"Wayne" wrote in message ...
These polls crack me up. When the Dems were in power were there ever
any stupid questions in polls like "trying to use the federal government
to interfere with the private lives of most Americans' on NON-moral
values."?

I am sure there were. I remember a lot of concern about Clinton's Oval
office blowjob degrading the office of the President, somebody probably took
a poll or two.



When was anyone's rights last violated by the "religious right" in this
country?

Well, there is a growing collection of dead physicians and the perps that
killed them. Murder is pretty much a violation of someones rights don't you
think?

I just spent the last week in California were government
has pretty much taken over every aspect of everyday life in some way or
another. The liberals control every branch of government and most
cities, yet they are broke and face huge tax increases or drastic cuts
in services. Hard choices need to be made, salaries need to be cut, but
it will never happen because it "hurts too much" or someone's feelings
may be hurt. It's way too late in my opinion to turn things around
there.

You can't learn much about California in a week.We will have 80 or so ballot
initiatives to vote on very shortly.
The state legistlature has become increasingly irrelevant and that has had
both positive and negative consequences.
Let me give you a couple of examples:

1) Prop 187 was so poorly written that in spite of the fact that the voters
passed it by a fair margin most of it was ruled unconstitutional by the
courts. Had this ballot initiative been written professionally and with the
constitution in mind it would have been both enforcable and effective. It
also would probably not have generated a visceral enough effect with the
voting public in that form to have passed. The result in the end is that
California continues to bear enormous costs that are beyond the states abili
ty to control.
2) A young man and his girlfriend were killed two days ago by what we call a
"wrong way" driver attempting te elude the police.
He was fleeing because he was a convicted sex offender with 2 prior felony
DUI convictions and no drivers license. You may be wondering why this guy
wasn't in jail. He wasn't in jail because of a flurry of ballot initiatives
over the last few years mandating incarceration for various categories of
non violent crime. How could that cause him to be out and about? The same
voters that passed the sentencing initiatives failed to provide the funds
required to staff LA counties jails. We have the space but do not have the
money to house inmates and for that reason all of the huge increase in our
inmate population has over filled the jails. Not good, but since nobody
wants to pay what has happened is that, with certain exceptions, the average
time served in the LA county system has dropped to 6.71 percent of the
sentence imposed by the courts.

In the end Wayne there just ain't no quick and/or easy solution but I can
tell you that California isn't getting much help from the feds.
We could use the 30 cents of every tax dollar we send off to Washington that
doesn't come back and a decent immigration policy to start and those aren't
state issues. Maybe somebody should take a poll or something.



--
John R. Carroll
Machining Solution Software, Inc.
Los Angeles San Francisco
www.machiningsolution.com