Bits and pieces from around the state this Wednesday:

• Jerry Brown took some heat over charitable solicitations. This story is rewritten every few months, just swap in a new name. Here it is for Fabian Nunez, and here’s oh, look, Rick Santorum. Either we need to regulate this stuff, or quit acting shocked when we hear about it. There are worse things for politicians to be doing than raising money for charities.

• A House ethics panel is taking a look at Rep. Laura Richardson’s Sacramento-area home, which you may remember she let it fall into disrepair and fell so far behind on the payments it fell into foreclosure, only when someone bought it at auction, Richardson allegedly used her clout with Washington Mutual to get the deed returned to her.  Why nobody is considering a primary against Richardson is beyond me.

• More news on the BART negotiations.

• HuffPo has a map of counties with higher unemployment than the national average. Guess which state is almost entirely in the wrong color.

• More maps!  Pete Stark (CA-13) has put together a tagged Google map indicating each appropriation to the district approved through the federal stimulus package.  This is innovative, but it’s hard to cut through the right-wing rhetoric that the stimulus has done nothing of value.

• Public comment at the Santa Cruz City Council looks like a transcendent experience.

• The Jewish Family Services condemned the Governor’s social services cuts (PDF).

• There’s a little tiff between Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, and Jack O’Connell, our own Superintendent of Public Instruction.  Duncan chided the state for not tying test scores to teacher assessments, O’Connell says that isn’t true.

• The president of Oaksterdam University and an East Bay marijuana group have submitted a measure to place legalization, regulation, and taxation of marijuana on the ballot.  If people want to seriously talk about this, they should at least take a look at Mark Kleiman’s compelling criticism of the state Board of Equalization’s scoring of the potential revenue benefits of legalized marijuana.