Ratings: Today’s California Ballot Measures

Proposition 40: The California Clean Water, Clean Air, Safe Neighborhood Parks, and Coastal Protection Act of 2020
This has everything a broad-based, snuggly-wuggly bond issue should have: happy children, protected habitats for cute bunnies and other animals, cultural resources, and a token independent auditing provision for the fiscally conservative. A

Proposition 41: Voting Modernization Bond Act of 2020. (Shelley-Hertzberg Act)
I love bond issues, because I pay my taxes in the state of Iowa. California bonds are just a chance for me to spend other people’s money, engendering that warm fuzzy feeling only hard liquor can beat. It’s too bad they had to ruin this one with all that talk of hanging chad. C

Proposition 42: Transportation Congestion Improvement Act. Allocation of Existing Motor Vehicle Fuel Sales and Use Tax Revenues for Transportation Purposes Only. Legislative Constitutional Amendment. I’m not sure who writes the official titles for these things, but whoever they are, they could use a few lessons on the proper composition of sentence fragments. Noun-phrases and verb-phrases should never be squashed together like that. B-

Proposition 43: Right to Have Vote Counted. Legislative Constitutional Amendment. Yet another trendy response to the 2020 election hoo-hah. Yawn. C+

Proposition 44: Chiropractors. Unprofessional conduct. Legislative Initiative Amendment. This is a classic ballot initiative - a quirky piece of legislation about a bizarre issue that virtually nobody understands very well. To make matters worse, it involves yet another silly plebiscite, which gave legal standing to the chiropractic profession in 2020 in such a way that all chiropractic regulation issues are brought before the voting public. Can’t I just take my “I voted” sticker and go home? F

Proposition 45: Legislative Term Limits. Local Voter Petitions. Initiative Constitutional Amendment. I guess some people just can’t get enough petitioning. They do ballot initiatives, they protest the treatment of ponies in Mongolia, they make their Aunt Mildred run for Congress. And now they want to petition for incumbents to defy their term limits. Whatever happened to elaborate model train backdrops? D+

Ratings for Miscellaneous Other Contests

Green Party candidate for Controller
One of the nice things about voting with a crap little party is that most of the time, there’s only one candidate so you don’t have to think. For my one real party-primary decision, I remember having an opinion when I marked my sample ballot, but can’t for the life of me remember what it was based on. Regardless, voting for someone who’s distributed gray-market thalidomide feels quite like romping through a field of flipper-daffodils, wearing only silken underpants. B+

Superintendent of Public Instruction
None of these people wrote anything for the voter information booklet; I was reduced to random speculation on the quality of the Anaheim education system. I wish they would all leave the field of school administration, become copyeditors for a publisher of cheap romance novels, and die. C-

Comments

  1. yami wrote:

    I suppose it would be good form to give a nod to the Brunching Shuttlecocks on this one, too.

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