Author: SacBee — Opinion

Looking for hot air about global warming?

You don’t have to look very far.

You can find it in columns by George Will and other pundits who dismiss the preponderance of scientific literature that global climate change is happening, and that human activities are contributing to it.

You can find it in the propaganda of front groups funded by fossil fuel industries that have a financial stake in maintaining their ability to dump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, unrestricted.

You can see it here in California, where certain politicians and trade organizations – ever eager to find a scapegoat for the state’s economic woes – are trying to suspend a landmark environmental law that hasn’t even been implemented yet.

Led by pair of Republicans, U.S. Rep. Tom McClintock and Assemblyman Dan Logue, this coalition is collecting signatures to roll back Assembly Bill 32, the 2006 California law that requires a 25 percent reduction in greenhouse gases statewide by 2020.

Initially, this crusade showed signs of grass-roots support, organized by local activist Ted Costa, leader of the People’s Advocate. Yet in recent weeks it was learned that a pair of Texas oil refiners, Valero Energy Corp. and Tesoro Corp., were bankrolling the start of the signature-gathering effort. That stripped away the veneer that this was anything but a self-serving attempt by industry to avoid regulation. Costa has since jumped ship, saying he was pushed out.

Along with the oil companies, the opponents of AB 32 include the California Manufacturing and Technology Association, which argues that the law will increase electricity prices and cost jobs. Yet as the Legislative Analyst Office’s report noted last week, the long-term impacts of the law are far from certain. Overall, the LAO said, AB 32 will likely result in “gains in some occupations and industries (including so-called ‘green’ jobs) and losses in others (primarily involving fossil fuel-related energy production).”

In other words, there will be economic winners and losers with AB 32. Regions that have worked to attract green-tech industries and reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, such as Sacramento, will benefit. Industries and regions that want to cling to the old way of doing things will likely face comparative harm.

Given that California consists of diverse regions and local economies, it is reasonable for lawmakers and the California Air Resources Board to consider how they can best mitigate the impacts of AB 32, so that no one industry or region is hurt disproportionately. If Logue or McClintock were to lead this crusade, they’d have allies. Instead, they are attempting to gut the law by suspending its implementation until unemployment drops dramatically, to 5.5 percent.

There are valid questions with AB 32: What will happen if California were “go it alone” – without national and international controls on greenhouse emissions? Obviously, that is a worst-case scenario. A single-state effort would do little to address the larger global challenge, and it would put California at a competitive disadvantage.

That said, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has already launched rules to limit greenhouse gases. Even with the hurdles that President Barack Obama confronts, Congress may well enact its own controls. That job would be easier if certain industries weren’t determined to block climate change legislation – the same industries seeking to upend California’s law.

So California must stay on the front lines of a clean energy future, just as it was on the vanguard of air pollution laws, coastal protection and efforts to preserve ancient redwoods. There will always be naysayers to a healthy environment, but their hot air can’t stand the test of time.

Classics:
Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon,” left, and The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

This may be hard to believe for anyone under 40, but back in the day people really did listen to albums all the way through – and liked it.

Until not so long ago, listeners immersed themselves in the experience that many musicians crafted for their fans. Bands and producers carefully constructed their albums as a cohesive whole – not just a collection of singles. They wanted to stress themes in the lyrics, or they sought interesting segues or contrasts musically.

Last week, the British High Court showed that it is hip to album rock (even though it no longer wears those funny wigs.) The court backed up Pink Floyd, which was in a legal tussle with its recording label over control of its work. The court ruled Thursday that without the band’s permission, EMI Group Ltd. can’t sell Pink Floyd tracks individually, either as physical recordings or online.

Pink Floyd is best known for high-concept electronica such as “Dark Side of the Moon” and “The Wall.” Instead of clear breaks between songs, these albums are knitted by clock chimes, screams and mind-bending riffs that made use of what was a novel instrument, the synthesizer.

Some of the greatest rock and pop classics are the same way. The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “Abbey Road” are examples. So are Carole King’s “Tapestry” or Van Morrison’s “Moondance.” And who can ignore the arc of albums such as the Rolling Stones’ “Sticky Fingers,” Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” or “Born to Run” by Bruce Springsteen?

If you’re of that generation, you can probably name a dozen more of your favorites. The album helped separate the real bands whose music would last from the one-hit wonders.

In recent years, some of these old-timers have tried to keep the tradition alive, by playing entire albums live in concert.

During her 2007 tour, alt-country’s Lucinda Williams played five nights each in New York and Los Angeles and in each concert sang one of her most popular albums in its entirety.

Springsteen did something similar in his shows last fall, first as an experiment, but then regularly due to fan demand.

Alas, Springsteen and others may be fighting a losing battle. The concept of the concept album has faded as videos and MTV became popular and as artists focused on singles that could top the charts and be turned into extended mixes. While bands such as Green Day have come out with albums such as “American Idiot,” the trend is clear: CD sales are plunging while digital downloads, often of individual songs, are surging.

Don’t get us wrong: There’s nothing wrong with empowering people to create their own personal soundtracks. The new technology allows digital downloaders to become mini record producers, assembling albums of their own.

Yet there is no substitute for hearing music the way an artist intended. While the ruling of the British High Court may not have wide application and is based on narrow legal precepts, it has helped highlight that fading notion.

To that, we say, hear, hear.

It’s ironic that there’s so much resistance to health care reform from people who don’t even realize they’re already socialists.

Americans say they don’t want socialized medicine. Guess what: You’re already getting it. It just comes from your employer, who relieves you of having to shop for it, think about it, maintain it and of course, pay for much of it.

You’re hardly like Max Alshaer, who’s operated his handyman business out of Rocklin for 15 years. Eighteen months ago he dropped his Kaiser coverage – $900 a month was too much. There was nothing cheaper.

“It was a choice between my mortgage or health care,” he says.

He only covers his children now, a $240-a-month policy that’s seen four increases in six months though the kids have yet to use it.

At age 47, Max has never been seriously ill, but if he’s seriously hurt on the job, he’s sunk – can’t work, can’t earn.

“I want to pay for my health care,” he explains. “I just want premiums to be reasonable.”

Paula Zimmerman left her payroll job at UC Davis six years ago so she and her husband, Tim, could pursue a dream: They bought a fishing lodge in Klamath. Health insurance was $205 a month. When it hit $588 last year, she called their insurer, Anthem Blue Cross.

“I asked why they kept raising the premiums,” she recalls, “and they told me, ‘Oh, we raise them every year.’ ”

The Zimmermans dropped their coverage last month. They couldn’t afford this year’s 39 percent rate hike. There was nothing cheaper. Like Max, they’re on an increasingly popular health care plan: Don’t get sick.

But if they get sick, it’s off to the ER. Once the bill tops what they can afford, the hospital will put them on MediCal and any other program it can find, passing the cost on to taxpayers, or on to insurance companies who then pass it on to their clients through higher premiums.

Paula says, “I just hope I can make it to Medicare.” She’s 51.

When you look at the profitability of Blue Cross and the plight of Americans crushed by the annual ritual of rising rates, you understand why some say a single-payer system is the answer.

Why pay Anthem a profit to handle paying for our medical procedures when the government could pay it without the profit and save us the difference?

Anthem’s reason for the rate hike: “Unfortunately, in the weak economy, many people who do not have health conditions are forgoing buying insurance. This leaves fewer people often with significantly greater medical needs in the insured pool.”

I see. You’re facing greater risk of higher payouts on claims because you priced people out of the market last year, so your solution is to raise rates this year and price more people out of the market so that next year, you can use the same excuse. Who needs these people?

Coverage for an average family costs $13,375, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 131 percent more than in 1999. If the trend continues, by 2019 the average family plan will cost $30,083.

You’re no safer at work. Today, six in 10 Americans – 160 million – get insurance through their employers, who pick up about 73 percent of the tab. But employers are dropping health benefits at alarming rates.

From 1999 to 2008, the Small Business Administration recorded a 17 percentage-point drop in the number of businesses offering health benefits – from 58 percent to 41 percent.

Mostly, small businesses are dropping coverage. In California, 98 percent of all businesses employ fewer than 100 people; more than half their employees are uninsured, according to a UCLA study. At the remaining 2 percent of firms, 29 percent of workers are uninsured.

Six percent of California firms say they’re “very likely” to drop health care coverage this year, compared with 1 percent the previous year.

With exponentially increasing heath care costs and an increasing underemployed class, how soon before six in 10 Americans becomes five, and then four in 10?

“What we’ve seen over the years is the gradual fraying of the employment-based system,” said Drew Altman, the chief executive of the Kaiser foundation. “The real Achilles heel is the small employer.”

It’s easy to oppose reform when someone else is paying for most of your coverage. You’re paying your congressman’s health care; who’s paying yours? If reform fails in Washington, we’ll have to wait until enough Americans are forced to confront the true cost of their own health care. They will, too, as employers continue to drop increasingly unaffordable employee benefits.

The free market at work!

No more socialism after that. You’ll be a true capitalist contending with rapacious corporate curmudgeons like Anthem Blue Cross while trying to come up with $13,000 to buy coverage. Or $30,000. Or you’ll end up like Max or Paula, whose health care will be paid for by those who can still afford insurance.

That’s when we’ll insist that government fix this problem. Goodness, we might even demand a single-payer system.

Over the last few weeks, Californians have read accounts about how Anthem Blue Cross, the state’s largest medical insurer, is raising health insurance premiums for Californians in the individual market. This was quickly followed by politicians trying to blame insurer profits for the woes of our health care system.

While criticizing insurers for raising rates makes a convenient story line for pundits and lawmakers eager to boil down the complexities of health care into media sound bites, it does very little to illuminate the real culprits in rising health care costs. In fact, we have the opportunity to take what is happening in California and use it as a lesson for what happens when the core issue is ignored: the need to halt the unsustainable increases in medical costs.

First, let me say that Anthem Blue Cross understands that raising premiums creates many challenges and is hard on individuals and families, especially in these tough economic times. We also exist in a highly competitive insurance marketplace with more than 100 plan options in California alone – so if our rates are higher than our competitors, we won’t keep our customers.

This leads to an important point: consumers can often switch plans if they believe another plan offers a better value – but the reality is all insurers are in the same boat. This is easily confirmed by visiting any of the online health insurance portals and looking at quotes. Anthem Blue Cross alone offers consumers more than 60 different individual plan options from which they can choose.

Insurance premiums and increasing rates are a function of medical expenses. By law, premiums have to reflect the anticipated costs that they will cover. The higher the medical costs, the higher the rates. In California, as in much of the country, rates are on the rise because medical costs continue their skyward ascent.

While the balance sheets of insurance companies make for convenient targets, medical expense – and not company profits – is the major cost driver underpinning the rates that consumers pay. PricewaterhouseCoopers data show that 87 cents of every premium dollar is spent on health care services, while approximately 3 cents goes to insurance company profits – a number that is relatively constant – while the cost of services continues to explode.

Unfortunately, in this recession, individuals are far more likely to opt out of coverage or to disenroll, if they think they are healthy enough to take that risk. The result is a pool of people that uses more services per individual, increasing premium rates for all that remain.

An example underscores the problem. If an insurance pool consists of 100 people and incurs medical costs of $10,000 per month, the cost per individual is $100 per month. But if 10 people who incur little or no costs leave the pool, the $10,000 must be spread among 90 people. The per-individual cost is now $111 per month, an increase of 11 percent. This means a health insurer must increase rates 11 percent in order to cover the increase in costs per individual, and that’s before accounting for medical inflation. Now extrapolate this problem across the state.

How to address this? Encourage everyone to participate in the system. When everyone is covered, the risk pool becomes not only more diverse, but also more predictable. Insurers are then able to spread the risk among the total population and bring greater stability to rates.

Let’s assume for a moment that physicians, hospitals, drug companies and device makers are not likely to slash prices. Anthem Blue Cross isn’t waiting. At the local level, we are acting to bring greater stability to insurance rates and ensure quality of medical care for all Californians.

Partnering with three regional hospital associations representing most of the state’s hospitals, Anthem Blue Cross has invested in a collaboration designed to address patient safety. The goal of this partnership is to improve patient outcomes and cut medical costs by sharing data, resources and successful safety practices. We are aggressively taking these actions because focusing on quality and the cost of care is the only path to creating a sustainable health care system.

As California’s largest health benefits company with nearly 8 million members, including more than 1 million low-income Californians, we are committed to ensuring access to quality health care. What we ask of our political leaders is that true health care reform targets what actually needs reforming: high medical costs and encouraging coverage for all.

Peter Schrag’s Feb. 28 column “Justices must do more to rein in initiatives” asks the state Supreme Court to wander further than it has into the political thicket. That’s a bad idea.

When courts mess with California’s initiative process they get themselves into trouble. Two years ago, a Supreme Court majority decided the people could not statutorily ban gay marriages. The voters turned right around and passed Proposition 8, doing so by constitutional amendment, which the court was forced to uphold. Proposition 8 probably would have lost had the court kept out of the issue in the first place.

Schrag’s problem is not that the courts are too reticent to overturn initiatives, but that the voters keep doing things he does not like. Liberals howl about the two-thirds rule to raise taxes, which was part of Proposition 13. Well, the voters had a chance by initiative to overturn the two-thirds rule several years back, and chose not to do so. The problem is not that initiatives have made California government dysfunctional; it is that voters refuse to do what the liberal elite want them to on matters of taxes and spending. The people know they have the right to set tax policy in this state, and the courts have been wise to defer to them.

We are told many initiatives are “poorly drafted and lacking any reliable legislative history.” Are acts of the Legislature any better? Remember energy deregulation, passed with almost no dissent by a Legislature that had no idea how it would work. Few actions of government did more damage to California. Just last month the Assembly busied itself passing budget acts, until someone realized they were voting on the wrong set of bills. For this behavior we should defer to the Legislature.

Courts can and do overturn initiatives that violate the constitution’s “single subject” rule on the grounds that voters should not be forced to vote on multiple subject measures. Courts have made it quite clear when a constitutional amendment is a revision of the constitution, which cannot be done by the people.

We have a good balance between the right of the people to make policy through direct democracy and the oversight role of the courts. Popular lawmaking, restrained by court action only when necessary, has worked just fine in California for the past century. We do not need the courts to “rein in” the initiative process.

Karl Rove defends his former boss, President George W. Bush, in his new memoir on issues from the missing WMDs to runaway deficits.

Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight

Publisher: Threshold Editions (596 pages, $30)

Excerpts of reviews

Rove rejects accusations Bush lied

Karl Rove, the chief political adviser to President George W. Bush and architect of his two successful campaigns for the White House, says in a new memoir that Bush probably would not have invaded Iraq had he known there were no unconventional weapons there.

Rove adamantly rejects accusations that the administration deliberately lied about the presence of such weapons in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. But he acknowledges that the failure to find them seriously damaged Bush’s presidency, and he blames himself for not countering the narrative that “Bush lied,” calling it “one of the biggest mistakes of the Bush years.”

Rove’s book offers the most expansive account yet of the Bush presidency by one of the people most responsible for it. Addressing the most controversial and consequential moments of Bush’s eight years in power, Rove takes responsibility for the widely criticized Air Force One flyover after Hurricane Katrina and writes that he secretly cried in his White House office when he learned he would not be indicted in a CIA leak case.

For the most part, his book, “Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight,” is an unapologetic defense of Bush and his presidency, and takes aim at Democrats, the news media and disloyal Republicans for what he describes as hypocrisy, deceit and vanity. He also recounts his hardscrabble upbringing in a family broken by divorce and his mother’s suicide.

– Peter Baker, New York Times

Brain: Bush was misunderstood

What to make of a memoir called “Courage and Consequence”?

That’s the title of Karl Rove’s new volume, and the bookstore browser might easily conclude that the courage and consequence Rove refers to are his own.

It’s impossible to know his intentions, but let’s give Rove the benefit of the doubt. The predominant theme of this book, after all, is the courage and consequence of former President George W. Bush.

There are two protagonists to this tale, Rove and Bush, and a good portion of this volume is an exploration if not explanation of the ways of W., which can be summarized thus: He isn’t lazy. He isn’t intellectually limited. He didn’t tell Americans to go shopping after 9/11. He didn’t authorize torture. He didn’t invade Iraq to finish the job his father started.

In this rendering, the 43rd president is a good and simple man who was, to use a favorite Bushism, misunderestimated, and, among Democrats and the press, misunderstood.

Now to the other guy in this book. Rove sees himself as one part intellectual, one part ideologue, steeped in conservatism and seasoned with common sense – overall, a fair assessment. He is, no question about it, a political pugilist, and the carnivorous among conservatives will find between these hard covers ample red meat to masticate.

– David M. Shribman, Bloomberg News

Ex-White House scribe sees the light

As a White House reporter during the Bush presidency, I often worried that I wasn’t getting the whole story. Now, Karl Rove has finally given it to me.

His new book, “Courage and Consequence,” promises to “pull back the curtain on my journey to the White House and my years there.” What he divulges nearly made me choke on a pretzel.

That business about President George W. Bush misleading the nation about Iraq? Didn’t happen. “Did Bush lie us into war? Absolutely not,” Rove writes.

Condoning torture? Wrong! “The president never authorized torture. He did just the opposite.”

Foot-dragging on global warming? Au contraire. “He was aggressive and smart on this front.”

You thought Bush was responsible for turning a budget surplus into a record deficit and nearly doubling the national debt? That he was in charge when the economy plunged into the worst collapse since the Great Depression? Guess again. Spending was “far below average” under Bush, who led the nation through “the longest period of economic growth since President Reagan.”

Even Bush’s televised claim that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Michael “Brownie” Brown was doing a “heckuva” job after Hurricane Katrina wasn’t what our lying ears told us it was. “Bush was responding to compliments others had offered to Brown.”

Heckuva job, Architect. In fact, these new disclosures call for a correction of some of my past reporting:

CORRECTION – Every article about George W. Bush ever written by Dana Milbank was wrong. The Post regrets the error.

Rove’s book is 600 pages thick, the work of a man with a lot of scores to settle.

– Dana Milbank, Washington Post

It hasn’t flooded since 1911. So, in some quarters, a certain complacency has set in about the 53,000-acre Natomas Basin.

The reality, however, is that the 43 miles of levees currently only meet a 30-year flood protection standard, the lowest level of flood protection for any major metropolitan area in the United States. A flood could put the area under 20 feet of water.

The bottom line is that Natomas levees don’t meet minimum 100-year federal flood protection standards. So new home construction has been banned since Dec. 8, 2008 (unless homes are elevated 21 feet). That’s a de facto building moratorium until levee upgrades are done – which is not expected until summer 2012.

During this levee upgrade period, potential homebuyers depend on developers, city officials and lenders to follow the rules and protect them from flood hazards.

That didn’t happen with 35 sites, where a city employee overrode a computer system to illegally grant building permits last year.

After this was discovered, construction stopped last October. But the city asked FEMA in December to grant exceptions to the rules to allow the 35 homes to be completed, occupied and follow insurance requirements as if they were in a low-risk flood zone (that is, voluntary rather than mandatory coverage).

Who was that request protecting? Certainly not potential homebuyers in that high-risk flood area. Fortunately, FEMA in a Feb. 8 letter rejected the city’s proposal as unacceptable. The agency insists that each violation must be “fully corrected or mitigated.”

So what now? Of the 35 sites, the city can easily deal with 25. Until levee upgrades are done, the 21 that are slab foundations and the four that are framed can sit tight. The city issued a notice of suspension on these sites Feb. 23.

But what about 10 completed homes that received final city inspection for occupancy in August and September last year?

FEMA made it clear that these “represent a significant exposure to flood damages, personal loss and potential emergency/disaster costs” and “must be brought into full compliance.”

City officials included one in the Feb. 23 notice of suspension, because closing hadn’t yet occurred.

That leaves nine completed, sold homes. Between now and April 8, the city must figure out a plan for these homeowners. As part of that, a lingering question should be thoroughly investigated: Did the lender tell each of these families that they were buying homes in a high-risk flood zone where federal law mandates flood insurance?

FEMA did not make suggestions for dealing with the nine homebuyers, especially the six who occupy homes. But FEMA did make it clear that the city would have to take “corrective action” or all Sacramento residents could lose premium discounts on flood insurance policies – or, at worst, be suspended from federal flood insurance or federal disaster assistance if a flood occurs.

Making things right, thus, is urgent for all city residents who buy flood insurance. Now and in the future, the new leadership in the city manager and development departments should make it clear that homeowners, not just developers, are part of “getting the customer to success.”

On these pages last month, Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, declared that the moment was right for peace negotiations with Palestinian leaders.

“We are committed,” he wrote, “to moving as swiftly as possible to resolve all outstanding issues between ourselves and the Palestinians, including the thorny issues of Jerusalem, borders and refugees.”

It’s difficult to reconcile that commitment with the way Vice President Joe Biden was greeted in Israel this week.

On the very day Biden arrived to promote peace talks, Israel announced plans to build 1,600 more homes in disputed East Jerusalem. That raises at least two questions:

Would a U.S. leader have been dissed so publicly if Israeli leaders didn’t believe that the Obama administration is in too weak a position to object?

And are some in the Israeli government trying to sabotage any peace deal?

The early indications are not encouraging. President Barack Obama is of a mind to avoid public confrontation with Israel at a time when he needs it on board in his diplomatic efforts to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. While Israel’s interior minister apologized for the chronology of the announcement, he did not back down from the plan itself. He also troublingly suggested there would be more expansions, saying that “next time we need to take the timing into account.”

What one Israeli newspaper called “The Slap Heard ‘Round the World” is certainly not the segue one would want to the first peace negotiations in more than a year. These are not even direct talks, but ones where U.S. officials will carry messages back and forth.

The future of Jerusalem is one of the hottest flash points in the negotiations. The Palestinians insist on East Jerusalem as their capital should they ever get a state, but Israel claims the entire holy city.

Biden was right to be angry – for the personal insult, yes, but more so for the distrust it only worsened. He was more diplomatic than his hosts, urging both sides to avoid actions “that inflame tensions or prejudice the outcome of talks.”

Jason Clemens

California has the largest state economy, and the state Capitol jostles with players seeking a piece of the action. The biggest single lobbyist, however, is not Wal-Mart, Apple, Toyota, the entertainment industry or some fat-cat Jack Abramoff figure. The biggest lobbyist is government itself.

In 2009, government-to-government lobbying in California totaled $50.1 million, representing 18.3 percent of the total. According to this figure, derived from official state sources, government-to-government lobbying is the single largest category of lobbying in the Golden State.

This activity imposes costs on society but for too long has gone largely unnoticed.

The state of California, like most jurisdictions, categorizes lobbying by sector. Much of the lobbying is undertaken by private-sector companies in finance, health care, energy, and real estate. On the taxpayer-funded side, the players include county and city governments, from San Diego to Susanville. They also include state agencies and the many state commissions, from the powerful California Coastal Commission all the way to the California Sea Urchin Commission.

Public education, California’s biggest budget item, is one of the major players in government lobbying, with massive entities such as the Los Angeles Unified School District, the community college districts and the county offices of education. Public-sector unions also qualify and, like school districts, lobby state government extensively.

Such tax-funded activity accounts for nearly one out of every four dollars of lobbying, an astonishing amount. The taxpayers who provide the funding, and whose interests may not be the same, have good reason to care about the rather stark differences between the two kinds of lobbying.

First, lobbyists in the private sector pay for their lobbying activity out of their own pockets. Second, private-sector lobbying is disciplined by competition. That is, there are almost always opposing private-sector interests engaged in lobbying that temper one another. For example, commodity producers often lobby for subsidies and protection while the users of the commodities lobby for the exact opposite. This competition between interests results in discipline.

Third, private-sector firms have limited resources with which to lobby and they have to show their owners or members results for their efforts. On the other side, things are different. When government agencies lobby the state, they pay for such activity out of the pockets of California taxpayers. Those resources are not subject to the same limitations as in the private sector. Very little if any competition exists on the government side.

In California, this activity shows no signs of slowing down and could use some discipline. Thankfully, the secretary of state’s Web site provides valuable information. The latest full year of available data (2009) indicates that $273.4 million was spent in California lobbying. This is a slight decrease from the $282.7 million spent in 2008, although 2008 was an election year.

The key to discipline of taxpayer-funded lobbying is transparency, which leads to greater public awareness and accountability. Transparency begins with requiring disclosure of lobbying activities. In an analysis of 37 types of lobbying disclosure across the 50 states, California ranked 20th with a score of 23 out of 37 (62 percent). That leaves much room for improvement.

California should require more and better disclosure of lobbying information, with a single standard of disclosure for all types of lobbying.

A double standard is unacceptable, though one can argue that government lobbying deserves more scrutiny, not less.

The second step is ensuring that the data are easily accessible for interested parties. An analysis of the 50 states concluded that California had the 13th-best system for accessing lobbying disclosure data.

California’s actual score, however, was a dismal 50.9 percent.

California faces deficits in the range of $20 billion for the foreseeable future. Government spending fuels that deficit, much of it driven by lobbying on the part of taxpayer-funded groups that have a vested interest in the expansion of government. All Californians have an interest in getting spending under control and restoring the state’s fiscal health. The key first step is better transparency of lobbying activity.

Lloyd Billingsley

Hate has no place in the house of God. No one should be excluded from our love, our compassion or our concern because of race or gender, faith or ethnicity – or because of their sexual orientation. Nor should anyone be excluded from health care on any of these grounds. In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights. We knew this was wrong. Thankfully, the world supported us in our struggle for freedom and dignity.

It is time to stand up against another wrong.

Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people are part of so many families. They are part of the human family. They are part of God’s family. And of course they are part of the African family. But a wave of hate is spreading across my beloved continent. People are again being denied their fundamental rights and freedoms. Men have been falsely charged and imprisoned in Senegal, and health services for these men and their community have suffered. In Malawi, men have been jailed and humiliated for expressing their partnerships with other men.

Just this month, mobs in Mtwapa Township, Kenya, attacked men they suspected of being gay. Kenyan religious leaders, I am ashamed to say, threatened an HIV clinic there for providing counseling services to all members of that community, because the clerics wanted gay men excluded.

Uganda’s parliament is debating legislation that would make homosexuality punishable by life imprisonment, and more discriminatory legislation has been debated in Rwanda and Burundi.

These are terrible backward steps for human rights in Africa.

Our lesbian and gay brothers and sisters across Africa are living in fear.

And they are living in hiding – away from care, away from the protection the state should offer to every citizen and away from health care in the AIDS era, when all of us, especially Africans, need access to essential HIV services. That this pandering to intolerance is being done by politicians looking for scapegoats for their failures is not surprising. But it is a great wrong. An even larger offense is that it is being done in the name of God. Show me where Christ said “Love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones.” Gay people, too, are made in my God’s image. I would never worship a homophobic God.

“But they are sinners,” I can hear the preachers and politicians say. “They are choosing a life of sin for which they must be punished.” My scientist and medical friends have shared with me a reality that so many gay people have confirmed, I now know it in my heart to be true. No one chooses to be gay. Sexual orientation, like skin color, is another feature of our diversity as a human family.

Isn’t it amazing that we are all made in God’s image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people? Does God love his dark- or his light-skinned children less? The brave more than the timid? And does any of us know the mind of God so well that we can decide for him who is included, and who is excluded, from the circle of his love? The wave of hate must stop.

Politicians who profit from exploiting this hate, from fanning it, must not be tempted by this easy way to profit from fear and misunderstanding. And my fellow clerics, of all faiths, must stand up for the principles of universal dignity and fellowship. Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice.

Health reform is back from the dead. Many Democrats have realized that their electoral prospects will be better if they can point to a real accomplishment. Polling on reform – which was never as negative as portrayed – shows signs of improving. And I’ve been really impressed by the passion and energy of this guy Barack Obama. Where was he last year? But reform still has to run a gantlet of misinformation and outright lies. So let me address three big myths about the proposed reform, myths that are believed by many people who consider themselves well-informed, but who have actually fallen for deceptive spin.

The first of these myths, which has been all over the airwaves lately, is the claim that President Obama is proposing a government takeover of one-sixth of the economy, the share of GDP currently spent on health.

Well, if having the government regulate and subsidize health insurance is a “takeover,” that takeover happened long ago.

Medicare, Medicaid and other government programs already pay for almost half of American health care, while private insurance pays for barely more than a third (the rest is mostly out-of-pocket expenses). And the great bulk of that private insurance is provided via employee plans, which are both subsidized with tax exemptions and tightly regulated.

The only part of health care in which there isn’t already a lot of federal intervention is the market in which individuals who can’t get employment-based coverage buy their own insurance. And that market, in case you hadn’t noticed, is a disaster – no coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions, coverage dropped when you get sick and huge premium increases in the middle of an economic crisis. It’s this sector, plus the plight of Americans with no insurance at all, that reform aims to fix. What’s wrong with that?

The second myth is that the proposed reform does nothing to control costs. To support this claim, critics point to reports by the Medicare actuary, who predicts that total national health spending would be slightly higher in 2019 with reform than without it.

Even if this prediction were correct, it points to a pretty good bargain. The actuary’s assessment of the Senate bill, for example, finds that it would raise total health care spending by less than 1 percent, while extending coverage to 34 million Americans who would otherwise be uninsured. That’s a large expansion in coverage at an essentially trivial cost.

And it gets better as we go further into the future: the Congressional Budget Office has just concluded, in a new report, that the arithmetic of reform will look better in its second decade than it did in its first.

Furthermore, there’s good reason to believe that all such estimates are too pessimistic. There are many cost-saving efforts in the proposed reform, but nobody knows how well any one of these efforts will work. And as a result, official estimates don’t give the plan much credit for any of them. What the actuary and the budget office do is a bit like looking at an oil company’s prospecting efforts, concluding that any individual test hole it drills will probably come up dry, and predicting as a consequence that the company won’t find any oil at all – when the odds are, in fact, that some of the test holes will pan out, and produce big payoffs. Realistically, health reform is likely to do much better at controlling costs than any of the official projections suggest.

Which brings me to the third myth: that health reform is fiscally irresponsible. How can people say this given Congressional Budget Office predictions – which, as I’ve already argued, are probably too pessimistic – that reform would actually reduce the deficit? Critics argue that we should ignore what’s actually in the legislation; when cost control actually starts to bite on Medicare, they insist, Congress will back down.

But this isn’t an argument against Obamacare, it’s a declaration that we can’t control Medicare costs no matter what. And it also flies in the face of history: Contrary to legend, past efforts to limit Medicare spending have in fact “stuck,” rather than being withdrawn in the face of political pressure.

So what’s the reality of the proposed reform? Compared with the Platonic ideal of reform, Obamacare comes up short. If the votes were there, I would much prefer to see Medicare for all.

For a real piece of passable legislation, however, it looks very good. It wouldn’t transform our health care system; in fact, Americans whose jobs come with health coverage would see little effect. But it would make a huge difference to the less fortunate among us, even as it would do more to control costs than anything we’ve done before.

This is a reasonable, responsible plan. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

The arena task force assembled by Mayor Kevin Johnson has given the Sacramento City Council a gift. It’s a smart starting point as the council mulls over some weighty decisions on a possible sports and entertainment complex for the city.

Some on the council griped that the volunteer panel was created without their blessing and had no standing to evaluate arena proposals. But it would be difficult to argue that Johnson somehow gamed the report unveiled Thursday.

The mayor has insisted that he did not want to be boxed into supporting the complicated three-way land swap that has the backing of the Kings owners and the NBA. Yet, the task force concluded that of the seven proposals submitted, the land-swap plan from a group led by local developer Gerry Kamilos was indeed the most promising – both in terms of having financing and in spurring economic growth.

The so-called convergence plan calls for the state to obtain the current Arco Arena site in Natomas for a new fairgrounds; for Kamilos to buy the Cal Expo property from the state for a residential-commercial project; and for the arena to go on city-owned land in the downtown railyard.

Chris Lehane, chairman of the task force, told the council that the Kamilos plan had “the best chance of success right now.” He added that it is the most likely to limit taxpayers’ contribution and that it offers the prospect of an economic boost to three parts of the region.

The task force, however, urged the Kamilos team to tweak its proposal to integrate an arena with the city’s planned regional transit hub in the railyard. That idea was in the proposal from Thomas Enterprises, which is developing 240 acres surrounding the city-owned site for the transit station. As Johnson congratulated him after the meeting, Kamilos said he was open to that concept, which would help with traffic and access.

The task force also recommended that the council enter into exclusive negotiations with Kamilos and do much deeper vetting of the proposal with the help of outside experts.

That makes sense, as long as the city isn’t bound to any agreement before all the details are worked out.

Council members raised a host of other questions, and they are right to insist on getting answers before proceeding too far: How will the Natomas area be protected? How much is the Cal Expo land really worth, and is that enough to make the deal work? How will the city be repaid the outstanding $69 million on its loan to the Kings? And, most importantly, what will taxpayers put in?

An effusive Johnson said that a new arena could be a “transformative project” that could change the city’s trajectory for decades to come, and that if Sacramento can pull it off during a down economy, it would win national notice.

Maybe so, but only if the deal is done right.

Coming Sunday in California Forum

Associate Editor Foon Rhee and Sacramento-based economist Jock O’Connell pose questions the city should consider in financing and siting a new arena.

Political reform will never come from the California Legislature. It must be imposed by voters through the ballot box.

So says the conventional wisdom. On Thursday, lawmakers took some steps in challenging the CW.

Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez announced legislation that, if enacted, could make several significant changes to California’s broken budget system.

The centerpiece: Lawmakers could approve a budget by a simple majority, rather than the current two-thirds vote requirement, and would forfeit their pay for failing to meet the constitutional deadline for approving the budget.

The proposal would restrict programs from being created or expanded unless there is money to pay for them.

Another proposal would apply that same pay-as-you-go standard to initiatives. Promoters of initiatives would be required to identify sources of revenue to pay for ballot measures that, say, lengthen prison sentences or finance stem cell research.

Several forces will seek to torpedo the package. Initiative promoters will shudder at the pay-as-you-go plan. Senate GOP leader Dennis Hollingsworth called the overall package a “thinly veiled attempt to increase taxes even further and circumvent Proposition 13.”

At the least, lawmakers should give this process a chance to work.

The Joint Select Committee on Improving State Government, chaired by Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, and Assemblyman Mike Feuer, D-Los Angeles, has been holding hearings on elements of this package since October.

The foundation-funded California Forward, headed by former Speaker Robert Hertzberg, has also helped promote many of these concepts. The group had hoped to place initiatives on the ballot but failed to raise the $3 million or so needed to hire petition gatherers.

Steinberg and Pérez will need to invest serious political capitol to push this package forward. If they can manage to do so, the CW in Sacramento will never be the same.

Jill Duman

More than a year ago, I accepted a job as a lunchtime yard monitor at a local elementary school. I had been a bartender before, and I figured (correctly) that the same basic job skills applied: You’re there to make sure everyone has a good time, with a minimum of pandemonium, hurt feelings and bodily injuries.

Fortunately, the school where I work has made my mission easier by teaching kids about “Kelso’s Choice” – a conflict management model that provides solid tools for resolving disagreements before they turn into epithets, tears and fisticuffs.

Now, when kids in the lunchroom or on the playground have a gripe, we ask them if they can work out the problem themselves. Most often, they choose one of Kelso’s solutions: walk away, talk it out, tell the offender to stop, make a deal, apologize, ignore the problem or go to another game. If the scrap isn’t resolved, the protagonists get sent off to the principal’s office to spend the rest of their free play period hammering out a compromise.

Sadly, there are grown-ups in government who haven’t learned these conflict resolution skills – and they’re allowed to operate without play yard supervision. The most egregious local example is the Davis City Council. There, two members are proposing to toughen the “play nice” procedural rules for council meetings to avoid the kind of name-calling, disruption and hysteria that peaked at the Jan. 26 Davis City Council meeting. Because of that meeting, Davis Mayor Ruth Asmundson was hospitalized with stress-related afflictions and Councilwoman Sue Greenwald became the star of a scary video clip that so far has attracted more than 11,500 hits on YouTube.

Included in the evening’s drama were Greenwald’s refusal to yield the microphone and Asmundson blaming Greenwald for her own panic attacks. The understatement of the meeting was made by Greenwald, who sagely observed that “not everybody is cut out for public office.”

Like other cities and towns with educated, hyper-involved residents, Davis is known for public meetings that are involved, opinionated and even cantankerous. Just two years ago, the council adopted a few rules for reasonable behavior based on pointers drafted by local Judge Dave Rosenberg and published by the League of California Cities.

Miss Manners would probably regard those guidelines as minimal for maintaining civility at any gathering. Ask permission to speak. One person at a time, please.

The measures currently posed by Councilmen Steve Souza and Don Saylor – and drafted after consideration of policies in seven other California cities – are a bit stricter, but no less logical. Council members are asked to “preserve order and decorum,” to avoid delaying or interrupting “the proceeding or peace of the Council,” to cease speaking when ruled out of turn and, “to not refuse to obey the orders of the Council, or the presiding officer.”

Failure to abide by these basic rules of polite behavior should win offenders the derision of every city constituent and a personal visit from the Manners Police. Souza and Saylor are instead asking that consequences include public censure or having council members stripped of committee assignments.

Following a postponement, the Davis council is slated to discuss the new conduct rules on March 30. With any luck, the public won’t be treated to another round of elected officials behaving badly. Our confidence in government is already rattled.

A January poll by the Public Policy Institute of California revealed that 74 percent of those surveyed believe the state is going in the wrong direction. A nationwide survey taken last month by the Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan Pew Research Center showed anti-incumbent sentiment running higher than ever recorded in 16 years. Three in 10 voters said they do not want to see their representatives re-elected.

With health care premiums spiraling, employment in the dumps and our educational system and economy uncertain, we need to see calm professionals at work. No one wants to be a passenger in a plane where the co-pilots have lost control and are screaming at each other – particularly if we think the plane has already drifted off course.

At the Jan. 26 Davis council session, Greenwald was arguing about a measure she thought would save her city thousands of dollars in labor costs when the meeting erupted in pandemonium. Few constituents will remember what she was trying to do. Everyone will remember elected officials acting like buffoons.

Grown-ups should be able to regulate their own behavior at public meetings. When they can’t, they need new rules to spell out what they should already know. If that doesn’t work, we can always call in some yard monitors. I know some elementary school kids who would gladly advise.

James Corless

Two events in Washington, D.C., last week carried important implications for every Californian who relies on public transportation or navigates our increasingly rutted highways and besieged bridges.

First, a U.S. senator attempted to obstruct a jobs bill extending both unemployment aid and the federal highway trust fund. For the first time since it was created in 1956, the federal program that pays for transportation projects and highway safety literally shut down. For several days, ready-to-go California projects worth $37.5 million were in jeopardy, and construction firms made plans to keep their beleaguered workers at home.

A 30-day extension eventually passed, but the core problem remains: While Congress keeps our nation’s infrastructure on life support through stopgap measures and last-minute extensions, states like California suffer, and the nation as a whole falls farther behind our international competitors.

Decades ago, California led the nation into the era of freeway building, which means today we have an immense need to rebuild and repair our roads. Some major highways – Interstate 80 over Donner Pass, for example, or I-880 through Oakland – are so jarring to traverse that they could dislodge a kidney stone. In Long Beach, the Gerald Desmond Bridge has a “diaper” on it to catch falling pieces of concrete.

The federal government historically has covered up to 80 percent of highway work, but that has become less and less reliable. In 2006, California voters agreed to take out billions in bonds to keep our infrastructure intact, but the blow to our economy has devastated that effort. We – like most other states – desperately need a stable federal partner.

Californians who rely on public transportation know our agencies are bleeding right now. Up and down the coast and into the Valley, officials are reducing routes, raising fares and cutting workers at a time when we need every possible job. For the first time in memory, employees at Sacramento’s Regional Transit are bracing for layoffs, and many commuters already have seen their routes to work cut and their fares increased as RT struggles to cut $36 million. Agencies in Southern California and the Bay Area have raised fares 17 percent or more. Congress, meanwhile, overlooked transit when providing emergency aid to preserve essential services, and has dallied on passing a new transportation program that could provide more stable funding.

California is ready to lead the nation in high-speed rail, but we can’t do it alone. While Congress and the administration included a starter fund for inter-city rail in the economic stimulus, the current transportation law – the one just extended for another month – contains zero federal support for what ought to be a national effort. Los Angeles County, too, needs changes in the federal program in order to make the best use of the funds local voters approved to build out the much-needed rail and rapid-bus network. With those changes, L.A. could be moving in 10 years, rather than dragging out construction for 30.

The instability of funding for public transit and for rail is doubly bad news, because our future requires us to have more and better alternatives to driving everywhere for everything, as metro roads max out with population growth, and as we work to reduce carbon emissions and our dependency on imported oil. There is a glimmer of hope for a new national vision, and that brings us to the other D.C. development this week. Our own Sen. Barbara Boxer, who chairs the Senate committee that must write the bulk of a new transportation bill, announced that she is pulling this critical issue off the back burner at last and is pressing ahead. She held her first hearing on the bill, which she has aptly dubbed “Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century.”

Already the conventional road lobbyists are lining up to battle for continuing the status quo, only with more money. We Californians owe it to ourselves and the nation to let Boxer know we will support her if she will fight for a new national vision that helps us fulfill our goals of rebuilding our aging highways; expanding clean public transportation options; building a high-speed rail system; making our communities safe for walking and biking; and reducing our dependence on petroleum and the oil companies. It would be a home run for our senator and make California’s transportation system – once again – the envy of the world.

Stuart Cohen

Just 20 years ago, pro-life and anti-homosexual rights views seemed to overlap entirely. They appeared to be expressions of the same traditionalist moral framework, destined to succeed or fail together as twin pillars of the culture war.

But in the years since, the fortunes of these two social stands have dramatically diverged. A May 2009 Gallup poll found that more Americans, for the first time, describe themselves as “pro-life” than “pro-choice.” A February 2010 CNN/Time poll found that half of Americans, for the first time, believe that homosexuality is “not a moral issue.” This divergence says something about successful social movements in America.

Pro-life activists have made far less legal progress than have advocates for gay rights, in part because the courts have played an active role in discouraging democracy on abortion. But it is a remarkable achievement that 37 years after Roe v. Wade attempted to settle the abortion question, it remains unsettled. Fifty-two percent of Americans believe that having an abortion is “morally wrong.” Fifty-three percent oppose public funding in health reform legislation. The provision of abortion remains stigmatized within the medical profession. And the abortion rate in America has dropped significantly since the 1980s.

Part of this continuing unease results from technological innovation. Increasingly vivid sonograms have provided a window to the womb, revealing the humanity of a developing human.

But the pro-life movement also shifted its political strategy, moving away from judgmental moral arguments toward a language of civil rights aspiration. Pro-life activists and politicians, influenced by Catholic thinkers such a Richard John Neuhaus, began talking of an expanding circle of legal inclusion and protection that includes the unborn – a welcoming society that values the vulnerable. In this narrative, abortion is not only wrong but also unjust.

The advances of the homosexual rights movement have been broader.

Its progress is perhaps the most pronounced social change of the last few decades. Homosexual marriage remains a two-sided debate, but two-thirds of Americans now favor civil unions for homosexual couples.

The claim of basic rights for homosexuals – to be left alone, free from harassment – is conceded even by most critics of homosexual marriage. While there is serious opposition to gay nuptials, there is no serious movement for the return of sodomy laws and social discrimination.

Despite a long history of ostracism, the gay rights movement today has some advantages denied to pro-life advocates. Higher education, entertainment and advertising tend to be gay-friendly in a way that they cannot be considered pro-life friendly.

But much of the progress for gay rights has been parallel to the pro-life cause. The strategy of “coming out” has personalized this debate as surely as the sonogram. A 2009 CNN poll found that 49 percent of Americans report having a family member or close friend who is gay – up 17 points from 1994. A human face always makes harsh judgment more difficult.

Also similar to the pro-life movement, many gay rights advocates have shifted their political argument. The activism of the 1970s was often motivated by sexual liberationism – a revolutionary rejection of sexual morality and the idea of respectability. But a generation of thoughtful gay rights advocates, exemplified by Jonathan Rauch of the National Journal, has made the argument for joining traditional institutions instead of smashing them. More radical activists have criticized this approach as assimilationist and bourgeois. But only bourgeois arguments triumph in America. And many have found this more conservative argument for gay rights – encouraging homosexual commitment through traditional institutions – less threatening than moral anarchism.

It remains possible that the gay rights movement could provoke a backlash. If the Supreme Court were to strike down restrictions on gay marriage nationally, one could expect a Roe-like reaction in parts of the country. If the advance of homosexual rights were broadly used to undermine the tax status and funding of churches and charities that hold to a different moral standard, resentment and resistance would follow.

But so far the gay rights movement has succeeded for many of the same reasons that the pro-life movement (to a lesser extent) has succeeded. Both have taken sometimes abstract, theoretical arguments and humanized them. Both have moved away from extreme-sounding moralism (or anti-moralism) and placed their cause in the context of civil rights progress. Whatever your view on the application of these arguments, this is the way social movements advance in America.

One year ago, a panel at Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson’s education summit focused on teaching, stating what people know intuitively: “Research has shown that teacher quality is the single most important school-based variable that impacts student achievement.”

Among the panelists was Eric Scroggins of Teach for America, an organization created in 1990 to recruit top college graduates who teach for at least two years in the nation’s hardest-to-staff schools. The premise is that young, energetic, committed teachers can make a difference in the lives of students in lower- income communities.

Now, a year later, Teach for America has announced that Sacramento is among 15 finalists for five new slots across the country. Sacramento would have to commit to 30 teachers and raise $2.7 million in private funds by April. The Bay Area Morgan Family Foundation, known in Sacramento for funding youth projects, already has pledged $600,000.

Sacramento City Unified Superintendent Jonathan Raymond sees potential for Teach for America at a handful of chronically struggling schools – particularly in hard-to-staff math, science and special education positions where Teach for America excels in drawing applicants (more than one in five of this year’s 46,000 applicants have majors or minors in mathematics, science, engineering or finance).

Teach for America has had a successful track record in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Jose and San Francisco since the early 1990s. After the two-year commitment ends, two-thirds continue to work in education. Equally important, those who work outside education have firsthand experience working with low-income students.

Jason Kamras, a 1991 graduate of Rio Americano High School in San Juan Unified, is an example. He joined Teach for America after college and taught math at a Washington, D.C., middle school for eight years. He was National Teacher of the Year in 2005 and now works developing teachers in the D.C. district.

Sacramento should jump on the opportunity to add to its teaching pipeline a corps of top graduates who want to teach in the toughest schools.

I was tempted to turn my abaya into a black masquerade cloak and sneak into Mecca, just hop over the Tropic of Cancer to the Red Sea and crash the ultimate heaven’s gate: the Kaaba, in the Saudi city where the Prophet Muhammad was born.

But in the end, it seemed disrespectful, not to mention dangerous. So on my odyssey to Saudi Arabia, I tried to learn about the religion that smashed into the American consciousness on 9/11 in a less sneaky way. And that’s when the paradox sunk in: It was nearly impossible for me to experience Islam in the cradle of Islam.

You don’t have to be a Catholic to go to the Vatican. You don’t have to be Jewish to go to the Western Wall (although if you’re a woman, you’re squeezed into a slice of it at the side). You don’t have to be Buddhist to hear the Dalai Lama speak – and have your picture snapped with him afterward.

I assumed I at least could go to a mosque at prayer time, as long as I wore an abaya and hijab, took off my shoes, and stayed in the back in a cramped, segregated women’s section. The magnificent Blue Mosque in Istanbul, once the center of one of the greatest Muslim empires, is a huge tourist draw.

But at the Jeddah Hilton, I was told that non-Muslims could not visit mosques – not even the one on the hotel grounds.

A Saudi woman in Jeddah told me that the best way to absorb Islam was to listen to the call for prayer while standing on the corniche by the Red Sea at sunset.

That was indeed moving, but I didn’t feel any better equipped to understand the complexities of Islam that even Saudis continually debate – and where radical Islam fits in.

Saudis understandably have zero interest in outraging the rest of the Muslim world by letting members of other faiths observe their deeply private rituals and gawk at the parade of religious costumes fashioned from loose white sheets. But couldn’t they build a center to promote Islamic understanding in Mecca or Medina?

(Osama bin Laden’s jihad, after all, began with anger about American troops being deployed to Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War, which he considered a profanity against sacred ground.) Still, I pressed on with Prince Saud al- Faisal. With his tinted aviator glasses and sometimes sly demeanor, the Saudi foreign minister has the air of a Hollywood mogul – if moguls wore thobes.

I noted that when 15 Saudi hijackers joined four more proponents of radical jihad and flew into the twin towers, Islam had been hijacked as well. He nodded.

King Abdullah’s formal title is Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. And Saudis are very eager to remove the restrictions on visas and enhanced airport security measures slapped in place by America after 9/11.

So isn’t there a way for Saudi Arabia to shed light on Islam and reclaim it from the radicals? “Well, at least leave one place closed for the moment,” he said, looking askance at the mere question. “We only have Mecca now and Medina. Everything else is wide open now.”

“Wide open” is not a description that applies to anything in Saudi Arabia. Besides, I said, there were objections when I tried to go to a mosque.

“Well, you know, it depends who you ask,” he said. “Somebody in the hotel who doesn’t want to run into trouble may tell you no.

“Mecca is a special case. It’s written in the holy book that only Muslims can enter it because of an incident in the past where somebody desecrated the mosque in Mecca.

“But for other mosques to be entered, there is absolutely no reason why not. If you go to a mosque and you want to see the mosque and somebody prevents you, you can go to the emir of the region and ask to see the mosque and he will take you there.” Sure. Just call the emir. I bet he’s listed.

In the end, I did see the hajj. When I got home, I went to the Imax theater at the Smithsonian and bought a ticket to “Journey to Mecca.” I was surprised when the movie said that the Kaaba was built by “Abraham, the father of the Jews” – a reminder that the faiths have a lot to learn from each other.

There are legislative miles to go before the government will be emancipated from its health care myopia, but it is not too soon for a summing up. Whether all or nothing of the legislation becomes law, President Barack Obama has refuted critics who call him a radical. He has shown himself to be a timid progressive.

His timidity was displayed when he flinched from fighting for the boldness the nation needs – a transition from the irrationality of employer-provided health insurance. His progressivism is an attitude of genteel regret about the persistence of politics.

Employer-paid insurance is central to what David Gratzer of the Manhattan Institute calls “the 12 cent problem.” That is how much of every health care dollar is spent by the person receiving the care.

Hence Americans’ buffet mentality – we paid at the door to the health care feast, so let’s consume all we can.

John McCain had the correct prescription for health care during the 2008 campaign. He proposed serious change – taxing employer-provided health care as what it indisputably is – compensation – and giving tax credits, including refundable ones, for individuals to purchase insurance. Instead, as the legislative endgame plods toward us on leaden feet, the sprawling bills would subsidize insurance purchases for families of four earning almost $100,000 a year, a redundant reminder of unseriousness about the nation’s fiscal mismanagement.

Of course, there now is a commission of experts to recommend cures for this. It should be called the Philip Dru Memorial Commission.

In a scintillating book coming in June (“The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris”), Peter Beinart dissects the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson. Edward House, Wilson’s closest adviser, wrote an awful but indicative novel, “Philip Dru: Administrator.” With the nation in crisis, Dru seizes power, declares himself “Administrator of the Republic,” and replaces Congress with a commission of five experts who decree reforms that selfish interests had prevented.

Wilson, a professor of political science, said that the Princeton he led as its president was dedicated to unbiased expertise, and he thought government could be “reduced to science.” Progressives are forever longing to replace the governance of people by the administration of things. Because they are entirely public-spirited, progressives volunteer to be the administrators, and to be as disinterested as the dickens.

How gripped was Wilson by what Beinart calls “the hubris of reason”? Beinart writes: “He even recommended to his wife that they draft a constitution for their marriage. Let’s write down the basic rules, he suggested; ‘then we can make bylaws at our leisure as they become necessary.’ It was an early warning sign, a hint that perhaps the earnest young rationalizer did not understand that there were spheres where abstract principles didn’t get you very far, where reason could never be king.” Professor Obama, who will seek re-election on the 100th anniversary of Wilson’s 1912 election, understands, which makes him melancholy.

Speaking to Katie Couric on Feb. 7, Obama said: “I would have loved nothing better than to simply come up with some very elegant, academically approved approach to health care, and didn’t have any kinds of legislative fingerprints on it, and just go ahead and have that passed. But that’s not how it works in our democracy. Unfortunately, what we end up having to do is to do a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people.” Note his aesthetic criterion of elegance, by which he probably means sublime complexity. During the yearlong health care debate, Republicans such as Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee have consistently cautioned against the conceit that government is good at “comprehensive” solutions to the complex problems of a continental nation. Obama has consistently argued, in effect, that the health care system is like a Calder mobile – touch it here and things will jiggle here, there and everywhere. Because everything is connected to everything else, merely piecemeal change is impossible.

So note also Obama’s yearning for something “academically approved” rather than something resulting from “a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people,” a.k.a. politics. Here, too, Obama is in the spirit of the U.S. president who first was president of the American Political Science Association.

Wilson was the first president to criticize the Founding Fathers.

He faulted them for designing a government too susceptible to factions that impede disinterested experts from getting on with government undistracted. Like Princeton’s former president, Obama’s grievance is with the greatest Princetonian, the “father of the Constitution,” James Madison, class of 1771.

With “Alice in Wonderland” enjoying a revival in movie houses, it is hard not to notice a similarity between this fantasy tale and California’s budget deliberations.

Lawmakers have been in special session since January on the budget, but you wouldn’t know it from the results. There’s little sense of urgency. The Mad Hatter is throwing a tea party, with a watch that is two days slow.

Consider the current state of play. Lawmakers were supposed to send the governor a budget solution by Feb. 22. Instead of doing so, they met the deadline by approving payment deferrals to manage the state’s cash through June.

Then the Assembly sent the governor a budget bill that expressed intent to make cuts in the next fiscal year. The governor vetoed it Monday because it failed to enact cuts in the current fiscal year, as painful as those cuts might be.

The governor is right to stand his ground. As he notes, the state is spending $600 million a month more than it is taking in. The longer lawmakers wait to enact cuts, the larger the deficit will grow both this year and next.

So if they are not focused on the budget, what are lawmakers doing? Former Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, the Queen of Hearts, is running for Congress and raising money for a measure to kill redistricting reform.

Current Speaker John A. Pérez, the Knave of Hearts, is blocking the nomination of a moderate Republican, Abel Maldonado, to the lieutenant governor’s seat and engaged in other sideshows.

As The Bee’s Dan Morain noted in a column Wednesday, Pérez and others have been engaged in talks to torpedo an open primary measure on the June ballot. Far-left Democrats and far-right Republicans hate the idea of an open primary, because it creates the prospect for moderates such as Maldonado to slip into office.

All this might make Schwarzenegger sound like the only adult in the Capitol. Yet in recent months, he has been less than focused on the budget. He is starting to resemble the King of Hearts, motivated by good intentions but no match for his reckless and loony dominion.

If you are a citizen who cares about California, you might feel a bit like Alice right now. Your state has fallen into a deep rabbit hole. Nearly everywhere you go in the Capitol, you encounter a strange cast of characters who can’t seem to work together and who distort reality. You keep asking serious questions, but all you get back are riddles.

Lawmakers and the governor are hoping the economy will rebound, or that President Barack Obama will save California with billions of dollars in aid.

It is all very curious, this wishful thinking.

Or, as Alice once said, “Curiouser and curiouser.”