Author: SacBee — Opinion

California Attorney General Jerry Brown has belatedly decided he will argue in court that the state’s early-release law should apply prospectively, not retroactively. It’s a little late. Had he responded earlier to requests from county sheriffs and district attorneys to act, Brown could have eliminated a lot of confusion.

Before a single jail inmate was released under the state’s controversial “good time” credit law, several sheriffs and the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office asked the attorney general for guidance. Counties needed answers to basic questions: Did the early-release law apply to jail inmates retroactively – up until the law took effect Jan. 25? Or did it apply only to good behavior by inmates after that date? The attorney general elected not to weigh in.

Dane Gillette, the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division said, “We would not take a position because we could not conclude that one side or the other was the right position.”

Now that early releases applied retroactively have produced an angry backlash from victims’ rights organizations, the attorney general has a firm position: The law should be applied prospectively. How convenient.

County sheriffs and DAs could have used Brown’s input weeks ago. Instead, with no guidance from the state’s chief law enforcement officer, chaos ensued. Different counties interpreted the law differently.

San Benito County Sheriff Curtis Hill, president-elect of the California State Sheriffs’ Association, says that about 60 percent of the state’s 58 counties have done what Sacramento did initially, applied the law retroactively and released thousands of jail inmates early. Under their interpretation, inmates who behaved well behind bars were entitled to have one day of their sentences reduced for every day they had served before the law took effect Jan. 25.

When Sacramento County Sheriff John McGinness applied the early-release law retroactively, he was acting on legal advice from both the county counsel and the Sacramento District Attorney’s Office. He was warned that if he did not release nonviolent inmates eligible for early-release credits, the county risked lawsuits for false imprisonment. If a prisoner eligible for early release got injured while incarcerated, the county would be liable.

McGinness could have done a better job warning local police chiefs about the releases and arranging services for the inmates when they left jail. But given the legal advice he received, he acted reasonably.

In some counties, releases continue. They have largely been halted in Sacramento because Superior Court Judge Loren McMaster, in a novel ruling, said the law’s “good time” credits didn’t apply to jail inmates at all. He clarified that ruling Thursday, saying that county jail inmates could receive credits for time served before Jan. 25 but not after that date. His clarification on his own restraining order only served to muddy the waters of an already murky law.

If Attorney General Jerry Brown really believes that the early-release law should apply prospectively only, he should have told the state’s county sheriffs that before the law took effect. His failure to do so left counties, sheriffs and the public twisting in the wind.

Does the California Assembly have a secret plan for making itself seem more chaotic than it really is?

If you were watching the confirmation hearing for Abel Maldonado on Thursday, it was hard to draw any other conclusion.

Legislators had a simple task – to confirm a moderate Republican senator for the largely meaningless job of lieutenant governor.

It should have been a quick vote. Once it was done, they could have moved on to truly important tasks, such as finding budget solutions and crafting a bipartisan approach to creating jobs.

But not this Assembly.

Partisan and infantile, this Assembly demonstrated Thursday that it was void of leadership even before Speaker Karen Bass passed the torch to incoming Speaker John A. Pérez. Both joined colleagues in abstaining from the first vote on Maldonado.

Then, as a sick Danny Gilmore, R-Hanford, was being driven to Sacramento so he could vote, Pérez and Bass voted against Maldonado’s confirmation, effectively blocking it.

The Senate, to its credit, swiftly confirmed the senator to the post earlier on Thursday. The Senate’s leaders recognized the need not to play political games with the confirmation. To get through this budget year, both chambers will need to maintain a working relationship with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Assembly, alas, would rather beat up on a moderate GOP lawmaker who was crucial to last year’s budget deal.

It may not be over. The Schwarzenegger administration may challenge the rejection in court. The governor’s aides argue that, based on their reading of the constitution, opponents would need to marshal 41 votes to block such a confirmation.

This may produce a lively constitutional battle. Yet it is the last thing this state needs. Democrats and Republicans who waffled and voted against Maldonado need to look at themselves in the mirror and ask: Are you part of the solution in helping California? Or are you part of the problem?

Enough.

I am sick of children being – let’s be candid – tortured here in Sacramento County.

The heartbreaking stories like those in The Bee recently about Amariana Crenshaw don’t just shed a bad light on those directly involved in such a grotesque death.

The appalling deaths of these children disgrace you and they disgrace me.

These are our children. Not in some poetic sense.

When our government uses its blunt power to come into a home and remove children from their parents, you and I assume a terrific moral and spiritual responsibility to do right by these children; a responsibility to do better than the parents we took them from.

As the Book of Exodus commands, “Ye shall not afflict any … fatherless child.”

What happens if we ignore this commandment? God gets really, really mad: “And my wrath shall wax hot, and I will kill you with the sword.”

Yet when, via our government, we take these children from their parents, we treat them as if their lives and deaths were somebody else’s responsibility.

Consider just a few examples: How many Sacramento County children had to die wretchedly, how many Bee editorials had to scream for accountability and action, before the Board of Supervisors was shamed into doing anything other than publicly defending the repeatedly deadly status quo?

State policy is to kick foster children – already abused and neglected by their parents, then shoved into a system the Little Hoover Commission has dubbed “heartless” – out of their placements to live on their own after their 18th birthdays. Living alone on the cold streets, penniless, nighttimes of fear: These are the gifts you and I give our foster children for their 18th birthdays. The meager supports that do exist for former foster children are a mere fraction of what we spend on our biological children when they become young adults.

When the governor last year was forced to line-item $80 million in state costs to balance the budget, did he make 80 cuts of $1 million each? No, he cut this lump sum from child welfare budgets.

Proposition 63 was enacted in part to provide new programs addressing the mental health needs of “transition age youth.” No group of transition age youth has worse mental health than abused kids kicked to the streets after their 18th birthdays: Their rates of post-traumatic stress disorder exceed those of combat veterans. (Reading what happened to Amariana Crenshaw, does this surprise you?)

So, surely, the initiative with billions of dollars in its reserve is ambitiously offering desperately needed new mental health programs to our own youth forced into homelessness, right? Guess again. In a recent study by our group, the Children’s Advocacy Institute of the University of San Diego School of Law, 26 counties got an F on identifying the needs of these children and helping them.

The one champion these children are supposed to have as they move through our underfunded, secretive system is their court-appointed dependency lawyer. But the number of child clients these dedicated professionals are forced to represent is preposterous. Sometimes it is nearly twice what the Judicial Council itself says is the most these lawyers can shoulder, even while millions are spent building new courthouses.

These lawyers sometimes barely get the chance to meet their foster kid-clients. They often don’t have the time to enforce orders for them to visit their brothers, sisters, or grandmothers. Everyone in the know knows this is a travesty.

The whole system depends on social workers. However, these public servants scramble to separate fact from fiction in a life-or-death task laboring under caseloads that are up to twice what they are supposed to be. If your boss came into your cubicle today and announced that you had to work a second full-time job, would he be reasonable in assuming that you could do either job well? In every hall of power, the needs of these – your children – whether it be funding or accountability are too often ranked last, with predictably horrible consequences.

Here’s why: There are only about 80,000 of these kids, they can’t vote, they don’t live in wealthy areas, they can’t show up at obscure government meetings to plead their case, most everything that happens to them happens in secret, and – here is the kicker – no official suffers any consequences by placing them last.

Which brings us back to enough being enough. I am not a religious scholar but I do not think God’s commandments can be delegated.

Our children will continue to die until some courageous official of uncommon faith or conscience simply decides to put these children on top of their priority list, saying, “Whatever money we have, this gets fixed first.” And fatherless children will continue to be horrifically afflicted so long as communities of faith and individuals of conviction read about the anguish of little girls like Amariana Crenshaw, and decide, on purpose, to spend their time, treasure and passion on some other cause.

When a pet-related bill is up for a vote in the Capitol, the hallways are jammed with voters; the e-mails and calls to member offices are countless. But the hallways are empty and the phone stays silent when it comes to finally ending the afflictions of children like Amariana Crenshaw.

Think about that; pray on that, and I bet you won’t sleep well tonight.

“We have an agreement until 2012 that Russia will be responsible for this,” says Anatoly Perminov, head of the Russian space agency, about ferrying astronauts from other countries into low-Earth orbit. “But after that? Excuse me, but the prices should be absolutely different then!” The Russians may be new at capitalism, but they know how it works.

When you have a monopoly, you charge monopoly prices. Within months, Russia will have a monopoly on rides into space.

By the end of this year, there will be no shuttle, no U.S. manned space program, no way for us to get into space. We’re not talking about Mars or the moon here. We’re talking about low-Earth orbit, which the U.S. has dominated for nearly half a century and from which it is now retiring with nary a whimper.

Our absence from low-Earth orbit was meant to last a few years, the interval between the retirement of the fatally fragile space shuttle and its replacement with the Constellation program (Ares booster, Orion capsule, Altair lunar lander) to take astronauts more cheaply and safely back to space.

But the Obama 2011 budget kills Constellation. Instead, we shall have nothing. For the first time since John Glenn flew in 1962, the U.S. will have no access of its own for humans into space – and no prospect of getting there in the foreseeable future.

Of course, the administration presents the abdication as a great leap forward: Launching humans will now be turned over to the private sector, while NASA’s efforts will be directed toward landing on Mars.

This is nonsense. It would be swell for private companies to take over launching astronauts. But they cannot do it. It’s too expensive.

It’s too experimental. And the safety standards for actually getting people up and down reliably are just unreachably high.

Sure, decades from now there will be a robust private space-travel industry. But that is a long time. In the interim, space will be owned by Russia and then China. The president waxes seriously nationalist at the thought of China or India surpassing us in speculative “clean energy.” Yet he is quite prepared to gratuitously give up our spectacular lead in human space exploration.

As for Mars, more nonsense. Mars is just too far away. And how do you get there without the steppingstones of Ares and Orion? If we can’t afford an Ares rocket to get us into orbit and to the moon, how long will it take to develop a revolutionary new propulsion system that will take us not a quarter-million miles but 35 million miles? To say nothing of the effects of long-term weightlessness, of long-term cosmic ray exposure, and of the intolerable risk to astronaut safety involved in any Mars trip – six months of contingencies versus three days for a moon trip.

Of course, the whole Mars project as substitute for the moon is simply a ruse. It’s like the classic bait-and-switch for high-tech military spending: Kill the doable in the name of some distant sophisticated alternative, which either never gets developed or is simply killed later in the name of yet another, even more sophisticated alternative of the further future. A classic example is the B-1 bomber, which was canceled in the 1970s in favor of the over-the-horizon B-2 Stealth bomber, which was then killed in the 1990s after a production run of only 21 (instead of 132) in the name of post-Cold War obsolescence.

Moreover, there is the question of seriousness. When John F. Kennedy pledged to go to the moon, he meant it. He had an intense personal commitment to the enterprise. He delivered speeches remembered to this day. He dedicated astronomical sums to make it happen.

At the peak of the Apollo program, NASA was consuming almost 4 percent of the federal budget, which in terms of the 2011 budget is about $150 billion. Today the manned space program will die for want of $3 billion a year – one-three-hundredth of last year’s stimulus package with its endless make-work projects that will leave not a trace on the national consciousness.

As for President Obama’s commitment to beyond-lunar space: Has he given a single speech, devoted an iota of political capital to it? Obama’s NASA budget perfectly captures the difference in spirit between Kennedy’s liberalism and Obama’s. Kennedy’s was an expansive, bold, outward-looking summons. Obama’s is a constricted inward-looking call to retreat.

Fifty years ago, Kennedy opened the New Frontier. Obama has just shut it.

Much time and many volumes have been devoted to Freud’s famous question – What do women want? – with little commensurate attention to the male counterpart.

What do men want? The simple answer is well-known, but a more nuanced answer has presented itself the past several days during Snowmageddon.

Shovels. Men want shovels, the bigger the better.

No sooner had the first flakes begun falling in this crippling winter smackdown than the attendant quiet was interrupted by the scrape of metal against brick.

There was Craig, festooned in winter-defiant red jacket, battling snow with his Great Big Snow Shovel. Barely a donut’s dusting had yet settled on the sidewalk, but one can never get started too soon in the battle against accumulations to come.

Lest I be accused of sexist stereotyping, let me tweak the record to reflect that many women were also out clearing sidewalks and unearthing cars no longer identifiable as such. But most women do these things because they must, while men apparently can’t wait to do them.

Since the blizzards began, the shovel has become not just a tool of necessity, but a symbol of purpose and meaning, about whose absence the usual existential lament is more acute in a city that lives so much in its head.

This is the axis of wonkery, after all, where men (and women) spend most of their waking hours in a seated position, staring at a computer screen or talking by phone. Interruptions to these mostly mental rigors involve other seated endeavors, such as the power breakfast and lunch, or the ever-popular drinks-and-dinner duet. Whatever ambulation is required in between is hardly enough to satisfy the muscular memories of our tranquilized DNA.

Oh, we “work out.” Gym memberships are as common as Metro cards, and personal trainers nearly outnumber cab drivers. Washington has a disproportionate number of triathletes, which is testament both to Washingtonians’ principal source of animation – stress – and to the city’s miles of friendly running and biking paths.

But purpose-driven exercise is of a different order than shoveling snow. One is a to-do item on the calendar of obsessive-compulsives; the other is a taunt from Nature, a call to survival to bestir all those little lizard brains in repose. Man is never happier than when he is called to action, in other words. That is to say, when he is needed.

Much of today’s cultural angst can be plotted around that simple observation. We’ve gone to great strides to prove how unnecessary men are. Maureen Dowd even wrote a book about it, “Are Men Necessary?” to which, just incidentally, I responded with another title, “Save the Males.” Women can’t be blamed for wanting to become independent and self-sufficient, but smart ones have done so without diminishing the males whose shoulders they might prefer on imperfect days. Add to the cultural shifts our recent economic woes, which have left more men than women without jobs, and men are all the more riveted by opportunities to be useful.

Craig, though a gainfully employed USA Today columnist, further volunteered to shake the snow from garden trees bent double from the weight of crushing snow. My son, not to be outdone, grabbed a small garden trowel and hacked at the ice on my lethally steep steps.

Neither male is seeking feminine favor, it should go without saying in the case of my offspring. As for Craig, he’s been happy the past 25 years with Jack, who, though he pleads a bad back, cooks a mean stroganoff, from which I have benefited twice since the snows began.

Doubtless, such displays of manliness – which in my view includes feeding the hungry – are, like the weather, passing divertissements.

And these jottings but a wee contribution to the annals of gender study. But if one should ever stop pondering the malaise of modern woman long enough to consider what men might want, the answer is obvious to any except, perhaps, the U.S. Congress.

Give a man a job, and he’ll clear a path to your door.

Sue Greenwald is a Davis City Council member.

Re “Davis mayor hits road after council spat” (Our Region, Jan. 31): At a recent Davis City Council meeting, I overreacted when our mayor incorrectly denied that I had tried to reform an unusual and expensive employee benefit. For doing so, I profoundly apologize.

Since 2005, I have been waging a frustrating, losing battle to keep the city’s labor costs from outstripping revenues, and to deal with the city’s unfunded health and pension liabilities. My husband is a public employee, and so was my father. I believe public employees deserve to be fairly compensated. But unless reasonable reform is taken, the system will collapse.

Benefits in Davis exceed those of comparable state and university workers, and our firefighter costs are unsustainable. I had fought to moderate our previous contract with firefighters that raised salaries by 36 percent over four years, resulting in total compensation costs exceeding $140,000 plus overtime for every firefighter, except a few new recruits.

I fought a losing battle against enhanced early retirement benefits for our non-public-safety workers, warning that this benefit was unsustainable and irreversible, and would ultimately result in a two-tiered system where younger workers would receive lower benefits in order to fund higher benefits of current workers.

As early as 2004, I explained that our budget was being balanced by virtue of large property tax revenue increases that could not continue.

Today, we face a looming budget crisis. Yet our recent management contract requires few furlough days, and the city has not undertaken necessary structural reforms. For example, the city allows each employee to take home an additional $17,800 every year if he or she has a spouse with health insurance, although slightly less for firefighters. This “cash-out” costs the city about $4 million annually.

I proposed reducing this unusual and expensive provision by 75 percent, putting the savings into a fund to pay down our extraordinarily high unfunded retiree health liability, which will hit home in about eight years. I even lost this battle. After contemplation, I realized I had not been angry because my colleague wrongly claimed that I had not tried to lower the $17,800-per-year health insurance cash-out provision. In hindsight, I should not have raised the topic that evening, and I was overly harsh. I sincerely apologize to her.

I realize that I was not really reacting to what she said; rather I was expressing general frustration arising from years of fighting unwise decisions that have led to our current fiscal plight.

Joey Jones

Another day, another Sacramento arena plan.

So far, we have: rebuild at Arco, build at the railyard, some sort of land shuffle that makes one dizzy trying to remember which cup the pea is hidden under, and, for all I know, proposals to build on the planet Naboo or the floating island in “Avatar.”

Local politicians, team owners, NBA officials and developers are vocal in their support for this plan or that. Fans will doubtless make their views known.

Only one constituency has yet to be heard from.

Most residents of Sacramento County do not regularly attend Kings games. Some don’t go for economic reasons. With tickets running from $10 each for the “nosebleed seats” to $165 for a single game, and far more for a luxury box seat, many of our residents simply can’t afford to go. Others, like me, aren’t basketball fans. Just as some people love Brussels sprouts and some don’t, we don’t object to basketball; we just like other things more.

If you were to add up the residents who, for one reason or another, don’t often go to the games, we outnumber those who do – local politicians, developers, players, team owners, and NBA officials put together. What do we want from a new arena? My ambitions for a new arena are few. I want it to use not one taxpayer dollar. Not one grant, loan, tax waiver. I want it to pay its own way.

I’m not alone in this. Voters, including Kings fans, have soundly rejected previous proposals to invest tax dollars in a new arena.

Studies into the economic benefits of a sports arena to a city are mixed. Once you factor in what it costs – the economic incentives offered to get the team owners and builders to put up the arena, including taxes waived and outright loans – it’s debatable how long it takes a city to see any profit from an arena.

Compared with other ways of spending tax money, arenas may not provide much more new income – much of it is money that just moves around.

The person from Elk Grove who buys a Kings season ticket instead of, say, going to movies and restaurants more often, isn’t creating more local spending – she’s just putting it in one pocket instead of another.

Building anything is a business proposal. If it’s a good one, those who wish to build it should have no trouble finding funding without taxpayer contributions. So that’s what I want from it … unless I can get something else I want, something worth my investment.

Asked tough questions about what financial benefit a city will derive, supporters often hide behind phrases like “prestige” and “world-class city.”

Many things make a “world-class city.” Among those, as we’ve seen all too recently, are provisions to care for citizens in the event of a disaster. We’ve been reminded by the Army Corps of Engineers that our county sits in a floodplain. We aren’t all that far from earthquake fault lines. Where is our world-class emergency shelter?

If planners were to learn from the lessons of Katrina and Haiti, and work to design an arena not just as an expensive place for well-paid athletes to display their talents and wealthy executives to court each other, but as a durable, thoughtfully designed shelter for residents displaced by a disaster, I would enthusiastically support the building of a new arena.

This issue should drive the location debate. Some locations will be up to their giant billboards in water if the levees fail. Where does the Army Corps of Engineers think it should be built?

Federal dollars might be available to support the building of a complex that could provide shelter, with safe spaces for people to sleep, to shower, to survive, with places where those with RVs can park, making more beds available for those who don’t, and space where pets could be kenneled so residents don’t face watching beloved pets perish while they survive (reducing the number of those who don’t comply with evacuation orders, putting residents and emergency workers in peril).

Show me how this new facility will be built not just with luxury box seat sales in mind but also to give me and my neighbors peace of mind when we’re watching the rivers rise, and you’ve sold me on spending some of my tax dollars for a new arena.

The word “multipurpose” has been kicked around as arena plans float in the air like so many dandelion seeds. It’s nice if the place also has shopping, and the arena can host “Garbage Trucks on Ice” as well as basketball. But if you want real grass-roots support for a new arena, make it truly multipurpose.

We live between the rivers and the fault lines, and who wants to have to drive to the Houston Astrodome if the worst happens? Voters who aren’t interested in paying for an arena they may not visit might be willing to invest in the insurance that a truly well-designed arena could provide. That kind of farsighted intelligence would mark this region as truly world-class.

Mayor Kevin Johnson is getting closer to getting it right on his strong-mayor plan.

In a welcome moment of humility and introspection, the mayor on Tuesday allowed that “in hindsight” he could have been more diplomatic in drawing the City Council behind him on a plan to vastly expand the mayor’s power in Sacramento.

He assumed “full responsibility” for the issue becoming so divisive, and says he has listened to colleagues and critics to put together a collaborative proposal.

It would have served him, and the city, much better if he had taken this approach earlier. He could have done so before attempting a ballot initiative after sweeping into office in 2008.

Yet what is done is done. Now the council needs to meet him halfway. Johnson is right about the overarching issue: Cities nationwide have shown that, with stronger authority in the mayor’s office and the right leader, they can tackle festering problems of crime, schools and economic development.

Right now, in Sacramento, neither the city manager nor elected leaders are accountable for the inertia.

Like the council, the mayor should be willing to compromise. He is urging the council to fast-track his plan on to the June 8 ballot, which would force a vote by Feb. 23 – too ambitious a timetable for such momentous changes. Johnson has not made a convincing case why the package can’t wait until November.

The Executive Mayor Version 2.0 he floated Tuesday would vest less power in the mayor than the previous version, yet it would still be a major change.

It calls for letting the mayor veto council actions, submit a budget, and hire and fire the city manager, the assistant city managers and department heads – some 20 top officials in all, compared with hundreds in the initial plan. The council could override vetoes with a two-thirds vote, would get an independent analyst to vet the mayor’s budget, yet would still control the city attorney, clerk, and treasurer.

The mayor is also suggesting, but is not wedded to, term limits for the mayor and council members. He has also joined a call for an independent ethics commission that would investigate allegations of misdeeds within city government. And he proposes to have the entire initiative automatically expire – in eight to 10 years – unless voters make it permanent.

The mayor argues that waiting until November would allow special interests to water down a plan that, at least in part, has been debated for more than a year. Perhaps so, but if the mayor were to rally the council behind his change, it could blunt opposition.

The question now is whether council members will be receptive or vindictive. Sandy Sheedy said Tuesday the city has strong-mayor fatigue. “We just need to let it go,” she said, arguing that the council needs to focus on the budget and other more urgent matters.

That would be a mistake. Johnson and his allies have sparked a needed conversation on mayoral authority, and Sheedy and others should be willing to listen and talk.

If it can put aside personality conflicts, this council could do what others have done nationwide: Find a system of governance that better serves the people of this city.

How much does Phil McNally love 3-D? So much that he legally listed his name on his British driver’s license, and later on his Social Security card and American license, as “Phil Captain III D McNally.”

Captain 3-D, a 42-year-old Northern Ireland native, is also known as the resident “hurl-o-meter” at DreamWorks, the guy who goes through every frame to adjust the amount of depth, dial the intensity up or down, and fix the right-eye/left-eye camera settings so that moviegoers can enjoy dragons skydiving past them without having to turn their popcorn bags into motion-sickness bags.

“I am certain that it is not good to be in a business in which the result of what you do is to make people hurl,” says Jeffrey Katzenberg, the CEO of DreamWorks Animation.

Because 3-D gels in the brain, the Captain spends his time seeking an equipoise where objects can fly around without making you dizzy – a synchronicity that has a technical name that sounds like a spy thriller: “the zero parallax setting.”

As we realized watching James Cameron’s “Avatar” explode into the highest-grossing film of all time, 3-D technology has come a long way since it was the butt of jokes on “I Love Lucy” and a gimmick with polarized glasses in the ’50s horror classic “House of Wax.”

I had coffee with Katzenberg in Los Angeles recently because after seeing “The Polar Express” in an Imax theater, he has emerged as one of his industry’s biggest 3-D boosters, even when it meant rooting for Cameron’s blockbuster for another studio.

He knows that a 3-D revolution would be great for his business by spurring people to desert their home entertainment centers and actually go into theaters. It’s rare in this economy, he notes, for people to opt for “the more expensive, higher-end experience first.” Echoing the King of the World, Captain 3-D observes that “the struggle of movies has always been to transport viewers to a virtual world.” Directors simply have to get past their denial.

“They’ve spent their whole lives eliminating 3-D to make theatrical 2-D,” he said, “and now they’ve got to go from real-life 3-D into theatrical 3-D.”

Katzenberg says that “if you look at the history of film, there have now been three great revolutions. The first was silent to talkies. The second was black-and-white to color, 70 years ago. And this is the third great revolution, a quantum leap. We’re at the top of the waterfall with 3-D. And this is going to cascade down into virtually every facet of our lives where we are encountering video imagery or even photography.”

The 3-D market is popping. Studios are fighting over 3-D theater space and are well aware that the handful of new 3-D movies made in the last year represented a disproportionate chunk of the box office. Burberry is planning to live-stream a catwalk from London in 3-D. ESPN and Discovery Channel both plan on beaming 3-D into homes. Even the porn industry is nuzzling the new technology.

Katzenberg envisions a world where you can process so many pixels into space that we’ll all be watching 3-D TVs (without glasses in 10 to 20 years) and seeing every big-scale movie – not to mention every poster or painting you walk by on a wall – in 3-D.

Even Sandra Bullock comedies or dramas like “The Godfather”? “Absolutely,” he replied.

But both Katzenberg and the Captain concede that some movies may be too action-packed or intense – yes, they’re talking about you, Michael Bay and Martin Scorsese – to be experienced in 3-D because, as McNally says, “carrying that much data into the brain is not an enjoyable situation.”

Like his boss, the Captain thinks we are on the cusp of being immersed in a virtual world akin to lucid dreaming or the “Star Trek” holodeck, “where you start with a blank room and you are transported to a whole world of all the senses.”

Just as we had to be dragged into acknowledging that sound and color made movies more realistic, now we must get accustomed to films where, with apologies to a colleague, the world is not flat.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger regularly asks that Californians “trust” him.

Two years ago this month, the governor promised that if voters approved compacts authorizing significant expansion of four Indian-owned casinos in Southern California, the tribes would pay the state “hundreds of millions of dollars” annually.

He made the promise in California’s official voter pamphlet, and declared that the state would reap “billions in the years ahead to help pay for public safety, education, and other services.”

Tribes that benefited from the deals spent $82 million on their campaign. Voters approved the deals, as they have done repeatedly when Indian gambling goes before them.

Two years later, as the state is mired in a budget crisis, the public ought to be able to find out how many “hundreds of millions” have been delivered to state coffers. The question is timely now that the Morongo Band of Mission Indians is seeking the right to operate Internet poker in exchange for payments to the state.

Morongo is one of the four tribes whose compacts voters ratified in 2008. The deal authorizes Morongo to operate 7,500 lucrative slot machines, up from its past cap of 2,000.

So how much have the four tribes paid the state since the 2008 vote? The California Gambling Control Commission says the information is not public.

The Schwarzenegger-negotiated compacts exempt information that tribes provide to the state from disclosure under the California Public Records Act. As a result, the amounts that individual tribes pay to the state is secret.

That exemption is bad enough. But surely the public is entitled to know what the aggregate amount is that the four tribes have paid into the state coffers – especially given that the governor told voters in the official voter handbook that the deals would deliver “hundreds of millions” a year.

Schwarzenegger asks us to “trust” him. We rather follow the advice of another governor, Ronald Reagan:

Trust but verify.

Political speculation swirls. Meg Whitman, billionaire former eBay CEO and leading candidate for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in California, supposedly prefers not to run in tandem with Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, who seeks the Republican Senate nomination to run against three-term Democrat Barbara Boxer.

Fiorina, who advised John McCain’s presidential campaign, was mentioned as his possible running mate. Whitman supposedly thinks two female former tech tycoons on the ticket would be one too many.

Furthermore, Whitman supposedly harbors national ambitions, perhaps as 2012 vice presidential running mate with Mitt Romney, her business mentor and current supporter. If in 2012 Gov. Whitman is wallowing in California’s multiplying disasters, she might not want Fiorina in Washington surrounded by television cameras and unencumbered by executive responsibilities.

So Whitman supposedly persuaded a rival for the gubernatorial nomination – Tom Campbell, a former congressman of large talents but slender means – to switch to the Senate race, leaving her opposed only by Steve Poizner, another rich refugee from Silicon Valley. This may have been a bit too clever, because Poizner can now make this a binary choice: Who is most conservative? Campbell leads Fiorina 30 to 25 in the Field Poll, with 39 percent undecided. A third candidate, Chuck DeVore, a state assemblyman from Orange County, had just 6 percent, but might be the nominee.

California’s electorate is about 45 percent Democratic, 31 percent Republican, 20 percent “decline to state” and about 5 percent affiliated with minor parties. The June primary will be open to Republicans and “decline to states,” and probably about 15 percent of those unaffiliated voters who will participate in the primary will request Republican ballots.

So, incandescent conservatives among California’s 5.2 million Republicans are apt to determine the Senate nominee. The most conservative candidate is DeVore, 47, an aerospace executive and lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve.

Last year, Campbell supported Proposition 1A, which would have extended for two years the largest state tax increase in U.S. history. This lost 2-to-1; it lost in every county, even San Francisco.

Campbell also favored increasing the gas tax by 32 cents. Fiorina has cited the “cap-and-trade” legislation of Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., as praiseworthy bipartisanship. DeVore has no such deviations from conservative orthodoxy.

No pro-life candidate has won statewide since 1998 (for secretary of state). A contributor who has been supporting California Republicans since Richard Nixon in the 1960s recently told DeVore, who is pro-life, that social issues should be peripheral. DeVore replied that when the GOP was born in the 1850s, it resembled the Whig Party except for a large social issue – slavery, the practice of allowing some people to choose the status of other people. DeVore thinks abortion involves the same practice.

Boxer supports an “absolute right” to abortion – public funding, partial-birth abortions, no requirement of parental notification, all positions opposed by majorities. But because of California’s parlous fiscal condition and other emergencies – a water shortage, for example – social issues will, DeVore thinks, lose some saliency.

Boxer is arguably the most liberal senator and her job approval is under 50 percent. DeVore thinks voters generally are biased against someone seeking a fourth term – California has had only three four-term senators – if there is a credible opponent.

Furthermore, DeVore believes some ballot initiatives this November might help him. If there is another vote on gay marriage, that could energize conservatives. And a referendum on “paycheck protection” (requiring unions to seek members’ permission to spend dues on political activities) would cause labor to spend many millions that would thus be unavailable for the Senate contest.

When addressing Tea Party audiences, DeVore asks how many of his listeners have ever been politically active before. Only about 10 percent raise their hands. Conservatives everywhere were dispirited by the Bush administration; California conservatives are doubly demoralized as the failed Schwarzenegger experiment expires. Politics is supposed to be fun and for California conservatives, voting for DeVore would be the first fun in many a moon.

Would it be futile? California has not elected a Republican senator since 1988 (Pete Wilson). Massachusetts, however, had not elected one since 1972.

Meeting with The Bee’s editorial board on Tuesday, Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg acknowledged that the state is limited in its ability to stimulate new jobs.

Unlike the federal government, the state can’t print money (although it can print IOUs). Nor can the state, facing a deficit of $20 billion, launch its own public infrastructure program on the scale of the 1930s Works Progress Administration.

Yet Steinberg, being an astute politician, knows that jobs are the order of the day. Lawmakers of all stripes will be judged this year on what they’ve done or attempted to do to reduce unemployment, currently at 12.4 percent. And so Steinberg and Senate Democrats have a 27-bill package he calls “A Plan for 140,000 Jobs.”

Part of Steinberg’s plan is to pass authorizations that would allow the state to tap into federal funds for high-speed rail, school construction, local roads and other projects. He also sees opportunities for reappropriating bond funds to stimulate housing construction, expand work-force training and improve energy efficiency at public schools.

Some of these proposals may run into opposition from groups that supported the original bonds, but they are worth pursuing.

Other parts of Steinberg’s plan are more spotty. On Tuesday, he touted an alternative to the governor’s plan on ending the sales tax on gasoline, and replacing it, or part of it, with an excise tax on gasoline. Steinberg’s alternative, he says, would help transit agencies that the governor has stiffed. It sounds promising, but more details are needed.

There’s also the question of whether the proposal would actually produce 140,000 new jobs, or save them from being lost. After some questioning, Steinberg conceded it would be a bit of both.

You can quibble all you want with the numbers, but the bigger question is: Is this proposal ambitious enough? California has lost 1 million jobs since 2007, and it’s still not clear that the worst of the recession is behind us. Stronger medicine is needed.

Steinberg has insisted that Democrats will not repeal labor laws and environmental protections to stimulate the economy, as some Republicans are seeking to do.

It’s an admirable stance, but it sidesteps the question of whether some if these laws are in need of minor modification. The California Environmental Quality Act, as this page has noted, has been abused by non-environmental interests to stall hospital expansions and energy plants. Meal break requirements protect workers in sweatshops, but hurt various small businesses.

Steinberg’s jobs plan shows promise. But it would be bolder if extended to some laws that Democrats have largely refused to touch.

The new era of Democratic bipartisanship, like cut flowers in a vase, wilted in less than a week.

During his question time at the House Republican retreat, President Barack Obama elevated congressman and budget expert Paul Ryan as a “sincere guy” whose budget blueprint – which, according to the Congressional Budget Office, eventually achieves a balanced budget – has “some ideas in there that I would agree with.”

Days later, Democratic legislators held a conference call to lambaste the Wisconsin Republican’s plan as a vicious, voucherizing, privatizing assault on Social Security, Medicare and every non-millionaire American. Progressive advocacy groups and liberal bloggers joined the jeering in practiced harmony.

The attack “came out of the Democratic National Committee, and that is the White House,” Ryan told me, sounding both disappointed and unsurprised. On the deficit, Obama’s outreach to Republicans has been a ploy, which is to say, a deception. Once again, a president so impressed by his own idealism has become the nation’s main manufacturer of public cynicism.

To Ryan, the motivations of Democratic leaders are transparent. “They had an ugly week of budget news. They are precipitating a debt crisis, with deficits that get up to 85 percent of GDP and never get to a sustainable level. They are flirting with economic disaster.” So they are attempting some “misdirection” – calling attention to Ryan’s two-year-old budget road map, which proposes difficult entitlement reforms. When all else fails, change the subject to Republican heartlessness.

From a political perspective, Democratic leaders are right to single out Ryan for unkind attention. He is among their greatest long-term threats. He possesses the appeal of a young Jack Kemp (for whom both Ryan and I once worked). Like Kemp, Ryan is aggressively likable, crackling with ideas and shockingly sincere.

But unlike Kemp – who didn’t give a rip for deficits, being focused exclusively on economic growth – Ryan is the cheerful prophet of deficit doom. “For the first generation of supply-siders,” he explains, “the fiscal balance sheet was not as bad. The second generation of supply-siders needs to be just as concerned about debt and deficits. They are the greatest threats to economic growth today.”

Fiscal Obamaism is not just a temporary, Keynesian, countercyclical spike in spending; it is deficits to infinity and beyond. “It is the interest that kills you,” Ryan says. In a few weeks, he expects the CBO to report that, in the 10th year of Obama’s budget, the federal government will “spend nearly a trillion dollars a year, just on interest! This traps us as a country. Inflation will wipe out savings and hurt people on fixed incomes. A plunging dollar will make goods more expensive. High tax rates will undermine economic growth. It is the path of national decline.”

But unlike other deficit hawks, Ryan courageously – some would say foolhardily – presents his own alternative. His budget road map offers many proposals, but one big vision. Over time, Ryan concentrates government spending on the poor through means-tested programs, patching holes in the safety net while making entitlements more sustainable. He saves money by providing the middle class with defined-contribution benefits – private retirement accounts and health vouchers – that are more portable but less generous in the long run. And he expects a growing economy, liberated from debt and inflation, to provide more real gains for middle-class citizens than they lose from lower government benefits.

Ryanism is not only a technical solution to endless deficits; it represents an alternative political philosophy. For decades, culminating in the Obama health reform proposal, Democrats have attempted to build a political constituency for the welfare state by expanding its provisions to larger and larger portions of the middle class. Ryan proposes a federal system that focuses on helping the poor, while encouraging the middle class to take more personal responsibility in a dynamic economy. It is the appeal of security vs. the appeal of independence and enterprise.

Both sides of this debate make serious arguments, rooted in differing visions of justice and freedom. But the advocates of security, including Obama, have a serious problem: They are currently on a path to economic ruin.

In his Kemp-like way, Ryan manages to find a bright side. “The way I look at it, we were sleepwalking down this path anyway. The Democratic overreach woke people up. It was a splash of cold water in the face of every voter. Now we have a new, more serious conversation. And I’m not going to back down.”

Anyone sitting in a dank, fetid Haitian jail for any reason probably deserves at least a measure of sympathy, so in that sense I feel sorry for the Baptist missionaries from Idaho charged with kidnapping 33 “orphans” and trying to take them out of the country. But what the do-gooders allegedly did was not just misguided. It could be criminal, and Haitian authorities are right to hold them accountable.

Even in the midst of a terrible natural disaster, spiriting away a busload of kids in that manner – with vague plans to worry about the “paperwork” later – is no act of charity. The missionaries’ misadventure can only make the work of those truly interested in the welfare of neglected or abandoned children more difficult.

It doesn’t help the missionaries’ case that their leader, 40-year-old Laura Silsby, has, according to the Idaho Statesman, “a history of failing to pay debts, failing to pay employees and failing to follow Idaho laws.” The newspaper reported last weekend that Silsby has been the target of eight lawsuits and 14 claims for unpaid wages, mostly relating to an Internet business that she founded in 1999, and also that she had received four traffic citations since 1997 for having failed to register or insure the vehicle she was driving.

The Statesman also reported that “the $358,000 house in a Boise suburb where (Silsby) founded her nonprofit New Life Children’s Refuge in November was foreclosed on in December.” What’s interesting about that isn’t the foreclosure but the time frame: Silsby’s initiative to establish her own orphanage, or “refuge,” for Haitian children was just weeks old. The group planned to set up a facility to house, educate and outplace the orphans in the Dominican Republic.

When the Haiti earthquake struck, Silsby and nine others flew down, assembled a group of 33 boys and girls, and headed for the Dominican border. That was where Haitian police stopped them and discovered they had none of the documents required to take children out of the country.

According to reports from Haiti, it has now been established that many, if not most, of the children were not even orphans. Silsby is believed to have had “permission” from at least some of the children’s parents or guardians to take them away. But in no instance, authorities say, did the missionaries have the proper documentation needed for a surrender of parental rights. And reports from Calebasse, the small town near Port-au-Prince where most of the children lived, indicate that some were handed over by adults who were not their parents – a brother, a godmother, an informal guardian.

Did the Haitian authorities overreact? Not given the fact that thousands of Haitian children are effectively sold into servitude each year, mostly as domestic workers. Known in Creole as restaveks – from the French reste avec, or “stays with” – the children are vulnerable to psychological, physical and sexual abuse. Mostly they are exploited in Haiti, but restaveks have been rescued from the Dominican Republic as well. At the border, Haitian authorities said, there was no way to be sure that these people from Idaho had the children’s best interests at heart.

Silsby’s intention, according to press reports, was to find American families to adopt the children. I am a huge advocate of adoption, be it international, cross-racial or cross-cultural; the bottom line should be the best interests of the child. But giving up a son or daughter is one of the most wrenching decisions a parent could ever face, and it has to be done right, with ample time to think about it. No parent or guardian should ever have to surrender a child under duress.

I can’t imagine more duress than trying to provide for a family in the days after a disaster of the magnitude of the Haiti earthquake. It was a moment of overwhelming need and despair – precisely the wrong moment to expect a parent or guardian to make a permanent, life-changing decision.

True charity would have been to help those families care for their children – not to put them in a bus and drive them away.

Unwilling to pursue revenue options that have the word “tax” attached to them, the Schwarzenegger administration has floated yet another grasping-at-straws idea to fill the state’s depleted coffers.

This time the governor wants to sell advertising space on state highway message boards.

You laugh? Don’t.

The proposal is serious. If approved, existing message boards – the ones used to alert drivers to road hazards ahead or abducted children – would be upgraded with LED technology and converted to colorful commercial grade electronic billboards. The state would lease the billboards to outdoor advertising firms and collect the money upfront to help balance the state budget – as much as $2 billion over 20 years for 500 billboards.

But there’s a hitch. Because the billboards would operate within the rights of way of interstate highways, the proposal requires a change in federal law. State Transportation Department officials have sent a waiver request to federal highway administrators asking permission.

A federal review of electronic billboard safety is already under way, suggesting the governor’s idea is not as far-fetched as some might think. But the review involves e-billboards alongside highways, not on the road itself.

Frankly, we’re both hoping and betting that the state’s waiver request doesn’t go anywhere. Billboards are ugly, and LED billboards are blinking ugly. Not only that, but they could pose a traffic hazard if they distract motorists already distracted by the lunch they are eating and the cell-phone calls they are conducting.

If the Schwarzenegger administration follows this path, it may soon embrace an idea first suggested by Board of Equalization member Bill Leonard – sell naming rights to various state buildings.

“Major corporations pay big bucks to have their names on sports arenas,” Leonard said in his weekly newsletter. “It’s time California joined the auction. “

Think about the possibilities. The California Environmental Protection Agency headquarters in downtown Sacramento could become the Chevron EPA Building.

The California secretary of state’s office could be sponsored by Diebold, the controversial maker of digital voting machines.

The Board of Equalization building? Perhaps Clorox could sponsor it – since a lot of bleach is needed to clean up that mold.

Crass? Yes, but preferable to electronic billboards in the middle of state highways. At least a big Terminix sign on the Capitol dome wouldn’t be a road hazard.

When first lady Michelle Obama decided to make the “obesity epidemic” among American youth part of her agenda last Tuesday, she took a bold step toward sparking a needed dialogue on the health and well-being of our children.

Most parents would agree that taking care of our children is something so valuable that lack of funding for education and health care seem irrelevant. Even in the worst of times, we know that taking care of our own is something that no one can place a price tag on.

But instead of leaving it at that, she took her commentary one step too far. She announced to millions of Americans on NBC’s “Today” show that her 8-year-old daughter was put on a “diet.”

This came on the heels of President Barack Obama announcing last November that this same daughter was “chubby.” Some praised her for her efforts, others chastised her and the president for being so careless to use such disparaging terms publicly about their own child. As a mother of an 8-year-old, a therapist, and someone recovered from anorexia for more than 15 years, I was not alone in my frustration about another well-intended public figure picking the right platform but choosing the wrong words.

Childhood obesity is certainly reaching epidemic proportions. Obesity, anorexia and bulimia are universally on the rise.

Nearly one-third of the children in the United States are overweight, and for African Americans and Latinos, the numbers are even higher. To paint a clearer picture, eating disorders, of which obesity or binge eating disorder can be included, affect an estimated 10 million girls and women and 1 million boys and men in the United States. It’s ironic that at a time when we have perhaps the most research and information available about making healthy food choices and the importance of leading an active lifestyle, our country has never experienced more eating disorders.

Sadly, comments like the Obamas’ do not help. According to research conducted as far back as 1991, nearly 42 percent of girls polled in the first through third grades wanted to be thinner. Girls who diet are 12 times more likely to binge on food. Nearly half of 10- and 11-year-old boys and girls polled said they were on a diet, as were most of their families. And 81 percent of the 10-year-olds were afraid of being fat.

Clearly, despite preaching the values of eating right and regular exercise, we are raising our children to have an unhealthy relationship with not only food but their own bodies.

So what can be done? First, look at the research and listen to the guidance from treatment providers who have been in the trenches of these illnesses for years. Whether it’s anorexia or binge eating disorder, I hear story after story from clients who, as kids, were put on diets or attended weight-loss programs with their well- intended parents. I listen to clients talk about families in which they constantly heard negative and disparaging remarks about weight and appearance – toward others, toward themselves and comments parents made directly about themselves.

What did they learn? To not trust their internal cues for hunger and fullness.

I witness the results of chronic stress due to being pushed into sports and over-exercising with very little time for rest or quality family time.

Did they learn that exercise is supposed to be not only good for their bodies but most importantly, fun? Absolutely not. They learned to dislike their bodies for not being fast enough, talented enough or, simply put, good enough.

I hear the shame and sense of failure because they struggle with eating “bad” or “junk” food, never realizing that there truly is no such thing.

The concept of “intuitive eating” has been lost on them, and they are starving, bingeing or purging to make themselves acceptable to a culture that laughs at children who are overweight and calls them “chubby” and glorifies those who are thin.

The recipe for change starts with us. We have to change our views on food in general and stop labeling it as “good” or “bad.” We need to realize that balance is about having carrots and cake, and having too much of either one is not the answer.

We need to ensure that regardless of funding, physical activity remains a crucial part of our children’s daily lives. Not necessarily because it’s about being the best at a sport, but because it’s something that our kids actually can enjoy. Most importantly, we need to start having family meals together – ones that take place at a dinner table, not in front of a television set, and involve having a dialogue with one another.

It’s precious time that we have to commit to, and doing so will help in fighting not only eating disorders, but teenage pregnancy, drugs and alcohol as well.

As our nation’s capital recovers from yet another massive blizzard, the problem of unregulated snow can no longer be ignored. It’s time for Congress to set limits on the crystalline mayhem that descends through the atmosphere, wreaking havoc on all hard-working Americans.

Certainly, snow-control legislation would require political willpower and bipartisan support. But if today’s policymakers cannot put an end to snowstorms, none of us will escape these boom-and-bust blizzards that undermine the foundations of our nation’s growth and prosperity.

Consider the facts.

Local governments – particularly plow crews – cannot deal with snow effectively. Weatherpersons “predict” snow but don’t do anything about it. With the D.C. area yet again buried in nearly 2 feet, essential federal services have been shut down. Many government workers are being encouraged to take leave days after the initial powder dump.

Snow is costly for taxpayers, as well. It’s expensive to clear. Salting roads even in a southern state like North Carolina requires 29,000 tons of sodium chloride, costing some $2.5 million. And then there are the trucks and plows and workers on extended overtime – all of which gobble up taxpayer dollars and break strained budgets.

But the costs of snow removal are insignificant compared to the billions of dollars lost through decreased economic productivity.

Snowbound businesses close down. Consumers don’t shop. Schools shut their doors. Even the financial sector freezes. As soon as it started snowing, the World Bank declared a holiday.

With every flake that falls from the sky, roads become increasingly slick. Traffic comes to a standstill. Hospital emergency rooms overflow with accidents and falls, driving up health costs. Public transportation seizes up. Airports shut down, flights are diverted, and Amtrak suspends service.

In short, everything grinds to a halt.

Unfortunately, because snow is a global phenomenon, banning it will require worldwide cooperation. But the first step is regulating it in the United States. As we’ve seen countless times, building an international consortium – particularly through the United Nations – invariably requires U.S. leadership and support.

Regulating snowfall will not be easy. There are several constitutional and practical challenges, but none is insurmountable.

The most obvious question is whether the federal government actually has the authority to ban snow. Federalist diehards – who claim that virtually any Washington regulation intrudes upon states’ rights – would invariably challenge the law, citing the 10th Amendment.

But a Supreme Court challenge predicated on states’ rights is unlikely to succeed for one obvious reason. Snow is not confined to individual states. The Commerce Clause of Article I empowers the federal government to regulate matters that spill – or, in this case, blow – over state lines. Simply put, the Supreme Court is unlikely to interpret snowfall as a state-specific issue.

The bigger problem, of course, is the practical one. Regulating precipitation – or even banning snow entirely – won’t actually stop snow from falling. Virtually all meteorologists agree that, given certain atmospheric conditions, snow will continue to fall from the sky regardless of any federal law.

Although this may seem like an intractable problem, there is a simple solution. Congress should create a special committee – comprising a blue-ribbon panel of experts (with at least one labor representative) – to study the problem and submit recommendations four years hence, at which time a more effective law could be passed.

The committee – and its various subcommittees – could be funded by a penny-per-shovel tax. Some might argue that taxing shovels could actually exacerbate the snow problem by discouraging Americans from buying them. However, this problem can also be fixed through legislation.

Congress could simply mandate that all Americans purchase shovels. Yes, there would need to be a carve-out for Alaskans who already own shovels, and perhaps a Medicaid-style program for those who cannot afford shovels. But those are minor details that could be worked out in conference committee.

California is on the cusp of financial Armageddon. Finding a solution to the state’s $20 billion budget hole should be priority No. 1 for state lawmakers, regardless of party.

Yet at the Capitol these days, the major sideshow is state Sen. Abel Maldonado’s confirmation to the job of lieutenant governor. Rarely has so much political muscle been flexed over so little a job.

You’d think that, if you were a GOP lawmaker, you’d be falling over yourself to confirm a fellow Republican who could help a Republican governor recover some of his lost luster.

You’d think that, if you were a Democrat, the sudden exit of a GOP senator such as Maldonado would be seen as a gift. It opens up a seat that a Democrat – such as former Assemblyman John Laird, perhaps – could win, giving Democrats more power in the Senate.

Yet that is not the way it works in this Legislature. Instead of confirming Maldonado, lawmakers are beating up their own. Republicans vs. Republicans. Latinos vs. Latinos.

Wondering why voters hold this crowd in such low regard? This confirmation process is Exhibit No. 1,001.

The Democratic Party machinations are most worthy of comment. If lawmakers approve Maldonado prior to next Tuesday, the governor could schedule a runoff for his District 15 seat as part of the June election primary. That would save taxpayers money.

The trouble is, some Democrats believe they could face trouble winning a June runoff for the Senate seat because Democrats might stay home that day. Why? The anointed Democratic nominee, Attorney General Jerry Brown, faces zero competition in the gubernatorial primary.

If it all sounds like a nursery school version of Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” it’s because it does. California needs to transform the lieutenant governor’s office so that he or she runs in tandem with the governor, similar to the arrangement in the White House. For now, Maldonado would serve the state’s interests better than some predecessors. Lawmakers should confirm him.

Many Californians have long bemoaned the back-room deals where political honchos drew electoral districts to protect friends and punish enemies, making many districts less competitive that they would otherwise be.

Want to change that? Well, it’s time to step up and sign up.

Any voter who meets some basic qualifications and doesn’t have an obvious conflict of interest can apply to be one of 14 on the first-in-the- nation Citizens Redistricting Commission. That panel will determine the new state Senate, Assembly, and Board of Equalization districts for the next decade after the 2010 census.

If you’re interested, you have more time: State Auditor Elaine Howle, who is in charge of putting together the panel, announced Monday that she is extending the application deadline by four days – to 5 p.m. next Tuesday.

That’s a wise decision.

For one thing, gathering more applications could help dampen one of the criticisms so far – that the current pool of applicants lacks ethnic diversity.

As of Monday, nearly 20,000 voters had applied and nearly 17,000 had been initially ruled eligible. Of those, nearly three-fourths are non-Hispanic whites and nearly 70 percent are men – far higher than their proportions in the general population. On the flip side, Hispanics, Asians, and blacks are nowhere near as numerous in the applicant pool as they are in the population. Latinos, for example, make up 10 percent of applicants, compared with about 37 percent of Californians.

Some advocacy groups fret that if those numbers hold, the commission will not look anything like California, perpetuating the underrepresentation of minorities among voters and elected officials.

Not to worry, says Janis Hirohama, president of the League of Women Voters of California, which supported Proposition 11, the initiative approved in 2008 that called for the commission.

While there’s no diversity requirement for the panel other than political affiliation – five Democrats, five Republicans, and four voters of neither party – Hirohama notes that an applicant’s appreciation for ethnic diversity is emphasized at two different stages in the selection process.

Hirohama also says that the outreach in minority communities – including a $1.3 million public relations effort – “has been taking hold” after a slow start during the holidays. Overall applications for the panel have surged since mid-December from an average of 238 a day to 872 daily since the campaign started on Jan. 28. Partly because of that surge, the state auditor decided to extend the deadline, to take advantage of the momentum.

While the process for picking the commission may not be as tidy as some might hope, it is sure to be more fair and transparent than the gerrymandered ways of the past.

Under this new law, the commission will be in place by next Jan. 1 and will meet in public as it draws new districts by mid-September 2011. For their service, panel members will get $300 a day, plus expenses.

Interested? If so, then go to the panel’s Web site – www. wedrawthelines.ca.gov – to get more information on the qualifications and the application process.

We’ve always known that America’s reign as the world’s greatest nation would eventually end. But most of us imagined that our downfall, when it came, would be something grand and tragic.

What we’re getting instead is less a tragedy than a deadly farce. Instead of fraying under the strain of imperial overstretch, we’re paralyzed by procedure. Instead of re-enacting the decline and fall of Rome, we’re re-enacting the dissolution of 18th-century Poland.

A brief history lesson: In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Polish legislature, the Sejm, operated on the unanimity principle: Any member could nullify legislation by shouting “I do not allow!” This made the nation largely ungovernable, and neighboring regimes began hacking off pieces of its territory. By 1795, Poland had disappeared, not to re-emerge for more than a century.

Today, the U.S. Senate seems determined to make the Sejm look good by comparison.

Last week, after nine months, the Senate finally approved Martha Johnson to head the General Services Administration, which runs government buildings and purchases supplies. It’s an essentially nonpolitical position, and nobody questioned Johnson’s qualifications: she was approved by a vote of 94-2. But Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo., had put a “hold” on her appointment to pressure the government into approving a building project in Kansas City.

This dubious achievement may have inspired Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala. In any case, Shelby has now placed a hold on all outstanding Obama administration nominations – about 70 high-level government positions – until his state gets a tanker contract and a counterterrorism center. (Shelby said late Monday that he was lifting his hold.)

What gives individual senators this kind of power? Much of the Senate’s business relies on unanimous consent: It’s difficult to get anything done unless everyone agrees on procedure. A tradition has grown up under which senators, in return for not gumming up everything, get the right to block nominees they don’t like.

In the past, holds were used sparingly, restricted by bounds of courtesy and reciprocity. That’s because, as a Congressional Research Service report on the practice says, the Senate used to be ruled by “traditions of comity, courtesy, reciprocity and accommodation.” But that was then. Rules that used to be workable have become crippling now that one of the nation’s major political parties has descended into nihilism, seeing no harm – in fact, political dividends – in making the nation ungovernable.

How bad is it? It’s so bad that I miss Newt Gingrich.

Readers may recall that in 1995 Gingrich, then speaker of the House, cut off the federal government’s funding and forced a temporary government shutdown. It was ugly and extreme, but at least Gingrich had specific demands: He wanted Bill Clinton to agree to sharp cuts in Medicare.

Today, by contrast, Republican leaders refuse to offer any specific proposals. They inveigh against the deficit – and last month their senators voted in lockstep against any increase in the federal debt limit, a move that would have precipitated another government shutdown if Democrats hadn’t had 60 votes. But they also denounce anything that might actually reduce the deficit, including, ironically, any effort to spend Medicare funds more wisely.

And with the national GOP having abdicated any responsibility for making things work, it’s only natural that individual senators should feel free to take the nation hostage until they get their pet projects funded.

The truth is that given the state of American politics, the way the Senate works is no longer consistent with a functioning government. Senators themselves should recognize this fact and push through changes in those rules, including eliminating or at least limiting the filibuster. This is something they could and should do, by majority vote, on the first day of the next Senate session.

Don’t hold your breath. As it is, Democrats don’t even seem able to score political points by highlighting their opponents’ obstructionism.

It should be a simple message (and it should have been the central message in Massachusetts): A vote for a Republican, no matter what you think of him as a person, is a vote for paralysis.

By now, we know how the Obama administration deals with those who would destroy it: It goes straight for the capillaries. Sure enough, Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, accused Shelby of “silliness.” Yep, that will really resonate with voters.

After the dissolution of Poland, a Polish officer serving under Napoleon penned a song that eventually – after the country’s post-World War I resurrection – became Poland’s national anthem. It begins, “Poland is not yet lost.” Well, America is not yet lost. But the Senate is working on it.