October 27, 2010
Dear Everyone:
Lordy, I will be glad when this
Election is over!
Here in California we have the usual nonsense.
But we also have two interesting individuals; one is named, “Meg”
and the other, “Carly”. They
both have the distinction of having been “Chief Executive Officer” (CEO)
of internationally-known businesses (eBay and
Hewlett-Packard.)
And they are both pouring millions of their own money into their
campaigns.
Why? Because they want to.
Used to be, if an actor decided to direct a movie, it was an indication
that the actor really wanted
to make that movie. (Or
wanted to become a director; and some of them have done quite well for
themselves.
Ron Howard and
Clint Eastwood leap to mind.
Mel Gibson,
Kevin Costner, and
Charlton Heston, not so much.)
As for Meg and Carly, you can look them up in
Wikipedia.
Go directly to the bottom of the page and note when that page was
last updated. Chances are:
today. They have
people whose job it is to keep track of what’s being written and can be
changed if it’s too unflattering.
Meg wants to be
Governor and Carly wants to be a
Senator.
For both of them I have two words:
Frank Jordan. Jordan
wanted to be
Mayor of San Francisco.
He fought a long, hard campaign in the 1990s and won.
Then he discovered that he didn’t much like the job of being
mayor. He liked running for,
and winning the election. He
just didn’t like the job that came after it.
Ask Meg and/or Carly why they want to be in politics and they will point
with pride to their achievements in business.
But that doesn’t indicate that they would be any good in an
elected office.
If they really wanted to do a good job, they would start small and work
their way up, the way
Dianne Feinstein did.
She served on the
San Francisco Board of Supervisors (each member
was elected by and represented a portion of the City, which isn’t all
that big to begin with), working her way up to Board President.
Then she succeeded Mayor
George Moscone when he was assassinated
(along with Supervisor
Harvey Milk) back in 1978.
From there she moved up to Senator from California.
Neither Meg nor Carly seem interested in working their way up to
anything. They both want to
start at the top. (Where do
you go from up?) Personally,
I’m not sure that being rich is sufficient experience for anything.
Remember when Ross Perot try to
buy his way into the Presidency?
Heard anything from Ross lately?
Apart from all the personalities, there are the
Propositions:
18 through 27.
Thankfully, for whatever reason, number 18 was removed from the ballot,
so that’s one we don’t have to worry about.
Next up:
Proposition 19.
This is the one to legalize
marijuana in California.
For those of you just returning from intergalactic travel,
marijuana is a weed that grows freely in many parts of the world.
It can have mild psychoactive properties, depending on how it’s
used.
When I was a college student living in
Morocco, it was called,
“hashish”, or just “hash”.
In the American southwest, it was called “loco weed” because animals who
ate it acted “loco” (crazy.)
During the Reagan Administration (see
Wikipedia), President Reagan
“declared war on drugs”, which include marijuana, thus causing officials
to wonder, “How do you regulate a weed?”
As for this business of solving problems by “declaring war” on them,
President Lyndon Baines Johnson “declared
war on poverty”.
Johnson is gone; poverty is flourishing.
‘Nuff said.
Back to the other Propositions:
There’s one, or two, to try and “prevent”
gerrymandering (back to
Wikipedia!) There’s
another to give, or take, tax breaks to, or from, businesses depending
on which hysterical ads you choose to believe.
There are two, yes two! which claim “fix” the ever-present budget
crises.
The actual election is next Tuesday (the first Tuesday in November.)
the first Tuesday is because of frontier days.
People couldn’t be expected to travel on Sunday, so they were
given enough time to walk, or ride, to town all day Monday, camp out
Monday night, and take until nearly 8:00 PM Tuesday evening to arrive in
time to vote.
But I use an Absentee Ballot, so I need to get mine in the mail by this
weekend to be sure it gets counted.
I plan to study all the issues carefully (good old
Wikipedia!
Yes on O! No on W!)
The good thing about the
Internet is that you can collect data
from the comfort of your home.
And there’s always the
Public Library.
And, if all else fails, there’s always the tried-and-true “Vote Yes on
Odd, No on Even”.
Love, as always,
Pete
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