I woke up at 4:15 this morning, panicked, out of a vivid, realistic dream. It took place at a lake that looked much like Donner Lake near Truckee, but with gentler slopes all around it, and with an enormous dam at the east end where the state park is. There were houses all up and down the hills around the lake, a small city really, four or five thousand people, […]
Election day 1980. I was in my second year of law school in Ithaca, New York, and invited about 15 of my fellow classmates/friends over to the attic apartment on College Avenue that I shared with my Sue and Sue to watch the election returns. As the evening went on and it became clearer and clearer that Ronald Reagan was going to become the next President, the sense of disbelief […]
I have a former colleague whose daughter is an outstanding soccer player on one of the best high school teams in the area. The paper today reported that her team had lost in the quarterfinals of the playoffs by a 1-0 score. That made me start thinking of how unfair it is that athletic contests have a binary outcome, and then thinking about how we overvalue the results of arbitrary […]
It’s now almost a certainty that Russia is attempting to influence the U.S. Presidential election by leaking stolen/hacked emails from John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager. And it’s evident who Russia wants to win the election: Donald Trump. Before pulling the lever, or filling in the bubble, or marking an “x” on the ballot for Trump, every Trump supporter ought to take a good long while to ask, “Why?” Why […]
This gets tiring after a while, watching politicians on the left and the right using the upcoming deadline over raising the federal debt limit to score political points with their respective bases. The idiocy of the Right’s “no new taxes or revenues ever ever ever” position against the Left’s preposterous “we’ll give everyone everything they ever want forever forever forever” — what a choice, huh? It isn’t even as if […]
Apologies to my friend Randy Boyd for this, but I chafe at the hypocritical pounding BP is taking from the media and the public about the oil spill in Gulf of Mexico, for two reasons. First, this was an accident. Does anyone really believe BP wanted this to happen? It’s going to lose billions and billions of dollars out of pocket, and God knows how much more in public goodwill. […]
I have an unusual background for someone in the public sector, having worked for a number of years in the private sector not just as a consultant, but actually in a private enterprise. In the private sector, it is a gospel fact that government in California is bloated at all levels — too many employees doing too little work. But like many gospel facts, it turns out that this one […]
There is a woman here in Sonoma County who transmits on Twitter various and sundry pieces of information and gossip (much of it presumably unconfirmed) about the local political scene. Tweeting under the name “SRPolitics,” she has chosen to conceal her true name, taking as her on-line identity a photo of John F. Kennedy, for reasons that aren’t clear to me. My initial reaction to this was irritation. Dealing in rumors […]
In light of the fact that from the beginning of this Congressional term Senate Republicans have been threatening to filibuster everything they object to, no matter how routine or minor (the latest being a nomination to the National Labor Relations Board), why haven’t the Democrats called their bluff? What Democrats have been doing is this — if the Republicans threaten to filibuster and the Democrats don’t have 60 votes, they throw […]
Frequently the most difficult legal issues arise at the intersection of two separate and distinct areas of the law. The Supreme Court’s recent much-criticized First Amendment/campaign finance decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is a good example of this. On its face, given the facts of the particular case in front of it, the decision seems to me to be entirely correct. A conservative non-profit corporation, formed for […]