Calitics is coming to you today from Orange County, where I’m about to go visit my new niece, whose birth and health care were enabled by the wages and benefits provided to California’s public school teachers. All Californians should have the ability to start a family without worrying about how to pay for the costs of health care and child care for both the mother and child. While some attack teachers for being able to cling tenuously to middle-class status, we should instead celebrate it and fight to extend good wages and benefits to every worker in this state – rejecting the right-wing nonsense of “if everyone is poor, then we are all rich!”

Along those lines, your holiday present is Michael Hiltzik’s recent column in the LA Times about economic growth and job creation, and why we need to seize the opportunity provided to us in 2011 with a new governor to reframe this conversation.

We’ve already been doing this at Calitics for some time now, including in the most recent post below this one. But it is time for that conversation to be taken across the state. It is time for progressives to seize control of not just the discussion and the framing, but seize control of this state’s destiny.