John Laird kicks a little Republican tail on the budget.  The backstory here is that the Reeps have been demanding a vote on the Democratic proposal despite their leadership offering other options in secret.  In addition, the Republicans have consistently opposed the budget without marking out what their alternative would be.  Here’s Laird:

“One of the great joys in serving in this body is when some of my colleagues take firm stands on both sides of an issue.

“We stood here on this floor just a couple of months ago and we wanted to take just an itty-bitty portion of windfall profits from the oil companies-where last week they reported $11 billion in profits-and use it to keep from laying off teachers. And speaker after speaker on this floor said, “Don’t waste our time with a drill. We’re against drills. Debates with foregone conclusions are of no value.” Now from the same quarter it’s “We demand a drill.”

“If I had gone 7 months into the budget process and not made a public proposal, not shared what my point of view for balancing the budget was with the people of California, I might want to change the subject as well.

“We have a situation where the voters of California have been taken hostage but we can’t get a ransom note.

“Because it’s been said on this floor today, people are having a tough time with gas prices. Well, if you are going to take their public transit away, they have to know. People have to have the courage to tell them.

“People are struggling with education. Well, if we’re going to take their retraining away at a time of economic downturn, we should tell them.

“People are having trouble making ends meet. Well, if their health care is going out the door, shouldn’t we tell them?

“Because the governor-it’s interesting people were making comments against the sale tax on the floor. Well, that is not in the conference report. That is the Governor’s proposal. And the reason the Governor has make the proposal is he originally said you can’t just do cuts. He says you have to have revenue. He had $7 billion of revenues in his proposed budget, and with $7 billion of revenue he still wanted to close 48 parks. He still wanted to cut health care by 10%. He still wanted to take the overwhelming majority [sic] from transit. He wanted to cut schools by $79 per student in California and what’s been demanded on the floor is that we have cuts that are higher than that because we won’t have revenue.

“Because if that’s the case, of course, there wouldn’t be a public budget. You have to level with the public. It’s time to have a budget in public. You can’t compromise with nothing.

“And we want to drive this down the middle. We want to get it done. We want the people to know what the issues are.”

They’re complete cowards.  They don’t want to explain their scheme to hurt struggling and vulnerable Californians and make them suffer.  So they play these games every year.  The 2/3 requirement must be demolished so we have a legislature that’s slightly more mature than the average elementary school playground.

Coming soon to Carlsbad, the nation’s largest desalination plant. A 10 1/2 hour hearing concluded with approval for the project which has been pushed hard by Mayor Jerry Sanders to address the water crisis affecting San Diego. The ruling also opened the door for as many as 20 other desalination plants that have been proposed in the state.

The ruling includes a number of pretty good requirements of Poseidon Resources which will build the plant. They include enhancement of marine habitats, diluting the waste-water that tends to cause dead-zones in the ocean where it’s dumped, carbon offsets, energy recovery and use of solar panels.

San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders has been pushing voluntary water conservation for months. It’s to his credit (to a point) that he’s identified this issue and spoken out about it. But he’s refused to institute anything resembling a mandatory conservation plan, and on my morning commute I still see countless businesses watering a narrow strip of grass and a wide swath of parking lot under the baking sun. Quite simply, he has not committed to making this a big deal despite the executive director of the Utility Consumers’ Action Network recently commenting

Somebody needed to throw out a well-thought, reasoned proposal to ratchet up the quality and urgency of the discussion…I think the region has suffered from an overzealous desire to reach consensus without providing any kind of clear vision.

In fact, Sanders has overtly thwarted attempts to establish just that sort of clear vision in the name of tired old GOP laissez-faire fanaticism. Plus, since it’s Jerry Sanders, there’s quite possibly inappropriate business relationships involved in his politics. City Attorney Mike Aguirre testified in opposition to the desalination plan yesterday, contending that “the primary way to gain new water is through reclamation.” Sanders has vehemently opposed water reclamation and his veto of a pilot project was overruled by the City Council earlier this year. In traditional form, Sanders has responded by trying to poison the project by tying it to increases in utility costs.

In response to this foot-dragging obstructionism coupled with evangelism for the Poseidon desalination project, Aguirre wrote a letter to Sanders on Tuesday calling into question the motivations involved by noting:

* Three Poseidon officers each contributed $300 to Sanders’ first election campaign.

* Sanders’ campaign manager, Tom Shepard, is president of a firm that lobbies for Poseidon, and a Sanders campaign staffer once employed by Shepard now works for Poseidon.

* A city staff e-mail questioning the council’s water project was copied to Shepard by a Sanders aide.

Sanders has a long history of intimate ties to lobbyists doing business in and around the City of San Diego and has never apologized for it. But more broadly, this fits in with the age-old GOP modus operandi: force government to ignore a problem until it reaches a crisis point, then force through a flawed and incomplete solution that benefits friends and business contacts. We see it here, we see it with the state budget, we see it with national security.

It’s not as though water is a new issue. People have needed it for literally ever and the sharing thereof has been a sticking point in California as long as there’s been a California. But rather than starting years ago down a path of responsible water use and steady, deliberate development of new sources, we wait until the last second, hang the threat of impending doom over people without insisting they actually do anything but sign away their right to oversight and skepticism, and come up with the solution that will make Jerry Sanders’ retirement party more lavish.

Just more for-profit incompetence and fear mongering by your modern-day GOP.

This is from the press release:

Los Angeles, CA-The California League of Conservation Voters (CLCV) announced today their endorsement of Debbie Cook, the Democratic nominee for Congress in the 46th Congressional District.

“We’re proud to support Debbie Cook because she has shown time and again her commitment to protecting our coastal resources,” said CLCV’s Southern California Director David Allgood. “Mayor Cook has a long record of achievement on environmental, public health and other issues important to the people of the 46th District.”

In 1989, rather than see her city’s parks and beaches destroyed by private development, Cook led a group that collected 18,000 signatures for a successful ballot measure to require voter approval in order to build in Huntington Beach public parks and beaches.

After attending law school, she joined the Bolsa Chica Land Trust legal team, winning a case that protects sensitive coastal habitat throughout California to this day. As Mayor of Huntington Beach, she led the fight to stop the Orange County Sanitation District from dumping partially-treated sewage into the ocean, resulting in cleaner water for our beach’s recreational users.

Cook’s opponent, longtime Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, ignores science to deny that climate change is man-made, favors drilling off the coast of California and has spoken against the landmark Clean Trucks Program at the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles – which will slash toxic truck emissions by 50%, significantly reducing the port-related diesel pollution that leads to 2,400 premature deaths per year, according to the California Air Resources Board. He currently has a low 10 percent rating on the League of Conservation Voters’ congressional scorecard.

It’s not surprising that Cook would get the endorsement; what’s crucial here is whether or not she becomes a cause for the environmental movement the way that Jerry McNerney became a cause in 2006.  Rohrabacher’s rejection of port cleanup, which just passed the California State Senate, could be a really salient issue in this district, part of which covers Long Beach and most of which is situated on the coast.  Some hard-hitting ads and mailers accusing Crazy Dana of allowing kids to suffer and die from pollution seem to be in order.

UPDATE: Cook is also pivoting off of the historic nominating speech by Barack Obama at the DNC, holding 200 “Making History” parties in the district and raising money for Cook’s campaign.  This is really a local effort.  You can sign up at her website.

California’s answer to David Broder, George Skelton, practically falls all over himself in today’s LA Times in excitement over a possible Dianne Feinstein candidacy. But in doing so he misses two crucial points – her poll numbers among Democrats aren’t that strong, and her “leadership” on major California issues has been weak to nonexistent. There’s just not much here to indicate that DiFi is the unstoppable force in 2010 that Skelton would have us believe.

Skelton writes:

You can almost feel the shudders and shock among the other Democrats gearing up to compete for governor when Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger is termed out in two years. Feinstein’s candidacy would be an earthquake on the California political landscape — likely burying the current front-runner, former governor and current state Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown.

A private poll taken in mid-July shows Feinstein trouncing Brown 50% to 24% in a hypothetical Democratic primary. A third candidate, Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, gets only 10%.

But Skelton’s missing a key point here. As the Moore poll was explained in the SF Chronicle last month:

But if you add Feinstein to the mix – and take out Newsom, Villaraigosa and O’Connell, figuring they might bow out if she jumps in – Brown drops to 24 percent, and the state’s senior senator grabs 50 percent.

That’s a weak number, not a strong number. Feinstein, one of the state’s most identifiable Democrats and a leading US Senator, only gets 50%? Among Democrats? Polling wisdom suggests that any incumbent polling at or below 50% is in trouble. These numbers suggest that Democrats aren’t nearly as enthused about a Feinstein for governor campaign as Skelton would have us believe.

In contrast to the rah-rah column Skelton wrote, Feinstein is in serious trouble with the California Democratic rank and file. Her weak polling numbers as described above suggest an inability to consolidate the base around her.

The reasons for this weakness are that, in contrast to what Skelton argues, Feinstein isn’t actually a good leader on California political issues. He quotes DiFi:

And she went on about California’s problems: “Think back, there’s been no major water infrastructure built since Pat Brown was governor. Everything’s drying up. . . . California sort of rests on its laurels. . . . You’ve got to move people, you’ve got to move goods. . . . I’d love to be the governor who builds the high-speed rail.”

It’s big talk, but it hasn’t been backed up with action. The US Senate is in a very strong position to help California address these problems, especially with money. But California remains a donor state, giving more to the federal government in taxes than it receives in spending. Feinstein is one of the leading Senators and has good relations with Republicans – more on that in a moment – but hasn’t used those relationships to help California address its problems.

To take one example, high speed rail. Feinstein doesn’t have to wait to be governor to help build it. One of the persistent criticisms of the HSR project is that federal funding isn’t guaranteed, so we’re taking a risk by passing the Prop 1 bond. Feinstein could have helped deliver federal money to the HSR project, even a small amount as a sign of future commitments, to defuse that argument. Harry Reid got $45 million to study a maglev train that will probably never be built – surely Feinstein could have done the same. Feinstein could also exercise leadership right now in resolving disputes between some environmentalists and the HSR project.

Instead of showing that leadership Feinstein has recently busied herself gutting the Fourth Amendment by supporting Bush’s FISA law. Her support of Attorney General Michael Mukasey has backfired badly. Her role in helping confirm far-right anti-choice justices like Leslie Southwick undermined her support among women’s rights advocates.

Over the last few years Feinstein has been piling up bad feelings among Democrats. To date Dems haven’t had a contested primary to vent that anger, but if she runs in 2010, they will.

Given the above it seems likely that a DiFi candidacy, rather than being a shoo-in, will more closely resemble the Hillary Clinton for president campaign, where the presumed front-runner ran into a deep well of discontent among Democratic voters that a smart opponent successfully exploited. Skelton thinks that DiFi’s possible rivals are worrying about her supposedly strong poll numbers. What’s just as likely is that they see what Hillary’s Democratic rivals saw earlier this year – a flawed candidate who is resented by lots of Democrats, providing an opportunity for a good challenger to deal her a bitter defeat.

Skelton’s love of bipartisanship seems to be blinding him to the very real struggles she will face if she runs in 2010. No wonder she refused to tell him she would run.

[UPDATE by Robert] The issue of DiFi’s favorables is worth a bit of exploration. In an email to me Skelton quoted the Moore poll as giving DiFi a 75% favorability rating among Democrats compared to Jerry Brown’s 58%. But the latest Field Poll shows her support only at 64%.

And even if you stick with the Moore numbers, she polls 75% favorable among Dems but only 50% would vote for her for governor. That’s soft support, folks. A strong campaign from several Democratic candidates, all focused on tearing down the frontrunner DiFi, would create a much closer race than Skelton suggests.

We all know that the conservative Republicans have been attempting to slash services to the state’s neediest, but the California Budget Project released a report today highlighted these facts.  So, to the Republicans who keep fighting to slash more, know this. You are fighting to cut aid for children, and quite literally taking the food of a child’s mouth. You are fighting to reduce help for the disabled and elderly, and literally putting these people on the streets. You are taking money from Child and Adult Protective Services, and literally allowing children, the elderly, and disabled adults be beaten and abused.

Purposefully allowing injury to those who can’t defend themselves makes us no better than the ancient Spartans, who left weak babies to die. And, if we keep cutting, funds to Child Protective services will suffer. Josh Richman gives us a nice little summary:

A slow squeeze on state funding for county-provided social services over recent years has left California’s children, families and seniors with a badly tattered safety net, the California Budget Project concludes in a new report.

The survey of 13 counties – representing two-thirds of the state’s population, and including Alameda, Contra Costa and Santa Clara – gauged the effect of funding cuts on adoption programs, Adult Protective Services, California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids (CalWORKs), Child Welfare Services, the food stamp program, foster care, In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS) and Medi-Cal.

“Asking counties to do more with less has undermined human services programs that help some of California’s most vulnerable residents including children at risk of abuse and neglect, and seniors who want to live safely in their own homes,” said California Budget Project senior policy analyst Scott Graves, the report’s co-author.(SJ Merc 8/8/08)

Unfortunately, it takes a crisis for Republicans to demand action. One can only hope that it doesn’t take such a crisis in the form of an injured child to spur legislators into action.  You can only cut so far before you begin to cut into what makes our society work and what makes our society special.  Taxes are the wages of a functioning government that protects those who need protection. You can’t scream about prisons and locking everybody up and then ignore the everyday living situation of our children.  Or, at least you can’t do so and go to sleep with a clear conscience.  

• The CDP’s Rules Committee is going to be having a meeting to discuss, primarily, the CDP’s Endorsement Process on August 17. It’s a system that truly needs reform.

• A quick reminder about the CDP’s Rural Caucus Questions for the Chair Candidates. The time has been extended out to August 15th. They will send the questions to all of the candidates for Chair.

• Some funny stuff from the Prop 8 Donor roll. For months there have been no donations from Chino Hills, and then on July 24, there were 3 donations of $5,000+. Then on July 28, 2 more $5K+ donations.  Guess what else happened the next day? Yup, an earthquake centered in Chino Hills.  If you follow your typical right-wing logic, isn’t this the deities being enraged with Prop 8?  Just sayin’

Anything else?

[UPDATE] by Robert – I will be on KRXA 540 AM tomorrow morning at 8 to discuss California politics, including Arnold’s latest act of right-wing desperation.

With this epic FAIL maneuver on the budget, Arnold Schwarzenegger signaling here that his little state employee wage cut gambit didn’t work.  It didn’t produce the kind of compromise he wanted and it sent him tumbling in the polls as he attempted to cynically hold innocent bystanders hostage in an unrelated fight.  So he had to cut off all bills instead.  Maybe now, he thinks, the legislators will take notice.

But let’s understand what he’s doing here.  Yesterday, as a culmination of four years of work, Alan Lowenthal’s bill to clean up the ports of Oakland, LA and Long Beach passed the State Senate.  Eliminating the toxic pollution at the ports would save 3,700 lives annually according to the California Air Resources Board.  The bill would enact a $30 container fee on every import, using that money ($300 million annually) for investment in reducing pollution and improving freight rail.  It’s a milestone bill that is sorely needed to improve the air quality of these communities.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Arnold’s latest stunt will actually kill thousands of people from reversible diseases.

There’s a bill pending in the Senate Appropriations Committee authored by Fiona Ma (AB 2716) which would deliver guaranteed paid sick days to all California workers.  This bill has the support of 73% of the public and would make the state the first in the nation to provide this to their residents.  Arnold would rather stamp his feet and issue ultimatums than improve the lives of Californians and do the bidding of the overwhelming majority of the public.

On health care, while we cannot expect a comprehensive plan to come out of this legislative session, there is a deal coming together that would improve health care for those who have insurance by mandating some strict rules for the industry:

In the final weeks of the legislative session, they are negotiating measures that would limit insurer profits on individual plans, require plans to provide a minimum set of benefits and restrict insurers’ ability to cancel policies retroactively […]

Three million Californians buy health insurance on their own rather than through employers. Insurers keep premiums low — and profits high, their critics say — on some individual policies by limiting the services they cover. Such plans may exclude prescription drugs and maternity services, for example; others may cover only hospital visits.

Many of the policies have big deductibles and require patients to pay large portions of their expenses, costing them much more than coverage obtained at workplaces.

The game-playing by Arnold on the budget means that, in all likelihood, these rules will not go into effect, and individual consumers of health insurance (like me) will remain incredibly vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the insurance industry, which has shown already a penchant to deny coverage and jack up premiums.  That too will put the lives of Californians at risk.

There’s a human cost to the bullshit that Terminator Boy isn’t accounting for.  His head is in the clouds, and he thinks he can bully the legislature liked he bullied people in scripted movies for decades.  But the recklessness will cost money, pain, suffering, and even lives.