Full disclosure: I have endorsed Das Williams, but do not have any official involvement in the campaign. I am attempting to cover this race as evenhandedly as possible.
In my previous analysis of the AD-35 primary race, I included the competing press releases between the Williams and Jordan campaigns. The gist of the issue was that while Jordan's release emphasized a $10,500 advantage in cash on hand and $1,600 advantage in total funds raised, the Williams campaign emphasized the $12,500 personal loan made by Jordan to her own campaign to give those numbers a boost. Also noted was the attempt by the Williams campaign to portray Jordan, despite her having held no elected office in the past, as a Sacramento pol, even as the Jordan campaign painted Williams as untrustworthy, opportunistic and overly aggressive and ambitious.
Williams' latest press release is already doubling down on this campaign theme, emphasizing the comparatively large number of donations coming to Jordan from outside the district, compared to Williams. And it is a staggeringly wide discrepancy to the tune of 85% to 22%:
Santa Barbara, CA - Following recent reports of strong early financial numbers, Assembly Candidate Das Williams today released the following comments regarding a breakdown of contributions that shows 85 percent of his campaign's donations come from within the 35th Assembly district, while his main opponent, Susan Jordan, received only 22 percent of her contributions from district sources:
"I'm humbled by the outpouring of local grassroots support and enthusiasm about my candidacy," said Williams. "Voters are ready for a new vision, new direction and new priorities."
As of the June 30th reporting deadline, Das Williams for Assembly raised over $120,000 - with no personal loans and no unpaid debt to report.
Das Williams is running to succeed Assemblymember Pedro Nava who will be termed out in 2010.
Das Williams grew up on the Central Coast and is a product of local public schools. In 2003, he became the youngest person ever to be elected to the Santa Barbara City Council, and was re-elected in 2007. Das has worked as a teacher, a policy aide for former Assemblywoman Hannah-Beth Jackson, and a community organizer who worked to stop the development of a Wal-Mart in Ventura and enact local living wage laws in Santa Barbara and Ventura. Das serves on the Peabody Charter School Board and is a national board member of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Das received his undergraduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley and holds a graduate degree in Environmental Science & Management from the University of California at Santa Barbara.
This is a risky strategy for Williams. The numbers are impressive, certainly, and reinforce the idea that Jordan is leveraging statewide connections rather than local chops. But it's also the second aggressive release from the Williams campaign in a couple of days, and will do nothing to dispel the negative image helpful to the Jordan campaign of Mr. Williams as a back-climbing career politician. At this early stage, the question seems to be: will the Williams campaign gain on substance from surprisingly good fundraising and strong local support, or lose on tone from negativity?
With no publicly available poll numbers yet, only time will tell.
The flames are growing above Santa Barbara this afternoon, as a wildfire that seemed to start near Jesusita Trail in San Roque Canyon continues to march its way up the mountains.
Wildfire expert and Indy correspondent Ray Ford is with a fire crew about 400 yards from the fire, which has been officially named the Jesusita Fire. He said that it is burning straight uphill, with 40-foot high flames. He said that the wind is starting to blow hard, with 20 to 25 mph gusts, pushing the fire northeast and east into Mission Canyon. He's watching two helicopters attack the fire, and says they are doing a good job of knocking it down. He has noticed a plume coming up from Mission Canyon and believes something may be burning there. But the fire does not seem to be moving back down San Roque Canyon at the moment.
Mandatory evacuations are underway in the Santa Barbara foothills, although the current path of the fire is quite unclear. This is pretty early in the year to see a major wildfire, as the "season" usually doesn't start until June 1. But global warming and the drought are causing nearly year-round fire conditions across the state, putting an added strain on firefighting resources.
Something Arnold might want to think about before threatening to destroy Cal Fire as part of a tantrum over voters' unwillingness to support Prop 1A.
(Marie also writes at Making Waves, a Ventura County blog. - promoted by Brian Leubitz)
WHAT IF SOMEONE asked you to vote to extend the unemployment benefits of nearly 300,000 jobless Californians in a way that wouldn't cost state taxpayers a dime?
Would you do it?
Even with state unemployment figures now running at 10.1 percent, Assemblywoman Audra Strickland (R-Moorpark) couldn't bring herself to vote for AB 3X 23, which would help unemployed workers for an additional 20 weeks, all with federal stimulus money.
It seems like a no-brainer, but Strickland sat on the sidelines along with 17 of her GOP colleagues, including another Ventura County legislator, Cameron Smyth, (R-Santa Clarita) and intentionally failed to vote. Another nine had the nerve to just vote against it.
Just one more vote Monday night and this bill to help our struggling families would have passed. Is it always a fait accompli that we must grovel for one Republican vote every time a 2/3 vote is required?
So I was flying through Seacliff at about eighty miles an hour when the universe suddenly and spectacularly decided to align in my favor. An unseasonably glorious sun shone down on the 101 freeway, and as I threaded the California coastline's spine on my way north to Santa Barbara, I felt the soft and deadly tentacles of contentment wrap themselves around my decaying cerebrum-and I was okay with that.
Yeah, because the combination of dramatic scenery, agreeable weather, a fast car, and an adorably earnest song about the collapse of Antarctic icebergs erupting out of the stereo was quiet a potent one, yo. I mean, you try to be a cynical asshole when the coda of "Larsen B" dumps you in its warm bath of epic Euro-echo right when the Rincon headlands loom up ahead like inverted Cliffs of Insanity. It's virtually impossible-or at least that's what I told myself in that giddy moment-so I just let it happen, you know?
Tim Herdt over at the VC Star's 95 Percent Accurate* is a veritable fountain of information today. This time he brings us news about our favorite new state senator, "Phony" Tony Strickland. As readers may recall, Tony Strickland ran a bogus campaign claiming to be an alternative energy entrepreneur though his alternative energy company has yet to secure a contract, and his voting record has been a boon to oil companies and other polluting industries who richly rewarded him with a major infusion of campaign contributions.
The protracted count is finally over, and it appears that Hannah-Beth Jackson's outsize effort to defeat Phony Tony Strickland has come up just short. With only a few hundred ballots left to count, Strickland currently maintains a 903 vote lead out of 414,587 ballots cast. That margin is .2%: well within the margin necessary for a mandatory recount request by the Jackson campaign. Unfortunately, as the pro-Strickland blog Policy Report correctly notes, such a recount effort would almost certainly be insufficient to net Hannah-Beth the votes she would need to overtake Strickland's lead, even were the final votes to close the gap to 700 or 800:
According to some experts, a recount of all 400,000+ ballots might yield a variance of 150 votes in one direction or the other at great cost. Gaining 800 votes in an election of this size is next to impossible.
With the latest totals showing Strickland hanging on to the lead by a little over 900 votes, Jackson said a victory was not mathematically possible.
"I'm disappointed, but I think that it's pretty clear at this point in time, we're not going to be able to catch up," she said.
Strickland is due to be sworn in Monday in Sacramento. He will represent voters in most of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties as well as the northwest corner of Los Angeles County, including Santa Clarita and Stevenson Ranch.
The outcome has been in doubt since the Nov. 4 election, but by Wednesday both candidates agreed that Strickland had won.
(good part about this is that we're under the mandatory recount window of .5% right now. - promoted by Dante Atkins (hekebolos))
There's good news and bad news, and then some possibly good news again, and then some possibly bad news again. The good news: latest vote counts have cut Strickland's lead in half, down to just under 1,300 votes. The bad news: the votes out of Santa Barbara County, Jackson's strongest base, are pretty much all counted. It's all up to the provisionals coming out of Ventura County now; if they trend Strickland as the rest of Ventura's votes have--or even just 50-50--Strickland will eke this one out.
The possibly good news: provisional ballots are usually new voters, and those are quite likely new Democratic voters who might be expected to trend our way contra the overall County trend. The possibly bad news: those new Democratic voters often have a tendency to vote for the top of the ticket only, failing to vote for Democrats downballot.
What will end up happening? It's anybody's guess. The VC Star has more:
Elections officials in Ventura County began processing provisional ballots this week but are not expected to release the first results from those ballots until Monday.
In votes tallied thus far, Strickland has about a 5 percentage lead in the Ventura County portion of the district. Jackson would have to at least reverse that advantage among provisional ballots - perhaps unlikely, but something political observers say is possible given that many such ballots are cast by newly registered voters, who this year were predominantly Democrats.
With 401,864 votes now tabulated, Strickland leads by about one-third of a percentage point.
Looks like we're in a for ride. As painful as the wait is, though, it's good to know that the democratic process is being respected. Better to get the right result with a wait, than the wrong result too quickly.
(The impact has been joined. - promoted by Dante Atkins (hekebolos))
Yes, Ventura, there is a Progressive Left--and it came in force today for Join the Impact. It's a common joke here that we live in "Ventucky", though our situation less resembles that of the deep South and more that of a clinging outpost of Red, stuck between the swaths of Blue that are Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. We have the gag-worthy Gallegly as our representative, and even unprincipled liars like Tony Strickland somehow manage to attract over half the population here to vote for them. True, the demographics have been changing with voter registrations to match, but that has translated neither into electoral gains nor significant grassroots activity in the Democratic and progressive community--though that is changing due to the tireless efforts of people like our new VCDP Communications Director Brian Leshon.
But today a sea of Blue washed up on the Ventura shores in front of the Old San Buenaventura Mission to let Ventura and all of California know that yes, we do exist. And no, we're not taking it lying down anymore. Unfortunately, the pictures here don't do the crowd justice; an amateur photographer is emailing me some pics that I'll be putting up as soon as I get them.
(This is a big fight, but there are others across the state. Stay for Change! - promoted by Brian Leubitz)
Over 14,000 new voters registered this year at UC Santa Barbara and Hannah-Beth Jackson came to rally them to support her today. Hannah-Beth Jackson is running for California State Senate against 6 million dollars worth of lies. That's how much her opponent Tony Strickland is spending to try to win this Senate seat. Hannah Beth reminded students today of her commitment to education and the environment. The student vote is important in this race because Hannah-Beth Jackson's opponent is running defamatory ads against Hannah-Beth as well as trying to convince voters that he is an environmentalist. It makes you wonder, can six million dollars really convince voters that he is an environmentalist, when in reality Tony Strickland voted against every pro-environment bill every introduced into the Assembly?
Bettina Duval is the founder of CALIFORNIA LIST, a network to elect Democratic women to California state government.
If you're in Southern California or the Central Coast and haven't given your time to the Hannah-Beth Jackson campaign yet, you're in luck: you can still make a big difference in an extraordinarily close, extremely hard-fought race. Regular Calitics readers know all about Phony Tony's corporate-backed scam on the voters, and about Hannah-Beth's record of decisive action to protect Californians from the rapacious greed of Strickland's industry-backed sponsors. Strickland cannot win on his own record or policies; a Strickland victory would be a travesty of justice, and a missed opportunity for California. And perhaps nowhere else in Southern California will volunteer efforts be more effective and impactful to push the margins off the razor's edge toward victory.
There were two major debates held this month between IndependentGreenRepublican Tony Strickland and Hannah-Beth Jackson: the first was put on by the right-wing Ventura County Chamber of Commerce on Oct. 3rd at Ventura College, and the second by the significantly more friendly Ventura County League of Women Voters on Oct. 10th at Cal Lutheran in Oxnard.
Both debates were supposed to have been shown live on local CAPS-TV here in Ventura County (and I was going to liveblog them), but were for technical reasons not broadcast or streamed live at the time. The debates have finally been put in the can to air repeatedly here in Ventura County regularly until election day. Fortunately, we live in the Internet age, and CAPS-TV has done us the service (finally!) of putting the debates on their website.
They've been encoded as WMV files, and thus cannot be embedded here. If you're interested in watching, please click on the following links:
I haven't heard anything earth-shattering so far in listening to the debates, but I highly recommend that anyone interested in the race listen and highlight anything newsworthy they may see now that the debates are finally available to all.
In the meantime, I'll have a photodiary up within a few days about canvassing this last Sunday for Hannah-Beth in Thousand Oaks. Pretty good results, and there's good reason to feel confident about this race.
(Another piece from blogger thereisnospoon, who lives in the district and is serving as our Ventura County correspondent. - promoted by Dante Atkins (hekebolos))
The Strickland campaign is really outdoing itself at this point, and reinforcing Hannah-Beth Jackson's arguments against him all at the same time. No sooner does Hannah-Beth's latest mailer (a copy of which I got in my mailbox yesterday) come out attacking Strickland for his big money contributors in the oil, tobacco, pharmaceutical and other industries, than Tony tries to pull off yet another fraud on voters with the hidden help of those same industries in whose pocket he resides.
Apparently, voters all across the 19th District started receiving mysterious robocalls from a group called "Californians for Jobs & Education". The calls, of which there are as yet no transcripts available, are in support of Tony Strickland. Below is what a quick google search of this outfit brings up, via Election Track:
As David Dayen noted on the frontpage, Hannah-Beth Jackson has a new ad on the air discussing her role in protecting schoolchildren from toxic pesticides; I live in downtown Ventura and have seen the aid on my TV several times already. It's an excellent piece of political communication, showing her bipartisan credentials in a race where both candidates are desperately vying for the middle ground, and illustrating the contrast between her concern for everyday families and Tony Strickland's evident lack thereof.
But the ad, good as it is, doesn't tell the whole story. For a little background, let's go way back in the time machine to the year 2000, when a group of children were blithely making their way onto school grounds for a day of classes at Mound Elementary School in Ventura, naively under the assumption that they could trust the air they breathe. Because surely there must have been a law preventing toxic chemicals from being spewed into the air right next to a school, right? Boy, were they wrong:
Abel Maldonado is one of the most vulnerable of the Senate Republicans facing reelection this year. Democrats hold a 40-37 edge in registrations in SD-15 and the district was given a D+7.8 rating in cali_girl_in_texas' latest rankings. And he has a long, conservative voting record - including a 20% lifetime rating from the California Labor Federation (as of 2006). Maldonado's moderate reputation should be put to its strictest test yet in 2008, with a very Democratic turnout in November and a Republican Party having to defend a record of economic crisis and budgetary disaster.
So why is it that NO Democrat filed to run for the SD-15 seat?! Is Maldonado being given a free pass?
When the filing deadline came and went on March 7, I was curious to see who was going to be the Democratic opponent in SD-15. As I called the registrar's offices in the five counties that make up this long district (Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Barbara) I discovered that apparently nobody had filed. The CDP's online organizers helped investigate, and ultimately concluded that there was no Democratic candidate, as the candidate filing status at the Secretary of State's website confirms. Although former Assemblywoman Rebecca Cohn (who had represented AD-24, Santa Clara County, from 2000 to 2006) had expressed interest in a campaign for the SD-15 seat, no actual candidacy materialized.
As one of the most winnable Senate seats on this year's ballot, not having a candidate is a pretty big failure. And it obviously begs the question why this failure happened. Since it is the leader of the chamber that is responsible for candidate recruitment - in this case, Don Perata - this quote from last summer, from an August 2007 George Skelton column (now in the LA Times pay-only archives), is worth remembering:
If the Senate's top Democrat -- President Pro Tem Don Perata of Oakland -- has anything to do with it, Maldonado will survive. "I'd be happy to go down to Santa Maria any time and knock on doors and say what a solid guy he is," Perata says. "I just admire him. I was just blown away by what he did, by his courageous stand on principle."
This refers to Maldonado's break with the Senate Republicans - including Jeff Denham - and voting for the Democratic budget during last summer's standoff. As I explained at the time, however, this vote should not have been construed as overriding his long right-wing voting record. Maldonado voted against AB 32, and supported the Democratic budget only after Arnold promised to line-item $700 million in health care spending out of the final budget.
One quote alone from August 2007 does not prove Perata gave Maldonado a pass, but it is also cause for serious concern. Were Democratic candidates discouraged from taking on Maldonado? Was this a case of the failure of the local netroots, or a failure of Senate Democratic leaders, or a failure of a party system that centralizes candidate recruitment when this is perhaps better handled by local Democrats?
As we await these answers, it is worth keeping in mind the possibility of a write-in campaign to put someone on the June ballot - and give Maldonado the Democratic challenger he so richly deserves. According to the SoS website a write-in candidate would need 3,689 votes in June to be placed on the November ballot. Surely there is someone in this district, from Los Gatos on down to Santa Maria, who is interested in taking on this task.
Back in November I wrote about Santa Cruz County's "wrong way" proposal to pass a tax measure to spend $600 million on widening the Highway 1 freeway but would have delivered virtually nothing for local passenger rail, despite the fact that the infrastructure to provide rail already exists.
Happily, wiser heads appear to have prevailed. The county's Regional Transportation Commission voted to kill the plan yesterday, meaning it won't go to the ballot in November as originally intended. Erosion of public support was cited as the reason for the decision. The county's Business Council withdrew its support and, more importantly, its promise to fund the plan's campaign; bicycle and transit supporters objected to the inadequate rail funding; the Sierra Club criticized the road's effect on climate change; and local Republicans demanded that the freeway widening alone be funded.
I predicted that the plan would have failed at the ballot box, and I'm not surprised that it didn't even make it that far. The tide is beginning to turn against using freeways to solve our transportation problems. Last November Seattle voters rejected a plan that would have added 160 miles of new freeway lanes, even though they have some of the nation's worst traffic (outside of California, of course). And this week the Coastal Commission rejected a toll road through San Onofre State Beach, rightly choosing to protect the environment over continuing our outdated reliance on highway transportation.
By refusing to waste precious tax dollars on freeway lanes, Santa Cruz County has taken the first step toward solving its transportation issues in a sustainable and responsible way. This gives county leaders and activists time to educate the public about the need for passenger rail, and come back to voters in a few years with a plan that will actually provide for the county's needs, instead of foolishly trying to pretend that the methods of the 20th century can continue.
Hopefully we in Monterey County will follow Santa Cruz' lead - transportation officials here are proposing a similar roads-focused tax plan, having stripped $90 million to bring Caltrain to Salinas. Public hearings are going on next week, so if you're in Monterey County, speak out in favor of sustainable transportation, and against sticking our heads in the sand on climate change and peak oil!
A Caltrain rail extension is no longer on a list of projects that Monterey County transportation officials hope a sales tax will help fund over the next quarter century.
On Wednesday, the Transportation Agency for Monterey County board approved a 25-year improvement package wish-list that boasts more than 20 road and transit projects at a cost of $1.8 billion.
TAMC is working to place a half-cent sales tax on the November 2008 ballot that would generate an estimated $980 million. The county would seek matching state and federal funding to pay for the rest of the work.
Over the summer, officials from the Monterey County Hospitality Association and the Monterey County Farm Bureau withheld their support from an earlier draft sales tax proposal, arguing there wasn't enough focus on highway and roads projects that would benefit their industries. They also complained about proposed spending on a Caltrain rail project included in the earlier draft.
But after TAMC officials eliminated the rail spending, both groups sent a letter last month indicating they would back the sales tax effort.
This is madness. The TAMC proposal is reckless planning and poor public policy - locking Monterey County into a roads-only future for the next 25 years puts our economy at risk and will cause us to miss out on leveraged funding opportunities. We can become nationwide leaders in sustainable tourism and sustainable agriculture, but not if we believe against all available evidence that the 20th century dependence on roads can be continued for much longer.
As anyone who's had the misfortune to be stuck in a traffic jam on Highway 1 in Santa Cruz County knows, there's a major traffic problem on the northern end of Monterey Bay. High housing costs in Santa Cruz have spurred growth over in Watsonville, where homes are (relatively) more affordable. When combined with the job engine of Silicon Valley just over the hill, this means there's a LOT of traffic on Highway 1.
So what should be done? Widen the freeway? Take advantage of the rail line that connects Watsonville to Santa Cruz to provide commuter rail and take the pressure off of Highway 1?
Highway 1 widening has been very contentious - a 2004 plan to widen the freeway was shot down by voters - and so it is somewhat surprising to see that a Santa Cruz County transportation tax force has suggested trying again in November 2008, with another 1/2 cent sales tax that would largely go toward an additional freeway lane and only a pittance for rail.
Environmentalists and transit advocates, led by Friends of the Rail Trail and former Santa Cruz mayor and Democratic candidate for AD-27 (should Prop 93 fail) Emily Reilly, have denounced the proposal and vowed to fight for transportation alternatives.
What I want to do here is explain why they are right, why Santa Cruz needs to seize this opportunity to lead the state into a more sustainable and effective transportation future. Instead of trying in vain to keep the 20th century alive, we need to realize our limits and embrace a more sensible vision for the 21st century.
This article written by: Former Assemblymember Hannah- Beth Jackson of Speak Out California
For those of us who remember the 60's (and yes, there are some of us who lived through them and still remember), it was a night to wax nostalgic and hopeful. Last evening, I had the pleasure of listening to Peter and Paul (two-thirds of the great Peter, Paul & Mary trio) talk and sing about what it has meant for them and still means for them, to sing about justice, freedom and a love between their brothers and sisters all over the land. They were in Santa Barbara, my home town, to receive the prestigious Nuclear Age Peace Foundation's Distinguished Peace Leadership Award.
The award is presented annually to individuals who have "demonstrated courageous leadership in the cause of peace." To put this award in context, some of its prior recipients include: Dr. Helen Caldicott, Dr. Carl Sagan, His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Walter Cronkite, Anne and Paul Ehrilich and Daniel Elsberg (among others). Obviously, a pretty impressive group.
While Mary was, unfortunately, back home in Connecticut recovering from back surgery (having won her battle against a virulent form of leukemia as well ), Peter and Paul sang gallantly (clearly missing that magnificent Mary Travers sound). They talked of their life-long commitment to peace, social justice and community well-being.
In addition to those of us who remember them with full heads of hair, there were 120 young people in the audience---primarily college students, but some high school students who were selected as the next best hope to restore a sense of commitment to the principles that moved so many of us during our college years back when the Vietnam War and Civil Rights battles were raging in this country.
In that earlier era,we sang and danced to the Movement for political and social justice, peace in our time, brotherly and sisterly love and respect. We hoped for a better world that was comprised of these things, not material things. We dreamed about justice and goodness and love and kindness. The notion of dreaming for Versace, BMW's, 10,000 square foot mansions and diamonds were nowhere on our radar-screens or desires. We wanted peace, and a more just world for ourselves and all humankind.
It brought tears to the eyes of many of us as Peter Yarrow implored the youngsters in the audience to pursue these goals as our next generation of leaders. He and Paul (actually Noel Paul Stookey) spoke eloquently about these causes and their hopes that we can, yet again, regain our footing by pursuing a kinder, more peaceful planet.
Although partially immersed in the music and nostalgia, I couldn't help asking: "What has happened in our nation that we see our youngsters dancing to gangsta rap and other 'music' that glorifies killing and objectification of women? Why are our youngster's heroes packing heat along with their ostentatious gold and diamond jewelry? How is it that the nation's heroes today do not call for social justice or self-sacrifice or human kindness? Rather, they are admired and even worshiped for the number of cars, or girl-friends or houses they own.
Where are the young people crying out for social justice or marching against this illegal and hopelessly failed war? Why are we and they not calling for accountability by a White House that believes it is above the law? Why are we not challenging Bush and Chaney for their corrupt and destructive management of our environment, their criminal indifference to the poor who are living on the streets or in gang-infested communities where neither they nor their children are safe from violence? Where is the public outcry against corporate greed and irresponsibility in the pursuit of greater and greater wealth, to the detriment to our own workers?
Where are we on all this, Peter and Paul ask? We of the so-called "peace generation' demanding social justice, peace and the freedom to think and be who we are and want to become. We HAVE the hammer, we ARE the hammer....of justice, of freedom of love between our brothers and our sisters.......... We are at a cross-roads in our nation's history and in our own sense of purpose. There should be little doubt: It's time to bring that hammer back.
One of the hardest things about being a California historian is watching the same tragedies repeating themselves, nearly every generation. Ever since the Anglo conquest in 1846, non-whites have faced the brunt of scapegoating during hard economic times. And in almost every case, this immigrant-bashing has turned violent.
California's ugly history of racial terror spans all 150+ years of US ownership. It includes the attacks on Mexican miners (here legally under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo) in the Sierra goldfields in 1850, the state-sanctioned genocide of Native peoples in central and Northern California later in the 1850s, the forced disposession of Latinos' land in the 1870s, the violent assaults on Chinese laborers and communities in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and the forcible deportation of 1 million Mexican residents of CA, including many US citizens in the early 1930s.
Now, in 2007, it is returning, with an ugly vengeance. Last Friday, day laborer Artemio Santiago Garcia was savagely beaten in Seaside, a majority-Latino city next to Monterey. Prosecutors are calling it a hate crime. We can call it the leading edge of outright terrorism, a predictable evolution in the already ugly immigration paranoia. And it's spreading.
Just one of many actions around the state on the budget standoff. This one targets Republican State Senator Jeff Denham, who ran as a moderate in his Democratic leaning district.
SEIU 521
MONTEREY COUNTY COMMUNITY MEMBERS, NONPROFIT PROVIDERS AND WORKERS WILL HOLD PRESS CONFERENCE DEMANDING SENATOR JEFF DENHAM END STATE BUDGET STALEMATE
SALINAS, Calif. - Monterey County community members, nonprofit providers and workers will hold a press conference outside State Senator Jeff Denham's office at 369 Main Street, #208 on Monday, Aug. 13, at 12:00 noon.
The press conference will highlight the devastating impacts the state budget impasse is having on community social service and healthcare providers, educators, children, students, and seniors in Monterey County.
As if on cue, Mother Nature reminds us that in a dry and fire-prone state such as ours, it is 
Yes, Ventura, there is a Progressive Left--and it came in force today for Join the Impact. It's a common joke here that we live in "Ventucky", though our situation less resembles that of the deep South and more that of a clinging outpost of Red, stuck between the swaths of Blue that are Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. We have the gag-worthy Gallegly as our representative, and even unprincipled liars like Tony Strickland somehow manage to attract over half the population here to vote for them. True, the demographics have been changing with 
As anyone who's had the misfortune to be stuck in a traffic jam on Highway 1 in Santa Cruz County knows, there's a major traffic problem on the northern end of Monterey Bay. High housing costs in Santa Cruz have spurred growth over in Watsonville, where homes are (relatively) more affordable. When combined with the job engine of Silicon Valley just over the hill, this means there's a LOT of traffic on Highway 1.
