Straight to it:
• John Chiang has a cool new feature on his website that lets everybody see how much cash is coming into the state day by day.
• Does Arnold Schwarzenegger seriously have nothing better to do than bring back gigantic bear sculptures to put in front of the horseshoe? I mean, I can’t think of anything that would occupy his time. But, the Bee’s caption contest makes it kinda ok.
• A slap fight on the right, as Steve Poizner and Meg Whitman fight over which one is a more disastrous manager. I say split the difference, chaps – you’re BOTH awful!
• This is a truly horrible story about Avenues Pregnancy Clinic in Glendale, where the fundie directors browbeat women into believing they risk eternal damnation for “living in sin.” And they get state licensing and accrediting for that! Awesome.
• The business interests who want to shut down LA’s Clean Trucks program have failed again, as a US District Court judge rejected the motion to halt the program. There’s a lot of money and effort being spent fighting the law when they could just comply with it – and in the process stop thousands of kids from coughing and choking every five seconds from the smoke and soot.
• The CBP had this the other day about the legislature risking turning down federal stimulus money for low-income families. The Legislature needs to get to work on this.
• CalChamber’s job creator list is here!!! I can’t wait to live in a state where such job creator bills like eliminating meal breaks are law! There actually are a couple bills in there, like flexible work schedules and the research and development credit, which aren’t too bad.
• One of the most misleading statistics you will see today: there have been gains in the number of houses sold in Sacramento for 12 straight months. Yay, right? Well, it’s good that more houses are being sold, but they are being sold at fire-sale prices after foreclosure. On the other hand, median price of those homes sold has fallen for almost the entire period, with this month being the sole exception. The median now stands at $165,000, up $5,000 from last month, but down over $200,000 from the peak in 2005.
• Speaking of real estate, General Growth, one of the nation’s largest owners of malls and commercial property has filed for bankruptcy. It is the largest real estate bankruptcy in the history of the universe. Or well, at least the largest in US history. They run a whole slew of malls in California, from Stonestown Galleria in San Francisco to the Glendale Galleria. They are expected to remain open during the bankruptcy.
• Did you just have a busy hour? Well, the state’s fundraisers have. Since 2000, there has been an average of over $14,000 every hour raised for political campaigns.
….it’s considerably more than ‘kids from coughing and choking every five seconds…’.
Thousands of people die every year from this form of pollution in the LA basin every year. There was a whole series of posts over at ‘Bonehead’ Bowers site about this last year.
which forwarded the California State PTA endorsement press release supporting 1A-1C and 1E. I was pretty disgusted that they were abusing that list to take advantage of the positive feelings parents have about the school our kid attends. It kind of struck me as something official. This is being touted as the “right thing to do”.
If I hear anybody say that these props are struggling one more time, I’m going to scream. It will be a real struggle to keep this conservative trojan horse from passing.