June 8, 2010

California Propositions

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It’s voting day! For all my California readers, here’s a recap of my recommendations for the five initiatives on today’s ballot:

  1. Seismic retrofits: YES.  This is small and harmless.

  2. Open Primaries: NO. I’m not a fan of letting members of one party select the other party’s candidates.

  3. Fair Elections Act: YES. This is a limited experiment with public financing for a single office. It’s worth a try.

  4. Municipal Power: NO. This is an effort by PG&E to use the ballot box to eliminate its competition. If it passes, you can expect a lot more sleazy initiatives like this.

  5. Auto Insurance: NO. This initiative is funded entirely by Mercury Insurance, which wants to base auto insurance rates on a factor not related to the risk of filing a claim. I think we’re better off maintaining a very bright line that prohibits this.

For more details, see here.

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We've never been very good at being conservative.

And usually, that serves us well in doing the ambitious, hard-hitting journalism that you turn to Mother Jones for. But it also means we can't afford to come up short when it comes to scratching together the funds it takes to keep our team firing on all cylinders, and the truth is, we finished our budgeting cycle on June 30 about $100,000 short of our online goal.

This is no time to come up short. It's time to fight like hell, as our namesake would tell us to do, for a democracy where minority rule cannot impose an extreme agenda, where facts matter, and where accountability has a chance at the polls and in the press. If you value our reporting and you can right now, please help us dig out of the $100,000 hole we're starting our new budgeting cycle in with an always-needed and always-appreciated donation today.

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