A bit of context: I am a married, full-time care-giver to a six month-old and a five year-old who just started kindergarten. I am, thus, unable to meaningfully write anything beyond grocery lists and suicide notes until everyone has gone to bed. I’m starting this around 11:20 PM and will see how far I can get before midnight. If this becomes gibberish, an endorsement of a Republican viewpoint, or a spec episode of “Heroes” it means I’ve fallen asleep on the keyboard. Wait for it….
PAGE 4: STATE MEASURES
These are items of sufficient complexity that they should be handled by our elected officials, but they can’t just do that because it involves spending money which a cancerous minority of Republican doofuses refuses to do by raising taxes .0000001 percent.
There are also the oddball items forced onto the ballot by church ladies of both sexes and aspiring pols who want to establish their “Tough on Crime” street cred by passing expensive redundant laws named after crime victims.
I don’t know what our actual legislators are doing these days but I’ll bet it involves caddies and Second Life.
OK.
MEASURE 1A. Shall we pass a bond act to finance really fast trains moving through the Frisco-LA-San Diego corridor?
Arguments Against basically boil down to how broke we are as a state and they’re valid. That said, we’re always broke and I’d rather be broke with fast trains than without. These trains will move at over 200 MPH and will get you from LA to Diego before you leave. Also, I must confess a morbid curiosity as to what happens to a train going 200 MPH when a 7.0 earthquake hits or some idiot parks his SUV on the tracks. Only one way to find out: YES on 1A!
MEASURE 2. Shall we make life incrementally less hellish for farm animals by mandating their cages be big enough to move around in before we grant them the merciful release of death?
Arguments Against boil down to fears of all those great animal torturing companies moving their businesses to China or Arizona along with all their great-paying animal torture jobs. Oh, and eggs may cost a few pennies more.
This isn’t a perfect proposal but it’s a step in the right direction. I’m no vegetarian but I’m for anything that makes life a little less awful for creatures capable of suffering. Worth paying more for my Egg McMuffin. YES on 2.
MEASURE 3. Shall we pass a bond act (instead of an icky tax increase) to fund state Children’s Hospitals that look like something you would NOT find in the black hole of Calcutta?
Yes, I know we’re broke but I’ve got two kids and I want their state hospitals to be better than what Skipper and the Professor threw together when Gilligan’s appendix blew. YES on 3.
MEASURE 4. Shall we let a bunch of pinch-faced, puritan perverts force their religions on us when all we want is to have our abortions in peace?
It’s the usual bunch of Bible-Nazis trying to chip away at a woman’s God-Given Right to Safe, Legal Abortion (Yeah, choke on that one, Pat Robertson) by forcing minor girls to get Daddy’s permission to not be a mother at age twelve. Sorry to be so shrill, but this is just the same damn thing every time. The Christaholics can’t quite manage to build that time machine that’ll get us back to pre-suffrage, so they’ll settle for just wasting years and millions of tax dollars to make it a little bit harder to make the hardest of decisions.
And of course they go after the kids first because they’re the least capable of fighting back.
NO on 4. Seriously. NO on 4.
Okay, I went to 12:05 here but I’ll cheat five minutes if it helps push the religious terrorists back under their rocks and save some teenager’s life.
More tomorrow.
