Who would have ever thought that a teenage bodybuilder from the Austrian hinterland would become Governor of Kalifornien? What an astonishing country.
The only thing I deeply regret about the California election is the defeat of Proposition 54, the Racial Privacy Iniatiative, which would have prohibited state and local governments in California from classifying any person by race, ethnicity, color, or national origin in public education, contracting, or employment. Former Surgeon General Everett Koop and other opponents of the measure blatantly lied to the public by saying that it would impede medical research, which was in fact explicitly exempted, as were law enforcement and the State Departments of Fair Employment & Housing. When are we going to be rid of the mentality of apartheid? (I should add that I cringe at a term such as “blatantly lied,” but in this case there is no other term that would do justice to what the opponents of Proposition 54 did. It was truly a shameful scare campaign.)