I'm not really much for forcible identity politics, but some Latino leaders are making noises that a Hispanic ought to replace Bill Richardson (who withdrew his nomination) as the Secretary of Commerce, making the argument that the Latino population must maintain its representation in the Administration. I'd prefer the best man or woman for the job, but this is a case where there already is a Hispanic who Obama considered for a separate cabinet appointment who may be able to be persuaded into accepting this one. That would be Xavier Becerra.
An Obama transition team source said a veteran California congressman, Xavier Becerra, has emerged as the leading congressional candidate to replace Richardson, the Hispanic governor of New Mexico, as President-elect Barack Obama's choice for a job that will include overseeing the 2010 U.S. Census.
"Even though he turned down the trade representative slot, Becerra is not only Hispanic, but he has the skill, talent and experience to do the Commerce job," said the source, who was not authorized to speak for the president-elect.
"Xavier's name has gone to the top of the list of potential replacements in part because he is a member of the House leadership, he is well liked, he has very good credentials, and, of course, he was an early Obama backer," the source said.
It's all speculative at the moment, but I wouldn't be surprised if this happened. Becerra wanted a bigger role in the Administration than trade representative, and certainly the Commerce Department would give him a better opportunity to shape White House policy.
Obviously this would create another special election in an adjoining district to incoming Labor Secretary Hilda Solis' CA-32. Los Angeles County from Hollywood to points east would be ground zero for political wrangling this spring.
Xavier Becerra is not considering an appointment to become Secretary of Commerce and will remain in the House, his spokeswoman told Politico.
"The Congressman has already expressed that he is staying in Congress and looks forward to working with the Obama Administration from his position as House Democratic Vice Chair," said Fabiola Rodriguez.
And, if you've been paying attention, they'll seem quite familiar. If you have been sucked in by the media's "pit the blacks against the gays" strategy, well, I guess you're in for a surprise. In a study by two New York political science professors, race ends up way down the list on correlation with yes votes. The report is highlighted by equalitygiving.org and the full PDF is here. Here they are in order, according to Profs. Egan and Sherrill, summarized at equalitygiving:
* The two most important characteristics determining the vote were party identification and ideology. Those self describing as Democrats or Liberals, overwhelmingly opposed Prop 8. Those self describing as Republicans or Conservatives, overwhelmingly supported California Proposition 8.
* The third most important characteristic determining the vote was religiosity. Those attending religious services every week, supported Prop 8 by 70% while those attending once a month opposed it by 52% and those hardly ever attending opposed it by 70%.
* The fourth most important characteristic determining the vote was age. All the ages groups opposed Prop 8, except for those 65+ who supported it by 67%. As importantly, when compared to another marriage initiative in California in 2000 (the Knight initiative), all age groups increased their support of same sex marriage equality in 2008---except for those 65 years of age or older.
Race, it turns out, was far from determinative. The votes of African-Americans and Latinos was described better by using the variable of religiosity. That is, minorities who attended church regularly were far more likely to vote yes than an unreligious member of the same community.
I think we can definitively put to bed the argument that any one group caused our defeat. Well, save the group of voters over 65. As those voters get gradually replaced by younger voters, our odds of defeating such an amendment grow. If you are a statistics nerd, I highly recommend the full PDF here. The analysis is quite, well, mathy.
So there has been quite a tempest in a teapot brewing over the reports that the Equality Summit set for January 24th at the Los Angeles Convention Center to discuss how to obtain marriage equality in California will not be completely open to the media.
People on LGBT blogs have been howling that this is just another example of the NO ON PROP 8 folks trying to be "secretive" and keep out the netroots and community-based activists.
All the major LGBT blogs Joe.My.God, Pam's House Blend, TowleRoad ran with the story which was clearly fueled by longtime lesbian activist Robin Tyler who was unhappy when the vote on whether to not have a strategic planning summit open to the media had gone against her wishes and resigned in protest.
As someone who is on the call and is still on the Planning Committee for the Equality Summit let me tell you the real deal. Only one blog got it right and it isn't one that you would expect...
It's more than a little surprising to me that the choice for CIA Director of Leon Panetta, who I considered a card-carrying Villager if there ever was one, is ruffling such feathers inside official Washington, particularly official Democratic Washington. At first blush this looked like whining about not being informed, but it seems like there's more there. Here's the relevant section from the LA Times:
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who this week begins her tenure as the first female chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said today that she was not consulted on the choice and indicated she might oppose it.
"I was not informed about the selection of Leon Panetta to be the CIA director," Feinstein said. "My position has consistently been that I believe the agency is best served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time." [...]
A senior aide to Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), outgoing chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that the senator "would have concerns" about a Panetta nomination.
Rockefeller "thinks very highly of Panetta," the aide said. "But he's puzzled by the selection. He has concerns because he has always believed that the director of CIA needs to be someone with significant operational intelligence experience, and someone outside the political realm."
Most of the intelligence professionals at the top over the past eight years had plenty of "experience" and that didn't work out too well. The one who came from the political arena, Porter Goss (who was a former spy), wasn't so objectionable to Dianne Feinstein - I mean she voted to confirm him, after all. Of course, he was a Republican, which makes everything OK.
But I don't think this is about Panetta's lack of experience; it's his wealth of it, which presages a change in culture inside the agency.
Panetta's selection suggests that Obama intends to shake up the agency, which has had little public accounting of its role in detaining top terror suspects and transferring others to regimes known to use torture, a procedure known as extraordinary rendition.
The CIA, which denies subjecting detainees to torture, is part of a 16-agency intelligence community whose annual budget now exceeds $47.5 billion. The agency keeps its own budget and number of employees secret. Its successes, too, are mostly kept secret while some of its failures reach front pages.
Panetta has suggested that Obama could do much to signal a break with Bush administration policies by signing executive orders during his first 100 days that ban the use of torture in interrogations and close the Guantanamo Bay prison.
"Issuing executive orders on issues such as prohibiting torture or closing Guantanamo Bay would make clear that his administration will do things differently," Panetta wrote Nov. 9 in a regular column he published in his local newspaper, the Monterey (Calif.) County Herald [...]
"He will be an outsider and I think the president wants an outsider's perspective on the CIA," said Lee Hamilton, a former Indiana congressman and a former chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence who heads the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. "The intelligence community has lost a lot of confidence with the American people and the Congress. I'm talking about 9/11, the Iraq war."
It's that he's an outsider with enough institutional power to actually make changes, and the moral compass to make those decisions based not on burying the past but rooting it out. THAT'S what has DiFi and Jello Jay spooked. In fact, they wanted Michael Hayden's right-hand man to take over (on the flip...)
• Meg Whitman looks increasingly like a candidate for the governor's gig. She quit a couple boards of directors over the last few weeks. Great, just what we need, another political neophyte who thinks they can buy their way into the job. That will never work...oh wait. The AP has it that she is going to announce soon.
Great, another Pro-Prop 8 Republican claiming to be moderate. I have to think that some conservative will come in there and clean the clock of the "moderates" Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner, and the true moderate Tom Campbell. As I see it, there is a real opportunity for a McClintock-esque grassroots conservative to get in the race and grab the nomination, with the moderate vote split.
• Also on the Prop 8 front, much has been said about Attorney General Jerry Brown and the brief emerging from his office on Proposition 8. The Bee's Peter Hecht takes a look at some of those responses today. If one were a cynic, you'd think about the position in relation to the 2010 primary, especially when you look at it through the prism of his decision-making process on Prop 5. The position of the AG's brief rejecting the revision theory is also quite troublesome.
• This could be an idea for the budget - call in an ethicist to set priorities on spending. One look at the Yacht Party's plan and any ethicist worth a damn might have them all committed as psychopaths.
• California's road to economic recovery is paved with solar panels. It's about 30 years too late, but we're finally starting to see some real results on the move toward one million solar roofs, and more. California now has more than half of the US solar capacity (sadly, the country ranks fourth in the world, behind Germany, Spain and Japan).
• Interested in an inauguration night party? Well, the Amador County Dems have what sounds like a fun one. Check the flip for more details.
I'm having some computer issues, but I have been able to notice that Leon Panetta, former White House Chief of Staff under Clinton, has been tapped for the CIA Director position. Digby references this article from Panetta from this year:
Even though we now know that there were intelligence officials who questioned the assertion, few leaders were willing to challenge this argument for war because they knew it might undermine public support for the president's decision to invade Iraq.
More recently, President Bush vetoed a law that would require the CIA and all the intelligence services to abide by the same rules on torture as contained in the U.S. Army Field Manual [...]
all forms of torture have long been prohibited by American law and international treaties respected by Republican and Democratic presidents alike.
Our forefathers prohibited "cruel and unusual punishment" because that was how tyrants and despots ruled in the 1700s. They wanted an America that was better than that. Torture is illegal, immoral, dangerous and counterproductive. And yet, the president is using fear to trump the law.
I hope he gets cracking on putting the CIA under the Army Field Manual. That would be a very good start.
As a side note, Panetta has been leading one of the most insufferable organizations in California's history, a high Broderist effort called California Forward, which thinks the biggest problem in the state is that lawmakers from both sides don't have drinks together anymore, or something. At least Panetta's influence on the state will be lessened. He's not my favorite guy by any stretch, but if he can manage to not have the CIA kidnapping and torturing anymore he can hold his head up high.
"I was not informed about the selection of Leon Panetta to be the CIA Director. I know nothing about this, other than what I've read," said Senator Feinstein, who will chair the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in the 111th Congress.
"My position has consistently been that I believe the Agency is best-served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time."
There was much to like in the Governor's Weekly Radio Address this week, at least to the untrained eye. It was presented by the Governor's Finance Director Mike Genest and includes an open plea to the Legislature. It spoke of the dire situation our state is facing, in end of the world like terms. A snip:
So, bear with me a moment while I speak directly to your state legislator.
Sir or Madam, I know that you didn't run for office so you could vote to raise taxes or cut spending for vital programs. I too wish there was another way. But, we have to do what is needed to bring this state back from the fiscal brink. You are a leader. In times like this leadership requires compromise. Your state needs your help.
You can save it from disaster, but only if you reach across the aisle. Time is up. Please act now.
The problem of course? It's all propaganda that ignores the $18 Billion package that is facing his veto. While the state dawdles away its general fund, the Governor's team dishonestly ignores the fact that the Democrats have compromised, and the Republicans refuse to move an inch.
And that veto. So, Mr. Genest, if you want to point a finger, perhaps that finger should turn right back upon the current Administration.
I have it on good authority that a certain Emanuel Pleitez, a member of the Treasury Department review of the Obama-Biden Presidential Transition Team, is prepping for a run for California's CD-32, which is being vacated by Hilda Solis.
Pleitez has an interesting resume thus far in his career, though it seems unlikely that he'll be able to provide a substantial challenge to the heavyweight-laden field that the CA-32 special is likely to produce, including Judy Chu, Gil Cedillo and Gloria Romero.
My instant analysis is that the addition of yet another Hispanic candidate does little except strengthen the chances of Judy Chu's ascent to Congress.
So far I've been able to meet a ton of really interesting activists, both new and old. Every once in a while it is great just to sit down with other like-minded activists. In many ways, the educational aspect is just a great bonus.
But, that being said, it is quite a bonus. There have been discussions on engaging young voters and activists, reaching diverse communities, using the Obama training and tool set, and strategic messaging. And a whole lot more.
I'll toss in some more links later. In the interim, keep an eye out on http://equalitycamp.com
Five top Democratic governors have called for a larger stimulus package than is presently being called for in Washington, precisely to fill in the gaps created by a loss of tax revenue in the states.
To help offset state budget cuts, a group of Democratic governors urged the federal government Friday to pass a $1 trillion economic stimulus package, significantly larger than the one under discussion in Congress.
The package would help states compensate for cuts to education spending that could cause long-term economic decline, as well as bolster infrastructure projects and benefits programs for the poor, the governors from New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Ohio and Wisconsin said in a news conference [...]
The governors recommended that the stimulus plan include $350 billion for infrastructure, including transportation, wastewater and broadband projects; $250 billion for anti-poverty programs such as Medicaid, unemployment insurance, food stamps and child care; $250 billion in flexible education spending to maintain funding for programs from pre-kindergarten to higher education; and middle-class tax cuts.
The money, disbursed over two years, would offset cuts needed to balance state budgets and would serve as a "bridge" until 2011, by which time the governors hope the economy will have recovered, said Massachusetts Gov. Deval L. Patrick.
Predictably, the Republican Governor's Association called it a "bailout" of the general funds of the various states.
Well, yes. The states, by and large, did not have the ability to get out from under the financial meltdown, and the consequent economic downturn that resulted shouldn't disproportionately affect the least of their citizens. Furthermore, given that the road to recovery is massive fiscal stimulus, having states cutting back on spending at this time, be it infrastructure, education or healthcare, is completely counterproductive and will do nothing but prolong the agony.
In the future, it will take more than backfilling state budget cuts in a downturn, but a more structured system, like a "Federal Infrastructure Finance Corporation," to ensure that state assets aren't sold off to private interests during a downturn. The days of creative borrowing and the crossing of fingers are over. We need new structures to manage economic volatility and avoid fiscal traps, PARTICULARLY in California, where the tax system too closely mirrors the boom and bust cycle.
In the near term, I imagine something like this will pass. Barack Obama today put out a call for "strategic investments" to create jobs and improve the long-term economic outlook simultaneously. The question locally is whether California's plans will actually accomplish that. CalPIRG is criticizing the state's wish list, saying that it relies too much on increasing highway and road capacity and not enough on cleaner energy investments:
The California Public Interest Research Group reports that the state plans to spend 31% of road money on creating new capacity instead of addressing long-deferred maintenance and repair projects. By contrast, the group said, Massachusetts would commit 100% of its road funds to repairs.
"We can't afford to waste precious resources on new highways at the expense of ready-to-go projects to repair and maintain existing roads and bridges and expand public transportation," said spokeswoman Erin Steva.
The group also faulted the California Department of Transportation's list, saying that only 37% of the funds would flow to public transportation. The group called for a higher percentage, citing the record ridership on California's mass transit systems, which have been hit by severe cutbacks in recent years. The proposed percentage is less than what is being planned in Tennessee, Wisconsin and Massachusetts, CALPIRG said.
It is elemental that the stimulus spending cannot prop up an unsustainable growth model based on sprawl. Experts up and down the state understand this, and one of the best examples is in this Merced Sun-Star editorial, which nicely explains the tension between speed and smarts:
The problem for the planners is that the stimulus must be geared toward putting people to work as fast as possible. That, many believe, argues for the traditional sort of public works, such as highways.
In many cases, plans are already in place to replace crumbling roads, highways and bridges. By contrast, plans for urban transit systems and intercity high-speed rail are less firm, meaning it may take more time to actually start turning dirt and generating paychecks [...]
We're confident that a solution exists that puts people to work right away and also lays the groundwork for a new approach to the nation's transportation needs.
It won't be easy, but it has to happen. We can't continue to simply build more transportation infrastructure on a model that's now more than a half-century old.
A new model for transportation is part of the change we need.
Read the whole thing. One good idea calls for phased stimulus spending, giving enough for critical highway and road repairs at the start, with the bulk coming later for transit and rail projects.
Today's Paul Krugman column exploring the apparent end of Republican racial backlash politics has been getting some excellent commentary across the blogosphere, including friend of Calitics thereisnospoon's excellent take at Daily Kos:
For the longest time, the progressive economic agenda was held hostage to vaguely economically progressive but socially retrograde racist Dixiecrats in the South. When truly progressive economics required that all our nation's people have equal opportunity to share in the nation's wealth, those erstwhile allies became strained or broken. But today Democrats are no longer dependent on the likes of Zell Miller and his Dixiecratic friends to enact a progressive economic agenda. The Republicans have painted themselves into a corner as the Party of the South, and Democrats have largely cleaned our own house of the racists.
All that leaves for us is the question of whether enough of our Democratic officials will recover from their Battered Wife Syndrome and the reject the temptations of corporate corruption to truly herald the advent of a 2nd New Deal.
Krugman and spoon's points are especially applicable to California, where the Republican politics of backlash was born and perfected. From Reagan's 1966 campaign that took many white working class voters from Pat Brown and the Dems, to Howard Jarvis' 1978 Prop 13 campaign to cut taxes he argued were being misspent on people of color, to Pete Wilson's 1994 campaign won by scapegoating immigrants (also true of Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2003 recall campaign, to a lesser extent) California Republican ideologies and political success have been built on exploiting white voters' resentments. As both Krugman and spoon point out, the base wanted the Great Society undone, and the real power in the Republican Party wanted to undo the New Deal.
As the state of California enters the most serious fiscal crisis in its 150-year history, it's worth looking at how the collapse of Republican backlash politics may provide the necessary opening to fix this state and move beyond 40 years of destructive and failed conservative ideology.
The short version of what I'm going to explain below is this: the collapse of the backlash is due to a more diverse electorate and to an economic crisis that is now consuming the white middle-class, eliminating previous economic privileges they turned to conservatives to defend.
The underlying economic and demographic rationale for Republican anti-tax backlash politics in California is now gone, making multiracial coalitional politics based on expanding government in order to provide badly needed services and jobs a very real possibility, and likely the seed of a new political framework in California. More services and more spending, not less taxes, are now the overriding concern of California voters. Our politicians will have to catch up to be viable.
Lost amidst the union-busting and efforts to destroy public schools in Arnold's budget proposal is maybe the first serious, legitimate attempt to sensibly manage the prison crisis in decades, with a reform plan that would save the state $1 billion by boarding up the revolving door between jail and parole for nonviolent offenders.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's latest budget proposal would reduce by tens of thousands the number of criminals behind bars and under community supervision.
Parole would be eliminated for all nonserious, nonviolent and non-sex offenders. The proposal would cut the parole population by about 65,000 by June 30, 2010, or more than half of the Christmas Eve count of 123,144.
At the same time, the corrections plan calls for increasing good-time credits for inmates who obey the rules and complete rehabilitation programs. Combined with the new parole policies that would result in fewer violators forced back into custody, the proposal would reduce the prison population by 15,000 by June 30, 2010. It stood at 171,542 on Dec. 24.
It is insane and wrong, particularly during this budget meltdown but really in general, that 2/3 of all prisoners entering the system in 2007 were parole violators. These are minor, possibly technical offenses with little bearing on public safety that clog up the jails, creating constitutional crises. California is the worst state in the union when it comes to parole policy, and these changes would simply bring the state in line with the rest of the country, all of which are able to manage without a perpetual crime wave.
Now, it may anger tough on crime advocates, as well as those who have a self-interested stake like the prison guards, but I have to say that they are the right people to anger.
The California Correctional Peace Officers Association, still at odds with Schwarzenegger over a new contract, blasted the plan.
"What it means is residual costs to all citizens of California and higher insurance rates and more crime," said CCPOA spokesman Lance Corcoran, whose union represents about 30,000 correctional officers and parole agents. "These are individuals who do not take advantage of opportunities for change, and they are not going to change," he said of the offenders who stand to benefit from the proposals.
More scaremongering isn't going to work. There is no reason for tough on crime policies to continue to rule the day. Those days are over.
The proposals on rehabilitation and time credits for prisoners, which would accrue in county lockups and get advanced if detainees take drug, vocational and educational programs, are already in the work-around budget passed by the Legislature. Arnold could go ahead and sign that, and put us on a more responsible criminal justice path immediately.
We know that Arnold holds a grudge against unions, which he believes caused him that stinging defeat in 2005, and much of his goals on the budget lately have taken their aim at those unions. In particular, Arnold is seeking to privatize major infrastructure projects, ostensibly for the sake of "efficiency" but as a practical matter to get the jobs out of union hands. I thought that much of this was just a sop to Arnold's friends on the Chamber of Commerce and just more of the conservative mantras of animosity toward unions and privatization equaling a universal good. But there's also a quid pro quo angle involved here in the form of David Crane, a top economic advisor to the Governor, who would stand to benefit financially from any public-private projects put forward by his current boss.
As Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger demands that lawmakers allow private interests into California's huge market for public works projects, a company with close personal and financial ties to the governor's economic advisor is positioned to benefit.
The advisor, David Crane, has spent years promoting private-sector involvement in public construction projects -- one of a few issues holding up a deal between Schwarzenegger and legislative Democrats to ease the state's worsening fiscal crisis.
Babcock & Brown, the financial services firm where Crane worked for a quarter of a century, hired a Sacramento lobbyist last year to influence the governor's office on so-called public-private partnerships, records show. Since joining the governor's team in 2004, Crane has received hundreds of thousands of dollars of income from deals he made while at Babcock, a firm founded in San Francisco and based in Australia, according to financial disclosure reports.
Those deals included projects in areas such as telecommunications, in which he served as a financial advisor; personal investments in real estate from Babcock's public-private partnership projects in England; and partnerships he formed with other Babcock executives to invest in oil wells and an Italian restaurant chain.
Crane is claiming that he cannot possibly benefit financially from any future deals, but one wonders whether, even if Crane is telling the truth, it really matters. The network of friends and former business associates to which Crane's advice could directly or indirectly steer business is vast. This is how government-by-profit-taking typically works, rewarding friends and punishing enemies. Whether or not Crane gets his profit now, as an economic adviser, or later, when he returns to Babcock & Brown or some other destination, is in many ways besides the point, just a clever way to avoid violating the letter of the law.
Jessica Levinson, the director of political reform at the nonprofit Center for Governmental Reform in Los Angeles, said Crane appears to be operating within the letter, though perhaps not the spirit, of the law.
"It starts to have the appearance of doing political favors for old friends, and that is not something that I think is illegal, but it still may not be fully ethical," Levinson said. "I think it all comes down to, is he making this decision for public good or is he making it to help his old business friends?"
By the way, Crane is a Democrat, or at least that's what it says on his voter registration card. The issues are the same. He's a free market fundamentalist who probably thinks he's advocating on behalf of a good solution for California. After a while, the theft becomes so commonplace that the thieves don't even see it as stealing anymore.
The details of Arnold's budget plan are in and it is even more insane than we thought. His budget includes large cuts to public schools, which are bad enough in their own right. But the specific kinds of cuts are going to trigger a snowball effect that could destroy public schools in California - and I don't believe that's an exaggeration.
California schools could eliminate a week of instruction and increase class sizes next year under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's new plan for solving the state's budget crisis.
Vowing to give schools maximum flexibility to cut costs, the proposal unveiled Wednesday also would allow districts to eliminate one of two science courses required for high school graduation.
Schwarzenegger's plan would provide no teacher salary increases, eliminate a program providing subsidies to overhaul low-performing schools, and suspend participation in a program encouraging teachers to obtain national certification.
In and of themselves these cuts are damaging and reckless. California students need MORE science instruction, not less, if they're going to be globally competitive. Cutting instruction isn't going to help students learn more, and will lead to corner-cutting by teachers and administrators alike.
Those damaging cuts become catastrophic, however, in the context of No Child Left Behind. Arnold's proposals are likely to cause numerous schools to fail to meet federal standards set by the law, especially when subsidies to low-performing schools are cut. Because NCLB mandates the closure of low-performing schools, Arnold's budget if enacted as-is would virtually ensure the closure of numerous schools in this state.
Arnold's budget also leaves schools facing their own cash crisis during the school year (and in prime testing season):
The governor has proposed to ease the pain, in part, by accounting transfers involving state transportation funds and by deferring $2.8 billion in school payments from April to July. Wells said the state, by deferring payments for three months, would place an "awful" new burden on school districts to secure short-term loans.
It will be extremely difficult to secure those kinds of loans, but Arnold continues to delude himself into thinking the private sector is interested in lending to state government or its affiliated agencies.
There are plenty of other ridiculous elements to Arnold's budget but the kinds of education cuts proposed are a good example of just how badly Arnold has screwed up our state. One has to wonder whether this is a shock-doctrine style plan to force mass privatization of public schools in California by starving them of revenue and forcing them to close when they inevitably are unable to meet NCLB standards.
Two years from now a new governor will be sworn in. I wonder if California can wait that long.
• An interesting piece from earlier in the week on Jerry Brown's legal challenge to Prop. 8, strictly speaking the first time a state Attorney General has sought to invalidate a popularly passed ballot measure since 1964.
• In other Brown news, he's suing the Bush Administration to block one of their "midnight regulations"- this one would reduce the input of federal scientists on mining and logging projects that may threaten endangered species.
• John Garamendi is, er, a little worried about the trajectory of the state's financial prospects.
• Again, you can check out Arnold's plan to cover the $41.8 billion dollar budget hole here.
• And a Happy New Year to everyone, with hopes for a great 2009! Oh, and if you want to sue for divorce, stay at a parking meter beyond the proscribed time, or not wear a seat belt, better get it in before the end of the year - state fees go up after midnight.
