My gawd, what horrible writing. You could completely chuck the first six paragraphs and not lose anything.

Then consider this sentence: “Cal Forward is pushing substantive proposals flowing from the contemporary state of agreement regarding meaningful budget and fiscal reform of the miserable budget process we all seem to loath.”

Gobbledegook at its very finest. It says absolutely nothing.

Finally, to completely scare the pants off of you, we learn that the author teaches at the university level. We’re sunk. Buh-bye, California.

Keeley was great on the Parsky commission, but Cal Backwards’ plan is not sound, and while the concon folks started out with great ideas, they compromised on a delegate selection plan that surrenders to the partisan right.

As for compromise, for the past year Democrats have slashed deeply into programs they care about because of total Republican intransigence on revenue. This is worse than compromise, it is 1/3 rule.

No one elected CalBackward’s board to rewrite our constitution (which you may view as a positive attribute). But they do not have the public’s best interest at heart — they are mostly a ruse of reformists with predetermined agendas: protect the bizarrely unfair tax structure that favors big business in ways that no other state would consider, do not allow any substantive modification to Prop 13, and prevent the near-2/3 Democratic majority from actually controlling the state budget.

Our state budget process is seriously broken, and we need a package of serious solutions. CalBack’s plan is designed to look like reform, but it will only worsen our political gridlock.

I’ve spent too much time in sausage factories to buy a pig in a poke.

Yea, they are legislators and good legislators compromise occasionally. Gawd how I wish some of the folks could actually do that once they get into office.

Maybe we should send them all to the Legislature to get all their hard-core positions out of the way, then send them to some commissions to get some public policy done?

I imagine you’ve never visited a sausage factory…

As discussed in detail in my earlier post, the “reforms” proposed by his Republican-dominated group are a give-away to the conservative special interest groups who populate and subsidize this pop-up think tank. Far from solving the state’s budget problems, their plan will reinforce Prop 13’s worst defects and strengthen “1/3 Rule” over revenue, giving the wacko fringe of the extreme conservative wing of the Republican party complete control over the entire budget — because without control of revenue, you don’t control expenditures. And CalForward (I mean, CalBackward) has completely ducked meaningful reform of Prop 13, despite their website’s tacit acknowledgment that it is at the heart of the state’s fiscal turmoil.

I suppose the real problem is that Fred and Bob are, at their hearts, legislators. This process must have felt like old times to them, and out of habit they heeded the responsibility of getting done what can be done, instead of what should be done.

But in CalBackward they aren’t working in a legislature which is representative of California, and the “compromises” which have emerged vary little from what might emerge from your average Chamber of Commerce mixer. (Standing in this crowd, Fred and Bob look a little like Kirk and McCoy at a Klingon Tribunal.)

Thus, Fred and Bob’s participation has become something akin to “green-washing” — put a few Democratic faces out in front of a core Republican plan.

We can continue to respect the men while forgiving the error.