Providing low-interest state loans to veterans to purchase a home or farm is a tradition that stretches back almost 90 years in California. Since 1922, Californians have voted 26 times to pass bond measures to aid veterans, and this year it has expanded to benefit even more former service men and women.

Let’s say for instance that you work the night shift at a low-paying job, you still drive the ’84 coupe you bought used and you’re renting a small one-bedroom apartment. You work hard, you save, but at this moment in time you’re barely making it. Oh, and don’t forget your credit card debt that has piled up over the years.

Your dream is to someday break out of your job, move to a nice house and most importantly, own a new Ferrari. You have the ambition, and one day you’ll have it, but for now, you have more important things to focus on.

In the summary for this proposition, the author uses the verb “gerrymander,” a verb that came into usage because of the gross abuse of a politician’s power in deciding what constitutes a state office boundary. This problem continues today, and will continue to do so. Once elected, it becomes difficult to vote out legislators when they have the ability to choose their constituents by drawing odd-shaped districts favorable to them and their party.

For an exercise in futility, log onto the Amtrak Web site and reserve a seat on the Coast Starlight train, which will take you from Emeryville, California straight into Los Angeles’ Union Station. To the tune of about fifty bucks one-way, you can chug your way down the coast to sunny southern California in only 12 hours and 40 minutes.

Right now our state office boundaries are drawn by the people that entire voting districts have elected and are accountable to their very constituents. Proposition 11 wants to take this power out of the hands of duly elected officials and instead hand it over to private citizens who have never held office and would only be accountable to the commission erected for the purpose of this proposition.

This proposition is too big and too complex; with more than twenty pages of fine print legal speak in the back of the voter information guide, few people will take the time to read up on a statute that tries to kill too many birds with a single, clumsily thrown stone.

Recently, the libertarian Ron Paul who made a run for the White House essentially said that if we do not want to have any more problems with drug crimes, we should decriminalize all drugs.

The idea behind the proposition is fine: a family should have good communication, especially about pregnancy, and this communication should promote good decision making in young adults, still maturing and looking for the wisdom and guidance of older, informed parents.

Minors have long been required to gain consent before they can do certain things, such as getting a body piercing or choosing to drop out of high school. These sort of parental co-singings have been implemented because it is generally held to be true that a child cannot always make an informed and responsible decision on his or her own, and thus the consent of the person taking care of this child is deemed necessary.

Proposition 10 is hardly the giant paving stone on the road to energy independence which its proponents make it out to be. In fact, it doesn’t even belong on the road to hell, because the intentions behind it are so dubious at best. The plan is the brainchild of Texas oil man T. Boone Pickens, who only recently began gracing the airwaves with constant and apparently selfless advocacy for wind power. This bill makes it clear that his advocacy for wind was anything but selfless.