It Pains Me...

Yesterday I was in a 1:00 meeting, and my stomach started hurting. It kept right on aching until about 2:30. And then, for the rest of the day, it would gradually start aching again, sometimes enough that I had to stop what I was doing and get up and walk around, or just stay where I was until it went away. It stayed this week until I went to bed.

It's been much better today, but it's still been a dull ache much of the day, with three or four stronger ones. Fortunately it didn't disturb my sleep last night, and I've only felt nauseous once (and maybe then because I was thinking I was glad I didn't feel nauseous). My guess is that I have some stomach virus, though I'm not sure where I picked it up. Or I had some bad sauce on my pasta for lunch yesterday. It's been a pain in the, um, gut, though. I'm ready for it to go away.

Looks like Debbi's going to need to get a new car. Hers is on its last legs, though we think she can kick it along for another month or so. So this weekend we'll kick off the car-shopping extravaganza, hoping to find a used car that meets her wants and needs, but with the possibility that we'll have to go new. Wish us luck!

Election day today. I went and did my citizenly duty, as I almost always do (I think I skipped a fall election that had something like one race and one referendum I didn't care about; I think I skipped it because I forgot all about it).

I voted for John Edwards, not out of great conviction. Arguably I should have voted for Kucinich, who perhaps meets my own ideals more closely, though Edwards seems like a decent guy. I'm not wild about Kerry, but I wasn't wild about Clinton either, and realistically in this largely-conservative nation in race against a strong sitting President, there's not much point in crying in our beer over wanting a better candidate.

I was more interested in voting on the referenda. The State of California had four on the ballot:

• Prop 55: A bond measure to find schools.
• Prop 56: Would reduce the vote needed in the state legislature to pass the budget from 67% to 55%. (Most states don't require such a high supermajority to pass a budget.) But, it would permanently dock the pay of legislators and the governor of a budget is not passed by the constitutionally-mandated annual deadline.
• Prop 57: A bond measure to erase the current state debt.
• Prop 58: Would require (in theory; opponent argue that there are loopholes) the state to pass a balanced budget every year.

I voted NO-YES-NO-NO. Basically, I think that when we're already in a huge financial hole is the last time we should be mortgaging our future for our present through bond measures, especially Prop 57, which does nothing but push our present debt off to the future (with interest). I generally support school bonds, but the state is in it so deep right now that I think it's a bad idea.

I'm generally opposed to any sort of balanced budget amendments in government. Going into debt can be a good thing, even a necessary thing, to ease the pain of recession or some bad decisions. Proponents of such measures argue that ordinary folks balance their own budgets every month, which is, of course, largely wrong. Many ordinary folks take on huge, long-term debt. It's called a "mortgage". The key is to manage your debt, which most people do manage to do - as do most governments. So I voted against Prop 58.

Lastly, I generally feel that we elect our representatives to run our government for us, and we should empower them to do so. The sort of gridlock California gets due to the 2/3ds majority requirement doesn't really benefit anyone. It's argued that lowering the bar will be a sign to the legislature that they should raise taxes. To which I say: So? If taxes are too high here, move to another state. Or, better yet, vote the bums out of office! But don't elect legislators and then take away their ability to legislate. So I voted for Prop 56.

I have not yet seen any election results, but my guess is that we'll get the most ridiculous of all worlds: We'll pass two big bond measures (meaning: go into debt which will be paid back in about 20 years with interest), require the state to pass balanced budgets, but keep the very high bar for them to be able to pass budgets. So we'll be in debt, and we'll need to pass draconian budgets but we'll need a huge consensus in order to do so.

Sounds worse than ever, doesn't it?

We also had a local measure to raise property taxes a bit to pay for local schools. After some waffling, I voted for this one. It's a short-term measure, and it's not a large burden, while keeping the local schools going helps my own property values.

Referenda are silly. I'd rather have the legislators just do their thing, rather than turning matters over to uninformed or apathetic voters (like myself), or worse, the few voters who are sufficiently radical to be motivated to actually vote (like myself). But I vote for 'em anyway. 'Cause you can't win the game if you don't play.