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Politics : IMPEACH GRAY DAVIS! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (370)	6/1/2003 12:50:21 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1641

deliver no power in return. Are you trying to prove to us that it is impossible to underestimate your intelligence? If they did that, how could they possibly have charged anyone anything? Do you send money to all the ISPs that you don't use? But suppose the state had NOT interposed itself. What would have happened? 1. Industry would have cut back its power usage to save money. 2. Consumers would have cut back their power usage to save money. There would have been no need for those TV ads from the state exhorting people to turn out lights in rooms they weren't in. They would have gone much further than that. And more quickly. And with no advertising costs. Of course, the downside is that that would have deprived Davis of an opportunity to get his mug on statewide TV. But everything has its costs. 3. The outrage, and the political effects of that, would have been 1000X what they were. As it was, they were pretty muted. Why demonstrate, scream, and yell when you're not being hurt? Or apparently not being hurt. The fact that the state gov't is being bankrupted wouldn't be visible for some time. And the huge tax increases to stemming from that wouldn't hit for a while. In fact, it was outrage that got the ball rolling for Davis. The caps came off first in the southernmost part of the state. Bills shot up. People screamed. Davis, sensing an opportunity to appear the hero, tossed the state treasury in- -putting it at the mercy of those wolves you detest. But he did NOTHING before the screaming and yelling down south.

To: TigerPaw who wrote (370)	6/1/2003 2:14:01 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Respond to of 1641

For me the real issue isn't what Davis did or didn't do in this crisis. I don't think there is a reasonable case on either side that Davis should have done the opposite, or not. The real issue, is when it became clear to everyone in the state that business was going down hard, (this was late 91 - mid 02) and not bouncing back as assumed, Davis did nothing. He should have put a hard stop on all spending immediately. We even talked about it here on SI, "the impending CA budget crisis". I can't think of any reason at all why Davis would not acknowledge the crisis except for the 02 elections. I can't forgive the CA gov't for this. People forget that CA is a fiscally conservative state. Tax and spend really doesn't work here. It isn't working now. Having said all this, the fact that Davis and his partners screwed up royally does not mean republicans can win here, because the republicans here are (I think) the worst example of a divided party in the US. Since 92 the republicans have allowed the social conservatives to run the party and that is a no-win platform, and when I say no win I mean suffer a humiliating defeat kind of no-win. A year or so ago the republican state party convention resulted in separate meetings for the social conservatives vs. the fiscal group. And now, Bush's callous remarks regarding energy mismanagement, his dividend tax cut (which imo actually HURTS growth companies and tech), and this war against what looks like an unarmed enemy makes the rebublicans look pretty bad. Bush was here a few weeks ago and he made one small stop at an defense-related tech company. No tech whirlwind tour like Clinton and Gore used to do. So all this whining about Davis goes unheard. He will be gone soon enough, and all California can hope for is that Riordan or some other republican who actually represents the values of Ca can get elected by the republican social conservatives (not likely since they made abortion a key issue for the party), OR we get a more fiscally responsible middle ground democrat. BTW we had a top notch republican politician here representing SV, Bill Campbell. This is just my opinion, but I think he could have been a governor. The far right wing of the party wouldn't support him, because again he represented progressive social views, things like evolution in schools vs. creationism- radical thought like that. Anyway he is now the dean of the law school at Berkeley.