California Insider

I'm looking for suggestions on local ballot measures we should be following on Nov. 7. So far, these have caught my eye:

Sacramento County Measures Q and R: A quarter-cent sales tax increase and an advisory measure urging that the money raised be spent on a new downtown arena for the Sacramento Kings.

San Francisco Measure F: Requires employers in the city to provide paid sick leave to their workers for their own use or to care for a sick family member or friend.

San Diego City Propositions B and C: Mayor Jerry Sanders' proposals to require voter approval for public employee penson increases and to allow the city to more easily contract with private firms to provide public services.

Los Angeles Proposition R: Loosens city council term limits (allowing three terms instead of two) and adopts new ethics provisions.

Santa Clara County Measure A: New general plan with stricter growth limits.

Fresno County Measure C: Extend half-cent transportation sales tax for another 20 years.

Orange County Measure M: Extend half-cent transportation sales tax for another 30 years.

Please email me if you know of others I should be watching.

Will Wilkinson thinks the left's focus on economic insecurity is no more valid than Bush's constant reminders about national security. Both warnings are meant to make us feel more insecure so that their sponsors can win elections and policy debates.

Debra Saunders is raising questions about the claims being made by the backers of Proposition 1B.

Last year it was Hiram Johnson. This year it's Earl Warren. A biographer of the cross-filing governor who became chief justice of the Supreme Court looks at the parallels with Schwarzenegger. But Jim Newton thinks Warren came by his centrism "more honestly" than Schwarzenegger because Warren was an early backer of universal health care while Schwarzenegger once antagonized public employee unions. No word in this piece on how sending Japanese-Americans to internment camps fits into the "honest moderate" equation.

With two weeks to go before the election, this can't be said often enough: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has no plan to balance the state's budget, or, if he does have a plan, he's not sharing it with the voters. John Myers takes a look at the issue here, on his blog and, linked, KQED radio.

Schwarzenegger is staring at a $5 billion gap between projected revenues and spending next year -- and that's assuming the economy performs as expected. Unless he is bailed out by higher tax revenues than his own economists have told him are likely, Schwarzenegger is going to have to propose deep spending cuts, or break his pledges on taxes (he won't raise them) or borrowing ("live within our means.") When asked about this on the campaign trail, he says he doesn't talk about "hypotheticals." But the real hypothetical would be a scenario under which he does not face a shortfall. If all goes according to plan, he will.

For those keeping score at home, the last governor who ran for reelection facing a shortfall he refused to talk about was Gray Davis. The say-no-evil strategy worked for him, too. For a while.