Steven Rubio's Online Life

the twitter occupation

There was really only one way to keep up with the happenings across UC campuses as students rallied against fee increases. Twitter. It wasn’t all good … there was a tendency for people to re-tweet everything, so each bit of news was repeated a dozen times. And while the immediacy of the tweets were invaluable, there was a definite feeling of the blind men and the elephant: people tweeting from inside Wheeler had a different perspective than people tweeting from outside Wheeler, and no one seemed to recognize the elephant for what it was. But that was a small price to pay for the ability to get unfiltered information out to the masses. There is a place for analysis, but that comes tomorrow. For now, follow the tweets.

i read the news today, oh boy

Kevin Drum:

We used to have the world's greatest system of higher education and we thrived.  Now we have the world's biggest system of penal institutions and we're broke.  That's the decision Californians have made over the past 30 years: more prisons and better paid prison guards, but lower taxes and less education.  (And not just higher education, either.)  It's hard to think of a stupider allocation of resources.  But hey — at least our property taxes are capped!  Hooray!

i read the news today, oh boy

Cameron Scott on “progressive aesthetics”:

Nobody would claim that Safeway is green. But Trader Joe's isn't either. I've written before about the excess packaging at the store. And TJ's is also under pressure by Greenpeace to agree to buy sustainable seafood. (Sign the petition here.)

This housemate is certainly not alone in averting her gaze from our buddy Joe's flaws. What's the deal? I have two theories. First, a low price will buy you a lot of good will. And, second, TJ's appeals to a progressive aesthetic by carrying fewer processed foods, fewer chemical cleaners, and more alcohol (whose supply chain is hardly green). Put all that in a less industrial setting and, voila, you have customer loyalty that has absolutely nothing to do with your purchasing practices, and may even believe they are what they're not.

There may be one other factor: Unlike either Safeway or Whole Foods Market, Trader Joe's is privately held. That makes it harder to dig up dirt on the company and to do anything about what you find.

i read the news today, oh boy

Jonathan Bernstein:

Liberals have expressed a lot of frustration about which policy positions are considered mainstream, and which are considered liberal, radical left, conservative, and far conservative. Liberals -- I'm not going to look for a citation here, but anyone who reads liberal blogs will recognize this -- believe that conservatives have succeeded in moving the "center" well to the right over the last couple of decades, mainly through pure bullying tactics.

I don’t think of this as a liberal blog, but I have definitely expressed the frustration Jonathan refers to here. But I don’t think of it as “conservatives moving the center,” or even that they are bullies. I will say this: in my memories, which have every possibility of being tinted with the crap of nostalgia, “liberals” and “Democrats” were similar the way “conservatives” and “Republicans” are similar. These days, too often, I see the debate framed as being fought by liberals, Democrats, and conservative Republicans. Liberals are being defined right out of the party that I’ve always assumed was their home. What was once a national discussion between the moderate left and the moderate right becomes, in the absence of those increasingly-ignored liberals, a national discussion between the center and the right. When that happens, the “center,” that point midway between the most common ways of approaching a problem, has itself moved to the right. And I think some of the frustration Jonathan identifies comes from the realization by liberals that it’s not just the right wing that is opposing them, but what they thought of as their own party … not exactly opposing them, but ignoring them, which can be just as lethal.

i read the news today, oh boy

Andrew Leonard:

Obama is not Roosevelt in part because, well, he's not Roosevelt, but also because the times (in addition to the Senate) will not let him be Roosevelt.

fucking dickheads

Just when I thought I could retire the saying … to be honest, just when I was about to chew certain Democrats’ ass about abortion rights … I came across this, via Talking Points Memo:

i read the news today, fucked-up bigoted americans edition

Maine voters reject gay-marriage law

Gay marriage has now lost in every single state — 31 in all — in which it has been put to a popular vote.

i read the news today, oh boy

Doug Henwood, writing before results are revealed, on what tomorrow’s analysis will look like:

A year after being pronounced dead, the Republicans are resurgent! Liberals will say that this proves that Obama must move to the left, but Obama will tack to the right. The rightward tilt will prompt a spate of anguished blog posts and Nation editorials wondering why Obama is doing it.

i read the news today, oh boy

SECTION 1. (a) The maximum amount of any ad valorem tax on real property shall not exceed One percent (1%) of the full cash value of such property. The one percent (1%) tax to be collected by the counties and apportioned according to law to the districts within the counties….

Section 3. From and after the effective date of this article, any changes in state taxes enacted for the purpose of increasing revenues collected pursuant thereto whether by increased rates or changes in methods of computation must be imposed by an Act passed by not less than two-thirds of all members elected to each of the two houses of the Legislature, except that no new ad valorem taxes on real property, or sales or transaction taxes on the sales of real property may be imposed. [emphasis added]

-- from the text of “Prop. 13”

Some years ago, I spent a semester teaching two courses at San Francisco State. It wasn’t my finest hour as a teacher … the courses, on California culture and San Francisco culture, were outside of my normal areas of expertise, and while some will say if you can teach, you can teach, I spent a lot of time in those classes just half a step ahead of the syllabus. (The smartest thing I did was invite my friend Pete Richardson to give a guest lecture in the California course. You could say it went well … Pete teaches that course now, and unlike me, he’s qualified, having written books on Carey McWilliams and Ramparts magazine while currently serving as the interim chair of the California Studies Association.)

The theme of the course, to the extent I was able to pull it off, was that California, once the “Promised Land,” had fallen into decline, a fall which could be connected to the passage of Proposition 13.

In today’s Chronicle, Arthur I. Blaustein, who wrote a prescient article on Prop. 13 for Harper’s in 1978, wrote again on Prop. 13 and the current state of California:

Prop. 13 was to become California's Folly. I thought then, and am firmly convinced now, that the key elements in the proposition - the taxation formula and the two-thirds legislative requirement - would be responsible for causing a fiscal and social disaster. These two requirements have, in time, helped to lead the state into financial bankruptcy and created a dysfunctional state government.

With Gavin Newsom’s withdrawal from the race to win nomination as the Democratic Party’s candidate for Governor in the next election, our old friend Jerry Brown is clearly the man who will represent his party in that election. Brown is many things to many people, or at least he tries to be. In his book Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future (which was the central text in my course), Peter Schrag wrote:

Governor Jerry Brown, the prophet of lowered expectations and now dubbed “Jerry Jarvis,” not only announced he would do everything he could to make Proposition 13 work, a matter on which he had little choice, but as the chief apostle of the “era of limits,” slipped into the new mode with the ease of a man who had always been waiting for it. He had, he said, become “a born-again tax cutter." (153)

Interestingly, if you check out Brown’s bio on his campaign website, you’ll see that in 1975 he was inaugurated as Governor of California, and in 1979 he met with Menachim Begin. Nothing notable happened between those years, I guess … somehow he left 1978 out entirely.

Good luck, California.

i read the news today, oh boy

(With a hat tip to Glenn Greenwald for pointing these out.)

The New York Times:

The Obama administration has clung for so long to the Bush administration’s expansive claims of national security and executive power that it is in danger of turning President George W. Bush’s cover-up of abuses committed in the name of fighting terrorism into President Barack Obama’s cover-up.

We have had recent reminders of this dismaying retreat from Mr. Obama’s passionate campaign promises to make a break with Mr. Bush’s abuses of power, a shift that denies justice to the victims of wayward government policies and shields officials from accountability.

Julian Sanchez in The Nation:

The Obama administration makes vague, reassuring noises about constraining executive power and protecting civil liberties, but then merrily adopts whatever appalling policy George W. Bush put in place. …

It will take courage to push back against glib assurances that we can be made safe from terror only if Americans' private records can be vacuumed into vast databases with few limits. But if Democrats want to project real toughness in the national security arena, this would be a good place to start.