Blockbuster Democracy

Florida's "Hometown Democracy" initiative, now headed for the 2010 ballot, may be the most important measure on an American ballot next year.

Here's a funny little exchange between Gov. Schwarzenegger and Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters during a budget press conference in a Capitol hallway yesterday.

Attention readers in Northern California. New America is hosting an event next Monday, June 22, from noon to 2 p.m. that examines different paths to major reform in the state. Call it California 2.0.

It's an impressive collection of thinkers, including advocates for the constitutional convention. The event is free, but you can reserve a seat here.

Friend of the blog Dennis Engbarth, a Taiwan-based journalist, writes with news of a threat to that country's new direct democracy: the party of President Ma Ying-jeou's, the Chinese Nationalist Party or Kuomintang, is trying to purge leadership of the Taiwan Democracy Foundation.

The foundation promotes democracy and has funded efforts to study direct democracy, which have led to the establishment of the referendum in Taiwan. Ma opposes direct democracy.

Oklahoma has been one of the worst states to practice direct democracy. The short, 90-day time period for gathering signatures is a particular problem, making it difficult for anyone but the richest initiative sponsors to qualify a measure. (Such tight time limits, I would argue, also encourage petition fraud, though I've not seen enough data to say so for sure).

After months of false starts and promises of petitions to come, California's army of petition circulators seems to be re-forming. I'm hearing that contracts are drafted and circulators will be out on the street as early as next week. The big flurry of signature gathering activity will start next month, once more new measures are filed with an eye to the June 2010 ballot. By late summer, measures to permit the calling of a constitutional convention, to overturn the state's gay marriage ban, and to end the two-thirds vote for budgets and tax increases may be on the street.

My friend and former LA Times colleague Matt Welch, writing on his blog at Reason, the libertarian magazine he edits, makes a very good point about media commentary, particularly from our former paper, that voters are responsible for the state's fiscal fix because they vote for so many ballot measures that boost spending.

KnowThyNeighbor.org -- which makes public the names of signers of anti-gay petitions -- has found a new target in signers of a Washington referendum petition to overturn that state's domestic partnership law. The group has already made public the names of supporters of same-sex marriage bans in other states and of a ban on adoption by gays (or other unmarried adults) in Arkansas.

Your blogger, whose favorite flavor is schadenfreude, has been amused as all sorts of people realize -- in the wake of the supreme court's decision upholding Prop 8 -- just how powerful and inflexible California's ballot initiative is, and how easy it would be for a majority to infringe on the rights or prerogatives of others.

One of the polite email responses I received to my op-ed this morning in the New York Times (readers of that elite broadsheet are more foul-mouthed than one might think) came from a New Yorker familiar with the federal assistance to his city in the 1970s. Here is an interesting bit, which I checked out: