Vote Early, Vote Often

Vote Early, Vote Often

Did you know that today is a day when you should go vote? Yes, that's right - Vote early and vote often! Then again, it's California -- no matter what we do, we're going to be doing something wrong.

I mean, we are the place tha Tax-and-spend socialist democrat Jerry Brown wants to cut more money from colleges and universities, asshole from the howard jarvis illuminati says maybe colleges have only themselves to blame??

prop 14 is going to kill third parties

cops taze someone to death

voting time is next tuesday. and I Have No Time For Your Bourgeois Electoral System and all but i'm still really pissed about prop 14, it's just such an awful way of running an election. anyway here's the two statewide initiatives on the ballot this time around:

• Proposition 28: Limits on Legislators' Terms in Office. The current term limits on state legislators are six years in the Assembly and eight in the Senate. Proposition 28 would do away with these two limits and replace them with a 12-year total limit in the legislature, without regard to the house.
  
• Proposition 29: Imposes Additional Tax on Cigarettes for Cancer Research. Excise taxes on packs of cigarettes would increase from 87¢ to $1.87. The additional funds collected by this dollar increase would fund cancer and tobacco-related disease research and tobacco prevention programs.

It seems that prop 28 is one I'm voting NO on. It's a little deceptive and increases the amount of time a legislator can spend in any particular house. They're billing it as thought it decreases term limits, which is technically somewhat true, but the actual effect is that most legislators' terms will be increased, since you won't have to try your luck running for senate once your assembly time is up when you can just hang out in the assembly for an extra six years. I mean, this is all assuming that the term limits are meaningful anyway, which I'm not completely sold on to begin with.

Then you have Prop 29, which I will gladly vote NO on. It's nothing more than a regressive tax. You don't get to pick and choose which addicts we help and which ones we should punish. Besides that, cigarette taxes are just ways of keeping the state afloat without taking anything from the rich.

It's like hmmm, perhaps I could ask my rich pals to chip in so my kids don't starve or suffer from cancer, but I've got all these addicts who can't help themselves if I want to steal the money out of their small paychecks instead.

Sure, let's fund research on the backs of addicts. No mixed incentives or future revenue problems could possibly come out of that, I tell you! And I doubt that this is really going to stop people from puffing in up in public. But shit, places like Midtown Manhattan, all you have to do is yell out something like "Loosies" a few times in a crowd and some dude will show up with individual cigs smuggled tax-free off an India Reservation for you to buy.