It should be clear from reading my stuff that I am generally supportive of unions. Our system of government is designed to allow for – even encourage – the collision of interests as a way of restraining the power of any single interest, and until unions came along, the interests of workers were generally undefended.

But all interests – even admirable ones – can over-reach.

In the case of government, one of the problems is that the employees are also constituents. That is to say that they also help select those who – in turn – make the decisions that govern the work conditions, pay and benefits which those constituents receive. That kind of back-scratching happens at all levels; the California Citizens Compensation Commission sets the salaries for legislators, and includes members who do business with the state.

That problem is amplified in this era of ‘electoral politics for hire.’

The reality is that a moderate-sized constituency with significant money can easily dominate state politics in the same ways that the old business interests did back in the Union Pacific days. And that is, exactly, what is going on today in California.

Increasingly, our penal policies are being set by the prison guards’ union; our educational policies by the teachers’ union; state compensation is wildly out of whack as state employees, who enjoy job security and benefits packages well above those in the private sector now appear to outearn them as well.

Currently a California Highway Patrol officer will earn 90% of their final salary (which may include significant overtime, which is often allocated to those about to retire) in retirement as early as 50.

Add this budget overhang to work rules which make it more difficult to flexibly manage state employees, and suddenly the ability of state government to effectively deliver the services we pay taxes to get is pretty seriously challenged.

I think that the simple fact that the teacher’s union alone has budgeted over $50 million into opposing this measure…which gives you an idea of the magnitude of cash they have available for political spending.

It’s too much cash, the effects are visible and pernicious, and it’s time that the balance of power in state government was tipped away from state employees.

For those reasons, I’m voting for Proposition 75, and encourage you to as well.

Check out Omar’s profile over at Norm Geras’ place.

I’m proud to have shaken Omar and his brother Mohammed’s hand (hugged them actually), and their faith in the future – tested as is it by the harsh reality of their present – inspires me every day.

I look forward to a sharing meal with all three brothers – Omar, Mohammed, and Ali – sometime soon.

Proposition 74 would lengthen the duration of the “probation” period during which new schoolteachers could be dismissed at the end of the year without cause from two to five years.

After this period, dismissing teachers with unsatisfactory ratings would be simplified.

Job protections are often a good thing; the notion that one’s livelihood depends on the whims and mood of one’s supervisors isn’t a good thing. But conversely, at some point the web of protections gets so strong that it’s virtually impossible to fire bad employees, and around that time the enterprise begins to be run for the benefit of the employees rather than the other stakeholders.

In vastly simplified blog-speak, that’s a big part of what has happened to public schools in much of the country. They are no longer run primarily for the benefit of the children or community, but instead have become the captives of their employees.

My ex’s husband (who is a great friend and I usually call my “brother-in-law”) left his career in Hollywood to become a high school teacher at a high school in a near-bankrupt poor school district about five years ago.

When we get together to make plans for Littlest Guy, we talk a lot about politics, and his work. He’s a dedicated progressive, can’t understand my support of Bush or the war, but – to put it simply – sees the need to significantly shake up and reform the public education establishment.

He’s voting for 74, as am I.

Teachers (and others) deserve some protection against whimsical or retaliatory firing. But our children, the schools and the taxpayers who pay for them deserve a staff that isn’t marking time until retirement with little concern for the quality of their work – for the quality of education our children get.

So over the next few days, I’ll go through my thoughts on the California initiatives.

I’ll start with what is, for me, the most difficult decision – Proposition 73.

The gist of the proposition would require that pregnant minor girls would have to have parental consent to get an abortion, or lacking that, consent from a juvenile court.

A tough one for me.

I have no daughters, only sons. I’ve paid for some abortions in my time, and while I’m not tormented by those memories, neither am I exuberant about them. Personally, I subscribe to the “legal, safe, and rare” formulation where abortion is concerned.
But – to set out something which I think closely parallels abortion (although abortion is to me far more complex, because it represents the intersection with three sets of rights – the woman’s, the to-be-born fetus’, and the father’s) – I also believe strongly in the individual right to own guns. And in the notion that that right may be limited by reasonable regulations.

One of the reasonable regulations on gun ownership says that minors may not buy guns, or in many states, possess them without an adult’s presence.

I don’t think that’s a bad thing. And yes, I know about the idyllic days when kids would bring their 30-30 to school on the opening day of deer season.

Similarly, I’m a strong supporter of some core right to abortion – probably not including late-term abortions. But I’m troubled at the idea that a girl who cannot get her ears pierced (or here in L.A., her bellybutton pierced) without Mon or Dad signing off can go to a clinic and have an abortion with no adult supervision or involvement except by the abortion provider.

So I was spinning around this issue pretty tightly, until TG and I discussed it. She hates initiative law in general (she works with lawyers, and thinks that we ought to leave it to the pros – riiiiight).

But she made the telling point on this to me when she said “I’d support this if the Legislature passed it. But it just doesn’t seem to rise to the level of the kind of issue we ought to be passing in initiative law.”

She’s right.

So I’ll be voting – more than a bit reluctantly – “No” on Proposition 73.

Next week, we’ll be voting on a series of initiatives here in California.

I’ll take some time and go through them in some detail over the next week.

They are:
Proposition 73: Requires parental or judicial notification before a minor can get an abortion.

Proposition 74: Lengthens the period before unionized public school teachers are granted tenure from two to five years.

Proposition 75: Requires that public employee unions get individual annual approval from their members before spending dues on political campaigning.

Proposition 76: Limits state spending, mandates legislative or gubernatorial budget cuts midyear if the budgets are not being met.

Proposition 77: Removes redistricting from the power ofthe legislature and instead mandates that it be done by a panel of retired judges.

Proposition 78: Prescription Drug Discounts: Big Pharma’s version.

Proposition 79: Prescription Drug Discounts: the non-Big Pharma version.

Proposition 80: Reregulation of state electricity market.

All links are to www.smartvoter.org

I’ve always been fond of Bill Mauldin’s “Willie and Joe” cartoons as a good check on the heroics that predominates in so much of written history.

And it leads me toward the point I made in slagging Matt Yglesias’ defeatist (defeatist? defeated!) post a few days ago…

The troops in Vietnam turned against the war before the mass American population did. As a ‘chickenhawk’ (and as a snarky sidenote, given the recent column about the wealthy and tax-avoiding Norm Chomsky – I’ll go back to my [buddy Duncan] Black and suggest that when he advocates that Chomsky or George Soros pay what would be ‘fair’ for his taxes, as opposed to what he owes under law – I’ll gladly make a ‘chickenhawk’ pin and put it on the site), I guess I just ought to keep listening to the troops.

And I can’t reccomend that you do as well…the voice of the troops, unvarnished & direct is the best indicator of how we’re doing.

Which leads me to an email I got today from Jean-Paul Borda, who is building a directory of milblogs at http://milblogging.com .

Go check them out yourself and see what they are saying. I can’t suggest strongly enough that you spend some significant time reading what these men & women have to say.

Because if you wait to read their words in the New York Times, they’ll Dowdify them to invert their meaning.Take this story (via Michelle Malkin):

Yesterday’s New York Times on-line edition carried the story of the 2000 Iraq US military death[s]. It grabbed my attention as the picture they used with the headline was that of my nephew, Cpl Jeffrey B. Starr, USMC.

Unfortunately they did not tell Jeffrey’s story. Jeffrey believed in what he was doing. He [was] willing put his life on the line for this cause. Just before he left for his third tour of duty in Iraq I asked him what he thought about going back the third time. He said: “If we (Americans) don’t do this (free the Iraqi people from tyranny) who will? No one else can.”

Several months after Jeffrey was killed his laptop computer was returned to his parents who found a letter in it that was addressed to his girlfriend and was intended to be found only if he did not return alive. It is a most poignant letter and filled with personal feelings he had for his girlfriend. But of importance to the rest of us was his expression of how he felt about putting his life at risk for this cause. He said it with grace and maturity.

He wrote: “Obviously if you are reading this then I have died in Iraq. I kind of predicted this, that is why I’m writing this in November. A third time just seemed like I’m pushing my chances. I don’t regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it’s not to me. I’m here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark.“

In quoting Cpl Starr’s letter, the Times left out the part in bold.

The tagline for the (generic, pretty uninteresting) New York Times article on the future direction of African-American politics is:

Many African-Americans are uncertain of what the civil rights movement accomplished and how it should move forward.

“…what the civil rights movement accomplished…”??

My God. I spent a lot of time as kid with two black families and both Joe and Theodis could tell me and told me at every opportunity that they could – very clearly and elequently – what the civil rights movement had accomplished, and how proud and happy they were for their fellow Southern blacks who’d finally had enough.

I’d suggest that a better use of the time of whatever editor wrote that, and of the Times’ valuable newsprint (and web space) would be collecting some oral histories of just what the civil rights movement accomplished so that we all have some appreciation for it. Then once they – and the rest of the country is in touch with what we’ve done we might be able to think about “how to move forward.” You’d think that in honoring Rosa Parks, the New Freaking York Times would be able to do that.

Good grief.

Greg Djerejian has a great post up at the Belgravia Dispatch that pretty well sums up my views on the state of play in Iraq and on my posture toward the Administration.

I think I have broader domestic-policy differences with Bush and his crowd than Greg does, but that’s kind of a given given that I’m a liberal. But he speaks for me when he says that

Back in October of 2004, I wrote a a long post in this blog supporting the re-election of George W. Bush largely based on the central importance of Iraq. Then and now, I believe to my core that the stakes in Iraq are immense, and could well determine America’s standing on the global stage for score years or more. Despite my revulsion at Abu Ghraib, my contempt for hubris-ridden, reckless Administration officials like Donald Rumsfeld, and my fear that George Bush’s lack of foreign policy expertise could have him proving an emperor with no clothes–I calculated that the alternative would be materially worse.

I’ll offer a cavil about a few things, and then sit back and try and figure out how I can do nearly as good a job as he is of making concrete suggestions.But let me start with the cavils.

I’ve read a ton of history, and I have a fondness for reading contemporary sources where such exist. All of them – from Thucydides onward – talk about war as the province of error, of chaos, of the worst in human nature – and they’re not just talking about the killing part.

I really do think that one product of the centrality of television and movies to our generation’s learning; the ‘closedness’ of experience in television and films – the neat way that events interact with intentions, and the way that the experiences on screen end as the closing credits come up.

We just flat don’t understand how messy the real world is, and when we’re presented with that mess – errors, misjudgments, the bad judgement and dishonesty that are inescapably part of human action, we throw up our hands and react like a Hollywood star who sees an imperfection in the paint on our new Ferrari and just walks away from it.

This doesn’t excuse errors, and don’t for a moment think that I believe that those who make them should not have to bear the consequences. In fact the thing I like the most about our system is that people bear the consequences – even if it is at times one that seems just but unfair. And no, I don’t think this Administration should escape consequences either.

But the really sad thing is that people like me have no choice but to support the Administration, because the alternatives – as much as I’ve tried to look for them – look as doltish as John Kerry. I’ve got – we’ve all got – the choice between someone who is trying to do the right thing for what appears to be the right reasons, but is both feckless and mulishly stubborn; and those who neither convince me that they know what the right thing to do is, and certainly offer little evidence that they would do better.

I should have been paying more attention…

For the last four months, I’ve been working in my off hours with a couple of folks on a better way to do blog (and web) search, with a particular emphasis on how best to take a user somewhere they’d like to go – if they only knew it existed.

I took some of the concepts that I had sketched out in the original round of design for Pajamas Media, and took them forward into some interesting new areas.

We’ve been through a series of rounds of design, and finally had a high-level design good enough to start coding – which we’d anticipated would take a couple of weeks for the framework functionality.

The basic concept was simple…instead of tagging your browser with cookies showing where you’d been, create a central repository of places you’d been and thought were interesting.We’d do this with a browser plugin that had two controls on it…a “save this place” control, and a “go look at my places” control.

A unique identifier would be embedded in the control, so when you saved a place, we’d associate it with a unique user; when you registered to get the plugin, you’d have the choice of registering under a pseudonym or your real name, and of whether to make the places you saved public, private, or ‘by invitation.’

The data would be used in a couple of ways…

Let me go lick my wounds for a day or two, think about whether anything we were working on ws novel enough to be worth keeping moving forward on in the light of today’s news, and I’ll probably start talking about them in the context of some general notions about where the blogswarm ought to go and how we can make better use of it.

Meanwhile, go take a look at the beta Yahoo ‘My Web’ toolbar…sigh.

OK, a couple of lessons here. First, when you have what you’re convinced is a really good idea…don’t take SIX months to do anything about it. Stay up late, tell your family you love them and will see them in a few months, play less, get it done, and get it done NOW. Other people just as smart as you are working hard to solve the same problems.

To quote one of the classiest things I’ve ever heard said about business…”They won, we lost. Next.” Sigh.

I’ve argued for a long time that one issue that the Democratic party ought to jump onto with both feet is that of leading the charge to fix and improve the infrastructure in our cities, states, and nation.

Joel Kotkin called it “sewer socialism” and sign me up as one, because if there is a critical role for government to play, it’s here.

The levee failure in New Orleans points out both the cost of not maintaining our infrastructure…the levees failed because they were badly designed, built, maintained, and monitored – and also the problems inherent in building and managing infrastructure in a warren of Federal agencies, state government, and local bodies. At every level, attention is seldom paid – I mean what politician wants to dig into the details on things like sewer construction or road rights-of-way?

And it points out the pervasive haze of corruption, in which things like sewer construction and road rights of way are not driven by engineering needs, but instead become a part of the pork platter in which political connections matter more than competence.

Vaclav Smil has a column on infrastructure up at TechCentral Station; in it he estimates that catching up on infrastructure will cost the Pentagon’s budget for five years.
He cites a new report by the American Society of Civil Engineers:

The complete report makes for an extremely depressing reading as the only bright spot (increased waste recycling has cut the total volume of solid waste and waste-to-energy plants now consume nearly 20% of all garbage) is overwhelmed by a litany of degradations, failures, risks, backlogs, shortfalls and warnings. Just half a dozen bullets convey the overwhelming nature of the report’s findings:

* by the year 2000 27% of all bridges were structurally deficient or functionally obsolete

* investment in roads and bridges would have to increase by 94% in order to reach the projected cost of maintaining and improving the current level

* many sewer systems (some a century old) and water treatment facilities are well past their designed lifespan and while there is a shortfall of $ 12 billion a year to pay for their renewal, federal funding has remained flat for a decade

* total number of unsafe dams has increased by 23% since 2001, to nearly 2,600

* most states have just a decade’s worth of remaining landfill capacity

* half of all navigation locks work beyond their 50-year design span, inland navigation increased by more than 30% since 1980 but construction funding dropped by some 60%

Government keeps grossly underestimating the resources needed to stop a further slide. For example, the FAA put the cost of airport development and reconstruction at $ 6.5 billion a year but the American Association of Airport Executives sees the need for at least $12 billion a year during the next five years. Expectedly, the overall bill to fix these ubiquitous inadequacies and near-failures would be staggering. In 2001 ASCE put the cost of needed infrastructural renewal at $1.3 trillion over a five-year period; this year it raised the estimate by nearly 25% to $1.6 trillion. But the real cost is certainly much higher: ASCE total is just an aggregate expert estimate and a detailed inventory of needs would undoubtedly uncover more inadequacies and failures and, as with any large-scale projects of this kind, cost overruns on the order of 10-20% would be considered a success once the repairs were underway. Consequently, a more realistic total may be now at least $2-2.5 trillion and rising.

OK, fellow Democrats – want to take a stand on an important issue that will improve our lives, save energy and water, and create domestic jobs?

Let’s figure out how to get this done, and how to get it done without just tossing billion-dollar checks into the floodwaters of the Mississippi.