Saturday, October 25, 2008

Bay/California Propositions: input welcome

I'll put up a separate post for local candidates, but comments are welcome, and I'm more interested in propositions that I'm unsure about:

Statewide propositions:

Prop 1A (high speed rail): I actually have some local-area environmental concerns, but despite that this seems like a good idea.

Prop 2 (farm animal treatment): easy yes.

Prop 3 (children hospital bonds): harder one. Hate the heartstring pulling, and I'd rather have the legislature determine funding, but California's moronic two-thirds vote for state budgets pushes the other direction. Leaning against. UPDATE: voted no.

Prop 4 (abortion parental notification): no.

Prop 5 (nonviolent drug offenses): leaning in favor, but there a lot of ways for voter micro-management of criminal punishment to go wrong. The countering problem is that the legislature is totally screwed up by the prison-industrial complex, and by limits imposed by California's moronic Three Strikes voter initiative. Also, many of these drugs should be legalized. UPDATE: voted yes.

Prop 6 (crime and police funding): easy no.

Prop 7 (renewable energy mandates): no, unfortunately.

Prop 8 (eliminate same-sex marriage right): easy no.

Prop 9 (victim rights changes): Easy no. I don't know why anyone thinks elected legislators have incentives to be soft on crime. They can handle this issue.

Prop 10 (alternative fuel vehicles): Leaning no, but I'm kind of following the environmental herd on this one and need to do some research. UPDATE: voted no.

Prop 11 (redistricting): yes. I think it fixed some problems that made me vote against Prop 77 in 2005, particularly by leaving Congress out of it. (Good links on Prop 77 here, btw, took me a while to find them to remember why I voted against 77.)

Prop 12 (veterans' bonds): leaning against for the same reasons as Prop 3. UPDATE: changed my mind and voted yes - these are just loan guarantees that have been done for years - if they had worked out poorly in the past there would've been evidence of that.

Local propositions in Santa Clara County:

Prop A (hospital retrofit): yes

Prop B (BART to San Jose): cons slightly outweigh the pros for me. While new money for light rail is good, it would also have the effect of redirecting money from previous propositions that would otherwise be spent more efficiently on bus lines. UPDATE: voted no.

Props C and D (VTA stuff): yes, I guess. Do we really have to vote on this?

Again, comments and links are welcome.

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