state. From the Bee:
State Controller John Chiang warned Tuesday that the first group to get hit in the wallet by California's budget debacle is likely to include legislators - and it could happen as early as Feb. 1.
The bad news is that next in line to get IOUs instead of cash would be state income taxpayers awaiting refunds and companies that do business with the state.
In a letter to state agencies, Chiang said his office was projecting the state would run out of cash around the beginning of March. (SacBee 12/30/08)
At this point the situation is so precarious, that it isn't even clear that if the Democratic Legislative Leaders and the Governor come to some sort of agreement, that we'll even be able to implement it in time. Perhaps we'll be in a better position to borrow money, but that depends a lot on the credit markets. And at this point, our position at the mercy of the credit markets is not an enviable one.
You know, it's really getting hard to think of new ways to describe this mess. I mean, FUBAR is putting it quite mildly. The state of California, the seventh largest economy in the world, will literally be out of cash in March. Such a collapse would make the collapse of Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns look laughable.
Paul Krugman advocates for the obvious solution, aid to states in paying for social services such as unemployment and medicaid. California will need a very large chunk of change, but the stimulus package appears to be growing by the day. Right now, it looks to be at least $850 Billion. With any luck, that will come down sooner rather than later.
In the interim, perhaps we should have a naming contest for this mess. My Entry: Minerva's Moola Mess.
