Today's Fresh Meat

August 08, 2007 @ 9:00 AM

The budget impasse may force child-care agencies across the state to stop providing services to tens of thousands of low-income children according to the LA Times. The shortfall would not only deprive these children of developmental education and meals, but also jeopardize the jobs of thousands of child-care workers and parents. “Feeling a bit helpless” is right.

If that sounds pathetic, the Associated Press has quoted Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata as saying, "We are really governing ourselves like a Third World country." The AP also reminds us that California is one of the world’s largest economies, which ought to make this even more embarrassing.

Governor Schwarzenegger has dispatched an undisclosed number of CHP officers to Oakland as part of CalGRIP, a new state anti-gang initiative, according to the Oakland Tribune. Oakland mayor Ron Dellums persuaded the Governor to test the new program in the beleaguered city, which has been fighting a recent crime wave. But yeah, guess what...the officers will be paid using overtime funds, because the forthcoming money for the program is tied up in the stalled state budget.

Top of the Ticket has an interesting post about voter participation among gays and lesbians—namely that it’s about twice as high as the average rate. Democratic courting of the gay vote, as will occur in the first Democratic presidential candidate debate addressing gay, lesbian, and transgender concerns tomorrow night, seems wise in the light of this.

Peter Schrag, formerly of the Sac Bee, writes about the dubious environmental credentials of ethanol fuel, which corn producers, among others, are touting as a way to reduce dependence on carbon-based energy and foreign oil. The Sac Bee editorial, also reprinted in the California Progress Report, describes how the farm bill, thanks in part to compromises made by Nancy Pelosi, will increase subsidies to corn growers to produce ethanol. Senator Dianne Feinstein has accused these growers of enjoying a “triple subsidy”—surely this money could be better spent?

The San Jose Merc is encouraging voters to do it the old-fashioned way the next election—by sending in absentee ballots, rather than risk using electronic machines like the ones which Secretary of State Debra Bowen recently decertified due to security concerns. Calitics likewise correctly places the blame on the companies, such as Diebold, which produced the machine.

This SF Chron story about the unexpectedly adequate performance of high school seniors on a standardized test on economics, regardless of whether they’d taken a general econ course, highlights either one of two things: that high school economics courses actually retard learning, which we already knew, or that the “difference between an asset and a liability” is somewhat easier to discern than test writers think. Both, of course, could be true.