Word: sacramento
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Gubernator's pugilistic performance was not over. As he walked around the facility during his August visit, he spotted a small replica of the long conference table that stands in his Sacramento office; the table itself was built in the prison's carpentry shop. Schwarzenegger couldn't stop himself from bragging: "I am the only one in the Governor's office who can pick...
Californians have come to expect such antics from their Republican Governor. At a typical event, he comes crashing onstage, delivers a macho statement of intent, metaphorically flexes his muscles, then roars away. Nothing could be more different from the distinctly undynamic Davis, who ended up a hostage of Sacramento's lawmakers and lobbyists and who certainly couldn't lift the Governor's conference table. In his first year in office, Schwarzenegger has proved to be a rousing political one-man show. In a quip that partly mocked his old Saturday Night Live caricature, he branded Democratic legislators who were blocking...
...second year in 2005 with a clean slate.” To be clear: an emergency 13.4 percent budget cut would leave spending 15.2 percent higher than when Gray Davis took office five years ago. Surely Californians can find it within ourselves to survive one year with Sacramento spending about one-sixth more than...
...California politics? While pundits ignore the state during the national elections, California voters actually have quite a lot to vote on: pesky things called initiatives, or propositions. During the Progressive Era, California enacted the recall, the referendum, and the initiative processes, all efforts to clean out corruption in Sacramento by promoting direct democracy. All it takes to place a proposition on the statewide ballot is a fee of $200 and signatures of registered voters equal to 5 or 7 percent—depending on the type of initiative—of the turnout of the previous gubernatorial election. Unfortunately, what...
Progressive mechanisms work; the recall in 2003, while much derided, correctly reflected voter anger at the partisan stalemate in Sacramento. So how can we make the system better? First, the state needs to enact spending limits on the amount individuals can donate to the special interest groups that back these propositions. Campaign finance laws protect the California Constitution by creating an environment that informs the citizenry without the excessive cash that flood the airwaves with misleading ads. Limiting the amount each person can contribute underscores that discourse should dominate instead of money. Second, California should have initiatives that don?...