Politics

Question #2 this year would replace the criminal penalties for possession of one ounce or less of marijuana with a new system of civil penalties.

I understand and appreciate the arguments in favor of it, but I think the arguments against it are more compelling. An ounce of marijuana is actually a good amount (56 individual sales according to the District Attorneys Association), first-time offenders get probation and don’t get a publicly-available criminal record, and it’s just not a good public image for the government to say that “minor” drug use is “okay”, and we’ll just charge you a $100 tax when you get caught. I don’t believe that it will save $30 million in police costs, and I think that it’s a good use of police time to try to get drugs off the streets, and get the drug users into the probation and rehabilitation programs.

I think I’ll do a blog series on my thoughts on the five ballot questions that I’ll be voting on this coming Tuesday. (If you want to see if your town has added questions to the three statewide ones, plug your address into the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’s Election Division Voting Info site.)

Question #1 is about repealing the state income tax. I’m wholeheartedly for voting for this question. I think the main goal of getting it to pass is to force the Legislature to take a hard look at its programs, and cut those that it really doesn’t need. I think that the 40% reduction in their budget is possible, but I’m expecting that they won’t actually reduce things that much. I mean, there was a ballot initiative that passed in 2000 to lower the income tax from 5.85% to 5.0%, and the Legislature basically ignored it, although they did eventually slowly lower it to the current 5.3%. (Although, you can still voluntarily pay 5.85% if you want. I always get a chuckle out of that check box on the state tax form.) So, it seems unlikely that they’ll actually just keep all other taxes the same and cut the 40% of the budget. But I bet they’ll cut some things, overall taxes will be somewhat lower than they are now, and it at least sends a message that we’re tired of paying for expensive government programs that don’t work. I hope that this will increase transparency of our state government, as they publicly demonstrate what is and isn’t important to them.

Today is the day of the Massachusetts State Primary, the third of this year’s 4 elections. (There are 4 in Massachusetts towns, at least. I think Cities use a different schedule for their municipal elections.) The purpose of primaries is to whittle down choices such that we as a society don’t end up with two people with similar views going against one person with opposing views, leading to the possibility that the the one person would win when people were in fact okay with either of the two people with similar views.

This morning, I voted in the presidential primary. While generally there are a few more elections on a ballot than the ones you hear mostly about (since some positions have one or zero candidates), I didn’t realize that there would be some on this ballot. In addition to an uncontested race for a “man on state committee”, and a race with no candidates for a “woman on state committee”, which in retrospect shouldn’t be too surprising, there were thirty-five write-in spaces (and no listed candidates) for “town committee”. I’m now wishing I thought to write my own name in on one of the lines.

Senator in Congress: Kenneth Chase
Governor: Michael Carl (Constitution Party)
Attorney General: Larry Frisoli
Secretary of State: None of the above
Treasurer: None of the above
Auditor: Joseph DeNucci
Representative in Congress: None of the above
Councillor: None of the above
Senator in General Court: None of the above
Representative in General Court: David Singer
District Attorney: Joseph Early
Clerk of Courts: (blank)
Register of Deeds: (blank)
Question 1: No
Question 2: No
Question 3: No

So, in general I haven’t paid a lot of attention to the race for Massachusetts Governor. I figure that the governor doesn’t really have much power anyway, since Romney vetoed a bunch of stuff during his administration, which is really the most you could hope a governor would do, and they pretty much all got overridden anyway. So, I think that the governor here is primarily just a ceremonial position that can try to set direction, but doesn’t really have much power. (I could be wrong on this, but it’s just how it looks from where I’m sitting.)

I’ve been somewhat saddened lately that while a majority of the country may share my overall political views (which for the purposes of this post I’ll define by voting for Bush), in the state that I live in, people sharing my views are definitely in the minority. However, I was recently encouraged by the fact that in the Spring, we’ll be moving to Charlton, and that Charlton was Bush’s best town in MA, winning 64% of the vote there. So, I’ll be in the majority nationally and locally, but just not regionally.

Well, somewhat on a whim, we decided to go over ‘s place for late-night election-watching. and were there when we got there, but got scared off and left shortly thereafter :). The watching was just kinda in a background as we (, , Pezz’s dad, and me) chatted about all sorts of political matters.

It looks like Bush’ll probably win. CNN isn’t calling Ohio yet, but Fox News is. And with Bush having a 120,000 vote lead with 97% reporting there, I tend to think that he’ll probably win that state, and therefore the presidency. That makes me very happy.