Word: reformer
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...protesters nip after Schwarzenegger because he has proposed four dramatic reforms that may be voted on in a special election next fall if he can't get action in the legislature. The four initiatives would cap spending, make the public employees' pension system less expensive, introduce merit pay for teachers and offer tenure only after 10 years of service, and create an independent panel of judges to draw legislative districts. These are the sort of good-government ideas that political scientists-and wonky columnists-love but that politicians avoid because they arouse fanatic opposition from entrenched interests and inspire massive...
...teachers' union began running ads against the Governor in January. Schwarzenegger's favorable ratings have dipped from the stratospheric to 55%, more or less. And while the Dems' knee-jerk support for the unions is a perennial portrait in cowardice, Schwarzenegger's proposals do avoid one crucial area of reform. "If he really wanted to lead with moral authority," says California state treasurer Phil Angelides, a Democrat running for Governor in 2006, "He would be asking everyone to make sacrifices. But he has been totally unwilling to ask those with means to give a nickel of their resources. We need...
...budging, and our conversation drifted into his standard riffs, some of them quite entertaining, about the "dinosaurs" in Sacramento who introduce bills about "plastic surgery for dogs and where you can park ice cream trucks and condom distribution in prisons" but who refuse to negotiate on his proposed reforms. Schwarzenegger is right to be scornful, but there is an obvious deal to be made here-real reform in exchange for new revenues-and it will take a politician who is more than an animatronic action figure to make...
...Dylan, can you explain tort reform...
...reform homeland security spending, Chertoff will have to take on powerful rural Senators who've grown accustomed to seemingly disproportionate slices of the pie. Today, 40% of the department's $40 billion budget is dispersed in equal share to the 50 states and the rest goes to states more or less on the basis of population. As a result, the federal government spends $28.22 annually on a resident of Wyoming and $15.72 on a citizen of New York. Instead, Chertoff wants to employ risk analysis-like the kind used in a DHS draft report inadvertantly placed on a Hawaii state...