All The Power To The Top

It should come as no surprise that when Republicans gain power, as they have in Indiana's and New Hampshire's legislatures, they try to take away make it so that workers have even less say about their work conditions. We have a bad economy, and it's a golden opportunity for them to return to the Gilded Age.

Never mind that more than 285,000 residents are looking for work and that public schools are trying to minimize harm to students from a $300 million, two-year budget cut. Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels and his allies in the state legislature have decided that their No. 1 priority this legislative session is to enact a so-called right-to-work law that research shows will lower the average worker’s wages by $1,500 a year.

The News from State Woe-Be-Here

California is such a wreck right now, though this is no secret. Once again, we have no budget and are set for some really tough wrangling in the next few months. In order to gain leverage, the Governator has decided to use state workers (once again) as leverage. His brilliant idea? Back the legislature into a corner by reducing state workers' salary to the federal minimum wage until a budget is passed. What's more, the threat of this allowed the state to strong arm 37,000 state workers into a new contract recently, by providing an exemption to the looming cuts.

If using working people as political pawns isn't bad enough, remember that California's budgeting process is a game set up to be fraught with delays and failures. Any tax increases must be approved by 2/3 of the legislature, and even a strong Democratic majority can't muster that up. Without revenue increases, this is going to be a long fight.

Allies of the governor are quick to point out that the wages will be restored and back-pay awarded once a budget passes, but that just doesn't fly with me. If you are a working person, trying to provide for your family, not having your entire wage on time is really, really expensive. How many of these people will have to live on credit cards or take out payday loans at exorbitant rates, just to get by while Sacramento plays its game? This will cost most state worker families a lot of money and stress. Republicans just don't understand that, apparently-- it is astounding how out-of-touch these people are.

State Controlled John Chiang has said that he will not follow the governor's orders, like the last time this happened. Chiang's office was sued by Schwarzenegger; the governor won, but the case is on appeal.

Oh, and Arnold's other great idea? Make California the only state without a welfare-to-work program. Race to the bottom-- here we come, Arkansas!

Asshat Texan of the Day

State Rep. Betty Brown.

I don't know what I love more about this story: her insistence that, after saying Asian descendants' names are too hard to pronounce, she said Democrats were just trying to make it a "race issue" (cause, you know, blanket statements about people from a major part of the largest continent are not about race); or that she asked somebody who's last name is Ko if they couldn't just make their names "easier." Apparently, her intelligence level is such that a double-lettered, monosyllabic word is too difficult.

Go Texas! (Preferably, back to Mexico, though that's terribly unfair to Mexico).

h/t

Same Day Voter Registration in New Mexico?

I hope so, anyways. Back in November it came out that New Mexico was considering Election Day Voter Registration (you can read some of that old news here and here). Well, its on the table in the New Mexico State Legislature, which begins its 2009 session on January 20th. You can read the draft of the bill here. The way the bill is currently written, any person who is allowed to vote and not registered at the time early voting begins or on Election Day can show up at their precinct with the proper voter identification requirements and register to vote. 

There is a somewhat minor problem with the bill as it is (depending on how you look at it). It requires that a unregistered voter present themselves at the precinct in which they are supposed to vote had they been registered before the standard deadline. The way elections are currently run in New Mexico makes this somewhat difficult. The poll worker in charge of registering the voter would have to call the County Clerk's office and have them figure out if the voter was in the correct precinct. This might be ok if there aren't that many people who are registering when they vote, and it assumes that the poll worker could actually reach the Clerk's office. Polling locations on Election Day are currently not equipped with computers that would allow poll workers to verify where the person is supposed to vote (not to mention the terrible lack of internet access in many rural areas of New Mexico). And, many Clerk's offices do not have enough phone lines dedicated to dealing with Election Day issues. These are minor problems as long as someone has the foresight to deal with these technological issues before the next election. I'm not that worried about the bigger counties, but the smaller, primarily rural counties are likely have more problems. 

I hope this passes. Updating polling places in New Mexico with computers with internet access would really help reduce a number of other issues like registered voters showing up at the wrong location without being able to find their correct precinct, and helping reduce the number of provisional voters, which tend to bog down the final tallying of votes.