San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom took another step toward a full nanny city on Wednesday when he issued an executive directive mandating healthy eating in San Francisco.  This, after he banned bottled water for city employees (which I agree with on fiscal grounds — bottled water costs money and honestly Hetch Hetchy water is excellent anyway), and ordered composting citywide.

Newsom on Wednesday issued an executive directive he hopes will dramatically change how San Franciscans eat.

All city departments have six months to conduct an audit of unused land – including empty lots, rooftops, windowsills and median strips – that could be turned into community gardens or farms that could benefit residents, either by working at them or purchasing the fresh produce. Food vendors that contract with the city must offer healthy and sustainable food. All vending machines on city property must also offer healthy options, and farmers’ markets must begin accepting food stamps, although some already do.

The mayor will send an ordinance to the Board of Supervisors within two months mandating that all food served in city jails, hospitals, homeless shelters and community centers be healthy.

And effective immediately, no more runs to the doughnut shop before meetings and conferences held by city workers. Instead, city employees must use guidelines created by the Health Department when ordering food for meetings.

Examples include cutting bagels into halves or quarters so people can take smaller portions and serving vegetables instead of potato chips.

“We have an eating and drinking problem in the United States of America,” Newsom said Wednesday. “It’s impacting our health, and it’s impacting our economy.”

Now honestly, this is an honorable initiative.  People do need to eat healthier.  Turning unused land into gardens is an excellent idea.  But just how far does government need to intrude on citizens’ lives by now mandating how and what people eat?  Obesity certainly is an issue in America (I struggle with my weight, too).  But mostly these are personal, lifestyle choices that people make, unless there is a health issue like a thyroid problem. 

California is already a nanny state of the worst kind (and this is coming from someone with genuinely progressive leanings).  The state mandates all kinds of things from limiting cell phone use in cars to proscribing smoking in a car with a child in it.  Again, some of these are excellent ideas.  But for a state that can’t even pass a budget, doesn’t it have better things to do than intrude on people’s choices?

Now, San Francisco wants to worry about how people eat.  President Obama has mentioned it as well, but you haven’t seen him issuing executive orders on this.  The United States is a republic founded on the basis of personal liberty.  We don’t need the government infringing upon that one little step at a time.  Pretty soon Big Brother will indeed be watching.

The attorney general of Massachusetts filed a federal complaint against DOMA yesterday.  They are suing on constitutional grounds, saying that married same-sex couples in Massachusetts are unfairly being denied the same federal benefits that married opposite-sex couples enjoy.

BOSTON — Massachusetts, the first state to legalize gay marriage, sued the U.S. government Wednesday over a federal law that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

The federal Defense of Marriage Act interferes with the right of Massachusetts to define and regulate marriage as it sees fit, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said. The 1996 law denies federal recognition of gay marriage and gives states the right to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states.

Massachusetts is the first state to challenge the federal law. Its lawsuit, filed in federal court in Boston, argues the act “constitutes an overreaching and discriminatory federal law.” It says the approximately 16,000 same-sex couples who have married in Massachusetts since the state began performing gay marriages in 2004 are being unfairly denied federal benefits given to heterosexual couples.

“They are entitled to equal treatment under the laws regardless of whether they are gay or straight,” Coakley said at a news conference.

[snip]

The lawsuit focuses on the section of the law that creates a federal definition of marriage as “a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife.”

Before the law was passed, Coakley said, the federal government recognized that defining marital status was the “exclusive prerogative of the states.” Now, because of the U.S. law’s definition of marriage, same-sex couples are denied access to benefits given to heterosexual married couples, including federal income tax credits, employment benefits, retirement benefits, health insurance coverage and Social Security payments, the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit also argues that the federal law requires the state to violate the constitutional rights of its citizens by treating married heterosexual couples and married same-sex couples differently when determining eligibility for Medicaid benefits and when determining whether the spouse of a veteran can be buried in a Massachusetts veterans’ cemetery.

This is, in my non-lawyer opinion, the line of attack that a successful lawsuit has to take.  It seems to me that DOMA is unconstitutional and it always has been.  It is also, as Emma Ruby-Sachs notes today in the Huffington Post, the conservative argument against DOMA.

But yesterday, the Attorney General of Massachusetts filed a complaint that chiefly argues DOMA’s violation of state’s sovereignty over the definition and regulation of marriage.

The genius of this complaint is that it takes a conservative argument — that liberal states should not be permitted to impose their tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality on the rest of the country — and turns it around to benefit a state that really pioneered gay rights in the U.S.

Even a conservative justice would support the notion that federal encroachment over those few areas where states have sovereign jurisdiction is unconstitutional. In this case, that principle supports, at the very least, limiting the application of DOMA when it affects state programs with federal funding.

If a conservative justice chooses to oppose the argument put forward by Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, then their logic could be used in the future to justify federal enforcement of equal rights on those states that oppose same-sex marriage. If state’s no longer have absolute jurisdiction over marriage, a liberal government can interfere with a conservative state’s policies.

Coakley’s lawsuit will likely be joined with Gill et al. and the two will proceed as the most viable challenge to DOMA (many think that Smelt threw too many punches and doesn’t have the same institutional support as the Massachusetts suits since the lawyers involved were not working closely with Lambda Legal and other LGBT litigation groups with long histories in the gay rights movement).

It also has the support of Senator John Kerry. Kerry, a lawyer by training, argued way back in 1996 in the Senate, that DOMA was unconstitutional.

His reasoning then, that the full faith and credit clause would be threatened by a law that refused to recognize marriage rights potentially given by some states and not all, has not been popular in modern law suits. Perhaps this is because the trend on hot button social issues has been towards state sovereignty and full faith and credit undermines that sovereignty.

Hence the genius of Coakley’s argument.

We can all look forward to the slow, grueling process that is the march to the Supreme Court. And hopefully, by that time, a number of new states will join the same-sex marriage party.

But Coakley’s suit is significant. It is a smart, novel attack on a law that is clearly unconstitutional, but also has the support of a waning, yet still significant portion of the American population.

Hopefully this lawsuit will prevail.  Congress did overstep its bounds when it passed DOMA in 1996.  The law was then, as it is now, discriminatory and wrong.  It has been 13 years.  If Congress can’t find the backbone to repeal DOMA (and DADT), hopefully the courts will.  Perhaps the conservative argument that Massachusetts is making will prevail.

Sarah Palin gave notice to Alaska over the weekend, saying that she would resign her governorship effective July 25.  She also will not seek re-election in 2010.  So just what is she thinking?  No one knows for sure, although many people are trying to figure it out.  I don’t get it myself.

Palin, 45, the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate who has an ardent following among conservatives, had been expected to announce Friday that she would not seek re-election after her term ends in 2010. But, surrounded by her family, she blindsided even Alaska political veterans when she announced in a meandering statement that she will step down July 25 and turn over the reins to Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell.

[snip]

Palin, who has been the target of a series of ethical complaints in Alaska, delivered a rambling and defensive announcement surrounded by her family, and didn’t pinpoint a reason for the decision. She said she would be “taking my fight for Alaska in a new direction.”

“My choice is to take a stand and effect change and not just hit our heads against the wall,” she said. “We know we can effect positive change outside government at this moment in time.”

Palin noted that she had intended to announce she wouldn’t run for a second term, but “I thought about how much fun some governors have as lame ducks … then I thought, that’s what’s wrong.”

“They hit the road, they draw a paycheck, they kind of milk it, and I’m not going to put Alaska through that … the same old politics as usual.

“All I can ask is you trust me with that decision,” Palin said. “I cannot stand here as your governor and allow the millions of dollars and all that time to go to waste, just so I can hold the title of governor.”

Even many of her supporters called quitting her job in midterm an act of political insanity – hardly an argument for a presidential candidate trying to demonstrate the capacity to tackle the nation’s toughest problems. And the timing of the announcement of such a major decision was puzzling – on the start of a three-day holiday when important news tends to get lost.

Though Palin said she had been considering her decision for weeks, state officials told Alaska media they were completely surprised by the announcement.

The move is the latest in a series of headline-making events for Palin and ignited a debate about whether it would extinguish – or fire up – her presidential aspirations.

“That’s the $64,000 question: Is she fed up with politics, or does it put her in a stronger position to run for president?” Whalen said. Voters “may forget if you leave your job, but they don’t forget every time you leave the state and an ethics complaint is filed. Alaska, as much as she loves her job, becomes an enormous burden if she wants to run for other office.”

Palin referred in her announcement to the ethics complaints, which she has dismissed as politically motivated.

It’s an unorthodox move to be sure, if she wants to run for president in 2012.  You would think that retaining the office of governor would give her a “bully pulpit” of sorts.  But she’s giving that up.  But why?  I can’t see that this move helps her politically, even though she remains quite popular with the Republican base.  It looks to me like another indication that she is not ready to be president and that she never will be.  (Incidentally, this also makes McCain look even more irresponsible in picking her to be his running mate.)

There has been some speculation that because her personal legal bills are about $500,000, she needs to get a talk show or write a book or go on the speaking circuit, or some combination of all of those.  Does it give her an opportunity to rebrand herself as someone who is ready to be president?  Maybe.  But I doubt it.

I’m mystified by this move.  Why would she do this?  I really don’t get it.  What do you think?  Is she crazy, or crazy like a fox?

Another July 1 has come and California does not have a budget.  That’s been the case since I moved here in the mid 1990s; in fact that has been the norm for longer than that. 

This time, though, the impasse is particularly bad. 

California’s historic fiscal crisis became even more difficult to resolve today, after the state Senate failed to pass three bills that would have averted an immediate cash crunch.

The bills – which would have made immediate cuts in schools, saved the state additional cash by deferring certain payments to schools and made technical changes in how the state shifts funds from redevelopment agencies to schools – were unable to gain the required two-thirds majority support in the Senate by the midnight deadline. The failure of the bills could push the deficit to more than $27 billion.

Legislators are trying to solve a $24.3 billion deficit, which just got worse by another $3 billion because they missed the deadline.  Now the state will begin to issue IOUs to pay its bills probably as early as tomorrow.

Democratic legislators are trying to deal with that piecemeal, but Governor Schwarzenegger insists that the legislature deal with the entire deficit at once, something that seems to be an impossible task.  Schwarzenegger is also insisting that there be no new taxes on anything and promises to veto anything that passes that contains new taxes.  He is insisting that the legislature not kick the can down the road.  Personally, I think Schwarzenegger is being needlessly hardheaded on this.  There is no pragmatism in California at the moment, just people in entrenched positions, launching occasional forays against the other side’s emplaced machine gun nests.

The legislature is hindered by a requirement that budgets pass with a two-thirds majority, a provision that was enshrined in the state constitution when Proposition 13 passed in 1978.  That measure is still popular in California, largely because people vote (understandably) with their own pocketbooks in mind.  That, and all the mandated spending passed by California’s overly robust referendum system, has hog-tied the legislature.  It is a genuine struggle each year to get the required majority and to keep the budget within constitutional limits.  Because you know that if they don’t, someone will sue.

There is no help from anywhere.  The federal government doesn’t really want to help, although if California makes all the budget cuts it needs to make, it will deepen an already bad recession in California and in the rest of the country.

States across the nation are suffering the effects of lost tax revenue in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. California’s woes are similar and different in kind, played out on a grand scale in a state that boasts the world’s eighth largest economy and a Hollywood star in the lead role. After voters rejected a slew of convoluted budget-balancing measures, the governor has proposed cuts to programs that would make California more like a struggling Third World state than 21st century America: welfare subsistence benefits would end, 1 million poor children would lose health care, college aid for the state’s best and brightest would be phased out, nonviolent prisoners would be released, hundreds of state parks would be shuttered, and thousands of teachers would lose their jobs.

[snip]

This week, however, the Obama Administration said it was not going to do anything to help California right now, believing that the state should try to get its budget mess in order first. There are good reasons for the Treasury not to rush to California’s aid. If it backstops Sacramento, rewarding the state’s bad behavior, it would set an example for other states to follow. A nightmare scenario: the Federal Government backs California’s loans, which leads to a downgrading of the Treasury’s credit rating and the unnerving of the global credit markets. Spooked, the Chinese government, which currently bankrolls a large portion of the U.S. deficit, decides to take its money elsewhere.

Stark news indeed.  California is in shambles, a far cry from Pat Brown era, when the state spent loads of money on freeways, aqueducts, schools, universities that were the best in the world.

So, how did the state get here?  I’ve alluded to that a little above.  Proposition 13 bears much of the blame.  It requires a two-thirds majority in the legislature to pass a budget or to raise taxes.  Then we have other propositions — like Proposition 98 that sets education spending levels — that mandate state spending but doesn’t say how the legislature has to pay for that mandated spending.  It’s a real mess (and I know I’ve over-simplified it).  California’s dream, as Harold Meyerson writes today, is decimated.

In Sacramento, they can hear the chimes at midnight. State legislators and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have been told by State Controller John Chiang that he will be compelled to pay the state’s bills with IOUs starting tomorrow unless they come up with a way to close California’s mammoth $24 billion deficit.

[snip]

But California is a special case simply because it’s so big. Closing California’s budget gap entirely through cutbacks in programs, as Schwarzenegger and the Republicans in the legislature propose, will deepen not only the state’s recession but also the nation’s. Fully 1 in 4 of the nation’s underwater mortgages, for instance, are on California homes, and the effects of the governor’s proposed cuts — which UCLA’s Anderson School of Business estimates will cause 60,000 state employees to lose their jobs — will be to create a new wave of foreclosures and toxic assets on the banks’ books. California accounts for 12 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product and a disproportionate share of the federal government’s revenues (and for every dollar that Californians pay to the feds, they get just 80 cents back in services).

Right-wing ideologues see the crisis as an opportunity to shrink government regardless of the consequences. Schwarzenegger is proposing to end welfare, not just as we know it but altogether, and to throw 1 million children off the rolls of the state’s healthy families program. But the consequences of closing the deficit simply through cutbacks will be felt by more than the poor. Already reeling from $15 billion in cutbacks that the state put through in February, many school districts, including that of Los Angeles, have canceled summer school this year. Scholarships that enable students of modest means to attend California’s fabled university system have been slashed. Most of the state’s parks may have to be closed as well.

The terrible irony in decimating the public sector to save the state is that the California that was the epicenter of the postwar American dream was fundamentally a creation of government. Fighting a Pacific war during World War II compelled the federal government to spend billions on California industry and infrastructure, and the state was the leading beneficiary of Pentagon dollars during the Cold War. As Kevin Starr, California’s leading historian, points out in “Golden Dreams,” his brilliant new history of the state in the 1950s and early ’60s, fully 40 percent of all defense dollars for manufacturing and research in 1959 went to California, anchoring the state’s booming economy in a well-paid workforce that was either unionized or professionalized, and seeding an electronics and high-tech sector that was to blossom in the following decades. Building on that prosperity to create more prosperity, Earl Warren, Goodwin Knight and Pat Brown — two Republicans, one Democrat — invested state dollars in schools, universities, freeways and aqueducts that were the best in the world. The Golden State was never more golden.

Today, its governor seems determined to turn that gold to dross. On Monday, the Democrats in the legislature passed a budget that included cuts of $11 billion, levied a tax on oil companies and tobacco, and raised auto registration fees by $15 per car to keep the state parks from closing. Schwarzenegger reiterated his refusal to raise any taxes or fees and said he would veto the budget.

From a model for far-sighted investments in the future, California has become a state that uninvests in the present and has no vision at all for the future. Proposition 13, enacted by state voters in 1978, effectively blocked its cities and counties from funding their own endeavors, and the Republican minority in the legislature, abetted by Schwarzenegger, has made it all but impossible to invest in the kind of projects that Warren, Knight and Brown undertook. Today’s California visionaries are calling for a constitutional convention to rewrite the plainly dysfunctional rules by which the state governs itself. It is not only Californians but also America that has a stake in their success. A California that decimates itself during recessions drags the rest of the nation down with it.

I agree with the suggestion in the last paragraph of Meyerson’s piece.  It’s time for a constitutional convention in California.  The system of government we have now is not working.  When something doesn’t work for as long as California’s constitution hasn’t worked, it’s time to try something else.  Prop 13 needs to be repealed (as does Prop 8, for that matter).  The people need to stop mandating spending that sounds good but isn’t actually provided for, putting the legislature behind the 8-ball.  The referendum system needs to be completely overhauled.

California needs to dig out of this mess, and will probably require federal help to do it.  But it has to help itself in the long run and enact some sensible political system reforms so that this doesn’t happen again.

UPDATE: Governor Declares State of Emergency

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a fiscal emergency today citing the Legislature’s inability to pass a comprehensive solution to solve the state’s $24.3 billion deficit.

The Republican governor called a legislative special session under Proposition 58, which requires lawmakers to adopt a plan to close the deficit within 45 days.

In addition, the governor signed an executive order forcing 220,000 state workers to take a third furlough day without pay beginning this month.

What good will that do?  The legislature can’t fulfill its constitutional requirements to pass a budget already. 

Barack Obama has been far from perfect on gay rights thus far.  Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell remains the law of the land, as does the Defense of Marriage Act.  Both laws codify overt discrimination against a discrete group of people.  That’s wrong, any way you slice it.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell should be repealed now, without any further delay.  The military brass is out of step with the rest of the country.  They need to get out of the 1950s.  They need to stop discharging service members that we really need, people like Lt. Dan Choi, an Arabic linguist whose trial is today.  People like Lt. Col. Victor Fehrenbach, who is a decorated fighter pilot.  People like Lt. Sandy Tsao.  DADT is asking them to live a lie.  We need these people.  Obama could stop their discharges by signing an executive order.  But he has not.  And we’re bleeding good service members that we urgently need. 

The Obama administration’s defense of the Defense of Marriage Act was especially offensive.  The brief went much further than it needed to.  In fact, it could have been written by someone like James Dobson.  DOMA needs to be repealed now, too.

So President Obama’s record on gay rights has been, shall we say, less than stellar.  Our first African American president has been absent on the biggest civil rights cause of our generation.  He has been talking a good game, as he did yesterday at a reception for gay leaders marking the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, when he said (full remarks here), “We’ve been in office six months now.  I suspect that by the time this administration is over, I think you guys will have pretty good feelings about the Obama administration.”

That remains to be seen.  Obama also promised to get the Matthew Shepard hate crimes bill passed.  He reiterated that he had called on Congress to repeal DOMA and to pass the Domestic Partners Benefits and Obligations Act.  He said that DADT “doesn’t contribute to our national security” but didn’t call for its repeal.

Gays have made a lot of progress with this president.  Obama is the first president who has actually uttered the acronym LGBT in an official setting.  But gay people have been waiting a long time for full, equal rights under the law.    It’s been forty years since Stonewall and still gay rights lag those of other groups.  I appreciate Obama’s words.  But it’s time to follow them up with action. 

It’s time to get gay rights passed in this country.  It’s time to repeal DOMA and DADT (and to stop discharges in the meantime), get ENDA passed, and get the hate crimes bill passed.  Anything less would be a failure for Obama and would be a failure for the country.  A nation that discriminates against a particular group — whether it’s Jews or gays or on some other racial basis — can’t survive in the long term.  Passing full equal rights is the right thing to do.