Animal Confinement

This San Jose Mercury News story does the best job of any piece I've seen so far in explaining both sides of what promises to be the most talked-about ballot initiative in California this fall: a measure that would limit how farm animals may be confined. Two criticisms you're likely to hear from agricultural interests: 1. egg farmers will have to go cage free or leave the state. And 2. the initiative, if approved, will add to the already skyrocketing cost of food.

Also, here's some Humane Society propaganda on the issue. I pass this on not as an endorsement of your position -- your blogger eats meat and buys eggs without checking where they're from -- but because, as a city slicker, I found it helpful in understanding where the arguments will be in the campaign.

DEPARTMENT OF MOON HOWLING: The Las Vegas Review & Journal takes a long look at one of the country's more important signature firms, National Voter Outreach and its CEO Rick Arnold. I've interviewed Arnold in his Carson City home, and found him to be one of the more thoughtful people in the petition trade, critical of its problems and clear-eyed about its limitations. This story is built heavily around criticism from the liberal/progressive Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, which is quick to lable signature gathering as corrupt (at least in cases where it opposes the cause in question). There is a "shocked, shocked" quality to this criticism. The signature gathering business has plenty of problem workers, many of them poorly trained folks who, for lifestyle reasons, have taken a job that usually pays them in cash. But BISC and other critics invariably propopse to criminalize the process of gathering signatures, as in Oklahoma. In supporting these restrictions, liberals are hurting themselves, by establishing precedents restricting political speech that can be used by their political opponents. And such restrictions don't stop direct democracy. They merely slow it down, adding to the costs (and thus the influence of interest groups) that progressives love to denounce. The more you regulate, the more firms like National Voter Outreach will benefit.

This is according to the Sacramento Bee. Consultants are saying this could be a blockbuster.