Daily Archives: October 17, 2007

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Blog Roundup, Economy, Environment, Health Care

October 17, 2007 Blog Roundup

Today’s Blog Roundup is on the flip. Let me know what I missed.

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here and do what comes naturally.

Look, it all depends on
who Issa means by “us”.  For example, if he means
“Republicans” then Blackwater is probably “our troops”.  If he
means the United States, not so much.

Ayup

Health Care

Immigration

Voting Integrity

Environment

Local

The Rest

Economy

Budget This

6 Comments

There’s a certain irrelevancy to all of the back-slapping out of Sacramento for their presiding over a “fiscally sound budget” when you read stories like this:

Sales of houses and condominiums in the most populous Southern California counties fell 29.9 percent from the previous month and 48.5 percent from a year earlier, DataQuick Information Systems said on Tuesday.

The report covers the counties of Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura and showed a total of 12,455 new and existing homes and condos sold in September, the lowest since the company began recording the data in 1988.

Without being alarmist… aw, hell, I’m going to be alarmist.  The real estate market was the only thing propping up the state’s economy.  There’s an attempt to try and trade one bubble for another and re-create the dot-com speculation circa 1998, but that’ll only go so far, too, and that crash will be just as vicious as the first one.  And looming strikes in almost every aspect of the entertainment industry in LA will make life difficult as well.  It’s through little fault of state government, but you can see a pretty clear path to recession now.

UPDATE: On a somewhat related note, you can’t raise a family in California anymore.

The CBP analysis estimates that in order to pay basic bills in California:
A single-parent family needs an annual income of $59,732, equivalent to an hourly wage of $28.72.
A two-parent family with one employed parent needs an annual income of $50,383, equivalent to an hourly wage of $24.22.
A family with two working parents needs an annual income of $72,343, equivalent to each parent working full-time for an hourly wage of $17.39.
A single adult needs an annual income of $28,336, equivalent to an hourly wage of $13.62.

Uncategorized

John Doolittle Getting Hammered in Local Paper: Brown Rocks

Man is Doolittle getting smacked around by the local paper on his fundraising and legal problems.  These two paragraph are a beautiful sight to see in the Auburn Journal.  This was printed on Monday, but just saw it now.

Doolittle, whose ninth term in Congress has been marred by a Justice Depart-ment investigation related to his ties with imprisoned lobbyist Jack Abramoff, trailed during the July-to-September period, pulling in $54,908.

Doolittle’s third quarter fund-raising and expenditures left his campaign with $37,995 in cash on hand. Brown, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel from Roseville, was sitting by the end of September with $382,000 in cash on hand, a spokesman said Monday.

Got that.  Doolittle: marred, Justice Dept investigation, Jack Abramoff.  Brown: USAF Lt. Col. ret, sitting on cash in hand. Nice!

Love to see Charlie talking up all of the donors he has been getting and this being a grassroots campaign.

Todd Stenhouse, spokesman for Brown, said that the Democrat’s campaign so far had raised $610,000. The total includes a $63,000 carryover from the previous election.

A total of 6,000 separate donors have given to the Brown campaign, Stenhouse said.

“We’re getting a lot of support that really transcends partisanship,” he said. “This is really a grass-roots campaign.”

Keep it going.  Donate to Charlie via the Calitics ActBlue page.

Uncategorized

Dan Lungren: Champion of Oppressed White People in Jena

With liberty and justice for all presumably echoing somewhere in the background yesterday, Rep. Dan Lungren yesterday cut to the real concern in the Jena 6 case:

“Whether or not attempted murder is appropriate under that jurisdiction, I don’t know. I’ve never prosecuted under that jurisdiction,” says Dan Lungren (R-Calif.). “We need to talk about justice being done [to] all of the victims.”

Now, I would quibble a bit with Politico adding the “to” because that changes quite a bit the inflection of the statement.  Justice to and justice for would carry pretty different connotations.  Given that “justice” has only been applied to some of the people involved, Lungren’s attempt to paint over the racial issues involved in prosecution is an insulting and willful ignorance of the forces at play outside of the direct incidents involved.  In fact, it seems that Rep. Lungren would rather try focusing on broken families and delinquency than actually acknowledging racism.  Over we go.

During yesterday’s hearing, Lungren tried to get around to race without actually bringing it up, using tried and true proxy insults.  Anderson@Large covers his thoughts:

Rep. Dan Lungren asserted a relationship between “family structure” and juvenile delinquency. Lungren used “single parent family” as a proxy for race.

Prof. Ogletree flatly rejected Lungren’s claim:

It’s not the structure of the family. It’s the structure of the criminal justice system. It’s too easy to say “family structure” is the cause and consequence of the problem. It’s bigger than that. You must also look at disparities in punishment and charges.

Exactly.  Professor Ogletree by the way is Charles J. Ogletree Jr., the executive director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School.  So he didn’t exactly fall off a turnip truck and into this hearing.  He doesn’t spit it right into Lungren’s face like he could have, but he still hits the real issue here.  Trying to find a backdoor into justifying the over-prosecution of African Americans by claiming that their family structure is inherently more likely to turn them into criminals is really a pathetic way to couch latent racist tendencies.

Professor Ogletree, also via the post at Anderson@Large, clarified later in the day on NPR:

A noose is a hate crime. The government chose not to prosecute them…That’s what makes people so upset. Why is it that one set of conduct which violates the law was prosecuted. And another set was handled within the school system. It’s a disparity. It’s based on race and it’s hard to justify under these circumstances.

Lungren’s comments are directly aimed at suggesting that race isn’t the issue here.  It’s misdirection and non sequiturs and the enabling of perpetuated racial violence.  It’s his nothion that nobody involved is getting the justice they deserve regardless of race.  It’s his notion that the children being charged with attempted murder over a swollen eye and a concussion were just raised to be problematic.  And it sets the table for removing the notion of hate crimes from this and especially future prosecutions.

Thank goodness the committee and its witnesses aren’t sitting around and taking this from him.  But clearly Rep. Lungren wants to avoid and deny any role of race in this issue if possible.  Time to start asking why.

Bill Durston is running against Dan Lungren for Congress.

RaceTracker: CA-03

Uncategorized

The Return of Prop 90!

56 Comments

Well, it looks like it’s going to happen. The Right wingers aren’t ones to give up just because they got rebuffed once.  They’re at it again, and, if you believe them, they’ve got the signatures to get on the ballot:

Today, Californians for Property Rights Protection announced that the campaign has collected well over 700,000 signatures needed to qualify the California Property Owners and Farmland Protection Act for the June 2008 ballot. In order to qualify the eminent domain reform ballot measure, supporters must collect 694,354 valid signatures by November 26, 2007. The campaign is on track to submit more than 1 million signatures before this deadline. Link here

More on this proposition over the flip and why this is, yet again, a trojan horse.

You see, the Howard Jarvis folks don’t really care all that much about eminent domain, because it doesn’t really affect that many of their kind of people, or truthfully, any kind of people. But, it sounds really bad, and it polls well for them.  So, they use it as a trojan horse. That’s what they did with Prop 90, and that’s what they are doing this time.  This time, it is rent control that’s on their mind. I think it would also eliminate many of the “below market rate ownership” programs in San Francisco and across the state.

Why rent control? Hell’s if I know, but it’s what they are going after. They draw some tangential link by making some right to do whatever you damn well please with your property.  So, here’s some snippets. Read the whole thing here.

Section 19 of Article I of the California Constitution is amended to read:

SEC. 19(a) Private property may be taken or damaged only for a stated public use and when just compensation, ascertained by a jury unless waived, has first been paid to, or into court for, the owner. The Legislature may provide for possession by the condemnor following commencement of eminent domain proceedings upon deposit in court and prompt release to the owner of money determined by the court to be the probable amount of just compensation. Private property may not be taken or damaged for private use.

(b) For purposes of this section:

(1) “Taken” includes transferring the ownership, occupancy, or use of property from a private owner to a public agency or to any person or entity other than a public agency, or limiting the price a private owner may charge another person to purchase, occupy or use his or her real property.

Health Care

The Fake Schwarzenegger-Nunez Health Reform is DEAD

3 Comments

More than SCHIP, the important action in the movement for guaranteed healthcare is happening in California, where the insurance industry almost pulled off the big scam, getting Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Speaker Fabian Nunez to cooperate on a plan forcing the sale of more expensive, unworkable insurance products-and blocking the guaranteed, single-payer reform this country needs.

Good news!  The Schwarzenegger-Nunez scam is dead!  This is a major victory for progressives, patients, and nurses.  The Dems have figured out how bad a deal Schwarzenegger is offering, and the plan’s main cheerleader Nunez is near-dead politically by revelations that his wife is now on the hospital industry payroll to the tune of six figures, and that he is struggling with a nasty case of luxury shopaholism with donor money.

…cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association’s Breakroom Blog, as we organize to make 2007 the Year of GUARANTEED healthcare on the single-payer model.

The quick background for those of you who missed it…insurance corporations have set the terms of the debate this year in California, with Schwarzenegger proposing that all individuals be forced to purchase private insurance products, and Nunez and certain corporate Dems countering that all employers be forced to purchase them on behalf of their workforce.  Both plans would give more customers, revenue, and medical influence to the very insurance corporations who have ruined our healthcare system…while doing nothing to actually solve our healthcare crisis.

Everything has changed as a broad coalition of mainstream Dems has realized that Arnold’s plan is unaffordable for the average patient.  Of course it is!  Private insurers waste one-third of care dollars on overhead and profits.  You simply cannot do that and provide people with the care they need.  Of course, any plan built on private insurance corporations is unworkable.

What’s politically significant is that these Dems seem to be making it impossible for the grand Schwarzenegger-Nunez deal to be cut.  Personal attacks on the Governor are not the road to compromise.  Even USA Today noted the failure of the industry plan.

The Dems have hired attack dog Chris Lehane to help beat up the Governor, and he says, “the only way you get a health care plan done in this country is making it more affordable, not less – and this plan doesn’t do that.”

Meanwhile, Barbara O’Connor, a noted political commentator, added “clearly the goal is to define the governor as soft on industry, and it’s not going to resolve the conflict – and so health care will not get out.”

But what really kills the deal is the fact that Speaker Nunez’ wife has just gone on the payroll of the hospital industry, having been hired by a lobbying group funded by the California Hospital Association.  It is quite possible that he will be legally required to recuse himself on all healthcare bills…including the one he is trying to push through with Schwarzenegger.  Even if not, the symbolism of doubling his family income through HMO money leaves him with no credibility on the issue.

Or as Zenei Cortez, RN, put it: “Californians can no longer trust that he will represent the public interest and not the financial interest of a large industry that has put his wife on their payroll.”

Of course you gotta feel for the Nunez family…it’s not easy to fund global luxury travel anymore!

To join the fight for guaranteed healthcare (with a “Medicare for All” or SinglePayer financing), visit GuaranteedHealthcare.org, a project of the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association.

California

The Wiki-Avengers in Sacramento

Ready to promote their bosses at the drop of a hat! Ready to right the wrongs (or rights) of the Internet super-encyclopedia from their office computers at any moment. Yes, they are the Legislative Super Wiki-Avengers!

The Bee did some Wiki-spying on the California state government folks, and found some unsurprising results.  They edit Wikipedia! The Assembly wikiscanner report and the Senate report are quite intriguing on their edits. Many of them aren’t shocking, a few edits of California universities state senate campaigns, likely by interns from those universities, some changes to some high schools, and some self-aggrandizement of some politicians. Many are quite honest, like adding the committees on which they serve. Others, are a little more suspect. Flip

The Bee points out some edits to Sen. Leland Yee’s wikipage. Namely, it removed a story uncovered in Yee’s run for SF Supervisor about an arrest in Kona, Hawaii for shoplifting a bottle of suntan lotion. Matier and Ross story here. Furthermore, somebody in the Legislature added this little comment to Mike Nevin’s page, Yee’s primary opponent in 2006
Current version:

In his political career, Nevin has focused on transportation issues, including the expansion of BART and CalTrain, as well as gun control, education, and health care.

Legislative version:

In his political career, Nevin has focused entirely on transportation issues, including the expansion of BART and CalTrain, which has nearly bankrupt the local San Mateo County Transit agency

Other notable edits (besides some Dept. of Health staffers making some edits on the wiki-pages of some porn stars) include the taking of Joe Coto’s campaign bio and putting directly onto Wikipedia,  and the same thing for Loni Hancock. What other cool edits can you find with [Wiki-Scanner wikiscanner.virgil.gr]?

San Francisco

SF: R.I.P. Jim Rivaldo

1 Comment

(As Alex Clemens noted, “We are very, very, very diminished.” – promoted by Bob Brigham)

This diary is cross-posted on Daily Kos.

Today I received word on the local San Francisco community board The Wall that a city legend, gay rights pioneer and one of the late Harvey Milk’s closest confidants, Jim Rivaldo passed away yesterday afternoon at the age of 60 after succumbing to liver cancer, a condition he suffered for some time.

In case you haven’t seen the notice on Suspects, word comes that Jim passed away today. Fair Winds and Followings Seas. If anyone has a suitable pic of Jim we can put up please forward.

For those of who are young or fairly new to San Francisco, I found this article in the San Francisco Sentinel that briefly profiled his career.

He was a close friend and confidant of the late Supervisor Harvey Milk, and worked on Milk’s campaigns, which included unsuccessful bids for state Assembly and supervisor before he was elected to the board in 1977. Disgruntled former Supervisor Dan White gunned down Milk and Mayor George Moscone in their City Hall offices November 27, 1978.

He was actually the last person to speak to Milk before he and Moscone were killed. Most importantly, he forged a path for openly gay politicians in both parties.

Supervisor Tom Ammiano read the commendation, which highlighted Rivaldo’s work on the No on 6 (Briggs initiative) campaign, which saw the measure to ban gays from teaching in public schools go down to defeat in 1977.

In a brief interview, Rivaldo told the Bay Area Reporter that the highlight of his career was “my association with Harvey Milk.”

“There’s nobody better,” said Rebecca Prozan, co-chair of the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club, which honored Rivaldo with a Lifetime Achievement Award. He was similarly honored by the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, which he co-founded with Milk when it was known as the Gay Democratic Club.

“While he focused much of his attention on LGBT candidates and issues, to far less fanfare, Jim helped elect every African American candidate in the 1970s and 1980s, and in 1976 served as treasurer in the campaign that brought us district elections,” Ammiano stated.

Those district elections were abandoned in the aftermath of Milk’s murder, but city voters passed another version of district elections several years ago that remains in place today.

Rivaldo also served as the first openly gay state commissioner, appointed by Milk to represent San Francisco on the North Central Regional Coastal Commission.

“Through Jim’s efforts and leadership, we have the Office of Citizen Complaints, domestic partnerships, and ironically, the nation’s largest gay and lesbian Republican organization, the Log Cabin Republicans,” the commendation states.

In the brief obituary in todays’s Examiner, it was written that he also consulted Supervisor Bevan Dufty and Assemblyman Mark Leno. I never personally met Jim Rivaldo, but I value the wisdom he shared on “The Wall” and any exchange I had with him was a pleasure.

Jim Rivaldo was a treasure in this city, and he will be sorely missed. God’s Speed, Jim.

Health Care

Thanks to everyone who helped us ban toxic toys!

(No, Thank you Assemblymember Ma! Minor spacing edits and the added picture of the ducky. – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

IMG_2745On Sunday, Governor Schwarzenegger signed AB 1108, the bill I introduced to remove toxic toys from our shelves. 

It was only a few weeks ago that we started an online campaign urging Governor Schwarzenegger to sign this crucial piece of legislation.  We had hundreds of grassroots supporters email the Governor demanding that he pass the ban — now, parents will be no longer have to worry about the safety of the products that they buy for their toddlers.  Thank you to everyone who supported this bill and pushed for its passage!

As many of you may know (especially if you’ve been reading Calitics!), AB 1108 prohibits manufacturers from selling plastic products intended for young children that contain the toxic chemical phthalates.  Phthalates are used by manufacturers to make plastics softer — and can be found in children’s products like rubber duckies and soft bathtub books.  According to the Environment California Research and Policy Center, these chemicals can be particularly harmful for children under the age of three, with exposure leading to hormonal disruptions, early onset of puberty, reproductive impairment, ADHD, and even cancer.

That’s why I’m so thrilled with our success in passing the ban against these toys here in California.  It was a real struggle to convince the Governor to sign the bill particularly because, unsurprisingly, the chemical industry lobbied hard against this common-sense legislation.  But thanks to your dedication, we overcame the challenge and persuaded the Governor to pass AB 1108. 

California is now leading our nation in the fight against these unnecessary additives in baby products — as we should. With phthalates now banned from children’s toys here in our state, I look forward to working with Americans across the country to ensure that these dangerous products are banned throughout the nation as well! 

If you’d join me and thousands of other Californians as we work to improve our state on issues ranging from the economy to education to health care,  you can click here to sign up for the Ma Squad today!

Health Care

Most California Families Can’t Make Ends Meet, Study Suggests–Poverty Line Inadequate Measure

7 Comments

(We like it when Mr. Rosenberg writes here – promoted by jsw)

Front-paged at OpenLeft

Note: This is only about California, but the message is national.  Our measures of economic need are severely out of whack, which is a significant contributing factor in the making of bad social policy

A new report from the California Budget Project, the fifth iteration of “Making Ends Meet: How Much Does It Cost To Raise A Family In California?” [PDF], shows that the basic cost of living a no-frills, no-savings existence in California is substantially above the poverty line, the minimum wage, and even–for most families analyzed–the median hourly wage.  Nearly half of California’s full-time workers cannot make ends meet in a two-parent, two child family in which both parents work, and thus must pay for childcare-one of four family types analyzed.  Things are even worse for single-parent or single-income famities.

Among other things, the report strongly indicates the need for explanding SCHIP (the State Children’s Health Insurance Program), which President Bush recently vetoed.  “It shows the president is wrong. That famiy with inomes of up to and above 300 percent of poverty level do need asisitaint to afford health care if they don’t have emloyee-based health care,” said long-time CBP executive director Jean Ross.

According Ross, the no-frills budgets, “don’t provide any room for saivngs, for retireent or college,” nor do they provide services many now take for granted. “No DSL or cable.  Just bare-bones utilities,” Ross said.  Because each iteration of the report involves improvements in methodology, Ross cautioned that the reports could not be strictly compared to one another, but were primarily intended to provide the best possible contemporary analysis at the time of release.

Poverty Line Inadequate

Results from this approach, which analyzes actual living expenses on a regional basis, set a substantially higher level for keeping ones head above water than the poverty line, which was set back in the early 1960s at three times the cost of a basic food budget by a government economist Mollie Orshansky, who never intended it for general use as a poverty threashold.  But it was the first thing that came to hand when general insterest in poverty suddenly exploded, and has never revised, much less replaced, except for inflation adjustments.

“Orhansky just passed away this past year,” Ross noted, while pointing to “general and widespread agreemnt that it [the poverty line] is inadequate.”

Not only have increases in other costs-such as health care and child care-greatly exceeded food since then, there are substantial regional differences as well, with particularly high housing costs throughout California, especially in the Bay Area.

The report analyzes living expenses for four family types: a single adult, a single working parent with two children, a two-parent family with two children and one working parent, and two working parents with two children. Of these, only the single adult family income requirements indicate that a substantial number of them earn enough to get by.  Compared to statewide median wage of 17.42 an hour, a single adult needs $13.62 an hour ($11.45 to $14.55, according to region), a single-parent family needs $28.72 ($23.88 to $31.67), a two-parent family with one parent working needs $24.22 an hour ($21.37 to $26.35), and a two-parent family with both working needs $17.39 an hour ($15.05 to $18.53).

[From CBP Report]

In contrast to using the poverty, The report explains:

This report takes an alternate approach. It starts from the ground up, building a basic family budget based on the cost of housing, food, child care, and other essentials needed to support a family without public or private assistance. The standard of living envisioned is more than a “bare bones” existence, yet covers only basic expenses, allowing little to no room for “extras” such as college savings, vacations, or emergencies.

Specifically, this report estimates typical costs of housing and utilities, child care, transportation, food, health coverage, payroll and income taxes, and miscellaneous expenses for four hypothetical families: a single adult, a single working parent with two children, a two-parent family with two children and one working parent, and two working parents with two children. Because housing and other costs vary throughout California, this report provides basic family budgets for 10 regions within the state.

The breakdown of family expenses analyzed is as follows:

A single adult needs an annual income of $28,336, equivalent to an hourly wage of $13.62. Regional estimates range from $23,815 to $30,262 ($11.45 to $14.55 per hour).

A family with two working parents needs an annual income of $72,343, equivalent to each parent working full-time for an hourly wage of $17.39. Regional estimates range from $62,624 to $77,069 ($15.05 to $18.53 per hour for each parent).

A single-parent family needs an annual income of $59,732, equivalent to an hourly wage of $28.72. Regional estimates range from $49,672 to $65,864 ($23.88 to $31.67 per hour).

A two-parent family with one employed parent needs an annual income of $50,383, equivalent to an hourly wage of $24.22. Regional estimates range from $44,448 to $54,815 ($21.37 to $26.35 per hour).

Full report-with regional breakdowns and more-is here [PDF]