Steve Blum's Blog
Thank you, Gentle Reader, for the best Christmas present a writer can wish for: an audience. If you’re reading this on Christmas morning, you are doubly valued and thrice blessed. And you might even be interested in a blog post about the blog. If you aren’t, please forgive me and be assured my usual rants insights typing will resume tomorrow. If I were reading this, I’d just click here and listen to Jimmy Buffet and Linda Ronstadt instead.… More
The plan to split California into three new states won’t be on the November ballot. The California supreme court put the Cal3 initiative on hold Wednesday, while it decides whether or not the proposition meets spec under the California constitution. Opponents claim it is a constitutional “revision”, which needs the concurrence of two-thirds of the California legislature, rather than an “amendment”, which can be put on the ballot by initiative alone.
Arguably, it’s neither. It substitutes a popular vote for the decision making authority of the legislature, as the initiative process is intended to do, and triggers a request to the U.S.… More
The plan for dividing California into three states – dubbed Cal 3 by its proponents – qualified for the November general election this week. Reaction from the political establishment of both major parties generally ranged from I don’t think so to yawn. One exception was state senator Joel Anderson (R – San Diego County) who, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, said he will vote for it and called it “a barometer of the potential unhappiness of the state”.… More
Californians will vote on whether to break up our state into three new ones this November. An petition drive led by Silicon Valley investor Tim Draper gathered enough valid signatures to qualify for the general election ballot, according to the latest count released by the California secretary of state’s office. Draper needed 402,000 valid signatures to automatically qualify on the basis of random sample checking and, so far, 419,000 proved out. A handful of counties still have to report, but it’ll just be icing on the cake.
An initiative that calls for California to be split into three new states appears to have enough signatures to qualify for the November general election. County clerks are reviewing the petitions collected for Tim Draper’s Division of California into Three States initiative and, one by one, reporting back to the secretary of state’s office.
So far, random signature checks are complete in 48 of California’s 58 counties, with a validation rate of 76% – of the 472,000 signatures reviewed, 358,000 passed the random test.… More
We’re one step away from voting on whether to break California up into three states. All that’s standing between the ballot box and Tim Draper’s second try at disrupting California’s comfortable, and largely unaccountable, political class is signature verification by the secretary of state’s office. Earlier this week, he announced that he’s collected twice the number of signatures needed to get it on the ballot.
He’s been here before, collecting 1.3 million signatures for his Six Californias initiative in 2014, only to have too many of them rejected by the secretary of state.… More
What do you do when the public isn’t buying your product? You slap a 50% discount on it, of course. That’s what Tim Draper has done with his Six Californias campaign. In his latest filing with the California attorney general, Draper describes California as “nearly ungovernable” and outlines his new vision for breaking the state up into three parts (h/t to Fred Pilot at the Eldo Telecom blog for the pointer).
His plan splits off a strip of coastal counties, running from Los Angeles County north through Monterey and San Benito counties, and naming it – wait for it – California.… More