{"id":192824,"date":"2009-02-17T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2009-02-17T05:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/02\/17\/when-you-give-a-child-a-loaded-gun\/"},"modified":"2009-02-17T00:01:00","modified_gmt":"2009-02-17T05:01:00","slug":"when-you-give-a-child-a-loaded-gun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/02\/17\/when-you-give-a-child-a-loaded-gun\/","title":{"rendered":"When You Give a Child a Loaded Gun"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Let me be clear here, the metaphor implies <span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">no adult supervision<\/span>, I am not making a comment on children and their parents going to the shooting range, or enrolling a kid in a gun safety class, or going hunting with the kids.<\/p>\n<p>In this case, the metaphor refers to California, where a juxtaposition of heavily gerrymandered districts, term limits, and a requirement for a 2\/3 super-majority to pass any taxes, have <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/02\/17\/us\/17cali.html\">handed a loaded revolver to the most wingnutty of &#8216;Phants<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Seriously, when you combine the unbalanced districts with the super-majority, and then throw in a dash of &#8220;no respect for the legislature as an institution,&#8221; because they are limited to 6 years in the statehouse, and 8 years in the state senate, and you have a heady brew.<\/p>\n<p>The Dems, and Ahnuld Schwartzenegger, need to have a club to beat Republicans around the head and shoulders, I would suggest an out of cycle redistricting.<\/p>\n<p>To avoid the appearance of impropriety, have as a requirement, &#8220;The length of the borders shall be the minimum practical,&#8221; which means that the districts will be mathematically as contiguous as is possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Let me be clear here, the metaphor implies no adult supervision, I am not making a comment on children and their parents going to the shooting range, or enrolling a kid in a gun safety class, or going hunting with the kids. In this case, the metaphor refers to California, where a juxtaposition of heavily &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1038,1020],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-budget","category-legislation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192824"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192824\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}