Prop. 98 is a Bait and Switch

As most people have noticed, the California housing market is an utter mess right now. Especially in the Central Valley, but elsewhere as well, foreclosures, evictions, bank repossessions, jingle mail and underwater mortgages are now commonplace terms.

So what will all those former homeowners now do to put a roof over their heads? A few will have the money to simply buy another house, some will move out of state, some will move back in with their parents, some will crash on a friend's couch, and some will live out of their car or camp out under a freeway overpass, but most are going to be entering the rental market.

Given all that, along comes Prop. 98, bankrolled by wealthy landlords, that uses the rhetorical cover of opposing the government's right of eminent domain - long a bugaboo of the Howard Jarvis types - to stealthily outlaw any laws providing for rent control. While they've got you worried that the government will seize your house to put up a minimall - something for which they have no real life cases to hold up as evidence - they're setting up a chess move that will have California's renters in checkmate before they realize what's up.

Don't fall for the bait and switch. Vote no on Prop. 98.

Dog Bites Man

map by Meng Bomin

In a turn of events that should surprise nobody, the primaries today saw Clinton fill in that last blue Appalachian gap, Obama complete his sweep westwards from the Great Lakes all the way to the Pacific, and the finalization of Obama's victory in the Democratic Primary in pledged delegates (and putting any delegate total, super or otherwise, well out of mathematical reach for the dead parrot Clinton campaign). Clinton may well take it to the convention out of sheer pique, but it was over a long time ago, and she's likely to put herself even more in the hole than her current campaign debt of nearly $30 million.

In a nutshell, the crap that plays well in Kentucky falls flat in Oregon; when one looks back at that map, are we seeing the beginning of the first real Western strategy by a Democrat since Goldwater and Reagan first put the sagebrush rebellion and former Dixiecrats together as the new base of their party?

Sometimes I wonder if the media playing along with Clinton's increasingly absurd claims that only the states she plays well in are important to any election are because their predominantly east coast worldview doesn't extend west of the Mississippi (much less west of the Rockies!). The West and to a degree the Great Plains as well are ripe for a political realignment, and if he pushes his advantages out west wisely, Obama could be the guy to do it for the Democrats.

Yet while the outcome was beyond predictable after following the way that this primary has played in various regions of the country, the speech that Obama gave in Iowa was rather less pedestrian. Finally, after months of playing with the gloves on with a fellow Democrat, Obama got to take them off and engage McCain on his claims of being a "maverick" in any meaningful sense of the word.

It's about time. Enjoy.



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UPDATE - Newer map w/ Kentucky and Oregon added up top. For another look at the voting so far, check out the below map, also by Meng Bomin, that shades the green-blue map with a light-dark intensity by number of voters per delegate. Obama really is doing quite well in urban areas.

California Supreme Court Does the Right Thing - Marriage Equality is the Law

In a ruling based heavily on the California Supreme Court's landmark 1948 case Perez v. Sharp (which overturned the state's longstanding miscegenation laws that had relied on both "tradition" and popular opinion to define whole classes of married Californians out of the legal category of marriage because of their racial identity), the California Supreme Court today took the cause of equality one step further by ruling that prop. 22's restriction of marriage to heterosexual couples unconstitutional, and in violation with both the letter and spirit of the state constitution.

You can read the decision here. These passages are especially good:

First, we must determine the nature and scope of the “right to marry” — a right that past cases establish as one of the fundamental constitutional rights embodied in the California Constitution. Although, as an historical matter, civil marriage and the rights associated with it traditionally have been afforded only to opposite-sex couples, this court’s landmark decision 60 years ago in Perez v. Sharp (1948) 32 Cal.2d 7114 — which found that California’s statutory provisions prohibiting interracial marriages were inconsistent with the fundamental constitutional right to marry, notwithstanding the circumstance that statutory prohibitions on interracial marriage had existed since the founding of the state — makes clear that history alone is not invariably an appropriate guide for determining the meaning and scope of this fundamental constitutional guarantee. The decision in Perez, although rendered by a deeply divided court, is a judicial opinion whose legitimacy and constitutional soundness are by now universally recognized.

[...]

A number of factors lead us to this conclusion. First, the exclusion of same-sex couples from the designation of marriage clearly is not necessary in order to afford full protection to all of the rights and benefits that currently are enjoyed by married opposite-sex couples; permitting same-sex couples access to the designation of marriage will not deprive opposite-sex couples of any rights and will not alter the legal framework of the institution of marriage, because same-sex couples who choose to marry will be subject to the same obligations and duties that currently are imposed on married opposite-sex couples. Second, retaining the traditional definition of marriage and affording same-sex couples only a separate and differently named family relationship will, as a realistic matter, impose appreciable harm on same-sex couples and their children, because denying such couples access to the familiar and highly favored designation of marriage is likely to cast doubt on whether the official family relationship of same-sex couples enjoys dignity equal to that of opposite-sex couples. Third, because of the widespread disparagement that gay individuals historically have faced, it is all the more probable that excluding same-sex couples from the legal institution of marriage is likely to be viewed as reflecting an official view that their committed relationships are of lesser stature than the comparable relationships of opposite-sex couples. Finally, retaining the designation of marriage exclusively for opposite- sex couples and providing only a separate and distinct designation for same-sex couples may well have the effect of perpetuating a more general premise — now emphatically rejected by this state — that gay individuals and same-sex couples are in some respects “second-class citizens” who may, under the law, be treated differently from, and less favorably than, heterosexual individuals or opposite-sex couples. Under these circumstances, we cannot find that retention of the traditional definition of marriage constitutes a compelling state interest. Accordingly, we conclude that to the extent the current California statutory provisions limit marriage to opposite-sex couples, these statutes are unconstitutional.

There is no doubt that there will be a furious attempt by the religious right to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot to reverse this decision. All those fair-minded Californians who recognize that - in the words of Thomas Jefferson - legally recognizing the marriages of our gay and lesbian friends, neighbors and family members "neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg," know that we are going to have to work hard to turn it back, and preserve the forward-thinking legacy of the Golden State.

But honestly, I think the tide has turned in California, if not America just yet. The kids just don't buy into the whole homophobia thing, and with every election, they increasingly outweigh the older generations who can't get past it. With Obama on the ballot, I don't see how another hate amendment can pass. The winds of history are at our backs.

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UPDATE - 15 hours, 45 minutes after the decision, I remain - as before - happily married to my wife. Apparently denying marriage to gays and lesbians wasn't what was holding the fabric of civilization and the American family together after all. Who'd a thunk it?

Start Swimmin', Pat

You've got to play them at the same time, and then watch the top one, to get the full effect. Think of it as a 2008 version of Simon and Garfunkel's "Silent Night" with Cronkite reading the evening news in the background.

More Regionalism - Obama and Appalachia

This map of all the counties that Clinton has won by 65% in the primary, posted by kos on the front page of daily kos, makes it clear how hostile today's West Virginia primary (and next Tuesday's Kentucky primary) are going to be to the Obama campaign. For all the talk of how Obama has trouble with white, working class voters, it's pretty clear that what he actually has is an Appalachia/Ozarks problem. That is to say, it's not whites or working class whites that don't cotton to Obama (or, conversely, that like Clinton), but rather it's those whites that live in the region of Appalachia in specific that are breaking hard for Clinton, across state lines and the Mason-Dixon line.


h/t to Meng Bomin for the county map. Green is Obama, Blue is Hillary, Red is Edwards

One of the interesting things about this primary is how strong regionalism is coming into play. While Clinton and her media enablers are doing everything they can to play this off as a race or class issue, that line of argument presupposes that there are no white or working class people in the rest of the country. Or, perhaps, that those people aren't really "hard working people" or whatever the spin of the day is.



Oregon, Montana and South Dakota will put that line permanently to rest (there are few places whiter or more hard working), if the race even gets to the June 3rd primaries. But for today, look for West Virginia to pound Obama as thoroughly as the Great plains, northwest and lowland south have pounded Clinton. Not that it'll affect the contours of the race, which was effectively wrapped up back in February with Obama's wins in Wisconsin and the Potomac primary. But still, don't believe the hype.

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UPDATE - as expected, Clinton wins West Virginia 2-1, sweeping the state (although Obama held her to a narrow win in the eastern panhandle closer to the parts of Virginia and Maryland that he did well in). Clinton is blue here, those teal areas are where Obama wasn't completely blown out.



As goes Western Virginia, so goes...uh...eastern Kentucky. And that's about it. Everything else from here out is going to break hard for Obama, he should reach an absolute majority next Tuesday with the imminent shellacking of the Clinton campaign in Oregon. Game over, man.

New Flyer for Cabaldon by Insurance Group

We get flyers.

And while I was rather pleased with yesterday's Cabaldon flyer's friendly attempt to buy my vote give me an opportunity to watch a Rivercats game with Christopher Cabaldon (but seriously folks, it's probably the best flyer I've gotten in a campaign cycle; why can't everyone buy tickets to ball games for my family?), the new Cabaldon for Assembly flyer I got today piqued my interest, given my prior suspicions about the 8th AD Democratic primary being a proxy battle over the shape of health care reform, because of who paid for it:

The Cooperative of American Physicians.

Being insatiably curious, I googled them, and lo and behold, the CAP is in the insurance business, specifically health insurance, malpractice insurance, risk management and claims. The flyer, however, does not say a word about health insurance, but rather touts Cabaldon's experience in education, transportation and environmental protection.

So what kind of candidates does the Cooperative of American Physicians give money to? According to Campaignmoney.com, they gave to most of the Presidential candidates of both parties, a few Democrats in the congressional leadership such as DINO Steny Hoyer and Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, but other than that it mostly gave to Republicans.

In California, here are the list of congressional recipients of the CAP's donations:

Brian Bilbray (R, CA-50)
Mary Bono (R, CA-45)
Ken Calvert (R, CA-44)
David Drier (R, CA-26)
Elton Gallegly (R, CA-24)
Darryl Issa (R, CA-49)
Dana Rohrabacher (R, CA-46)
Ed Royce (R, CA-39)

Hmm, quite a rogue's gallery of California Republicans. But who did they donate to in California state politics?

More mixed, although to predominantly conservative Democrats and Republicans, but nothing for Cabaldon in direct contributions. However, when I checked out their Independent Expenditure Committee, a whole series of huge ($20,000 to $40,000) late independent expenditures showed up in a series of Democratic primaries:

Christopher Cabaldon in the 8th
Wilma Chan in the 9th
Norma Torres in the 61st
Gina Papan in the 19th
Joe Nation in the 3rd

So what would an insurance group that sponsors some of California's most reactionary congressmen be doing weighing in late in the primary with big ad buys?

If anyone has an idea about what's going on in the other assembly races above, I'm all ears, but to me this suggests an attempt to get some defensive traction in the assembly, should the Democrats to get a big enough majority to threaten actually passing single payer health insurance.

Because if that passes, CAP are out of a job, at least in CA.

At least that's how it looks to me. Brickbats and/or corrections welcomed, although I'd appreciate it if interested parties disclosed that as such.

Endorsements in the CA-08 Assembly Race - Healthcare Proxy Battle?

The California Nurses' Association called today about the Yamada campaign, and it piqued my interest enough to check out Mariko Yamada and Christopher Cabaldon's respective endorsement lists. While doing that, one noteworthy pair of endorsements for Yamada came from the California Nurses Association and SEIU United Healthcare Workers West, two unions who have not only been aggressive in pushing for a single payer health care plan for California, but who also stood up against Schwarzeneggar and the 2005 special election boondoggle back when the CA Democratic party was content to sit back and let Arnold run the state unimpeded.

On the issue of health care reform, the candidates are close but not identical. In a recent debate, Yamada backed Sheila Kuhl's single payer health insurance plan pretty strongly, while Cabaldon gave it lip service, but like the CA Democratic leadership in last year's health insurance negotiations, also left himself open to a compromise that fell short of single payer. As the Davis Vanguard reported at the time: [emphasis mine]

For Christopher Cabaldon he suggested that everyone is paying for the uninsured, even when we do not see it. He favors the Sheila Kuehl single payer health system as the ideal. However, he then argued that we must do something even it is not a single payer system. We cannot allow the perfect to be the enemy of the possible. Finally he argued that cuts in Medi-Cal are taking us in the wrong direction and it will make it impossible to find Medi-Cal providers who cover the disadvantaged. Mariko Yamada was also supportive of the Kuehl Bill and argued that if her supporter, Phil Angelides had been elected Governor, we would have it as law now. She is also willing to consider others but not as enthusiastically. Talked about the fact that social workers have supported single payer health system going back 50 years, back then, she quipped they were called Communists but now normal people also support such a system.

While Cabaldon has his fair share of union endorsements, the presence of that 2005 special election coalition of SEIU-UHWW, CNA, firefighters, police and teachers' unions on Yamada's endorsement list suggests that those unions don't trust Cabaldon, even though he's the front runner and as such would be easy enough to endorse. It's not a matter of liberal versus conservative - both candidates are fairly liberal Democrats, well in the mainstream for the blue 8th AD - but it suggests that the battle over the shape of health care reform between establishment accommodationists and single payer advocates that scuttled the compromise last year is still simmering under the surface, and that CNA and SEIU-UHWW are doing some quiet primary work to try and actually get single payer passed as more than a symbolic bill, should the Democrats get a big enough majority in November to pass it over the governor's veto.

Or maybe I'm just seeing things.

Events This Weekend - Dixon Mayfair, Whole Earth Festival and Music on the Green

Spring quarter is chock full o' festivals and stuff to do, but this weekend seems especially packed.

On Thursday, ASUCD and the City of Davis are throwing a free concert in Central Park at 6pm. Featured bands include A Definite Articles, An Angle, and Audrey Sessions. Thursday's weather should be beautiful, sunny and in the mid 70s when the concert begins.









Also beginning on Thursday and running through the weekend is the Dixon Mayfair,the longest running fair in California, dating back to 1876. The main attractions - in addition to the standard corn dogs, cotton candy and livestock shows - are the B-52s on Thursday, ZZ Top on Friday, Joe Dee Messina on Saturday, and the demolition derby on Sunday.





Finally, the Whole Earth Festival, three days of music, art, dance, hippies, environmental activism, handmade crafts and inedible vegan food will be going on around the UCD quad this weekend. Originally started in 1972 as a "happening" spearheaded by UCD art professor Jose Arguelles, the Whole Earth Festival has grown to become the second biggest event on campus (and thus in the city of Davis, along with the 4th of July). While it's fallen a bit from its heyday in the 70s and 80s when people like Timothy Leary and Bob Marley graced the stage, it's still a heck of a good way to spend a sunny May weekend, dancing and lounging around under the dappled shade of the cork oaks on the quad. But bring a picnic lunch if you're not fond of waiting in line for mediocre food. Vegans are very nice people, but they're not the greatest cooks in the world, apparently.



See you there!

It's Over

I'll be switching gears to the June 3rd local and state races later this week. The national primary is - thankfully - all over but the shouting.

Closing Arguments

A Proper Accounting of Things

I expect this sort of corporate pork masquerading as faux-populism from McCain, he's made a career out of posing as a good government anti-waste sort of guy while gutting important public spending and slyly passing earmarks to his corporate contributors. But for Hillary Clinton to start in on the tired old Republican refrain of "cut the gas tax and people will pocket the change" as "relief" is really quite revealing.

For people that love to [mis]quote Adam Smith and his all-powerful invisible hand of the free market for an excuse to slash government regulation (and in so doing, enable the very sorts of monopolistic leviathans that Smith directly warned about in The Wealth of Nations as being as dangerous as any state intervention), they sure don't get the rather simple principle that the price of a given commodity is set by supply and demand. If people want to buy gas, and there's a limited amount, cutting the gas tax isn't going to do anything to the price of gas. Washington state tried this, the Republicans cut it while promising that high gas prices were the fault of high gas taxes, and lo and behold the price stayed right up there like before, with the gas companies pocketing the extra profit.

The price of gas is set by what the market will bear. Unless you can make the supply of gas go up (which is difficult, given that global oil production is flat to a slight decline right now), or else you get people to consume less (which is not going to happen if you drop the price), no amount of cutting 18 cents of tax out of the profit will make the price at the pump drop by a single penny. All you'll do is add 18 cents a gallon to corporate coffers.

And, to get back to the picture at the top of the post, those 18 cents a gallon will come out of the federal transportation budget, which either means more rotting infrastructure, more spending taken from somehwere else in the budget, or more deficit spending that bloats the debt and sticks us with the bill for interest.

Decades of neglect of infrastructure has left us in a terrible predicament. When you don't pay for things, they eventually get old and fall apart. We expect that sort of greedy short sightedness from Republicans, it's been their mantra for as long as I've been alive. But no Democrat jumping on the Howard Jarvis bandwagon has any business in the Senate, much less running for president on the Democratic ticket.

[original photo: Eric Brandt ©2007-some rights reserved; poster image by highacidity]

ps. For poster-quality images:
low (643 K)
high (3 M)

Smells of April

Wisteria trailing off of trellises. Roses along sidewalks or in people's front yards. The intoxicating fragrance of orange blossoms as I ride by on my bike. Sweet peas and fava beans in the garden, buzzing with bees. Honeysuckle wafting off of neighbors' fences. Mock orange bushes, so plain to look at, but with waves of sweet scent when I walk past. The sweet crackling dustiness of straw mulch after being watered. Winter wheat and alfalfa drying out in the fields. The sour tang of tomato plants as I plant them in the soil. Oregano crushed underfoot. The dark, earthy compost from the bottom of the pile as I turn it over. The first good strawberries of the season in the farmer's market. And now, the harbinger of summer, the smell of star jasmine opening up its blossoms.

It must be about time to start swimming again. Star jasmine always makes me think of the pool, and summer, and the smells of jasmine, chlorinated water, oleander, dust, hot pavement, and freshly cut grass. We're right on the pivot between spring and summer, maybe summer feels closer than usual because it hasn't rained. It certainly smells a little dustier than it ought to.

High Speed Rail Meeting Tonight on UCD Campus

Nothing to add, just samizdatting the news from CA High Speed Rail blog:

Wednesday night [4/30/08] the California Student Sustainability Coalition and our own Ryan Loney will be hosting a forum on the high speed rail project at UC Davis. Full information can be found the Facebook event page but for those of you not into the whole social networking thing, here are the details:

7-9pm
1001 Giedt Hall

UC Davis map

A representative from the California High Speed Rail Authority will be there, as well as some professors from the UC Davis Department of Environmental Science and Policy. It is open to the public. The goal is to hold similar forums at campuses around the state in the coming weeks and months, and we'll announce those here as the plans are finalized.

Ding, Dong, the [Canal] is Dead!

Well, at least for another year. The Sac Bee reports that the Assembly Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee, chaired by Yolo County's own Lois Wolk (D- Davis), just killed SB 27 until next year. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Joe Simitian ( D-Palo Alto) would have established a committee to build a peripheral canal diverting water around the Sacramento Delta for export south, although it called it a "conveyance" in a modest feat of bureaucratic obscurantism.

Wolk, whose 8th Assembly District represents the northern half of the Delta, and who is running for the 5th State Senate district, which encompasses most of the eastern half of the Delta, recently spoke about Delta issues in a three part interview (1, 2, 3) in the Davis Vanguard:

We’ve asked the Delta to do many things and many of them are incompatible with each other. We want it to supply an unending or increasing supply of water to Southern California and to the Bay Area. We want it to be an extraordinary estuary to breed and facilitate fisheries. We want it to be the repository of agricultural and urban runoff. We want it to, I don’t, but it has become an area of increasing urbanization. We’ve asked it to do far too many things and it is dying, it is absolutely dying. Of course it is surrounded by levies that are basically 19th century piles of dirt, and they are failing. And it is seismically at risk. You can’t imagine an area that is of more significance and at risk.

What can we do? We can do a number of things. The people of the state of California voted for a bond in 2006 to repair the levies and to begin the process of improving the water quality in the Delta, and the fisheries, the habitat, and the agriculture. What we can do is to try to raise the profile of the delta. Most people know where the coast is and know why it’s important to protect it. Most people know about the Sierra Nevada, and they will protect it. They know about Yosemite and they will protect it. They know about their local parks and they want to protect those. But the Delta has very few people in it and very little political clout. So we need to be able to raise the profile of the Delta so that it takes its place as the key water and environmental issue for California.

Then we need to put in place structures that will protect it. It needs are steward. There is no steward—no body, no agency—whose sole purpose is to protect the delta. And if I’m elected to the Senate, that’s what I’ll spend many years trying to accomplish. It won’t be easy, but there has to be a body like the Coastal Commission that focuses exclusively on the Delta and has responsibility for all water decisions and all environmental decisions that affect it. That won’t be easy to do, but I am convinced that has to occur.

Of course, the Delta has to be preserved long enough to get such a commission to - ironically - preserve it, so it's great news to see this bill killed in committee. Gov. Schwarzeneggar and San Joaquin vallley agribusiness were pushing to get this on the November ballot along with a $4 billion bond, as part of that whole extra special emergency session intended to ram through a bunch of dams funded with public bond money. Having this off the ballot may make the High Speed Rail Ballot measure, which also stands to be a boon for the Central Valley (even if the Altamont Pass route that was rejected would have been even better for the Delta commuter cities), more likely to pass, so this is good all around.

The Delta is dying, for a host of reasons, ranging from So Cal and the San Joaquin Valley stealing too much of its water, to a network of static 19th century levees that work at direct cross-purposes with the innately dynamic hydrological structure of a river delta, to cities and farms dumping all manner of pollutants into the water, to sprawl in the floodplain, (and that's just the beginning), but the way to save the Delta isn't draining it. The Delta is a stark example of the way that modern society ignores the hidden values of things just because they don't overtly cost money to use. Until the state learns to see that incredibly complex ecosystem and hydrological system as something more than just a channel where a valuable commodity flows to the sea, and thus wasted, the Delta will continue to be in danger from hare-brained ideas like peripheral canals.

But for this year, it's safe. And that's worth remembering in November, when Wolk runs against San Joaquin Republican Greg Aghazarian to represent the Delta.

(h/t to Aquafornia for the link to the Bee story)

Time for CA to Invest in Renewable Energy Infrastructure

As the LA Times reports today, we may be looking at blackouts in So Cal this summer as energy demand outstrips the power capacity of the grid. And as anyone who was around for the great west coast blackout in the summer of '96, what starts cascading in So Cal doesn't necessarily stay there, especially on those hot July/August scorchers that cook us all the way up the Valley. The state's grid manager put it in terms of lacking adequate production:

The state will have 489 megawatts of new generation in time for peak demand in July or August, some of that replacing a 122-megawatt plant that's being retired. Southern California will need to rely on imports from Arizona, Nevada and Mexico, as well as conservation, to avoid blackouts.

Demand probably will increase by 1,000 megawatts this year over last year, Cal-ISO Chief Executive Yakout Mansour said during a conference call. Power demand peaked at 48,615 megawatts in 2007.

And yet this only looks at one side of energy load problems, that of supply. While it's not reasonable to ask people to turn off their AC in a real heat wave - although the degree to which one cools is definitely somewhere that people can make up some slack - energy efficiency elsewhere in the state can squeeze enough energy to keep things from tipping over into blackout. In fact, when we were at a similar point of crisis last year, because some of the So Cal wildfires were burning up transmission lines, voluntary energy reduction was what kept things running. Ditto for the Enron-masterminded 2001 energy shortages. Conservation is a big part of any solution.

But over the long term, how do we get the Golden State out of this trap of summer grid overload without going to more fossil fuel-powered peak load generators that pump more carbon into the atmosphere (making our summer heat waves that much worse in the years to come)?

Wind, solar, passive solar building design, urban trees and especially thermal solar.

As North American natural gas starts to hit its peak production, wind and solar have gotten progressively more economically viable for private investors. But the predictable annual crisis of the CA heat wave really cries out for public funding. Every brownout or blackout brings economic activity to a grinding halt, and the spot prices hit a lot of businesses pretty hard as the tipping point is reached. It would make a good deal of sense not to just wait for PG&E to build the power plants of the future, but rather to get the state involved in funding a bunch of capacity right now. European wind design has far outstripped the wind technolology that California pioneered in the 70s, all we need to do is start putting wind farms up, along the Delta and offshore.

Likewise, given the correlation between summer heat waves and an overstressed grid, building thermal solar down the valley and in inland So Cal, the very places where the peak usage occurs, would seem to be a complete no-brainer. As the mercury rises, so would the production of electricity. Combine this with a statewide and urban subsidy for solar panels on roofs (and perhaps grants for the construction of solar panels covering parking lots, would help to decentralize the production of electricity and reduce net demand, and in so doing take some of the stress off the transmission lines.

If the free market was going to provide this critical infrastructure in time to avoid crisis, we wouldn't have this problem. But they haven't, so we do. It is time for the state and local governments to step up and nudge things in the right direction. In the long run, we ought to think about trying to reduce our total consumption by pushing for planting more urban tree cover, and more efficient housing and appliance design (and yes, personal changes in wasteful behavior), but if we want to avoid blackouts in the short run, it's going to take more seed money from the state.

Of course, in the really long run, shifting our energy production away from carbon-producing fossil fuels will be the only way that we can avoid devastating heat waves and resulting blackouts. That the short term solution also works for the long run should be a reminder that both virtuous and vicious cycles tend to feed upon themselves. And it should be noted that just as with building the High Speed Rail line, sponsoring the construction of a bunch of thermal solar power plants down the valley, and wind in the Delta and along the coast would provide sorely needed jobs to communities already mired in endemic underemployment that are reeling from the collapse of the housing bubble.

And how to pay for it all? Well, a royalty tax on oil pumped in California, as is done everywhere else in the country, would seem a rather elegant solution.

Slow News Day in Sacramento?

While the Enterprise tends to be Davisites' piñata of choice for complaints about small town newspaper reporting (personally, I'm just cranky about the subscription wall, because it means I can't link to it), this one by the Sacramento Bee about technical difficulties in a Davis city council meeting takes the cake.

Apparently Councilmember Lamar Heystek tried to set up a videoconference call from Arkansas, and the signal came in garbled.

No, seriously, there is no other shoe to drop, that's the whole article. And newspapers wonder why bloggers are eating their lunch. We can do this sort of vapid coverage for free, guys.

Next up in the Bee: an in-depth expose in botched powerpoint presentations in UCD classrooms.

Shifting Goalposts

Jon Stewart just about sums it up.



I'm all for the primary going to the bitter end, if just because I like the idea of every state in this nation getting their say for a change, but Hillary's surreal contortions to move the goalposts and change the rules so that she doesn't have to face reality are really getting absurd.

Regionalism is Alive and Well in the Primary Race

Now that Pennsylvania has weighed in, it's pretty clear that this race is strongly inflected by region.



Compare that map to this one:



As before, Clinton is strong in Appalachia and rural Great Lakes, while Obama does well in urban Great Lakes and fair in the Northeast Corridor. Pennsylvania was about as bad a state for him as they make, and the fact that his campaign was able to keep it within 10 points and make steady improvements among key demographics was in itself fairly impressive.

Moving on to May 6th (Guam will end up a 2-2 delegate tie, is my guess), the terrain looks much better for Obama. North Carolina's large Southern Lowlands portion should make the state a lock for Obama, and Indiana will ride on whether it votes more like Illinois or Ohio. The combination of the two states yield as many delegates as Pennsylvania, and a blowout in North Carolina could well end this thing by putting Obama's delegate totals beyond mathematical reach. In terms of delegates, Clintons' pretty much finished, as her pyrrhic Pennsylvania victory only got her 10 or 11 delegates closer to catching up with Obama's 160 delegate lead. But people whose net worth is measured in the hundreds of millions can run Quixotic campaigns forever if they so choose, and the media is determined to make this look like a race to keep those ratings and ad revenues up, so who knows.

If this goes past May 6th, West Virginia and Kentucky will likely follow the rest of Appalachia in going to Hillary, while Oregon, Montana and South Dakota will go to Obama like their neighbors. After that, it's Puerto Rico, and who knows how the heck that island will vote.

But my guess is that May 6th ends it. Still, it would be sorta nice to fill in the empty spaces on the map, no?

(h/t Meng Bomin at daily kos for the top map. Obama's green, Hillary's blue, and Edwards is red)