CA election & whatnot

The Washington Post has a headline that Mexicans are stunned at the murder of the police chief of Tijuana. Given that a previous police chief was killed on the same street, it seems unlikely that it comes as that much of a surprise.

The latest in 10 Commandments gimmicks, as passed most recently by the Indiana legislature, is to post it in classrooms alongside other "historical" documents like the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence. Nice try.

The Supreme Court will decide the constitutionality of a lovely practice, drug-testing pregnant women without their consent and then reporting them to the police. Is there an actual question here?

McCain and Bradley are preparing to go out in a final burst of glory. McCain said what everyone thinks about the Christian right, which must feel good. Now tell us, what do you really think about the North Vietnamese? And he calls Bush a Pat Robertson Republican who will lose to Al Gore. By the way, he said will lose, not would lose, which is an admission unto itself. Bush says that he is a problem-solver and McCain is a finger-pointer, whatever that means. And says that Reagan was never so divisive, so far as he remembers. Of course he spent the '80s in a drug-induced stupor, and probably remembers Reagan as the guy who beat off the invasion of giant spiders from the Crab Nebula.

And Boo Bradley is running really hard in... Washington state. Ignoring, oh say, New York and California, just so that he can say he won one state when he has to pull out.

OK, the California election. It seems that I was wrong about 29 being the evil twin of 1A. It's actually the puny younger brother, and should be voted for in case 1A is defeated.

Also, I finally have an opinion on Prop 25, campaign financing. The need for campaign financing is shown by the fact that Governor Beige is raising money he won't have to disclose the source of for another year and can use for whatever he wants, including defeating this proposition. But this one ain't it. Too many loopholes and, the killer provision, unions are restricted to the same limits in total as a single individual person.