At first I thought that the headline writer was confused. "California tax reform plan much too bold for Capitol," it said above George Skelton's column today. "Too bold" could maybe have more than one meaning. Surely Skelton wasn't throwing in with the idea that massively shifting the tax burden to the lowest income levels in society was too good an idea. But I think that is, in fact, what he's saying.
"I would sign it immediately" if it were a bill, Schwarzenegger told reporters. "Without any doubt."
Of course, this is a governor who constantly seeks out things new and bold. And the tax proposal was all of that -- much too new and bold for most Capitol denizens, especially those representing special interests.
As Genest told me: "It shouldn't come as any surprise that lobbyists in Sacramento are in favor of maintaining the status quo unless they are confident that the change will serve their interests. That's why they're called 'special interests.' "
Nowhere in Skelton's article does he quote any figures or statistics citing the practical effect of the Parsky Commission's plans. He doesn't mention that, under the plan, taxpayers making over $1 million dollars a year would save $109,000 annually on average, while taxpayers making between $40,000 and $50,000 would save four bucks. He doesn't mention that the proposal would result in a net loss of revenue to the state, causing wider budget deficits. He does manage to mention critiques of the business net receipt tax from the side of business and industry, but offers no critiques from the opposite end, a la Jean Ross' statement that "You could not say, 'We're going to tax child care so we can lower the income tax on millionaires.' But that's what this does." The fact that the BNRT would hit business payrolls and disproportionately tax companies in the knowledge economy rather than the service economy also doesn't make it in. Skelton never mentions that, by taxing all businesses in the state, the BNRT would effectively tax rents.
He just says it's "too bold."
The Parsky Commission was practically designed to shift wealth upward. It should surprise nobody that this is what it ended up doing. That is bold, but not in the way that Skelton means it, I don't think.
He does give voice to where Karen Bass may steer the debate:
Bass was holding her tongue, trying not to express disappointment in the commission. When she first proposed its creation, the speaker envisioned the panel proposing something more practical and simple: reducing the sales tax rate and spreading it to currently untaxed services.
She promised a "thorough and objective public review" of the panel's recommendations.
Good idea, but don't stop there.
"My biggest message to dysfunctional Sacramento is to get something done," Parsky says. "If you've got a better idea, get it done."
There's no question that flattening and broadening the sales tax base is a decent enough idea. Under the constraints of minority rule, it may be the best one lawmakers can get, and it would prove popular if enacted. We'll see if the Parksy Commission report is dumped in favor of that.
Today, our dear Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner (let us all thank Cruz Bustamante for that) released his tax plan. You can grab the PDF here. Apparently Poizner fancies himself a George W. Bush for California, because he plans on cutting taxes with no way to pay for them. But, as we can't deficit spend, officially anyway, I'm not sure how he plans on paying for the cuts.
But the whole plan is riddled with more inaccuracies than an intern's all-nighter project. Except that this is probably the work of a few interns pulling an all-nighter. Just check the graph to the right, and somehow that's plopped down in his PDF presentation on page 5 as if it is supposed to mean something. Yes folks, that is total tax revenues. Not per capita, just bare dollar figures. Shockingly, California has far more tax revenue than every other state and the leading revenue states just happen to be the largest states by population. Now, if anybody who reads this "plan" has half a brain, they'll think, wait a minute, this data is meaningless, what is this guy trying to pull?
Well, something extraordinary as it turns out. Poizner is planning on setting fire to state government in a way that even Arnold would find worrisome. His tax plan simply cuts tax rates down the line. Of course, as is the custom, the rich will get the bulk of this tax cut, thus making the middle class carry more of the burden. The bottom tax bracket, for those making b/w $0 and $7K will be reduced from 1.25% to 0.90%, while the top tax bracket, from about $93K on up goes from 9.55% to 8.37% under Poizner's plan. Now, what Poizner isn't telling you as he continues to hide the ball, but that most Californians know and understand is that people who make less than $7,000 do not actually pay taxes, so this "working class tax cut" is completely illusory. Meanwhile, even the middle rates do not fall as much as the top tax cut.
But we should not even be shocked by this. As we've seen from the Parsky Commission, Republicans are feeling their oats. They have realized that despite defeat after defeat after defeat at the ballot box, they are still winning the war over where this state is heading. They are going to shock doctrine us, whether you like it or not. After all, they have graphs.
The data seems to be mostly from the Pacific Research Institute, a think tank chock full o' rightwing "thinkers." They are the type who sit around plotting various graphs in efforts to confuse the general public. They come up with graphs comparing net migration to the top personal tax rate, as if the two have causal relationship. But, why bother with showing causation when you can point to correlation. hey, look, I found a penny on the street yesterday, and today I got fired. Clearly, when you pick up a penny, you will get fired. It must be true, they're correlated.
But wait there's more to this so-called plan. He also plans on cutting the corporate tax as well as the capital gains tax. All this with no actual plan to pay for any of this. Oh sure, he's going to hire a Chief Innovation Officer, and "streamline" government. But, unless you read "streamline" to mean "destroy the social safety net" like most interested observers of Poizner's career track would do, there is nothing to indicate how this doesn't destroy the state budget even more than it already is.
Oh, and don't forget, he's going to make sure that grieving parents cannot recover for the loss of their children by continuing to tighten the valve on tort deform. Because, you know, the fact that the non-economic damages number hasn't been adjusted for inflation since its inception in the 1970s hasn't already done that.
Ladies and Gentleman, meet the Real Steve Poizner: The Man Who Finishes The Job That Arnold Was Too Much of A Girlie-Man to Finish. He'll go ahead and destroy the social safety net and the state budget once and for all.
We heard last week about outlines of the Parsky Commission report that would radically shift the tax burden in California. We even heard that offshore drilling may have been snuck into the draft at the last minute. Last week, the commission held a public meeting which featured more details, including the intimation that 3% of the population would see half of the tax break under the Parsky plan. They made the public wait for seven hours and then gave one individual a minute to make a comment. Yesterday, the final public meeting was held, and right before it, Jean Ross offered some facts and figures showing how the commission's recommendation would amount to the Latvia-ization of the state of California, with a massive transfer of wealth to the upper classes at the expense of working families.
The biggest winners would be the state's millionaires, who would receive personal income tax breaks averaging $109,000 per year. The biggest losers would be middle-income families who would receive a tiny, if any, reduction in their personal income taxes and who would pay substantially more for goods and services due to the new "value-added" tax the Commission proposes to replace revenues lost due to the tax cuts for the wealthy and repeal of the corporate income tax.
The magnitude of the shift proposed by the Commission is nothing short of stunning. The changes to the personal income tax structure alone would reduce income taxes paid by the poorest 62 percent of California taxpayers by $4 per year, on average, while providing six-figure breaks to the millionaires. The bottom 81 percent of the income distribution - the vast majority of all Californians - would receive 10 percent of the personal income tax cut, while the top 0.2 percent would receive 27 percent of the benefits.
And that's the "good news." The Commission would repeal the corporate income tax and the state's portion of the sales tax and replace it with a new tax on business net receipts - a tax that has never been tried anywhere in the US - that the Commission's own consultant notes would raise prices of goods and services, while exerting downward pressure on wages and benefits [...]
Some might be willing to support these changes if they ended California's persistent budget crises. But again, the Commission's own estimates predict that revenues raised by the new tax system would grow more slowly over time than those raised by the state's current tax system. Thus, the Commission's recommendations would lead to larger, not smaller, budget shortfalls in the future.
At the committee hearing yesterday, commissioners requested an analysis of the impact of the recommendation for taxpayers, and it came out precisely as Ross stated - "The 10 million taxpayers making less than $50,000 would pay $100 million more in taxes while the 7 million taxpayers who make more than $50,000 would get $6.8 billion in tax cuts."
This will not be a consensus document, most of the liberals on the panel won't sign it. And even the news reports today acknowledge that the changes would "largely benefit the wealthy." Clearly the Governor will put his weight behind it, but that's meant nothing in Sacramento for several years. The question is whether the Democratic Legislature would dare to massively reward the rich so nakedly by accepting these recommendations. Because the business community is actually against it, worried about the effect of the net receipts tax, I'd still guess no, but people should be letting their Representatives know that they will not get away with a transparent shift in wealth from the middle class to the super-rich.
CalBuzz points out some correspondence between Bush Ranger Parsky and the rest of the Parsky Commission:
As we first reported late Wednesday, tax reform commission Chairman Gerald Parsky sucker-punched at least some members of his panel by sending them an unexpected, last-minute recommendation to generate "tens of billions of dollars" of new revenue by vastly expanding offshore oil drilling in state waters.
***
The recommendation came as a shock, not only because the offshore issue was only casually discussed during the commission's months of hearings, but also because it deepened the atmosphere of secrecy and sleight-of-hand in which Parsky assembled the agenda for the panel's final, crucial meeting. As a political matter, such an expansion of offshore drilling would also directly conflict with decades of state policy, in which environmental protection of coastal waters and beaches have trumped economic issues, resulting in a long-held moratorium on new leases.
The proposal for more offshore drilling seems to have worked its way onto the commission's plate at least in part at the request of conservative Hoover Institution economist Michael Boskin, who also sits on the board of Exxon Mobil.
How oil drilling got into a so-called tax commission shouldn't be a surprise when there was a faux transparency. The website laid out a slew of emails and written conversations, but apparently Parsky and his cronies were working on something else entirely.
This is not the process that gets to determine whether we will set up oil rigs off of the entirety of our coast line. That is an entirely seperate conversation, and frankly Mr. Parsky, I don't care one iota what you think about that. Not that I really much cared about what you thought about our revenue system either at this point, but this was not your assigned task and frankly none of your business.
It's nice to see that ExxonMobil has its dirty hooves in just about political conversation where it can possibly make a buck. But if ever anybody thought that the Parsky Plan had any credibility as any sort of unbiased scheme, well, that can just about be written off right about now.
A reduction in income taxes across the board, but the reduction will be most beneficial to upper income Californians.
The elimination of the corporation tax
The phasing out of the state portion of the sales tax (5%)
A Business net receipts tax. It is a tax on all revenues less capital expenditures. It has some big loopholes
Arnold wants an up or down vote on this package, and I can tell you pretty much right now that there aren't the votes for this. Business groups are already screaming about it, and you can be assured that the Left won't be particularly happy. Chris Edley, the Dean of Boalt Hall (Berkeley's law school) and John Cogan, a Hoover Fellow, want the Legislature to seriously consider the merits of the plan, and you know, do the job to which they won election by crafting policy. Arnold isn't so into that.
Nonetheless, I can't see how this survives the Legislature.
When business groups began to object to various provisions in the Parsky Commission effort to upend the tax structure in California, including anything that even smelled like an increase (even though the plan had to be revenue-neutral to clear the Legislature), I figured the effort was dead and buried. It appeared that the entire effort was a complete waste of time, and the effort to Latvia-ize the state by shifting the tax burden from the upper class to the lower class had been sniffed out and extinguished. However, the recent secrecy on the part of the commission, after a pledge of transparency, has many wondering if the shock doctrine is alive and well.
The plan is that, just about 24 hours from now - or 11 a.m. Thursday, to be precise - a state commission will consider and potentially adopt a proposal for an entirely new tax system for the state of California.
It would be a radical undertaking, slashing some taxes, eliminating others and establishing a new tax about which no one in California is familiar. No one can say with anything approaching certainty how much it would cost businesses and consumers or how much revenue it would generate to finance state services.
Yet, despite the significance of the task, despite all the unanswered questions and despite the imminence of a decision, as of this writing - midafternoon Tuesday - the details of the proposed new tax plan have not been made available for public review.
A spokeswoman told me a little after 3 p.m. there was still hope that the detailed proposal would be posted on the commission's Web site before the day was out.
The Legislature has made no indication that they would take up whatever plan the Parsky Commission votes out, even after the Governor orders a special session to deal with it. And with both sides of the aisle condemning aspects of the plan, liberals for the tax burden shift, and conservatives for the unknown tax increases that may be part of any deal, I wouldn't call the prospects likely for a Parsky Commission plan to become law. But the secrecy is certainly troubling, as well as the revival of provisions voted down by the people on multiple occasions.
But members of the tax commission are reviving the rainy-day fund idea once again. Most notably, the idea has had some of its strongest support from Democratic-appointed commissioners.
Former Assemblyman Fred Keeley said recently that while many commissioners believe the state can reduce its budget volatility through changes in the tax system, he believes the tax system isn't so much the problem.
"My belief is that volatility of the general fund, to the degree it's a problem, is due to the governor and Legislature with regard to spending," Keeley said. "That can be solved by way of an appropriately designed rainy-day fund or lockbox."
Another Democratic appointee, University of Connecticut law professor Richard D. Pomp, reminded the commission this month that he has long believed the reduction of volatility was a spending issue.
"From the outset, I have argued, and continue to believe, that volatility, which is a feature of every state's tax system, is a spending problem and not a tax problem," Pomp wrote. (That comes awfully close to the oft-used GOP line that California's budget problems are "a spending problem, not a revenue problem.")
I think these Democrats are trying to argue that volatility in the tax structure is a good thing, which it is. But the leap from that to a spending cap doesn't follow. There's a difference between spending wisely in good years and a third-party mechanism that limits the ability to restore chronic budget cuts from bad years, which is what a cap would inevitably do. (A rainy-day fund without a cap would be different, but may end up serving the same purpose.)
I stick with my prediction that the commission is doomed, but it still bears watching.
The California Chamber of Commerce and 33 other business groups have basically stuck a knife in the Parsky Commission with a coalition letter opposing most of the tax reforms proposed. I'm sure they'd still love to see a flat income tax and the elimination of corporate taxes, but since they have basically refused all revenue-raisers in this document, that won't happen.
The coalition doesn't like removing Proposition 13's property tax limits from business property and a proposed new "carbon tax," both of which have been promoted by the tax commission's liberal bloc. But it also is warning about the potentially negative effects of a "net business receipts tax," similar to a European-style value-added tax, that commission chairman Gerald Parsky champions [...]
"The California business community has consistently stated that the solution to California's revenue problems will only come from robust economic growth and job creation," said today's letter to Parsky. "We believe the proposed split roll property tax and the energy tax would be extremely detrimental to California's economy. As for the business net receipts tax, we believe it is risky and inappropriate to move forward with dramatic changes to the tax structure without first fully vetting their impact on California jobs and the economy."
The only way for the Parsky Commission to get an up-or-down vote for its recommendations is by making the package revenue-neutral. The CalChamber document opposes all of the tax hikes while saying nothing about the reductions. California Democrats can be squishy, but not squishy enough to eliminate corporate taxes in exchange for nothing. Sen. Steinberg never agreed to bring the commission recommendations to a vote in the first place. And without an offset, they will never see the light of day.
Arnold Schwarzenegger is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Chamber of Commerce. Even in the unlikely even that the legislature ignores this letter and passes some plan including split-roll or a carbon tax or a business net receipts tax, there's no way the Governor signs it. The Parsky Commission is dead.
And I'm not really shedding a tear for it. Forcing a revenue-neutral standard on how to fix the tax structure inevitably was going to shift the tax burden from the rich, who have the clout to shield themselves from the predations of lawmakers, to the middle and lower classes, who don't. The very structure was flawed, and the reforms sought of a lesser order than being able to properly fund government according to the wishes of the majority.
So we can move on to the next challenge. Calbuzz has a good scene-setter on that, referring to something that Jean Ross mentioned in our Netroots Nation panel last week. California Forward's reform package may include, as a condition of repealing the 2/3 rule for passing a budget (and only the budget), a raising of the threshold to 2/3 for mitigation fees on businesses, which may extend to fees on alcohol, oil production and "anything else that carries a nexus to a public problem." In other words, while the budget would require a majority vote, revenue (which is 1/2 of a budget) would be subject to an even higher standard than it is now, and the legislature would be constrained in their ability to respond to the impact of corporate actions that harm the public good. Actually it could go even further than that:
But Chairman Bob (Hertzberg) insists it would be a mistake to focus only on Sinclair as the key to business support for CF reforms. The only way some of the conservatives and business people on CF would "even consider" allowing 50% to pass the budget is if there's a whole panoply of budget reforms - pay-as-you-go provisions, controls on one-time expenditures, two-year budgeting, performance reviews, sunset provisions AND limits on what can pass with 50% as a "fee," he said.
But will liberals - on CF and in the Legislature - agree to circumscribe their current authority to impost fees with a majority vote? Will they agree that there has to be a "clear nexus" between charges allocated to a polluter or manufacturer of polluty stuff?
As Jean Ross puts it, ever so succinctly, "California Forward?" I concur.
So while we appear to have sidestepped the Parsky Commission (for now), California Backward's set of "reforms" still lurk in the distance.
The 21st Century Commission, aka the Parsky commission aka the tax commission is apparently showing some signs of strain. Fortunately for us, we can see much of it online for ourselves. All written communications are published online here. So you can watch the tension like some sort of dorky voyeur.
The commission is now working on putting together some workshops in order to focus on the VAT-style Business Net Receipts Tax and to possibly look at some sort of fuel tax concept introduced by the liberal leaning members.
The Commission has been granted another extension, but their report is highly desired by the September 20 deadline.
We've been pessimistic about the so-called Parsky commission, whose task it was to reform the tax code. At first, the concept seemed benign enough, a panel to investigate ways to reduce volatility in our revenue. Terriffic. But we became suspect when Gerald Parsky was named chair, and we haven't really felt a whole lot of enthusiasm for the ideas emerging out of the commission. Mostly because they are regressive changes, increasing taxes for the middle class and reducing taxes on the wealthy. Because, you know, it's better to have stability than a sound economy and a growing middle class.
At any rate, the big news today is that the Governor plans on calling a special session for the fall upon completion of the Parsky Commission's assigned task. Now, the problem here is that there may not be one plan. As Dan Walters originally reported, Fred Keeley has introduced the idea of a so-called "Blue Plan" for a more progressive reform of the tax code.
Given the distance between the two sides only recently, it seems unlikely that a) the Commission will be able to produce a unanimous report or that b) that report wouldn't be DOA in the Legislature. As Parsky and the staff at the "21st Century Commission" have outlined, the biggest component of both plans is to merely increase taxes on those making between $20,000-200,000 and to decrease taxes on those making between $200,000 and over. In that large PDF file, under fairness (on page 14) they have the phrase "Reduces Progressivity Somewhat" and "Increases Number of Taxpayers." Because somehow those are fair? Well, let us just say fair is in the eye of the beholder.
There are some other bits and pieces of both plans, but both are odious to any progressive. And a Democratic Legislature, if only given the option of an up or down vote, would be required by their constituencies to vote No.
Now, the Keeley plan was still quite nebulous before, and few details are really out there. But there the problem is the same that we have faced in the past, Republicans are unwilling to vote for anything with an ounce of progressivity. It would be hard to imagine any tax commission dealing with what ultimately needs to be dealt with in this format.
So, in September or October, we'll go through some Kabuki to come up with what we already know: this system is too broken to fix this system.
We've been pretty critical of the so-called 21st Century Commission for a while now. We were skeptical when Bush acolyte Gerald Parsky signed up as chair and rather unsurprised when the commission staff posted a powerpoint slidedeck with their plan (PDF) which would lead to the Latvia-zation of California. In other words, the commission's staff plan shifted the tax burden off those making 100K+ and to lower income earners, in the name of "decreasing volatility." As if decreasing the progressiveness of our already fairly regressive system is the only way to do that, or even a good way.
But, today we get news, via Dan Walters, that former Assemblyman Fred Keeley has a plan to offer up another plan. The so-called "Blue Plan" which apparently has the support of at least one other member, Chris Edley, the Dean of Berkeley's Boalt School of Law.
Keeley and Boalt Hall School of Law Dean Christopher Edley Jr. are drafting the blue plan for presentation to the commission next week in a direct challenge to Parsky, who has been pushing his vision of tax reform very hard. "I don't think you get a consensus product by driving a stake on one side," Keeley said.
As of yet, the details of any "blue plan" are murky with the possibility of a carbon tax and changes to Prop 13 being raised. But the mere existence of an alternative plan, no matter what it entails, is a good sign.
Parsky, as Walters points out, has been pushing extremely hard for his plan of Bush-style tax shifting from the wealthy to the middle class. Until this point, the plan seemed to be steamrolling through the commission without much of a sense of teamwork so much as a sense of inevitability. With the mere concept of an alternative plan, that diminishes.
But, I want to take one more look at the Commission itself. Peruse the member list. On the Legislative side you have
Legislature Appointments
Edward De La Rosa - President of De La Rosa & Co., a leading source of capital for public and private infrastructure projects in California.
Michael Boskin - Republican adviser to the GOP-led Congress and Schwarzenegger
John Cogan - senior fellow at the Hoover Institution
William Hauck - Chair of the Business Roundtable, an organization of CEOs
Becky Morgan - former Republican State Senator from Los Altos Hills (a wealthy Silicon Valley suburb)
Curt Pringle - divisive former Republican Assembly Speaker Curt Pringle of Orange County
The Legislature picked a center-left experts on issues of taxation, the law, and social justice. I won't deny that some of them are fairly liberal, but you also have the CEO of an insurance plan and tax professor in there. The governor's appointment includes two former Republican legislators, one of whom is, shall we say, an outsized personality, and a slew of Bush-minded anti-tax "business" types.
In other words, there was a big ol' rock on this scale. That's not to say that you couldn't get a decent result, it's just that it would be an uphill battle and something of a surprise.
To: (insert fun and in no way dated Communist Party reference here) Comrades Phil Trounstine and Jerry Roberts
From: Dave
I read with interest your dripping-with-contempt response to my criticism of your reports on the Parsky Commission. Actually, 4/5 of the article concerned the Commission itself and not you, but I am reminded of the words of Carly Simon:
You're so vain
You probably think this song is about you
As a regular reader of Calbuzz, I admire your sources, if not your willingness to string an entire article together based on two politicians standing next to one another smiling, as well as an over-emphasis on horse-race politics and narratives. But clearly, you have a bit of an inflated view of your clear-eyed mission of "journalism," and the assumed objectivity that goes with it.
Allow me to be blunt: Calitics has been writing about the Parsky Commission since December of 2008, before there was such a thing as Calbuzz. We have followed up time and again, in particular when two weeks ago, Susan Kennedy tipped the hand of how this commission would go by stating that "Our revenue stream is way too progressive." So it was not exactly some kind of amazing scoop to report on a commission that has open meetings and presents all their material in public, which is why plenty of contemporaneous reports were written, based on the documents posted on the Internet that the Parsky Commission presented in anticipation of their open meeting.
Unlike you, I don't pretend to hide my opinions on the very clear economic and tax policy implications of the Commission's report behind some false veil of objectivity. Most of my comments were directed at the report itself, and the way in which a flat tax would quite obviously shift the burden of taxation to the middle class and the poor; but I couldn't help but notice clear language like...
the impending bankruptcy of state government should be sufficient to show players at every point of the political spectrum not only that sweeping change is needed, but also that everyone will have to compromise to keep California from sinking into the 9th Circle of Hell
...which certainly allows people, in my view, a window into how you determine the best policy, defined as the midpoint between whatever pleases those hateful hippies and the ranters on the right. That may be a nice and quick methodology, but it's anything but rigorous, and I'm pretty sure it's an apt description. After all, wasn't one of you the communications director for Gray Davis, who was not above bold expressions of centrism and a fear of the spectre of "The Left"?
(How did pumping out that daily message for ol' Gray turn out, by the way? What did that guy do after his two successful terms were up? Just curious.)
I mean, I'm very sorry for bringing up the inconvenient fact that so-called "objective" journalists can frame a story in such a way that they put their own thumbs on the ideological scale. You claim that your job is to "ferret out the facts" of the policymakers, you know, like hard-hitting reporting on an email to supporters and what one Republican said about another Republican in a press release, but it's fairly clear from the above-mentioned article that you view flat taxes and eliminating corporate taxes as pretty sensible and down the middle, and it colored your coverage. I should probably just have shut up about it and gone back to my Communist Party self-criticism sessions, which by the way is a hilarious and timely joke. Here's another one: In Soviet Russia, television watches you! You can use that!)
So this notion that I should just say thank you for illuminating a public document seems to me to be a bit too self-regarding, and your lashing out at me for pointing out the not-so-hidden biases in that particular article a bit too "the lady doth protest too much." But of course, I have an infantile disorder.
Which brings us to this criticism about the Barbara Boxer press conference and certain bloggers clapping at the end of it, something of a hobby horse for you folks. I am not going to speak for anyone in the room but myself, but I know quite for certain that I didn't clap, and I know what I asked. See, based on my notes (yes, I took them, just like a real live reporter) I know that I followed up a series of queries about torture (yours was some process question about how the Obama Administration "rolled out" the torture memos released a week before) with a specific question about a resolution before the state party seeking the impeachment of Jay Bybee for his role in authorizing torture, to which she answered "I'm very open to that," reminding those assembled that she voted against Bybee's confirmation as a federal judge. Now, at the time, I was involved in securing thousands of signatures from across the state endorsing this resolution, and when it came before the resolutions committee, I would argue that having Sen. Boxer's agreement that calling for the impeachment of someone who helped authorize torture was a reasonable request actually helped get that resolution passed. In other words, it was a combination of what the netroots community does best - using citizen journalism and activism in tandem to effect progress on progressive issues.
p.s. In the cited post, I used variations on the word "fetish" once, in a 1,400-word article. But it made for a smashing joke about therapists, so points for you!
