On Primary Elections:

I'm going to be voting for Kucinich.

Do I think he's going to win? Nope. However, since I believe that either Kerry or Edwards has an equal chance of beating Dubya in the finals and I'm neither drastically for nor against either of them, I'm going to throw in my $0.02 to help give Kucinich's progressive views a little more backing in the hopes of potentially influencing the party platform.


On California Propositions:

Normally, I automatically vote against bond issues and "sneaky" propositions. However, a friend explained some of California's financial woes to me in such a way that I'm actually probably going to vote for Prop 56.

On the surface, this sounds like one of those "sneaky" propositions: the good part is that it requires legislators to stay in session without additional pay until they pass a budget; the bad part is that it lowers the requirement to vote in new taxes from 2/3 to 55% majority.

Here's the interesting part: apparently the California legislature needs a 2/3 majority to pass new taxes unless it involves paying off the state debt, ie. bond payments, in which case it only requires a simple majority. Therefore, the state routinely turns to bond issues to finance projects, which, due to the need to pay back both the face amount plus interest, actually costs more money than if they'd just raised taxes to pay for it.

Make sense? Basically, they already have the power to raise taxes with a simple majority vote, and if we simplify the process, there's a good chance it'll actually be cheaper in the long haul.


On Gay Penguins:

Roy and Silo at the Central Park Zoo.