California: once the envy of the nation and now the state where "can't" is the operational word

Wonderful piece in today's New York Times on the state of California, where nobody can seem to agree on just about anything and the recession has left us with few options. Social services are being cut, state workers furloughed and laid off, tuition is being raised and Sacramento is a picture of a dysfunctional mess. Sometimes it takes an outsider to see things more clearly and this is as good a roundup as one can expect. Read the complete story here. A couple key excerpts:

"We are now the state that can’t,” said Stephen Levy, the director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, a private research organization in Palo Alto. “It can’t agree on its water problem. It can’t balance its budget, it can’t decide what to do with prisoners, and it’s still fussing about its immigrants. And this is not the end of our economic problems. This is the beginning.”

"...In the end, we do not know for sure whether the California public really wants the California dream anymore,” said Bruce E. Cain, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. “The population is too diverse to have a common vision of what it wants to provide to everyone. Some people want the old dream, some want the gated privatized version, and some would like to secede and get away from it all.”

$308 million in Obama stimulus money helps land a new power plant to Kern County

Turns out we can thank the Obama stimulus package for bringing some much needed jobs to Kern County. The New York Times is reporting that a new power plant that turns coal and waste petroleum into cleaner-burning gas has won the support from state and stimulus funds. The paper says the plant was awarded a $308 million grant from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and is the largest grant yet from the Department Energy's Clean Coal Power Initiative. Thanks to Trish Reed, head of investor relations over at the Kern Economic Development Corp., for alerting me to this story. (you can read the full piece here)Said Trish:

"Hydrogen Energy’s 250-megawatt facility will take petroleum coke (left over from refining), then will filter out 90 percent of its carbon dioxide for permanent underground storage in an adjacent oil field in Elk Hills, where it will also help with enhanced oil recovery. The hydrogen will power the plant’s turbine electrical generators."

Prop 8 backlash turns ugly

Nothing like reading the New York Times on a quiet Sunday morning to get your juices going. I happened on to a story on a new website called "eightmaps" which pinpoints every donor - and lists them by name - who gave money to support California's Prop 8, which defined marriage as that between a man and a woman and effectively bans gays from marrying. Turns out some who didn't like Prop 8 are using it to intimidate those who supported it, and that's just plain wrong, no matter how strongly you feel about the measure. An excerpt from today's New York Times:

"The site takes the names and ZIP codes of people who donated to the ballot measure — information that California collects and makes public under state campaign finance disclosure laws — and overlays the data on a Google map.

Visitors can see markers indicating a contributor’s name, approximate location, amount donated and, if the donor listed it, employer. That is often enough information for interested parties to find the rest — like an e-mail or home address. The identity of the site’s creators, meanwhile, is unknown; they have maintained their anonymity."


Bakersfield of course overwhelmingly supported Prop 8 and while it is interesting to use eightmaps.com to see all the folks who wrote checks to support it, it's terrifying to think some of these citizens are being harassed for engaging in the civic process.