November 9, 2005 latimes.com

Voters Reject Schwarzenegger’s Bid to Remake State Government

The governor’s four ballot proposals, the foundation of his sweeping plans for change in Sacramento, are halted at the polls.

By Michael Finnegan and Robert Salladay, Times Staff Writers

In a sharp repudiation of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Californians rejected all four of his ballot proposals Tuesday in an election that shattered his image as an agent of the popular will.

Voters turned down his plans to curb state spending, redraw California’s political map, restrain union politics and lengthen the time it takes teachers to get tenure.

The Republican governor had cast the four initiatives as central to his larger vision for restoring fiscal discipline to California and reforming its notoriously dysfunctional politics.

The failure of Proposition 76, his spending restraints, and Proposition 77, his election district overhaul, represented a particularly sharp snub of the governor by California voters. It also threw into question his strategy of threatening lawmakers with statewide votes to get around them when they block his favored proposals.

Also, Schwarzenegger’s defeat on Proposition 75 was a major victory for his rivals in organized labor. It would have required unions for public workers to get written consent from members before spending their dues money on politics.

On a Beverly Hills stage Tuesday night next to his wife, Maria Shriver, Schwarzenegger pledged “to find common ground” with his Democratic adversaries in Sacramento.

“The people of California are sick and tired of all the fighting, and they are sick and tired of all the negative TV ads,” he told supporters at the Beverly Hilton. He did not concede, saying instead that “in a couple of days the victories or the losses will be behind us.”

Dogging the governor, as it has for months, was the California Nurses Assn., which organized a luau at the Trader Vic’s in the same hotel. As Schwarzenegger’s defeats mounted, giddy nurses formed a conga line and danced around the room, singing, “We’re the mighty, mighty nurses.”

At labor’s election night party in Sacramento, union leaders were not in a forgiving mood, vowing revenge against the governor next year when he seeks reelection. They were particularly incensed that he had not given union members their due for what they believed to be a clean sweep of his agenda.

“He never apologized once for trashing every one of us,” said Mike Jimenez, president of the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. “And I can tell you, tomorrow we’re not going to apologize for the way this election turned out. Tomorrow starts Round 2.”

California Teachers Assn. President Barbara Kerr told several hundred activists in the ballroom: “This governor wasted $50 million, and he does not have the courage to apologize to all of you for the trash he talked about you. He doesn’t have the courage to say he was wrong, that we’re the real heroes of California.”

For months, labor and its Democratic allies called Schwarzenegger’s agenda an assault on nurses, firefighters, teachers and other public employees. Labor’s $100-million campaign against the governor this year has battered his public image as he prepares to seek reelection in 2006.

Also on the ballot were four other initiatives. Voters were narrowly defeating Proposition 73, which would bar abortions for minors without parental notification. The state Republican Party promoted Schwarzenegger’s endorsement of the measure among evangelicals and other religious conservatives in a bid to boost turnout of voters who would back the rest of his agenda.

By a wide margin, voters also rejected rival measures on prescription-drug discounts. The pharmaceutical industry spent $80 million on a campaign to defeat Proposition 79, a labor and consumer-group proposal, and pass its own alternative, Proposition 78.

Voters also turned down Proposition 80, a complex measure to revamp rules governing the electricity industry. The initiative, sponsored by consumer advocates, tried to draw on public anger from the state’s 2000 energy crisis, but polls suggested that it confused voters.

Overall, the special election called by Schwarzenegger to win public validation of his agenda sparked a campaign that became the costliest in California’s history. All told, the yes and no campaigns on the eight initiatives spent more than $250 million.

Schwarzenegger put in $7.2 million of his own money. That brings his total personal spending on political endeavors to $25 million since he ran for governor in the 2003 recall race.

I’m still waiting for results from California on Ah-nold’s referendums

By ROBERT TANNER AP National Writer
The Associated Press

Nov 8, 2005 — Democrats swept both governors’ races Tuesday, with Sen. Jon Corzine easily winning New Jersey and Lt. Gov. Tim Kaine taking Virginia despite a last-minute campaign push for his opponent from President Bush.

In Texas, voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional ban on gay marriage, while Republican Mayor Mike Bloomberg surged ahead in his bid for a second term in heavily Democratic New York. Voters also picked mayors in Detroit, Houston, San Diego and Boston.

Kaine had 860,719 votes, or 51 percent, to Kilgore’s 789,273 votes, or 46.8 percent, with 88 percent of precincts reporting.

Bush put his shit on the line for the GOP candidates in NJ and Va. and the Dems still kept the seats with new faces. The chattering class will chew that to death by the end of the Sunday gabfests. Two steps forward and then Texas takes us a step back; no same sex marriage under TX constitution after today’s purge … er … polls. Then ya got Kansas with their idiotic curriculum decision. Erg! Of course, Hillary and Bill put their shit on the line for Ferrar against Bloomberg in NYC and the Dem was drowned in $75 million of the billionaire’s chump change. Quel Suprise! In Jersey, they play hardball; the Repug drug out Corzine’s Xwife to trash him in a TV ad right at the wire. Richard Nixon’s legacy lives on. The big deal about Jersey is that Corzine will resign his U.S. Senate seat and then pick who will fill out his term from some Congressmen and/or state legislators. He gets to be a kingmaker for someone who will have a year’s seniority when he/she runs for a full term next year, and the Senate Dems keep their raw numbers in the meantime.

Associated Press
Updated: 5:35 p.m. ET Nov. 8, 2005

TOPEKA, Kan. – Revisiting a topic that exposed Kansas to nationwide ridicule six years ago, the state Board of Education approved science standards for public schools Tuesday that cast doubt on the theory of evolution.

The board’s 6-4 vote, expected for months, was a victory for intelligent-design advocates who helped draft the standards. Intelligent design holds that some aspects of the universe are so complex that their development must have been directed by an superintelligent agent.

Here’s the take on this by The Onion (link is on right for full text and other fun)

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New ‘Intelligent Falling’ Theory
August 17, 2005 | Issue 41*33

KANSAS CITY, KS-As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held “theory of gravity” is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.
Full Article Link: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39512

What do you think about this if you’re the head of the biology department at KU or KSU? How do you recruit professors to come to a school in the heart of American, no topology, great basketball, but with a student population dominated by local kids who think the world may really only be 6,000 years old and that the human eye must have been designed by God? Man, if I’m a parent in Kansas, I just became a big supporter of school vouchers. Vouchers are a shitty idea, but my damn kid is going to private schools that teach science in science class. And, if I do that, a thousand other parents are going to feel the same way and very soon there’s not just a digital divide, but there’s also western rationalists divided from occultists. Can anyone fucking say “Enlightenment”? Sure you can, boys and girls. Issac Newton, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin, Boyle, you remember some of these names, don’t you? At this rate, we’ll be burning witches and a new Torquemada will be grilling “terrorists” in CIA prisons. What’s that? They already torture people in secret CIA prisons? Damn. Nevermind.

Associated Press

Updated: 4:09 p.m. ET Nov. 7, 2005
PANAMA CITY, Panama – President Bush on Monday defended U.S. interrogation practices and called the treatment of terrorism suspects lawful. “We do not torture,” Bush declared in response to reports of secret CIA prisons overseas.

Bush supported an effort spearheaded by Vice President Dick Cheney to block or modify a proposed Senate-passed ban on torture.

Guess the fucker missed class the day they were showing the pictures from Abu Ghraib. Hey! Dummy! Ever hear of Gitmo? Guantanamo Bay, Cuba? Ring a bell? Secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe and Yemen? Buy a clue? Como se dici en Espanol “Short bus”?

FBI mines records of ordinary Americans

Under Patriot Act, feds probe lives of residents not alleged to be terrorists

By Barton Gellman

The FBI came calling in Windsor, Conn., this summer with a document marked for delivery by hand. On Matianuk Avenue, across from the tennis courts, two special agents found their man. They gave George Christian the letter, which warned him to tell no one, ever, what it said.

Under the shield and stars of the FBI crest, the letter directed Christian to surrender “all subscriber information, billing information and access logs of any person” who used a specific computer at a library branch some distance away. Christian, who manages digital records for three dozen Connecticut libraries, said in an affidavit that he configures his system for privacy. But the vendors of the software he operates said their databases can reveal the Web sites that visitors browse, the e-mail accounts they open and the books they borrow.

Christian refused to hand over those records, and his employer, Library Connection Inc., filed suit for the right to protest the FBI demand in public. The Washington Post established their identities — still under seal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit — by comparing unsealed portions of the file with public records and information gleaned from people who had no knowledge of the FBI demand.

The Connecticut case affords a rare glimpse of an exponentially growing practice of domestic surveillance under the USA Patriot Act, which marked its fourth anniversary on Oct. 26. “National security letters,” created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, originated as narrow exceptions in consumer privacy law, enabling the FBI to review in secret the customer records of suspected foreign agents. The Patriot Act, and Bush administration guidelines for its use, transformed those letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.

The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters — one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people — are extending the bureau’s reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.(Emphasis Added by John)

Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot.

The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks — and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed. Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for “state, local and tribal” governments and for “appropriate private sector entities,” which are not defined.

(Note from John: I’ve cut a few paragraphs here. Later, you get this quote that I wanted included for those of you too lazy or apathetic to read the whole story)

“The beef with the NSLs is that they don’t have even a pretense of judicial or impartial scrutiny,” said former representative Robert L. Barr Jr. (Ga.), who finds himself allied with the American Civil Liberties Union after a career as prosecutor, CIA analyst and conservative GOP stalwart. “There’s no checks and balances whatever on them. It is simply some bureaucrat’s decision that they want information, and they can basically just go and get it.”

Read the whole story here:

The FBI is watching

THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS!!!