This proposal has been floating around for a while, but it now looks to be concrete. As reported by the SacBee, Speaker Núñez is proposing to raise taxes on oil companies to help reduce education cuts:

Núñez, a Los Angeles Democrat with close ties to education unions, is proposing a two-pronged approach by levying a 6 percent tax on all oil produced within the state, and imposing a 2 percent tax on windfall oil profits.

Together, the taxes would generate an estimated $1.2 billion a year for a cash-strapped state that still faces an $8 billion deficit for the fiscal year starting in July. Under the speaker’s bill, ABX 9, oil tax revenues would be dedicated for schoolteachers, who are facing potential layoffs under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s across-the-board budget cuts.

This is basically Prop 87 again, and it’s a worthwhile proposal. The article goes on to note that the bill is likely to be opposed by Republicans. Which is probably the point here – to further expose the Yacht Party as out of touch, elitist, and defending the wealthy at the expense of schools.

Sure, this is low hanging fruit, and it’s not exactly a permanent solution to the structural revenue crisis. But I like the politics. Even though, as David notes below, we’re seeing a remarkable movement come together to protect education, the Republicans remain obstinate, and not as many Californians as we’d like see the need to raise taxes to finally fix our 30-year old revenue shortfall. Calling out the Republicans like this, and forcing them to make a public defense of unpopular companies at the expense of children is a great way to lay the groundwork for what will be a long struggle.

We don’t have a state that’s given to paying attention to policy debates in Sacramento.  The political media is woefully thin and getting thinner, people are simply distracted by struggling to stay afloat economically, and any politics that actually does penetrate the state consciousness is national, like what surrogate said what about what Presidential candidate.  So it’s something of a shock to see so many flashpoints on the California budget fight, with particular respect to the potential defunding of education.  As notices about imminent budget cuts go out to state teachers, and school boards set their budgets for the 2008-2009 school year, Californians are waking up – almost entirely at once – to the enormity of this situation.  The idea that we can give pink slips to tens of thousands of teachers without exploring the far more sensible option of reviewing the structural revenue model in the state and making it reflect current needs and collective responsibility has really enraged parents, teachers, administrators and students.

It takes a lot to get California residents and voters interested in state public policy. But we may be on the cusp of something big here-of the magnitude of what led to Proposition 13 on property taxes in 1978 and the recall election in 2003 of Gray Davis that brought us Arnold Schwarzenegger as our Governor. In fact, when it comes to 2003, some are suggesting that Arnold is the same as Gray. If you have a couple of minutes, take a look at this local television news report and see how unhappy the Governor is with the comparison.

California is earthquake country and sometimes the ground moves slowly with a series of barely detectable minor quakes, but sometimes it shakes violently and new fault lines are seen. As the San Jose Mercury News put it:

“…there’s no denying the emotional power generated by thousands of teacher pink slips in schools all over the state.

“It’s difficult for people to grasp a debate over something as abstract as the budget,” said Fred Silva, a budget expert and fiscal policy analyst at Beacon Economics. “But how much your public school is going to have for an arts program, or a reading program, is not abstract at all.”

Frank Russo details the number of protests that have broken out statewide, mostly from grassroots groups.  When they line up with the growing coalition of traditional interest groups (education, labor, public safety, environment, health care and social services), the pressure on the Governor and legislative Republicans to recognize that California is worth paying for and that the public would be furious at across-the-board cuts will be enormous.  Just yesterday school superintendents, parents and kids rallied on the Capitol steps, and Jack O’Connell found something else to emphasize (over):

By the time Jack O’Connell, California’s state Superintendent of Public Instruction, made his way through the crowd to speak, he was greeted with thunderous applause and a warm hug. He fired up the crowd, telling them what they already knew-but his words were clearly destined for those in legislative session inside the building and to Governor Schwarzenegger, who was in Fairfield, delivering a speech on carpenter apprenticeship programs. He charged the Governor with an “abdication of one’s responsibility to set values and priorities” in proposing a 10% across the board set of budget cuts and characterized the $4.8 billion of cuts to education as a “hostile suspension of Prop 98,” noting that the voters in passing that measure had supported educational funding and had confirmed that priority 3 years ago-a reference to their rejection of a ballot measure in Schwarzenegger’s special election of 2005 that would have weakened it.

O’Connell was just one of the speakers who tied education to our future, our economy as a state, to reductions in imprisonment and crime, and to moral values. He said: “If you want to invest in the future, you invest in public education. If you want to shortchange the future, then you shortchange education. The cuts being proposed would be devastating to education. It would be a great step backwards.”

He directly challenged the Governor and Republicans on the framing of this issue: “We don’t have a spending problem. Our problem is with our priorities. When you hear people say we have a spending problem, you tell them we have a values problem. We have a problem with or priorities. That is why we need to make sure that the public policy document for the state of California is one that invests in the future.”

This is an unusual moment, where street-level organizing and grassroots action is really dominating the news.  The last time we saw this was when the Governor’s special election initiatives were thoroughly defeated in 2005.  A more confrontational politics is a direct result of a more confrontational grassroots.  Lines in the sand are being drawn.  This is an interesting time to be covering state politics.

The Wall Street Journal has a writeup on my findings of the discrepancy between the national media’s California delegate counts and, you know, the actual count.  

A California politics blogger has argued that Sen. Clinton won 36 more pledged delegates in the state than Sen. Obama, rather than the 44-delegate margin that has long been included in the news organizations’ tallies. A spokesman for the state party confirms the blogger’s numbers.

The shift, if validated once the state certifies its election results this week and the party chooses its delegates, is a reminder that the commonly reported delegate totals are mere estimates, subject to change as states finalize election results. It also highlights how a blogger with intense focus on the numbers may be faster than the established delegate counters.

David Dayden, who blogs at the site Calitics and serves on its editorial board, wrote last week that Sen. Clinton won 203 of the state’s 370 pledged delegates – and not the commonly reported total of 207. He relied on updated vote totals from the state, based on late counts of absentee and provisional ballots. Later, when he noticed that several major news organizations still were showing Sen. Clinton with 207 delegates, he wrote a follow-up post explaining his calculation and exhorting, “I know math is hard and everything, but get out your calculators, people.”

I’ve long since given up on trying to correct the misspelling of my name, the most misspelled five-letter word in the English language.  But the author did a good job describing the situation.  The “delegate counters” at the media outlets have pretty much ignored these states once Election Day ends.  As Bob Mulholland rightly points out in the piece, this count has been this way for at least two weeks.  There was ample time to catch up.  But it took public pressure to get them to do it:

The New York Times’s page for California results shows the 207-163 result, but a page listing delegate totals for each state showed the 203-167 margin. NBC and CBS still showed the 207-163 margin. An inquiry to New York Times polling editor Janet Elder wasn’t returned. An NBC spokesman told me, “Apparently, there are discrepancies between the state count and the individual county tallies.” Kathy Frankovic, director of surveys for CBS News, told me, “delegate allocation is a work in progress.” (UPDATE: Ms. Frankovic told me later Monday that CBS would update its totals to reflect the 203-167 margin. “Thanks for alerting us to the problem,” she said.)

NBC is spinning madly.  They just stopped paying attention.

The official canvass will be done on March 15, and we’ll know at that point what the final number is.  Until then, I wouldn’t trust anything on those “delegate scoreboards”.