WCV:
I didn't read this article. Did he mention the "I" word?
Initiatives? Oh, yes. And Prop 13. And the 2/3 budget vote requirement.
But no mention of the level of taxes-- among the highest if not the highest overall and in almost every category: income tax, sales tax, gas tax, cigarette tax, bottle and can tax, etc.
Guess what? There were dozens of stories in the NYT that didn't mention unions, including this one. Because that's not what they were about. If you had read the NYT story instead of a goofy analysis of it, you'd know that it was about candidates for governor and what drives them. It wasn't about budgets or taxes. The short section that included passing mentions of Prop 13, the initiative process, and and the two-thirds budget/tax requirements were just a setup for this quote and a few similar ones: “Why in the world would you want to be governor?” [Meg] Whitman asks at her campaign events. Which perfectly fits the theme of the article: candidates for governor and what drives them.
Not every article that doesn't push your ideas is "biased, stupid or both." Sometimes they're just about something else.
SU,
So the NYT wants to be People magazine, covering the personalities but not the issues? If that's the case, they really need more swimsuit photos.
And even if we accept your premise that this is a People magazine article, don't you find it curious that all of the Democrat talking points (initiatives, prop 13, 2/3 vote) found their way in, while the elephants in the room (runaway spending growth, highest tax rates, and union domination of the legislature) got no mention?
Nice try for spin. Let me put it more succinctly: I call BS on your central premise that this is the NYT's "look at why California is a disaster"; it's not.
You might have gotten a clue from the first word of the head: "Who". I haven't seen People magazine for a long time, but I don't think a lengthy profile of candidates for office is a "People magazine article," nor does it preclude the NYT from running other articles about issues or swimsuits.
As I said before, the issues that were mentioned (none of which are exclusively "Democratic talking points") are among the things that make CA "ungovernable" (one can disagree about whether that's a good thing or not, but the fact remains that these items, in particular, tend to tie the governor's hands and lead to gridlock) to set up the section about why anyone would want the job. The elephant issues you mention (which aren't claimed exclusively by Republicans or conservatives, btw) are indeed serious problems--but don't relate to the state's "governability" and have nothing to do with the subject of this article.
Is that so hard to understand, or are you just trolling?
P.S. You left out illegal immigration. And why doesn't your list include lefty issues that were omitted from the article?
Exsqueeze me? The unions' stranglehold on the legislature doesn't relate to the state's "governability?"
SU, this is so typical. It's like there is a train coming down the tracks and it's going to hit the car. Instead of focusing the train, you are concentrating on whether or not the 10 mph wind will have a factor in the collision and how to act accordingly based on that. Nevermind that the train is going 80mph, is 700,000 tons of steel and it isn't going to stop in time unless Superman appears. But no, you'll keep focusing on the wind and see what we can do to adjust it in an effort to stop this train.
I never suggested that there isn't a train, or that California isn't a disaster. But claiming that the article is about something it's not--and then getting indignant because it doesn't cover what it's not about--further erodes the credibility of this blog. Makes it difficult to accept WCV's frequent implications that blogs (and this one in particular) are doing a better job than MSM.
Now you're claiming that an 8000-word article that begins "Budget shortfalls, perennial legislative gridlock and endless voter initiatives — who would want the job?" has nothing to do with the budget or the gridlock?
Or are you claiming the unions have nothing to do with the budget or the gridlock?
I would love to see an elaboration of either of those arguments.
WTH? Now you're making stuff up too? The NYT article you linked (indirectly, through the U-T opinion blog) doesn't have that text in it at the beginning or anywhere else.
But that's okay; I'll stipulate that your text is the lede or a subheading that didn't make it to the website. It's still a perfect lede for the subject of the article: "who would want the job?" It's about the people who seek the job and their motivations--not a detailed look at the problems they'll face. Is that really so difficult to understand?
SU,
If this were just a personality piece without reference to the issues, your argument would have some merit.
Sadly, it does discuss the issues selectively. Which is the whole point of the U-T fellow's complaint, with which I wholeheartedly agree.
You still haven't read the article, have you? Are you afraid you'll be converted if you read an article in the NYT? (Don't worry. Reading the drivel here hasn't affected me.)
It doesn't "discuss" any of those issues. The entire "discussion" of Prop 13, for example, is the one sentence that the U-T cherry-picked. There's similar not-in-depth coverage of the other two you keep bringing up (2/3 and initiatives) because, as I've pointed out many times, the article is not about issues. In fact, the author actually devotes substantially more space--an entire paragraph of 100 words, or just a little longer than this paragraph--to gerrymandered legislative districts.
And why are you suddenly such a big fan of budget by initiative? In several previous blog posts, you've told us how stupid these propositions are--mainly because most of them are driven by special interests (often unions), establish spending policies without specifying funding, and/or raise taxes. Now that can't be mentioned as a cause of gridlock because it's a "Democratic talking point"? This makes no more sense to me than the no votes on prop 1c and 1d, which would have at least started to unravel two of the stupid spending propositions that were previously voted into law.
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