Daily Archives: March 7, 2008

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Say it ain’t so Madame Speaker

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Glenn Greenwald has it on good authority that my Representative, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, is planning on letting the Republicans pwn the Constitution: (h/t FDL)

As has been expected for a week now, the House Democratic leadership has prepared and is now currently circulating (while trying very hard to keep it confidential) their so-called "compromise" FISA bill. Their soon-to-be-unveiled bill, unsurprisingly, is designed to give the White House exactly what it has demanded, with only the smallest and most inconsequential changes.

As I said to DiFi earlier this morning, not cool at all.  The Democrats, save Chris Dodd and Russ Feingold, have been remarkably mute on this issue.  It is an issue of basic seperation of powers and how much authority the President and his/her administration has. So, here's the president playing the fear card (via tortdeform)—> (flip it for more)  

UPDATE (by Dave): TPM Muckraker has more and the details are quite different from what Greenwald reported.  The compromise bill does not have immunity but there’s still a possibility that they’ll ping-pong the bill back and forth from the House to the Senate to get it back in.  I’d have to look further, but the compromise bill does look to me to be “in the ballpark” of the RESTORE Act, which was a good bill.  We’re not out of the woods on this and all your reps. deserve a call.  But it’s not clear to me that this is a bad development… yet.

Basically, they are using this tired argument of they're going to get us, booogy, boogey, to force immunity through.  And the basic question is should corporations require the government to get a damn warrant or at least have some visible authority. Sure, Mr. Bush is all honest about who he's spying on (uh-huh), but what happens if those rascaly Democrats decide they want to spy on some of the right-wing fringe groups. I mean, next thing you now, they'll want to spy on some of the crazy anti-choice groups, and the deity would surely frown.  So, all this law is really requiring is doing what Qwest did (until they were threatened with a cut-off of their contracts) by demanding a warrant.

And, I'll leave more of this up to Robert and others who have followed this battle more closely, but telecomm immunity isn't about money. It's not the "greedy trial lawyers" who are suing the telecoms, but the EFF, and the ACLU. And by the way, Mr. Bush, trial lawyers protect the rights of American consumers from greedy corporations, that's a hell of a lot more than your administration ever did.

So, Madam Speaker, do not cave on telecom immunity. It's just too important.  Contact Speaker Pelosi (or your own Rep here) and tell them to have a spine on protecting the Constitution, you know the thing they have sworn to uphold.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi: Phone:  (202) 225-4965, Fax:  202-225-8259

California

Not Even A Thank You?

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Yesterday I wrote a diary proving that the national media had their delegate counts completely wrong for weeks.  I sent an email to the AP referencing this and asking them to change their counts.  

Well, here’s where we are after Day 1.  Real Clear Politics changed their count.  The New York Times changed their count.  CBS has not.  MSNBC has not.  CNN still has it at 204-161 with five delegates undecided.

To the Times and RCP: you’re welcome.  To the others: get with the damn program.

I have calls and emails in to the Secretary of State’s office to confirm this, but I’m going by their own numbers.

education

Some Democrats Get It – Jack O’Connell Doesn’t

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Lieutenant Governor John Garamendi:

“Our state and its people cannot prosper in the 21st century if we force our schools to live on a fiscal starvation diet,” Garamendi said Thursday at Sacramento City College.

Assemblymember Dave Jones:

However, in doing so my Republican colleagues in the State Assembly decided that while they were prepared to cut education funding and health care for the poor, they just couldn’t stomach closing the yacht tax loophole. Too painful, apparently, to the Thurston Howell IIIs of the world. So they refused to provide the 2/3 vote necessary to close the yacht tax loophole. In doing so they robbed the poor to help subsidize tax avoidance by rich yacht owners. Are those the values we want reflected in our state budget? Those aren’t my values, that’s for sure.

Jack O’Connell, who is nominally in charge of education for the state, should find something else to emphasize.

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DiFi’s radical centrism & Other Stories Open Thread

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A few links:

  • DiFi sent a letter to Legislative Leaders to start plundering our rivers, or else! Listen, I think we do need to retool our water system. The pipes in SF are decades old, some even a century or more. We don't have enough water for SoCal and its out of place lawns, but building a peripheral canal without permission from the voters or just randomly building dams is not the answer.  We need a complete water plan, not some haphazard attempt to mollify the farmers and the exurbanites who like their lawns. These things take time. And DiFi's letter undercuts real Democrats in California. Not cool, DiFi, not cool at all.
  • The Arnold-backed redistricting initiative is rapidly becoming a GOP-backed initiative as Democratic donors are not so thriled with it. CC Times. Perhaps that's because Democrats understand that the plan gives power to Republicans that didn't earn it at the ballot box.
  • The Kevin Johnso-Heather Fargo fight in Sacto is getting interesting quickly. The SacBee writes a thank-you letter to the former NBA All-Star for entering the race, and then Fargo attacks him with old (resolved) tax issues. Not a good start to the re-election campaign for the incumbent.

This is an open thread.

Budget, California

Students Should Be Active Against GOP Budget Cuts

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Yesterday, David Dayen posted a story about the Alameda High School students who walked out and marched to their school district headquarters to protest the cuts to education. Dayen rightly said that it was, “really big deal” and continued:

It won’t be long before these students are joined by teachers and parents on the streets. […] Democrats need to simply defend the principle that the state is worth paying for.  The public will be with them.

Yet my morning Sacramento Bee Capitol Alert says:

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell will hold a morning news conference to urge California students not to walk out in protest of the cuts.

WTF? Why is the “Superintendent of Public Instruction” weakening the negotiating position for…public instruction? I haven’t seen the release, but if he wants to send the message that has been reported it simply makes no sense.

The Alameda students who marched on the school district made the transition from youth to citizen. They stepped up and are taking responsibility for their future. If anything, they should be applauded. I went to a great high school and yet I don’t think I learned as much in any month as those students learned pulling off this great act of political leadership. I have a hunch that if you ask them, they’ll say the same. The Alameda student leaders should be emulated:  in one afternoon they let the world know that they had learned enough to know they were going to get screwed by the GOP in Sacramento and mobilized and organized and made the papers and the blogs.

The GOP stranglehold on the state finances has dire effects and Superintendent O’Connell should be proud that these young adults understand the state budget and have the wherewithal to stand up the ideal of quality public education.

With social networking, organizing such events is easier than ever and personally I hope we see more of this, not less. The GOP budget disaster is an all hands on deck fight and I for one was proud and inspired to see Alameda high school students joining the fight — we need their help and they have proven they have game. Jack O’Connell should only be worried about the students who don’t walk out.

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Hypocrite Sal Rosselli Exposed

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A letter was sent by Tyrone Freeman the President of SEIU-ULTCWU to Sal Rosselli the President of SEIU-UHW-West.
In the letter Tyrone tells Sal that he just learned that Sal has been having secret back-door meetings and deals with a group of nursing home employers over economic issues covering bargaining unit workers where the two SEIU unions have joint representation to a master collective bargaining agreement.  He goes on to say it is a violation of the responsibility and fiduciary duties of a union leader and in violation of the fundamental principles of trade union democracy.
The secret deal was signed by Sal's union on 1/21/08 with the employers of Covenant Care, Kindred, Country Villa, Sun and Salva.  None of SEIU-ULTCWU members or even their staff were apart of the agreement or conversations, which means member contracts were being negotiated without the members or their knowledge.  The reason for this posting is the hypocrisy of Sal, who has tried to call out SEIU International's President Andy Stern for doing exactly what Sal is now caught doing himself, making deals with employers without member involvement.  In addition, Tyrone states Sal has been doing this without Sal's own members, the rank and file workers, but a group of hand picked workers bound to the secrecy of a pledge. 
The secret agreement uncovered states that both sides (Sal's union and the employers) will be “off-the-record”, except where terms of this agreement are sought to be enforced, absent the written consent of all parties.  It goes on that all parties shall not disclose their conversations to the media, the NLRB, or other government agencies, a mediator, arbitrator or court of law.  However, if you are under oath with a THREAT of judicial contempt, then tell the parties, before testifying. 
Tomorrow in Los Angeles Sal is arranging a protest of Andy for what Sal has just been caught doing.  The interesting question who now turns out, who turns out knows about this back door deal and will they still support Sal?  Finally, will Sal's own members believe these uncovered documents or follow him blindly into the abyss.
Cross-posted at San Diego Politico.
California

Hey, Catch Up, National Media

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Being that I kind of don’t pay attention to the national media’s delegate counts, I hadn’t realized that they were all getting California so very, very wrong, and in fact are about 800,000 votes off from the official tally.  Apparently many news organizations predict that Clinton will reap 207 delegates from California, and Obama 163.  MSNBC has this.  Real Clear Politics has this.  CBS has this.  The New York Times has this.  CNN has it as 204-161 with 5 to be decided.  They’re all simply wrong, and I know math is hard and everything, but get out your calculators, people.

Here’s an example at MSNBC’s site.  They list 2,144,251 votes for Clinton and 1,746,013 for Obama, which was right… about two weeks ago.  The actual official returns, readily available at the Secretary of State’s website, are 2,553,784 for Clinton and 2,126,600 for Obama.  That’s really, really off.  The final percentage is 8.7% and MSNBC lists it as 10%.  And that translates to a 70-59 split in delegates statewide.  They’re probably getting that wrong, too, not recognizing that there are two kinds of statewide delegates which are calculated separately.  When you add in the district-level delegate allocation (and I could list them all, but trust me on this), you get 203-167.  It takes about 10 minutes to come up with this and it’s completely irresponsible for the national media to have this wrong for over two weeks, and to relentlessly show a graphic of delegate counts with bad, outdated information.  In fact, it calls into question ALL of their other counts.

MSNBC, The New York Times, CBS, CNN and RCP need to get this right, today.  They’re screwing up and hurting America (again).  What a bunch of incompetents.

UPDATE: Just to embarrass the national media further, I’m going to show my work on the flip.

I noted the popular vote totals before: 2,553,784 for Clinton and 2,126,600 for Obama.  All other candidate totals drop out because they’re under 15%, so the statewide delegates are factored by proportion of the head-to-head vote.  There are 81 at-large delegates and 48 PLEO (Party Leader/Elected Official) delegates.  If you do the math, Hillary got 54.56% of the head-to-head, and that factors to a 44-37 split on at-large and a 26-22 split on PLEOs.

So we’re at 70-59.  The delegate allocations for each of the 53 districts are here.  The district-wide returns are here.  The key numbers are:

It takes 62.5001% of the head-to-head vote for a 3-1 split in a 4-delegate district.

It takes 58.3301% of the head-to-head vote for a 4-2 split in a 6-delegate district.

In the 21 CDs with an odd number of delegates, the presidential candidate with the most votes gets the most delegates in each of those CDs.

So, and you can do this math yourself given all the parameters outlined for you:

District   Delegates  Obama   Clinton

CA-01           5               3             2

CA-02           4               2             2

CA-03           4               2             2

CA-04           5               2             3

CA-05           5               3             2

CA-06           6               3             3

CA-07           5               2             3

CA-08           6               3             3

CA-09           6               4             2

CA-10           5               2             3

CA-11           4               2             2

CA-12           6               3             3

CA-13           5               2             3

CA-14           6               3             3

CA-15           5               2             3

CA-16           4               2             2  (this one is really close, but she has 62.47% of that vote)

CA-17           5               2             3

CA-18           4               1             3

CA-19           4               2             2

CA-20           3               1             2

CA-21           4               1             3

CA-22           4               2             2

CA-23           5               3             2

CA-24           5               2             3

CA-25           4               2             2

CA-26           4               2             2

CA-27           5               2             3

CA-28           5               2             3

CA-29           5               2             3

CA-30           6               3             3

CA-31           4               1             3

CA-32           4               1             3

CA-33           5               3             2

CA-34           4               1             3

CA-35           5               3             2

CA-36           5               2             3

CA-37           5               3             2

CA-38           4               1             3

CA-39           4               1             3

CA-40           4               2             2

CA-41           4               1             3

CA-42           4               2             2

CA-43           4               1             3

CA-44           4               2             2

CA-45           4               1             3

CA-46           4               2             2

CA-47           3               1             2

CA-48           4               2             2

CA-49           4               2             2

CA-50           5               2             3

CA-51           4               2             2

CA-52           4               2             2

CA-53           5               3             2

If you add that all up, the district totals are 133 for Clinton and 108 for Obama.  Add that to the 70-59 statewide split, and it’s 203-167.

Nice job, national media.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Budget

Movement on Closing the Tax Loopholes

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Tomorrow morning around 7:40 AM I am going to be on Roy Ulrich’s Morning Review Friday on KPFK 90.7 FM to discuss the state’s structural revenue shortfall. One major element of that is the $2.7 billion in tax loopholes that LAO Elizabeth Hill identified. George Skelton reports in today’s LA Times that Arnold appears serious about closing these – but that much remains to be done:

Give him credit: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the first Republican in California’s Capitol to begin taking off the budget blinders.

He’s actually advocating tax increases, give or take some semantics….

It was clear to Schwarzenegger that, for political and practical reasons, the deficit hole could not be filled with spending cuts alone. He decided to support loophole closings. But advisors were surprised when the governor spontaneously popped out with the idea the next morning during an audience Q&A after addressing Town Hall Los Angeles.

“I’m a big believer,” he said, “that when we have a financial crisis like this that we all should chip in. And this is why I totally agree with the legislative analyst’s office when she says that we should look at tax loopholes….

Democratic leaders should consider it an invitation to offer Schwarzenegger a tax proposal. The governor finally agrees with them, it seems, that the state does have a revenue problem — not simply a spending problem.

This is a productive development, as it is becoming obvious that catastrophic education cuts are not the answer to our budget crisis. But even this welcome news has to be tempered by some political and fiscal realities.

First, there seems to be some disagreement among Sacramento Democrats on what to do about the budget. Skelton believes that the Arnold-Núñez vs. Perata dynamic is about to replay itself:

Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata (D-Oakland) wants to fashion a budget proposal through the traditional legislative process, with public hearings, and avoid closed-door negotiations between leaders and the governor. That’s fine. But this is ominous: He’s vowing “the fight of a lifetime,” threatening to block budget passage all summer if necessary to protect school funding, insisting loophole-closing isn’t enough and talking up a sales tax increase.

Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez (D-Los Angeles) is more attuned to Schwarzenegger.

“If other Democrats want to beat up the governor, I respect their views,” he says. “But I think the governor is a good man and doesn’t want to make cuts any more than I do. Now it’s up to us to show him a road map to a balanced budget.”

Nuñez isn’t ready to support a general tax increase, like on sales. That should be a “last resort,” he says. For now, he advocates closing business loopholes. For example, he’d impose an oil severance tax — California is the only state without one, he says — and raise $1 billion.

Núñez is simply wrong to believe that a general tax increase can be avoided. An oil severance tax has its place, but even with loophole closures, something like a sales tax increase – or sales tax modernization – or the restoration of the VLF is a necessity if we are to avoid crippling cuts. Tax loophole closure and an oil severance tax would bring in around $3.7 billion, but that leaves over $4 billion in cuts. The VLF sits as a fat target, with the potential to bring $6 billion a year into the state’s account. It would be nice if someone in Sacramento started talking more loudly about that.

Of course, it’s by no means clear what role Núñez, who has grown closer politically to Arnold over his term as speaker, will actually play in these negotiations. Whereas the Senate handover of power from Perata to Darrell Steinberg is scheduled for August 21, the transition from Núñez to Karen Bass is much less clearly defined. And we don’t yet seem to know where Speaker-elect Bass stands on the tax issue.

We do know where the Yacht Party stands. Capitol Alert reports today that Dick Ackerman and Mike Villines have both come out strongly against any new taxes. They’ve decided to stake their party’s future on the construction of an aristocracy in California, where low taxes are paid for by permanent inequality as our education, transportation, and health care services are destroyed and with it, the state’s economy.

A united front is going to be necessary to break the Republicans. Democrats need to work out their differences soon and present that unity, for the sake of Californians and the state’s future.

Uncategorized

No, California is not in play for Mr. 3rd Term

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PhotobucketOver at the National Journal (via MSNBC, John Mercurio thinks that California is in play this November. Let me make this clear.

No. It. Is. Not.

There is no way that McCain wins California barring some last minute revelations that the Democratic nominee is in fact not a human, but one of those aliens that appears every Halloween in the Simpsons. Perhaps that would give pause to California voters. But to tell you the truth, I bet either Kang or Kodos would poll pretty strongly against McCain, and, perhaps might win with a strong mail vote campaign. It worked in 1996, right? Perhaps we should just nominate Kodos, that Kang is quite violent.

So, let’s get in to just why Mercurio thinks John McCain will win, and why Mercurio, in fact, knows less about the California electorate than, say, Bill Jones, whom he quotes as an excellent source. You know the one, Bill Jones, former SoS, and the guy that lost to Barbara Boxer, one of America’s most progressive Senators by 20 freaking points. Yeah, that guy thinks McCain can totally take California. Totally.

“California can be won by a Republican,” McCain campaign chair and former California secretary of state Bill Jones told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I did it twice. The governor [Schwarzenegger] has done it.”

I see where Jones thinks he can make the comparison between McCain and Schwarzenegger. I mean, both like to present themselves as moderate “mavericks.” But, Arnold is not McCain, and the opposite is true. In fact, Arnold basically played McCain for the 2005 special election. He spoke out against unions (check-McCain is not a friend of organized labor.) Arnold spoke out about changing the way things are done, and then went around business as usual. He said “the money comes in and the favors go out” and then went about bringing the money in and sending the favors out.  Oh look, McCain likes to play nice with campaign finance reform too (like say, using it as a collateral for a loan). Flip it.

But where did Arnold’s McCain act get him? Well, he took a beating in the 2005 special election. A thumping, if you’d like to borrow Bush’s words. When Arnold has been successful it’s been by moving quite visibly to the left. It’s been when he signed AB 32, when he tried to get health care legislation passed, when he increased the minimum wage.  Oh, and by the way, he signed legislation increasing the strength of domestic partnerships.

But McCain? Mr. 100 Years? In a state that overwhelmingly opposes the Iraq War? SUSA shows Obama leading by eleven points, and Clinton leading by ten points. (By the by, that SUSA poll shows McCain only beating Obama in Texas by a single point.) In other words, McCain’s maverick rhetoric isn’t working here.

California’s Republicans might be among the nuttiest of the country, but our DTS votes go strongly to Democrats and Democratic ideals. So, Arnold ripped off our ideas for a while. But that has proved to be something of a one-off in California. All of the Democratic statewide candidates won, save the inept Cruz Bustamante. The Republican Party is at war with its own Governator.  The Guy got booed at the last CRP convention he attended, and yet, somehow, that guy is going to help McCain win?

But there is one way for McCain to make the Golden State a red state, or at least give it an honest shot. And he’s just sitting there in Sacramento, waiting to be asked.

Well, to correct one obvious point, Arnold isn’t sitting in Sacramento, you’re far more likely to find him back in his posh LA County compound, but that’s neither here nor there. Arnold can get one man elected, and that’s Arnold. Arnold can’t carry Republicans for anybody else in the state, let alone for a statewide ballot.

And if McCain does try to win California, well, hell, to quote Bush again, Bring it on! Let’s see him veer to the left and freak out his party’s base.  Spend lots and lots of resources here. Drown the state in Freedom’s Watch money. Every penny spent here is a penny not going to the winnable states of Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc. We can reach in and nab Virginia too.

But sure, we’ll work to make sure that we maintain the strong leads, but I’d love to see McCain waste resources here. In the end, I think this is just the GOP saber rattling what turns out to be a might skimpy saber.