Links:

• Apparently Joel Fox doesn’t understand the difference between correlation, causation, and not statistically relevant.  He thinks that a part-time legislature would yield fewer initiatives because there were fewer initiatives in the 60s.  Of course, the 60s were a much different time in California’s politics. Corporate money wasn’t quite so omnipresent, and the signature gatherers hadn’t yet taken quite the position that they currently occupy. But, yeah, it’s almost the same thing.

• A couple of days ago, I (Brian) mentioned a proposed initiative that was being funded by Mercury Insurance, saying that it would basically repeal Prop 103. That’s not really true. The initiative in question (PDF) doesn’t actually have that great of an impact. It would allow insurance companies to provide a discount for continuous coverage regardless of what company they were using.

• Dan Walters takes (yet another) look at who would replace Garamendi as LG, one of the favorite pasttimes of political reporters in Sacramento for the past few months. Not all that much insight in the column if you’ve been at all paying attention to this stuff, but he likes the conventional wisdom picks of Riordan, Abel Maldonado, or Bob Hertzberg. That’s a whole lot of milquetoast, which I suppose is appropriate given the job.

• Despite the dearth of local media generally, leading to New York City newspapers potentially jumping in to fill the gap, there’s one local market where print media is thriving – the Vietnamese-language dailies serving Little Saigon’s 150,000 Vietnamese residents.  There are five of them, and all are doing well.  This probably has to do more with a search for news from Vietnam, and the cultural signifier of a free press to the community, than any desire on the part of these dailies to deliver important local news, however.

• The Citizens United Case is scheduled to be reargued soon. If you’ll recall, the Calitics Editorial Board was a party to an amicus brief filed by the Brennan Center. If the limits on corporate spending are completely tossed out, woe be progressive causes. Just consider this, if ExxonMobil had spent 1% of their profit on political spending last year, they would have outspent both McCain and Obama…combined.

• Happy 100th birthday, Santa Monica Pier.  As the story notes, its survival is a testament to fighting back against runaway development (it was almost toppled in favor of a man-made island with a resort hotel in the 1970s).