Monday, August 14, 2006
Page 7
IN MY OPINION (Column)
My Final Roller Coaster Ride
By RAY HAYNES
The Legislature has been on a one month hiatus after six months of session. I have often compared the legislative process to a roller coaster ride, and following that analogy, the first six months of session are sort of like the part of the roller coaster where the ride takes the riders higher and higher with the chain underneath. Everyone on the ride knows that the higher the ride goes, the wilder the ride will be when the car finally goes into free fall.
This year the roller coaster ride had a couple of interesting dips, the largest being the approval of a record amount of bonds for the November election. Between the school bond, the water bond, the housing bond and the transportation bond, the Legislature approved over $37 billion in bonds for a variety of public works projects to be approved by the voters. But if the Governor’s state of the state address was any indication of things to come, this is just the beginning of such proposals. The Governor proposed $220 billion in bonds for dams, prisons, roads (including toll roads) and the like. He and Legislative leaders are right now discussing prison bonds for an August vote. So the Legislature is about to send the people on a real wild ride on the issue of bonds alone.
But that is not all. The Democrats violated the rules of the house recently to send a bill, AB 1437, which would mandate that schools teach students about the “accomplishments and contributions” of homosexuals, in the bill described as lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender persons, throughout history. Add to this the bills about gay marriage and other mandates on schools to emphasize a person’s sexual behavior, and the August offerings on the California Channel should be as spicy as a daytime soap opera. We will spend more time talking about people’s sexual activities than Susan Lucci on All My Children. Now that’s real entertainment
In addition, the Legislature will have at least one bill, perhaps more, that addresses how we will deal with the health care costs of old people and the disabled. It is a unique solution for the United States. The last country to use this method was Nazi Germany. The current proposal in the Legislature is called the “Compassionate Care Act” and purports to help make it easier for the old and disabled to make “end of life” decisions. Where I come from, we say we are going to kill them off, but I guess I just understand the nuances of the English language.
Then there’s single payer universal health care. That’s “pretty speak” for socialized medicine. Maybe we won’t need a bill to help old people and the disabled kill themselves, we’ll just enact universal health care and kill them off by not providing them with any health care.
All of this does not even talk about the hundreds of ways that the ruling class wants to intrude upon your life. The Legislature will pass a whole bushel of bills that create more government bureaucrats who write more useless government reports about arcane government issues that no one cares about, and that no government bureaucrat ever really solves. (If they actually solved the problem, they would no longer have a job, and that would be a bad idea for their long term prosperity.)
It will be my last roller coaster ride, since term limits says it is time for me to go. I can only recommend that you hold on. As for me, I’m going to sit in the front car, and put my hands in the air. It is going to be a wild ride.
Copyright 2006, Metropolitan News Company