February 1st, 2008
Good evening fellow citizens. Come Tuesday morning it’ll be time once again to exercise our voting rights.I, for one, believe in exercise. When done properly it keeps the body politic fresh and nimble. It cuts the flab and adds lean, toned rhetorical muscle.I did say that when it’s done properly. Proper voting depends upon us, the body politic, to be fully informed. We’ve seen two elections in the last eight years where the body decided to perform the electoral equivalent of sitting on the couch with one of those TV-scam ab-masters that shoot bolts of electricity into your flabby love handles.What we offer here is something different. Each and every election cycle the Timothy Jordan Show News Staff sits down with the voter’s guide and a crate of whiskey to review the ballot and offer our listeners an informed view on their choices.It’s electoral granola for the body politic, and it’s available only here, on the Timothy Jordan Show News for Friday, the 1st of February, ‘08.As you’re no doubt aware, this is a ballot featuring a Presidential primary election. Tuesday’s votes in California and in 23 other states will almost certainly set our choices for the 2008 Presidential Election.The results of that election were, of course, called by the Timothy Jordan Show Staff one year ago in favor of Barack Obama, so it’d be really great if people went out and made it possible to prove us right.The field of contenders on both sides is rapidly narrowing as Tuesday approaches. The biggest surprise to date has been the sudden resurgence of John McCain, who had been written off by many political observers as recently as a month ago.Now running neck and neck with Mitt Romney, the other leading Republican candidate, McCain is enjoying a great deal of favorable press coverage.In light of that, I’d like to remind our listeners that the last time we elected a President as old as McCain, we ended up with an Alzheimer’s patient. Let’s not do that again, okay? Thanks.Mayor Coonerty already spoke about the local ballot measures, and we back him completely.That’d be a vote of YES for Measures G, O, and P.There are, as usual, a host of initiatives and referendums on the California ballot.They are numbered 91-97.We recommend a vote of: No, Yes, and then five provisional Yeas.Get that?No?Okay, here’s the detailed breakdown, then.Proposition 91 is a Constitutional Amendment that would have made changes to how money from gasoline taxes and other transportation funding is treated in the state budget, particularly limiting how the state government can borrow from transportation funding to pay for other services.A No vote is pretty easy to call for Prop 91 because it’s a mistake that it’s even on the ballot at all. Prop 91 was delayed in being put on the ballot until this year. Meanwhile, back in 2006, California voters passed Proposition 1A, which did exactly what Prop 91 would have done.So it’s already been done. Even the original supporters of Prop 91 agree. They’re asking that people vote against it.——–Next up is Proposition 92, which would change how the public Community College system is funded and governed.Most importantly for college students, it would actually LOWER class fees from $20 to $15 per unit per semester, and set limits on how quickly those fees can be raised again.It would also decouple Community College funding rates from K-12 funding. Instead of being based on the same general formula as K-12 funding, Community College minimum funding rates would be based upon growth of the young adult population, defined as state residents between the ages of 17 and 25.According to the State’s budget estimates, the law would only have an effect for the next two or three years, until the existing minimum funding level of 40% of the General Fund are once again reached.It’s opposed by business lobby organizations, and supported by students. Guess which side we’re going to come down on? Yeah, the Staff here recommends a Yes vote on Prop 92.——–The last initiative on the ballot is Proposition 93, a Constitutional Amendment that would change the existing term limits for the California legislature.It’s being marketed to the public as a much-needed reform to cut term limits from 14 years to 12.State legislators are currently limited to three terms in the Assembly and two in the Senate. That’s six and eight years, respectively. The proposed amendment would limit legislators to serving only 12 years, but change the law so that there’s no specific limit on terms served in either house.Opponents of the bill are arguing in your state-issued voter’s guide that Prop 93 would serve as a giant RESET button for current legislators, effectively allowing them to serve an additional 12 years in whichever office they currently hold.The problem is that this charge just isn’t true. The proposed amendment specifically states that the 12-year limit being proposed would include those years already served.So yes, it would increase the time that a legislator can spend in a single office, but it will decrease their potential time in office by two years.It’s a tough call. If you don’t think that there’s any problem with the existing system, then vote against Prop 93.We’re going to recommend a vote FOR Prop 93, if only because it does slightly reduce the overall time that a politician can theoretically spend in office.The four referendums that follow, Propositions 94-97, are all effectively all about the same thing, increasing the number of slot machines that four different Indian tribes are allowed to operate in their tribal casinos in the deserts around Palm Springs and San Diego.The four Propositions would let the tribes more than double the number of slot machines that they operate, increase the oversight capabilities of the California Environmental Protection Agency, and increase the possible gambling revenue paid into the California general fund.It’s true that the four tribes represented here are among the wealthiest in the state, thanks to their existing gambling revenue. In all likelihood these Propositions would earn them significantly more revenue. If you think that’s a bad thing, then vote against the final four Propositions on your ballot.Otherwise, the News Staff is going to recommend a YES vote on Propositions 94-97.• California Voter’s Guide PDF (688.5KB)• Supplemental California Voter’s Guide PDF (1.2MB)———-In other news of the week, it appeared that Democrats in the Senate developed a sudden and unexpected case of backbone when they stood up and voted against controversial changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.Those changes would have increased the U.S. government’s ability to wiretap American citizens, and most importantly provided retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that may have broken the law by cooperating with intelligence agencies issuing warrantless wiretap orders.The bill has been held up on the Senate floor while further amendments are offered, with the most recent vote coming yesterday afternoon. It’s set to be reconsidered Monday morning.• FISA Amendments Act of 2007——–Over a hundred billion dollars (One hundred billion dollars!) is needed to bring U.S. broadband internet connections up to connectivity standards already present in other developed nations, according to a report out this week by public policy group EDUCAUSE.Connection speeds up to 100Mbps are already becoming common in Asia and the Nordic nations, while the average Internet connection in the U.S. is roughly 1.5Mbps at a proportionally higher cost.The problem, according to the EDUCAUSE report, is a result of several factors. Deregulation of the telecommunications industry, sold to the public during the ’90s as a way for the market to encourage development, overlooked something crucial: it’s expensive and risky to build infrastructure.Left alone to determine whether or not to upgrade their network technologies, the major telecommunications companies have chosen to milk their existing networks for profits rather than investing in long-term upgrades.Central to the EDUCAUSE plan would be an official U.S. government policy of supporting an open fiber optic network extending to each and every home in the country. This new fiber optic network would replace the existing copper wire based network that carries telephone calls and Internet traffic to our homes these days.Up to an additional $55 billion is needed, on top of $72 billion already budgeted by the major telecoms for infrastructure development. This is equivalent roughly four months of funding for the occupation of Iraq, but unlike the occupation there would be immediate and measurable benefits for us.As it stands we’re starting to butt up against the limits of the existing infrastructure. It isn’t an issue for people who only use the Internet for some email and a little web browsing, but that won’t last. People are using the Internet for more and more of their daily information and entertainment needs, video in particular. The trend is clearly towards video playing increasingly important role in the online experience, but it’s a bandwidth hog.DVD-quality video represents about 5 Gigabytes of data. It takes on average nearly two hours to download that much data in this country. High definition video, the up-and-comer, takes up over 20 Gigabytes. That’s ten solid hours of download time on a U.S. broadband Internet connection.In rural Finland that same amount of data could be pulled down in ten minutes or less. In rural America it could take days, or never happen at all. You could be above the Arctic Circle in Finland and have better data access than someone living in the Santa Cruz mountains overlooking Silicon Valley.• EDUCAUSE, A Blueprint for Big Broadband PDF (1.1MB)That’s a travesty, and we’re going to close the News with it. We won’t have an Award of Excellence this week since my Staff and I spent way too much time digging through the state voter’s guide, actually fact-checking those statements.And that’s the News for the 1st of February, ‘08.