“A casual relationship with reality”
Categories: Political
My mom called last night saying that she's going to vote "No" on all the propositions, which runs counter to what I was planning to do. Specifically I was planning on voting yes on Prop. 80, de-deregulation of California's energy market.
I've somewhat changed my mind about 80. Not that I'm definitely going to vote "No" on it. In fact, I'm probably still going to vote for it. I mean, I started my "vote no on everything" policy in the last election and managed to break it at least twice then (stem cells and some other proposition that I've already forgotten) so why not break it again this time? Actually, the real reason is that I think it is a genuinely helpful proposition.
That being said, the primary reason I had for planning to vote in favor of Prop. 80 was that I was under the impression it needed to be a proposition in order to happen on the basis that the original energy de-regulation back in 1997 or whenever came from a ballot initiative as well. But several hours (or minutes) of Googling later, I'm pretty sure I was totally 100% mistaken about that. It appears that energy deregulation was a good old-fashioned legislative action, meaning it can be rescinded with traditional legislation as well.
In fact, voting in favor of this bill puts us in exactly the opposite situation we're in now: Energy re-deregulation (or other possible changes to California's energy policies) would require further ballot initiatives rather than going through traditional legislation. Which sucks.
So then, given that voting in favor of Prop. 80 causes exactly the sort of problem that I was hoping to fix, why on earth would I still be considering voting for it?
I don't know... Maybe I'm not. It's entirely possible that owing to a peculiar defect of character, I am incapable of admitting I was wrong twice in one post.
posted by Mark Kawakami at November 07, 2005, 07:11 PM // permalink // (1) Comments