Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

I'm starting a short series of blog posts about the ballot propositions on my ballot this year. "Props", as we call them for short, are often thought of as a California thing, though they're part of the process in a number of other states as well. It's worth taking a close look at props each cycle because they can be complex; more complex, say, than choosing whether to vote for Candidate A or Candidate B.

How are propositions complex? I mean, you just vote yes or no, right? For one, there are 3 types of ballot propositions with different rules and different impacts. Two, propositions may be poorly written or purposefully deceptive, among other problems. By the way, you can't let this complexity cause you to throw your hands up in disgust and vow to vote "No" on all of them. Due to the way the different types of props work, some of them will actually block or even reverse an act of the legislature if a majority of the people vote No,

This year there are a whopping 10 statewide ballot props plus several local props in my area. I'll start with the statewide props in numerical order, outlining a few per blog.This will take several days, so it's good I'm starting now! By the way, this isn't just altruistic. This is me doing my own research and me articulating my argument for or against to be confident my reasoning is sound.

Prop 2: Bond for Public School & Community College Facilities: Yes.

For this prop as with all the others the first source of information I'm checking is the California Secretary of State's Voter Information Guide | Propositions. This measure "Authorizes $10 billion in general obligation bonds for repair, upgrade, and construction of facilities at K-12 public schools (including charter schools), community colleges, and career technical education programs, including for improvement of health and safety conditions and classroom upgrades."

Years ago, when I was younger and less sophisticated in my understand of political economics, I looked at measures like this and scoffed, "Why does the state just pay for needed work? It seems like every year there's more bonds, extending payments out 30+ years. Why not just pay today for the stuff we need, today?"

Alas, that's not the reality of how the state's budget works. It would be nice if it were, but it's not. The only choice we have is pay this way, or let our schools continue to fall apart, worse.

I like to invest in our schools. Schools are an investment in our shared future. Schools educate the next generation, who'll help support us and help govern us in the future. Schools are also an investment in our economy. Good schools equal good local economies because people and companies want to locate here.

Another thing younger-me would've scoffed at is the fact that this measure is Put on the Ballot by the Legislature, as the voter information guide notes in bold and italic. "Why didn't the legislature just... y'know... legislate... this instead of sending it to us?" younger-me sneered. And that's why it's important to understand How California Ballot Propositions Work. This bond measure had to be approved by a super-majority of the legislature first, then it also has to be approved by the voters.

You can thank the anti-tax zealots for that process, BTW. And incidentally, those same anti-tax zealots also construct the deliberately false arguments yammering about, "Why didn't the legislature just... y'know... legislate... this instead of sending it to us?" that younger-me fell for years ago.

Prop 3: Constitutional Right to Marriage: Yes.

This proposition reverses 2008's Proposition 8, which defined marriage as only being between a man and a woman. It replaces that state constitutional amendment with a new amendment permitting marriage between any two adults, regardless of race or gender.

"How is this necessary?" critics of the measure ask. "Federal courts ruled Prop 8 unconstitutional in 2013." Yes, but consider what happened in 2022 with the US Supreme Court's Dobbs decision overturning nearly 50 years of jurisprudence under Roe v. Wade. We're just one case away from the far-right supermajority overturning the previous court's ruling and restoring California's ridiculous Prop 8. Our constitutional rights cannot be trusted to the interpretation of reactionary ideologues. We need to protect our liberties by putting them in plain text.

Note that this initiative is also tagged Put on the Ballot by the Legislature. Again, that is not an indication that the legislature is passing the buck. This is a Legislative Constitutional Amendment. It's already gone through the full process of being written and approved by both the Assembly and the state senate, and now it must be approved by a majority of the voters, too.

Edited to add: The list starts at 2 because that's the first prop this year.

Edit 2: Read about Props 4, 5, and 6 in my next blog.

As I've been watching Breaking Bad midway through Season 2, one thing little thing bothers me about the series. It seems like almost none of the characters are sympathetic.

Yes, it's a story about a main character who becomes a villain; Walt's transformation from Mr. Chips to Scarface. And along the way he works with a lot of criminals, so there are a lot of bad people in the story. And, of course, the point of the narrative is to get us rooting for at least some of the bad folks. But it's a principle of writing that there should be character we readers can feel genuinely good about cheering on. Here it's not clear if there are any.

The first place one might look for a good person in this story is the protagonist's wife, Skyler. She's not involved in Walt's criminal enterprise. He's keeping secrets from her and treating her brusquely. But while she's the aggrieved spouse she's not without fault. She shows little sympathy for him as he struggles to accept a diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer. She's not interested in his opinion about it. She feels she knows better than him how he should feel and what he should want to do. When she does literally ask him what he thinks, it's actually a bad-faith effort to get his family to gang up on him. Then, as Walt becomes distant from her and seems to suffer a memory lapse, she responds not by attempting to understand what he's going through but simply by giving him a taste of his own medicine, walking out of the house on him repeatedly and refusing to share where she's going. "Do unto others the shit they do unto you" may be cathartic but it is not how you improve a struggling relationship. In fact it's generally how you take joint responsibility for killing it.

Skyler is hardly the only supporting character who might've been a breath of fresh, good-person air but isn't. Sklyer's sister, Marie, is a narcissist with a shoplifting habit. As part of her narcissism (just one example but not the only one), when Skyler confronts her after almost being arrested at a store for possessing a necklace, Marie absolutely refuses even to acknowledge she stole the necklace. She instead reverses victim and offender (a classic narcissist trait) and faults Skyler for being rude to her.

The cops in the story are another place you might look for a good person. Walt's brother-in-law, Hank, is a DEA agent. He and his colleagues are out there busting drug dealers. But Hank is a blowhard who frequently makes racist jokes about Hispanic people.  Perhaps Hank's partner, "Gomez", is the one good person here. He is a Hispanic man who quietly puts up with Hank's racist ribbing. Though he does go along with all of Hank's racially motivated decisions.

Walt's ex-fiance, Gretchen, might've been a sympathetic character, too, but isn't. She's married to Walt's grad school buddy; and together, she and that buddy have become wealthy building a successful tech company based on research Walt's conducted as a grad student. Who's responsible for their relationship failing? Who's responsible for Walt getting cut out of the riches from his own work? Sure, some of it is Walt, but though Gretchen sees herself as a saint, she isn't. In confronting Walt about his lie to his family that he's taking their charity when actually he refused it, she demands to know the secret he won't tell his family. "You've involved me in the lie now, so you have to tell me everything," she says. That may sound reasonable... but let me translate it like this: "You're keeping a secret from your own family, and I, as your ex from 16+ years ago, assert I have a right to know what it is." How about, no?

The one regular supporting character who's left as a sympathetic person is Walt's son, Walt, Jr. Or "Flynn", as he's told his friends to start calling him. Flynn hasn't really done anything wrong. I mean, he got busted by an off-duty cop for asking him to buy beer for underage kids... but I'm not going to call him bad for that as underage drinking is something almost everyone in the US has done.

There's also one minor character who's done nothing wrong... yet. That's Carmen, the principal at Walt's school. I say "...yet" because I wonder, when does the other shoe drop? Since "nobody's genuinely good" is apparently a theme of Breaking Bad, when will Carmen be revealed as a bad person? Does she hit kids in the school? Does she have a drug habit of her own? And what about Walt, Jr./Flynn. Is he going to... break bad... at some point?