Yesterday I attended an event at the Santa Monica Democratic Club with State Senator Sheila Kuehl, who’s devoted the latter part of her legislative career to promoting and advancing SB 840, the single payer universal health care bill that the Governor vetoed last year.  Kuehl keenly understands the political dynamic of the health care debate in the state this year.  The Governor has vowed to pass a “universal” health care law this year, and he has vowed to veto Kuehl’s bill.  Nobody has brought the Governor’s initial program forward as a bill, and it’s likely that nobody ever will.  Both Senator Perata and Speaker Nunez have bills that are making their way through the relevant committees.  Sen. Kuehl’s bill has passed as well.  The Republican Assembly and Senate have forwarded piecemeal bits of legislation that don’t attempt to deal with health care in any kind of comprehensive way.

over…

Right now the advocates of single payer are continuing to build support.  Apparently there are ongoing talks with some hospitals to get them aboard.  It is likely that SB 840 will get to the Governor’s desk again, and it’s assured that he will veto.  Politically speaking, it’s positive (in my view) to keep advancing the same bill year after year and daring the Governor to betray his constituents and denying them the only comprehensive plan that ties health care to residency, not employment, and that will ensure that everyone in the state is covered with quality care.  If the Governor runs for higher office, that legislative history will be important.  Kuehl said that the Governor is not particularly interested in policy details; he wants to be able to sign something that he can call universal health care, whether the appellation applies or not.  Kuehl has signed on as a co-sponsor on Sen. Perata’s bill so that she can help steer it in a direction closer to universal care.  This is smart.  But the important thing is that any bill that’s passed this year (and there is likely to be something) should be seen as a stepping stone to the ultimate goal of single payer.  Because a “universal” program passes in 2007 does not mean the end of SB 840.  Kuehl, and whoever succeeds her in advancing the bill, will continue to build support, will continue to point to their funding mechanisms and study reports that prove the viability of single payer, and will continue to put forth a bill until there’s a governor who can sign it or a majority of Californians who can vote for it in an initiative form.  That initiative, according to Kuehl, should not be advanced until there is additional support among hospitals and doctors.

I am happy that Kuehl is using 840 as a means to get a better bill passed this year, while keeping focused on the ultimate goal of getting a real health care system passed that covers every single Californian.  The only way to rein in soaring costs is to ensure a baseline of care from a central pool that everybody pays into, with a system that is not based on making money but caring for people. And it’s important to note that Kuehl’s bill is not a pie-in-the-sky idea.  This is a detailed report on the financial structure of the proposal, showing how every single dollar can be accounted for, with every Californian able to access affordable care while saving total medical costs.  It’s a positive thing for the country that a plan of this nature is being offered with maximum seriousness and realism.  If it can be done in California, it can be done across the nation.

Two weeks may have passed between the Democratic Convention and today, but that hasn’t stopped us from speculating over what actually happened during that weekend. During these two weeks, everyone seems to have developed a theory on who knew what ahead of time, who was conspiring to silence the progressives, and who was really behind the mysterious quorum call. Two weeks have passed since then, and I’d like to do my part to end all the speculation NOW.

Last Thursday, I hopped on over to OC Drinking Liberally. John Hanna, Co-chair of the Resolutions Committee, also happened to be there. Pretty soon, hekebolos showed up, and we all went to the back room of Memphis to discuss what really happened at the convention. Later on, we also talked about what we can do better next time, but I’ll talk about that part of the discussion another time.

Right now, I’m inviting you to follow me after the flip to find out WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO ALL THOSE RESOLUTIONS. I have been collecting information from a few brave individuals for quite some time now, and my meeting with John Hanna on Thursday put an end to my own speculation on all these rumors. So why not join me after the flip, so that you can also toss the speculation and just find out what happened?

OK, let’s start out by going through all those wild rumors. Here’s what true, and here’s what’s just wild.

– Rumor #1: There was a deal made between PDA and party leadership on impeachment- TRUE! Yes, PDA did meet with party leaders before and during the convention. A friend of mine involved in PDA told me that the party leaders knew about PDA’s plans for San Diego, and they did not want the convention to turn ugly. PDA agreed to soften the language on impeachment of Bush, the leaders agreed to tough language on Cheney, and everyone agreed to fold all the resolutions into one.

– Rumor #2: There was a grand conspiracy among the party leaders to “appoint” a delegate to make the quorum call- FALSE (well, kinda sorta)! Neither John Hanna NOR Art Torres had any advance knowledge of the quorum call. This makes sense, as Torres really did look bewildered and genuinely frustrated at the podium. However, other folks that I spoke with earlier did drop me a hint. They’ve called Bob Mulholland a “street fighter”, and they have suggested that he wouldn’t hesitate to pull a stunt like this. Hmmm, so does this mean we have a culprit?

– Rumor #3: John Hanna conspired to silence the true antiwar voices who wanted to “stengthen” Don Perata’s Out of Iraq Resolution- FALSE! He wanted the Perata Resolution clean, but he didn’t block the amendments by Karen Bernall (deauthorize the war) and the Hull-Richters (defund the war). John Hanna wanted to ensure that the Perata’s Out of Iraq Resolution ended up looking like what Perata wants to put on the ballot next February. However Garry Shay, of the Rules Committee, urged him to come up with a way to allow Bernall and the others (even the Hull-Richters) to be heard. So they worked out a deal. The rules would be temporarily suspended, so that the amendments could be split off from the Perata measure, and they could become their own resolutions. All the delegates can then vote on each proposal separately, and all sides can get a fair shake. John seemed sincere when he said that he thought the perfect deal had been struck, and everyone could get what he/she wanted… Until Karen Wingard stepped in.

– Rumor #4: John Hanna conspired with AT&T and CWA to kill the net neutrality resolution- ABSOLUTELY FALSE! Unfortunately, John Hanna and the party leaders weren’t as familiar with net neutrality then as they are now. So out of good faith that Jim Gordon would work out a fair agreement with CWA and AT&T on net neutrality, the Resolutions Committee agreed to refer it to the Labor Caucus. But now, John Hanna regrets taking Jim Gordon’s word when he promised John that he’d come up with a resolution in the Labor Caucus that “the net neutrality folks will like”. John told us that he didn’t know about the CWA/AT&T deep hostility toward net neutrality. And yes, he wants our forgiveness, and he wants to make it up to us. That’s why he’s willing to give us another chance to get net neutrality passed. (And I’ll talk more about this in a future story.)

Basically, John Hanna regrets what happened with many of the resolutions. He now says that he should have just allowed Karen Bernall to do a petition drive for her own “Out of Iraq” resolution, even though her resolution had been “gutted and amended” to make way for Perata. He says that he might change the rules to allow for this next time. He has also said that we weren’t given a fair chance to clarify what was about to happen to net neutrality. And yes, this might inspire some changes in the rules as well. I know that we were all let down by what happened two weeks ago, but let’s not allow these disappointments to stop us from doing better next time.

Now we know how the internal politics are played. And now, we have a better grasp of the rules that we need to follow. So let’s follow the rules (including whatever new ones that might actually make our jobs easier), and let’s get our agenda accomplished. And now that we have made amends with the past, let’s get back to making a better future. : )

(This seems like a no-brainer. – promoted by blogswarm)

Once upon a time, a network of streetcars and commuter trains knit the small cities of the Sacramento area together with the urban core. And then, for a variety of reasons – the popularization of automobiles, corporate buyouts, shifts in zoning laws and the rise of low-density suburban developments – the infrastructure that supported a walkable urban center withered away for a half century or so.

And yet recently, the cities of West Sacramento and Sacramento have been exploring the possibility of running a streetcar line across the Tower Bridge over to the Capital Mall, linking it up with Sacramento’s existing light rail system. This makes sense as part of a larger recent development trend towards reurbanization, reflected in the Railyards project in Sacramento and the flurry of condos being thrown up in West Sacramento. Were the population density to get high enough, and the streetcar priced reasonably enough to actually make the use of it a real alternative to driving across the Tower Bridge into Sac (or, in the other direction, from Sac to the Rivercats stadium), establishing a streetcar could help build the kind of walkable, urbane neighborhoods that this country used to have before the car changed everything, and which cities like Sacramento are going to need in the future when post-peak gas prices render low density development unfeasible.

And yet, that’s a big if, according to Sacramento History Blog. Sac History argues that the postwar shift to suburban development in West Sac and Sacramento’s other commuter burbs was what killed the streetcars in the first place. As housing density thinned out, and streetcar lines fanned further and further out from the core of the city, the cost of operating the trains at greater distances began to outstrip the revenue from a thinly-dispersed ridership scattered over a longer distance. Eventually, the streetcars went bust. If this plan is to avoid the same fate, higher levels of density are going to have to be planned and built along the streetcar route, to guarantee adequate ridership. Given the move towards higher density already underway, I think it’s entirely possible.

This ties into an interview that the Sacramento News and Review did with Sacramento Mayor Heather Fargo in its Earth Day edition a month ago. At the end of the interview, the discussion turned to transportation and sustainability:

On public transportation: There’s a recommendation in the master plan that there be affordable public transportation within a quarter mile of everybody? How do we do that?

I don’t know how feasible that is. I think there are some other things we need to think about. I think it’s relatively easy to provide transit in the urban core. But as you get further out and the densities go down and the model gets more suburban, I’m not sure how you do that. I’m not even sure it would be smart because you’d be driving a lot of miles to get to people who may or may not want to get on the bus.

You know, there’s a lot of interest in fixing up downtown and the central city and the urban core. It’s older, it’s funkier, it’s fun. But, frankly, it’s not that hard.

No one is really addressing how you fix the suburban model. It’s much more fun to figure out how to fix R Street, rather than trying to figure out how to fix Northgate [Boulevard].

You go to Valley Hi, or south Natomas, and try to get people to use transit. Are they really going to ride a bus to the grocery store? Maybe in places like that we just need to switch to little electric vehicles. You know, the little golf carts? Maybe we stripe the street differently, or not, and let people drive what normally wouldn’t be considered a street-safe vehicle on certain streets. But allow someone to take their little electric car to the grocery store, instead of their big gas-guzzling vehicles. Maybe that’s a way to reduce emissions and reduce congestion and make the community more livable. Otherwise, how do you ever make a community that’s six units to the acre dense enough to support transit?

You’re talking about retrofitting the suburbs.

Someone’s got to figure it out. We have this suburban pattern all over California. Our best brain-stormers typically have been central-city focused. It will be interesting to get people like the American Institute of Architects and others to think about, “OK, how do we fix it out there? What do we do?” I think we need to figure that out before we go any further north than North Natomas.

This is the real tough spot in the whole puzzle of sustainability. How to retrofit the suburbs in terms of transportation infrastructure so that they can transition down the line to a reality where gas is so expensive (and the environmental costs of carbon emissions are so destructive) that it threatens the very car commuter culture that they were planned around? How do we fix that, or tinker with it to make it get by somehow?

Commuter rail is one existing solution, running more and more trains on existing lines such as the Capital Corridor, and perhaps running new lines out on the old tracks to Woodland or Winters, or up the Valley to Yuba City or Marysville, but what I’d really like to see is the light rail extended out to Davis, like they were talking about back in the early 90s. I would much rather hop a train or light rail and not have to bother with the mad commute of Hummers on speed through the tangle.  Truth be told, I’d probably spend a lot more time in Sacramento if there was such an extension.

Feeder networks are the other side, making sure that you’ve got good bus networks, or bike lanes, or even just adequate train station parking, feeding people into the big mass transit nodes at both ends. Sacramento’s light rail is getting better about this, and in Davis, Unitrans buses are somewhat useful for getting to the university, but less so for getting to the train station directly (and at any rate, the use of natural gas may bite us as that peaks down the road as well). The electric cars that Fargo talks about are all over the place here in Davis, and might be another good solution, especially given our plentiful sun and wind that could be tapped for energy needs in the suture (DMUD, anyone?). Many other suburbs have a long way to go in that regard, though, and I hope Fargo and other forward-thinking mayors and city councils are starting to think about it. And as I wrote a while ago, increasing the urban density in existing cities’ downtowns, within walking distance of things like train stations and basic amenities, could help to alleviate future post-peak transportation pressures as well.

California invented sprawl. Hopefully we can invent a way out of it as well that still allows the next generation to afford housing.

originally at surf putah

The U-T gives this its justice (oddly):

In recent days, planning group members have learned they are the subject of a lawsuit, a recall drive and a petition demanding that they retake a December vote approving the project.

During a raucous, 2½-hour meeting at the Potrero Community Center on Thursday night, the group agreed to vote again and asked residents to temper their emotions.

“We’re trying to govern here in a sane way,” group chairman Gordon Hammers said. “All this political frenzy is counterproductive.”

Yeah right. Political frenzy…don’t you hate that?  First, the nuts and bolts of what’s happened.

The planning group has decides to retake the inital December vote in which Blackwater was approved 7-0.  This vote is scheduled for July 12, be there or be…well, screwed.

Recall procedings have begun for six of the eight planning board members.  If 130 signatures are gathered in favor of recall (more than 300 have signed the anti-Blackwater petitions), it would go to the county Board of Supervisors to schedule a special election.  Unclear at this time whether they have a choice in the matter…anyone is welcome to educate me on this point.

A lawsuit has been filed against the planning board, the SD Board of Supervisors and the Department of Planning and Land Use alleging that there wasn’t sufficient notice given before the December vote nor sufficient information provided regarding the proposal.

What concerns me is that the ramifications are not being fully embraced here.  The U-T cites concerns about noise and traffic as driving this opposition, and while I’m not much interested in believing the U-T, I would imagine it’s not all THAT far off.  Blackwater West, at this point, is facing two forms of opposition: Noise and traffic is one, moral is the other.  There hasn’t yet been fire (that I know of) about the potential consequences.  As wu ming in particular has been pointing out in comments around Calitics, this is just the opening salvo in an attempt to change wholesale the way security functions in this country.

The military doesn’t have enough volunteers anymore, so it can’t keep up with the demands.  The National Guard is filling in the gaps, which leaves it dangerously hamstrung domestically.  The fire fighters of California are absolutely heroic and would go down swinging if Hell itself erupted in California, but Catalina needed support from as far as Fresno; they’re outmatched if a major fire gains momentum.  The police, well…they’re disgustingly undermanned in San Diego, they’re attacking journalists and peaceful protesters in LA and generally stretched to the breaking point all over the place.  So what does a lazy Republican government do?  Redouble investment in security infrastructure? Lead public servants at the national, state and local level responsibly?  Do anything to make public service both honorable and a reasonable way to support a family? No. Hire mercenaries.

This is the next step towards the wholesale outsourcing of American security and American principles.  That’s what we’re fighting in Potrero.  And I’m glad the locals are ready to battle.

Mr. Republican Insider and his GOP insider friends can trash my fabulous Congresswoman all they want, but they won’t ever take Loretta down. I just love Loretta Sanchez too much to ever see her being maliciously attacked by these jerks.

See the extended.

She knows what’s best for Orange County, and for her constituents. They don’t. It’s really that simple. Here’s the always fabulous Chris Prevatt from The Liberal OC:

CA-47 Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez has taken a few hits this past week for her support of Congresswoman Susan Davis’ efforts to save the San Onofre State Park from bisection by the 241 toll road extension that has other routes it can follow.

Andrew Davey, over at Calitics, has a post today lauding Sanchez for her efforts. There is a myth out there that somehow her stance will cost her support from organized labor, thus allowing a Republican (Van Tran) to take the seat.

Oh, we love you too, Chris! The Liberal OC is THE BEST LOCAL BLOG in California! But anyways, back to Loretta:

To our friends over at Red County/OCBlog a word of advice…

Don’t hold your breath! The Democrats and organized labor will never let the likes of anti-worker, anti-environment Van Tran skate to victory in the 47th.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: LORETTA IS OUR CHAMPION! She is doing what’s right for our community, and she won’t let a bunch of right-wing bullies pressure her into doing otherwise. That’s why we’ll always love Loretta! : )

(Missed the quick hit on this earlier, but it’s worth a full post)

In a particularly disheartening step towards making elections in San Diego a complete joke, the county has hired former Diebold sales representative Deborah Seiler as the new registrar of voters.  Diebold has “sold more than 10,000 of the machines to the county at a total cost of $31 million.”  Timed rather pugnaciously with Secretary of State Debra Bowen’s review of all the state’s voting systems, the article informs us that Seiler is “concerned” about potential decertification of voter machines.  Well, she should know right?  She sold them.  Former Registrar Mikel Haas, who’s since been promoted to a position overseeing the Registrar’s office (among others), insists her Diebold experience is a plus, saying “We use that system, so it’s kind of a plus.”

But w- w- w- w- wait it gets worse…

(Now Orange and Blue)

Making matters even worse is that this move just cements the all-corruption-all-the-time team at the San Diego County Registrar of Voters.  Last month, the Assistant Registrar of Voters position was handed over to Michael Vu, who, as the article reminds us, presided over Cuyahoga County, Ohio elections in 2004.  How did that go for him?  A court order forced the polls to stay open 90 minutes late and two election workers were convicted of rigging the vote (as Vu defended their innocence).  And so San Diego, your county has spoken.  Your votes should have as little chance of counting as possible.  Enough to warm the heart isn’t it? Or is that just the glow from the Constitution burning?

Now, there is the remote chance that these two people are not a lethal blend of evil and incompetent, but what are the real odds of that?  They both have records of being squarely on the wrong side of clean elections, and I have a hard time imagining that there’s literally nobody else available for this job who wouldn’t be an overt slap in the face to anyone who feels that voting should, perhaps, NOT be corrupt.  It isn’t as though San Diego has a particularly good record of late anyways.  Last year, protestors objected to irregularities such as voting machines being sent home with poll workers overnight before election day.  At the time Chairman of the Board of Supervisors Bill Horn explained “Nobody said that there was local fraud…Until I get a firm accusation of something illegal taking place, I don’t have a reason to have a public hearing.”

That, of course, was and remains complete crap.  Last year, the Board of Supes hid behind the SoS certification of voting machines as justification for not bothering to investigate potential problems (in addition to Horn’s blustering attempt at explanation).  And so now the integrity of San Diego County elections continues to circle the drain.  Here’s hoping that Debra Bowen carries a big stick when she reviews San Diego…she’s coming into the den of despotism.