I had the pleasure last night of attending George Lakoff's lecture at the Price Center Auditorium at UCSD.
The most emotional point of the long and wide-ranging lecture, the call to action, was about the upcoming California election, which he called a "national election" because Arnie's four propositions are part and parcel of the Republican national agenda. Particularly regarding 77, he says this is just Delay's Texas all over again.
Lakoff says the mechanism of how 77 advances the Republican agenda is that of the pool of retired judges that will make up the panel; the pool of available retired judges trends conservative, so no matter how they are selected, the fix is in from the get-go.
For me, it was good enough that Arnie is promoting it - call it knee-jerk, call it laziness, but lately it has served me very well to simply oppose whatever the Republicans are advancing. When I take time to examine the facts and policies, I find that jerking my knees has taken me in the right direction. But Lakoff looks hard and smart at all of these questions, and - particularly in this case - comes up with the same answer.
Kos, please reconsider.