Voter-Nominated Primaries in California?

Here in California, where most of us agree that our state legislature is broken and it seems that our state government is on the brink of bankruptcy every few months or so, there are a number of hotly contested races underway for our June 8th primary election.  But amidst votes that will be cast for the nominees in each major party for Governor, Lt. Governor and Attorney General, the outcome of a vote on one specific initiative on the ballot has the potential of having a far more long-lasting impact on our state than any of the individual races for elective office.

The Disappearing Middle

Last week's primary elections in some hotly contested campaigns for various House and Senate seats yielded results that were extremely important -- but not just for the obvious "who won and who lost" reports that filled up most political Web sites and cable news talk shows.

Making A Mark

What is art?  That's one of those great college study group questions, where everyone has an opinion and virtually none of them are the same.  The classical definition of art is typically the idea of using skill and imagination to create something that can be shared, while more modern conceptions of art seem to emphasize the importance of creating things that provoke reactions and engage audiences.  Whatever one's definition, I believe the highest form of artistic expression is when one uses creative skills to inspire other people, to lift them up, or to make a mark in the culture that points us to a better place.

Wrestling with the Immigration Debate

The recently enacted anti-illegal immigration law in Arizona, which for the first time empowers law enforcement authorities to investigate an individual's citizenship status based on the "reasonable suspicion" standard, has been a lightning rod in the immigration debate.  For two weeks now, this law has attracted the support of a majority of Americans but triggered large-scale protests by vocal opponents in major cities nationwide.

It would be tempting to think of this intense debate as something unique to the travails of 21st century America, but the truth is that we have a long tradition in our public discourse of being conflicted as a people when it comes to how we manage immigration.  There may be no better metaphor for this conflict than to review the writings on this subject from the most brilliant American political thinker of all time, who just so happened to be the author of our founding document.

The Two-Party System Under Pressure

The United States is one of the few Western democracies that has retained a two-party system for much of its history.  Sure, the names of the parties have changed from time to time and the political values espoused by the major parties are often unrecognizable from what they were generations ago, but the occasional flurries of interest in third parties have invariably crashed and burned.  We're witnessing another one of those periods of pressure on the two-party system now and one wonders if this time the results might be different.

RIP "Too Big to Fail"

I'm not a believer in the concept of government bailouts of private industry.  For one thing, as someone who has been self-employed for nearly 20 years, I have an acute understanding of the risks and rewards of entrepreneurship -- if you want to pursue a business strategy you think could yield greater profits for your wallet, you also take the inherent risk that your strategy might fail and instead leave you broke.  To paraphrase Jimmy Dugan in A League of Their Own, there's no crying in business.  Second, it's been my empirical observation that bailouts of soon-to-be-failed companies tend to benefit the largest equity stakeholders the most -- typically, the institutional investors and the executive team.  So the picture that leaves me is one of the average U.S. taxpayers pitching a few nickels into a hat in order to keep the wealthiest among us from suffering a major hit to their private balance sheets, something that offends my left-leaning sensibilities.

The Changing Image of America

My family just returned from a wonderful vacation in Australia.  It was a terrific trip and included a number of really special memories made at places like Darling Harbor in Sydney and the Great Barrier Reef.  We like to travel abroad about once a year in order to experience other cultures, see new things and challenge our perspectives.  There is, of course, a great big world out there beyond the borders of the USA.

One thing that I was struck by on this recent trip, however, was the dramatic change in perceptions of the United States government -- and our president in particular -- among "local" residents in the country we were visiting.  In recent years, I've had surprising conversations with waiters, taxi drivers and train passengers in countries such as France, Spain, Italy and England . . . conversations that have left me a bit disheartened about how people in those countries viewed our government as reckless and imperialist.  So it was shocking and altogether encouraging to hear quite different comments from average working folks in Australia, all of whom expressed confidence in our current president as a man of diplomacy and restraint (and a sense of admiration for America that we elected someone as our chief executive who would not have been allowed to use the same Mississippi drinking fountain as me just two generations ago).