Ground State

For those of you in California - the Feb. 5 voter's guide has been mailed. Propositions 91, 92 and 93, all proposed constitutional amendments, are discussed in the guide. Propositions 94 through 97 are on the ballot but are not written up in the voter guide, apparently having been approved too late for printing. The official voter information from the California Secretary of State on propositions 94 through 97 can be found here.

Here's your Ground State proposition Voter's guide:

Prop 91

Initiated by the same folks who fought for Prop 1A in 1996, 91 restricts the state from taking the gasoline tax revenue away from transportation programs. Prop 1A passed and is law. The folks who initiated Prop 91 now want you to vote no on it, and no one made an argument for it in the voter's guide. There's no reason to vote yes on it, so vote NO because less law is a good thing.

Prop 92

Prop 92 is the community college system seeking to separate itself from K-12 education and get a separate budget from the state, get reduced fees per unit for students written into the law and get the community college system made a permanent fixture of the constitution. According to the Easy Voter guide:

It would increase state costs by about $300 million per year in the near term. It would reduce student fee revenue to community colleges by about $70 million per year.

Constitutionally-mandated spending on the community college system is not in the best interests of anyone save those who work for community colleges. The constitutionally-limited student fees will keep the community colleges from having to fend off any private competition without placing any restriction on their spending. It's a zombie in the making. The argument in favor of the resolution in the state guide is made by the President of the Community College Faculty Association, the President of the Community College Trustees, and the Secretary Treasurer of the California Federation of Teachers. The proposition serves this bureaucracy well. NO on 92.

Prop 93

Prop 93 is not easy to analyze because both sides proclaim their support for term-limits. Current term limits are 3 terms in the Assembly (6 years) and 2 terms in the Senate (8 years) for a total of 14 years. The proposed change is 12 years total in either body. The catch is the 12 year limit applies to new legislators. There are 42 incumbent legislators who will be avoiding term limits with the 'reform', allowing some to serve up to 20 years. I'd be in favor of it if it was 12 years for everyone, but it's not. It's an attempt to skirt term limits for some of the folks in there now who are popular with special interests. NO on 93.

Propositions 94-97

These four propositions are per-tribe proposals to increase, in particular, the number of slot machines each Indian tribe can run at their casinos in return for the state getting a slice of the larger pie. Whether the slice, as a fraction of the total casino revenue, is larger or smaller I can't determine. Revenue to the state will surely increase, and presumably traffic from California to Las Vegas will decrease as more gambling urges are satisfied in-state.

The role of the state government of California in gambling is hypocritical at best. It is shocking to me that free people allow their government to tell them when and how they can gamble with their own money - but that is an argument that could cut either way on these propositions. On the purely pragmatic grounds that California gamblers earn their money here and we should encourage them to "chip-in" in California rather than Nevada - YES on 94, 95, 96 and 97.

From Michelle Malkin:

Let’s start with the beginning: January 2007. For me, what happened in January defined the rest of the year. We rang in 2007 with vehement Democrat opposition to the “surge” in Baghdad. In the ensuing 12 months, Democrats tried and failed repeatedly to sabotage and undermine this military campaign. Their poisonously partisan allies at MoveOn attempted to smear Gen. David Petraeus. Their fellow travelers in the MSM fought tooth and nail to obscure the successes of the counterinsurgency tactics with their relentless “grim milestone” drumbeat. But by year’s end, even anti-war Democrats and adversarial media outlets alike were forced to acknowledge that undeniable military progress and security improvements had been made.

In a related and sad commentary on Time Magazine - their "person of the year" is the new Russian Czar - Vlad Putin. As Christopher Hitchens and Hugh Hewitt discussed on Hugh's radio program - the moral disease within Time magazine has been festering for a long time. General Petraeus is the person of the year. And he's undoubtedly relieved not to have been selected by Time magazine, who's previous 'winners' include:

1938 Adolf Hitler
1939 Joseph Stalin
1979 Ayatollah Khomeini

The bar has been set high for Vladimir Putin - but perhaps he can rival their achievements.

The title links to an interesting post by Jordan W. on Michael Totten's excellent blog. I disagree with the author but recommend the read.

That Iraq had chemical and biological WMD programs prior to the first Gulf war is inarguable. Their state prior to the second Gulf war was misunderestimated - but is in the end irrelevant. The UN sanctions program, Oil for Bribes Food, constrained Saddam. Absent the second Gulf war and with the sanctions ending, Hussein would have plenty of chemical and biological WMD today. That Saddam was supporting terrorists targeting the US is also inarguable, but is often argued anyway. Abdul Rahman Yasin of the first WTC bombing lived in Baghdad working for the Iraqi government after fleeing the US in 1993. The post 9/11 decision to topple Iraq's government was strategically sound in a purely realpolitik sense. Saddam was pursuing WMD and supporting terrorism against the US. Keep that principle in mind.

The easy path for the US in Iraq would have been to install a friendly general and leave town. What's been attempted is wholesale transformation of rival sectarian groups ruled by a vicious dictator into a pluralistic democracy. It was bold. Perhaps naive, but perhaps not out of reach for a nation that orchestrated the transformation of imperial Japan. It has been in the end a test not of us but of Islam. Relieved of a sadistic madman - would Iraq choose the 21'st century or the 7'th? The debate on whether Iraq was relevant to the war against fascist Islam took place in the West. There was no debate within Al Qaeda. They knew success of the model in Iraq meant the end of Al Qaeda's vision.

Progress in Iraq has come down to tribally-cohesive regions ruled by local Imams ridding themselves of Al Qaeda by using the US to do the fighting. We cannot decry Americans being used to fight Al Qaeda in Iraq, that is by our design. As we rightly applaud the success of the surge and Al Qaeda's defeat piecemeal we must note the failure of the elected national government. The body of Al Qaeda in Iraq is defeated, but not it's vision. The pluralistic democratic nation has not emerged and Iraq will partition itself. In a doomed attempt to prop up the failed national government against Iranian subversion we seek accommodation with Iran. Knowing this would be the endgame, we'd have been better off installing a friendly general.

To paraphrase Michael Ledeen, the recent NIE is not an intelligence estimate at all. It is a policy document. The policy announced is that we will bury our heads in the Iraqi sand and give Iran a free pass on killing Americans and developing nuclear WMD. Yet that is precisely the reason Iraq's government had to be toppled. We have retreated in the face of Islamic fascism hell-bent on obtaining nuclear weapons and destroying the West. And we have come full circle. We are abandoning our own post-9/11 first principle of national security.

There's a reason why special forces are called special forces.

"There seems to be some kinky kind of competition on the left to be the Islamists' lead prison bitch."

From Rasmussen Reports, H.T. the Drudge Report.

Just 18% of American voters believe that Iran has halted its nuclear weapons program. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 66% disagree and say Iran has not stopped its nuclear weapons program.

The good news - no one is fooled by the NIE. The bad news - the Bush administration has abandoned any hope of stopping Iran going nuclear and is making up stories to disguise our craven weakness.

From Scott at Power Line:

The effect of the NIE puts me in mind of Churchill's words in Parliament condemning the Munich Agreement. Referring to the relief felt by the people of England to the temporary avoidance of war with Germany, he avowed that "they should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road[.]"

Indeed. If you're wondering how I feel about it - check out the banner quote at the top of the page.

The end effect of the battle of Iraq, in which Iran has been our active enemy, has been to paralyze us. No historical accounting on the worth of the Iraq invasion can conclude it is a success having led to American turning a blind eye to the Iranian nuclear weapons program. A failure of incredible proportions.

From the CAIR bears at The Rude News, Hat Tip JihadWatch.

As early as September, pundits were announcing the end of the sub-prime mortgage mess. Countrywide had taken it's medicine ($2 Billion at 7.3% from BofA), and the virus would not spread. Now that Citibank has had it's medicine ($7.5 Billion at 11%) - we'd like to think that even the proud have bowed to the securitized loan mess - and the damage is over.

We're not through the storm. Treasury Secretary Paulson (from Bloomberg):

``The number of subprime mortgage resets is going to increase dramatically next year, and we need to make sure the capacity is there to handle it,'' Paulson said in a speech at a housing conference in Washington. While no ``silver bullet,'' a deal to rewrite a set of subprime loans would ``clearly'' ease the risks from the housing slump, he said in an interview later.

We've seen the tip of the iceberg - that's all. The fed funds rate will be pushed lower, of necessity, through the first half of 2008. The inflation and unemployment reported will be low, but both numbers strain credulity.