Posted from the new Mark Leno Campaign blog

This Sunday at 6:00 PM, Assemblymember Mark Leno will be hosting his first Communities of Interest Policy Talks on Global Warming solutions. The goal is to brainstorm about ways we can reverse global warming… starting right here in Marin, Sonoma and San Francisco. Together, we can harness our combined creativity to drive new solutions.

While Assemblymember Leno has a long history of critical environmental policy,  there are important steps individuals can and should take to be part of the solution.

One way you can begin this process is to take a few minutes to calculate your carbon emissions so that you know your carbon footprint and can measure your progress towards reducing global warming.

There are numerous websites that serve this role, but we recommend you visit former Vice President Al Gore’s Carbon Calculator. It is very easy, just input some basic information on your household’s travel and energy consumption and the website will tell you how many tons of carbon you are responsible for putting into the atmosphere. This benchmark number will provide you the ability to quantify your individual progress.

Thanks, in advance, for taking a moment to join in this movement. We hope you can join us for Sunday’s online discussion at 6 PM — www.MarkLeno.com.

(I hope so! – promoted by atdleft)

The fight for guaranteed healthcare made an important advance yesterday as the California legislature prepared to send Governor Schwarzenegger a “Medicare for All” or “SinglePayer healthcare” bill.  He vetoed it last year-but will he have the guts to do so again?? Meanwhile a new study finds Canada’s healthcare better than the U.S.’s an only 42 percent the cost, the drug lobby keeps ripping us off, and the insurance industry wants to attack Hillary Clinton no matter what health plan she supports.

Brought to you by the National Nurses Organizing Committee as we organize to make 2007 the Year of GUARANTEED Healthcare

State Sen. Sheila Kuehl is a healthcare activist and the only person in the country who has passed a guaranteed healthcare bill through a state legislature.  Her bill, SB 840, the California Universal Healthcare Act uses single-payer financing, and has been projected to save the state hundreds of millions of dollars a year while covering every single person in the state.

Sounds good to me especially as the California Nurses Association is the bill’s lead sponsor.

While Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill last year, everything has changed this year, from the national healthcare debate to his desire to challenge Barbara Boxer for her Senate seat in 2010.  Wouldn’t it be weird if he ran as the person signed Guaranteed Healthcare into law?  Of course his plan right now is forced insurance-force people to sign up with private insurers, and fine them if they don’t.  Terrible. 

The good news is Schwarzenegger can’t even find a sponsor for his bill-while Kuehl just passed her bill through the Health Committee and sent it to the Senate floor for a vote!

There’s an excellent chance it will pass through both houses and give Schwarzenegger a very difficult choice.  Leading up to that, the bill does face a clear threat from a few Democratic politicians who want to compromise principles for expediency-fixing a gushing wound with a band-aid, then calling a press conference to brag about it.  In the words of Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the CA Nurses: “Whose life doesn’t count?

Those politicians should read the new study that came out yesterday, finding that Canada’s healthcare system is superior to America’s at only 42 percent of the cost.  That means we’re wasting about 1.2 trillion care dollars annually on nothing!  And, if Canada really has a 5 percent lower death rate in hospitals, our messed-up healthcare system is killing tens of thousands of people a year unnecessarily.  Many people talk about the private insurance racket as “Murder by Spreadsheet”-isn’t this “Genocide by Spreadsheet?”

Meanwhile, the for-profit healthcare corporations continue to roll in the bucks, as companies just got their Senate friends to prohibit Medicare from negotiating drug discounts.  More care dollars wasted.

And, finally, the insurance industry is already sharpening its claws against Candidate Clinton.  I hope she realizes they’ll come after her no matter what she does, and support a plan to get rid of their waste and abuse…like SB 840 or John Conyers’ federal bill HR 676.

If you want to join the fight for guaranteed healthcare (with a “Medicare for All” or SinglePayer financing), sign up with GuaranteedHealthcare.org, a project of the National Nurses Organizing Committee.  You can help the fight by sharing your story about surviving the healthcare industry here.

The Executive Director of the OC GOP, some guy named George, called Ryan and complained about this post. He asked Ryan to remove my reference to the OC GOP voter registration effort. No go! Ryan was NOT my source for that information. And no, it is not coming down. If the OC GOP wants to put a guy in charge of voter registration in central OC, who ran perhaps the most anti-Latino campaign I have ever seen (i.e. Trung Nguyen standing at the border to “stop” the Mexicans), that is his prerogative. But it is a dumb idea!

So what exactly is going on at Orange Juice? Apparently, these little chismes from Art Pedroza caused screaming, wailing, and gnashing of teeth over at the Orange County Republican Party:

Here’s a shocker – my sources are telling me that GOP Assemblyman Van Tran is trying to talk Democrat (and former state legislator) Joe Dunn into running against Supervisor Janet Nguyen in two years. Tran is apparently still quite bitter over Nguyen’s victory over his Trannie, Trung Nguyen. This sort of thing is not new for Tran – he has worked behind the scenes with other Democrats before, such as Bruce Broadwater and Mark Rosen.

Rosen by the way changed a prior vote and ended up backing Republican Steve Jones to replace Janet on the Garden Grove City Council. I wonder if Tran had anything to do with that? Jones is a developer – watch and see if he either has contributed to Tran and his cronies or will do so in the near future.

While we are on the subject of Trannies, Trung’s campaign manager, Saulo Londono, was apparently tabbed by the OC GOP to conduct voter registration in Central Orange County. They didn’t even bother to ask Janet how she felt about this. The sense was that Van Tran has been successful at this and so they went with the Trannies. I cannot see how this is going to work out. The Trannies will make this work for them and will not try to help the most prominent GOP elected official in the area, Janet Nguyen. (Yes, she is ostensibly in a non-partisan office, but you know that is true in name only).

So what’s going on with those lovely Republicans? And why do they hate bloggers? Well, follow me after the flip for more…

Ah, so the campaign manager who devised this marvelous anti-immigrant mailer for Trung is now taking over the OC Republicans’ “voter registration” efforts in Central County…
A region with communities full of LATINO AND VIETNAMESE IMMIGRANTS!! And what, they don’t expect any harsh words for this latest bone-headed move of theirs? If anything, they should be thanking Art Pedroza for pointing this out as a huge error. Since I’m not nearly as helpful and courteous as Art, I’d just prefer to LAUGH AT THEM for giving Latino voters yet ANOTHER REASON TO BE ANGRY AT THEM.

I guess they never learn. They didn’t learn from Tan Nguyen and his errors. They didn’t learn from all the immigrant-bashing of the Special Election. And now, this. But instead of blaming themselves for repeating the same mistakes of alienating minority voters in Central Orange County, they blame a blogger for calling them out on it!

I don’t know what else I can say about this, so I’ll leave it to another Orange Juice blogger, Claudio Gallegos, to sort this out:

Absolutely stunning. So George over at the GOP took it upon himself to order one of our Republican bloggers to censor us, the very nerve. For all their flag waving, America loving talk, they once again show their disdain for the very basic right of all Americans, FREEDOM. Instead of obsessing over the second amendment, the OC Republican Party should look more into that 1st Amendment, you know that pesky Amendment that gave Art the right to post what he did.

If Art wants to out various voter registration efforts, he has a right to. And NO REPUBLICAN, nor DEMOCRAT for that matter, has a right to try and censor what we post simply because there is something written that makes them mad. Apparently Republicans feel a need to silence Orange Juice.

Which brings me to my next point, how Democrats support free speech. Several times on this blog, there have been commenters and posters who have made Democratic ED Mike Levin or Chair Frank Barbaro their personal blogging punching bags. Never has Mike Levin nor Frank Barbaro called me to ask that I delete someone’s post or comment. I am sure they don’t like some stuff posted on here, but they believe in the value of one’s right to free speech. It seems the Orange County Republican Party has a problem with free speech. Shame on them, Orange Juice will never be silenced.

Jeez. Remind me to never, ever try to help the Orange County Republican Party. Obviously, they don’t appreciate folks to point out their huge mistakes.

“We expect our government to use our tax dollars to provide us with national security, and I contend that insuring us from illness and injury should be considered national security. Just compare the 3,000 Americans we lost on that dark day, September 11, 2001, with the 18,000 Americans who die every year due to denial of medical care. Private corporations, whose number one responsibility is to turn a profit for their shareholders, have proven themselves spectacularly unsuited for insuring our health, and every other civilized nation has come to the conclusion that health insurance is the proper function of government.”

That was Vern Nelson, local health care activist, giving an amazingly eloquent speech to the Costa Mesa City Council on why they should support SB 840, California’s plan for real universal health care. So what else happened at the city council meeting? Well, follow me after the flip for more…

Vern and his “posse” of people who care about health care access for arrived early for the city council meeting, and they were among the first ones to speak during the “public comments” segment, before the city council began to deliberate on the scheduled agenda. First up was Joe Tyndall, a computer tech writer from Costa Mesa who was concerned about the quality of health care in his own city. And in addition to his speech, he also provided all five council members with information packets on health care and why SB 840 is the only real solution for California.

“Americans pay more than $7,000 per person per year for health care, more than any other nation. Yet, we stand 37th in the quality of health care as measured across a wide range of indices. The cost of health care spirals out of control, while the number of Americans without health insurance continues to grow. Every other industrialized nation has a single-payer, Medicare-like system that leaves no person uninsured and costs roughly half as much per capita as our profit-driven, employer-based insurance system.”

Wait, isn’t Governor Schwarzenegger proposing “health care reform“? Dr. Richard Lara then explained to the council why Arnold’s “reform” doesn’t really change anything for the better.

“You, as a city, and we, as citizens, would save money if the health care crisis were solved. I suggest that you ask the Governor NOT to veto the solution if it comes to him again. He evidently feels guilty about that veto, for he is making a great show of interest in health care. He has admitted that there IS a crisis. He has proposed ten pages of band-aids. His scheme is like solving a transportation crisis by making us own a car. If you can’t afford it, the state will help you out, using tax dollars. The auto makers would love that plan. And the army of bureaucrats who will determine just how much help you need. This, from the man who wanted to shrink government!”

Wow, no wonder why no one likes his “health care reform” plan. But if Arnold-Care doesn’t solve anything, what does? If Arnold can’t solve our health care crisis, then what can?

Allan Beek, an Orange County resident who cares about real health care solutions, gave us the real solution: SB 840.

“SB 840 saves money- about $8 billion a year, according to the best estimate. […]
Medicines are bought at bulk prices… About 40% cheaper than what we pay here. (But the manufacturers won’t mind- they get 10 million new customers.) […]
Emergency rooms will be for emergencies only. Nearby hospitals will share, rather than duplicate, expensive equipment. One simple system of payment will replace 15,000 different insurance plans. Senate Bill 840 will cut administrative overhead from today’s 30% to at MOST 5%. We can all have preventive care and stay as healthy as nature permits. Preventing disease is cheaper than curing it. With all these savings, we can give a top-notch package of benefits to EVERYONE, still spending almost as much money total, so there will still be as may jobs. We don’t cause unemployment, but the jobs will be providing health care.”

After the presentation, Costa Mesa City Council Member Katrina Foley was quite impressed with this presentation. She actually asked the city’s legislative director to put together an analysis of all the current health care proposals in California- including SB 840. Fortunately, there are folks in Costa Mesa who see that city residents need a real solution for their health care problems.

And I guess this proves how SB 840 truly is the best choice for universal health care in California. OK, so all these great speeches still aren’t convincing you? Well, then go analyze SB 840 for yourself at Health Care for All. Here, you can see personal stories of struggle under the current privatized health care industry. And yes, you can find more reasons why we need REAL health care reform soon, and why SB 840 is the best course of action for that.

Don’t we owe it to our fellow Californians to provide them with health care security, once and for all?

UPDATE: The video is up. I agree with Sasha, they totally blew the money shot. Gavin Sucks issued a statement: “Everything you heard is true.”

I thought I’d seen it all online. I’ve done politics across the country and read state blogs like this everywhere they exist, but tonight was a first with a blogger ambush (assault???) of another blogger. It isn’t that potential violence hasn’t come into play before, there was the Markos standoff with the DCCC at the 2004 convention over the Ginny Schrader scandal. And some random blogger actually won a bar fight without throwing a punch after the DNC Chair race. But these were all episodes of bloggers rightously beating the establishment, not bloggers vs bloggers.

That all changed tonight with an ambush. After the fold, you’ll hear my take as I was sitting right next to the victim. Considering that I was also sitting next to a dozen bloggers, I think it is safe to assume this will be on every SF blog for at least a day and maybe for the rest of the week and will be linked back to for the rest of the mayoral campaign.

So there we were, minding our own business and doing the types of crazy blogger plotting that should drive fear into the hearts of crappy politicians when the Mayor and the Hair ladies showed up — in full regalia — with video rolling like Geraldo with the type of sunglasses normally used to cover up crow’s feet of a Grand Canyon scale. They bee-lined to the host of Gavin Sucks, verbally confronted him and then proceeded to dump a beer and a pink cocktail across him, his white shirt, and jacket.

The bloggers at the table were shocked. It was the most brazen link whoring publicity stunt I’ve ever seen online and probably solidified the netroots opposition to Newsom serving four more years as a lame duck mayor.

Way more fun than going to see the Giants suck, but WTF?

First Peter Ragone made an ass of himself online, then Newsom’s latest and now this? I’m only surprised bloggers haven’t nicknamed him ‘Macacca’ or worse.