Michael Bloomberg

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.

For a man who spent $70 million getting elected mayor of New York (and contemplated dropping $500 million of his own cash on a presidential campaign), billionaire Michael Bloomberg's gift of $250,000 to the redistricting ballot initiative backed by Gov. Schwarzenegger amounts to little more than loose change from the Gracie Mansion sofa (Except it wouldn't be Gracie--Bloomberg doesn't live at the official mayoral residence). But it's a nice endorsement for the initiative campaign and the governor, who needs to portray his redistricting proposal as truly bipartisan. Bloomberg is a former Democrat, former Republican, and current independent (Note to Californians: independent is New Yorkese for "Decline to State"). Democrats are already noting that Bloomberg's own redistricting efforts in New York differed in content from the California initiative.