All posts by David Dayen

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Chris Kelly: Tough On Crime FAIL

Far be it from me to agree so aggressively with my friend Steve Maviglio, but he’s absolutely right that Chris Kelly is making a fool out of himself by holding to outdated and dangerous Tough on Crime rhetoric in his campaign for Attorney General.  Kelly, the former Facebook chief privacy officer, has created a Cause called “Protect Our Communities.”  As Maviglio says, George Runner couldn’t have done it better himself:

Do you think the early release of 20,000 convicted felons will solve California’s budget crisis?  I don’t.

Please stand with me:  Click here to join my new “Protect California Communities” cause on Facebook and help me build grassroots opposition to this phony budget plan!

Our state is already more than $26 billion in debt and issuing hundreds of millions more in IOUs every week.

We need innovative solutions to get out of this mess. But a plan by Governor Schwarzenegger and some in the Legislature to early release nearly 20,000 felons from state prison is not one of them.

I’m all for prison reform — but this is surrender, not reform. Even if it would save us money — which it won’t — putting thousands of dangerous criminals back on the streets is a risk that California should never take.

Please stand with me: Click here to join my new “Protect California Communities” cause on Facebook and help me build grassroots opposition to this phony budget plan!

“Dangerous criminals” back on the streets include the terminally ill, nonviolent drug offenders and people returned to prison for the crime of technical parole violations, which eats up about 2/3 of total incarcerations in California in any given year.  This is the kind of absurd rhetoric that has our prisons full to bursting, that has created 1,000 sentencing laws passed by the Legislature in the past 30 years, ALL OF THEM increasing sentences, that has turned our parole policy and prison health care systems into a national joke and a federal crime, that has cost the state billions in overtime for prison guards and overall system costs, that has scared the public into passing really dangerous, pernicious laws like three strikes, that has nearly busted our Treasury, destroyed our corrections system and eliminated any possibility for rehabilitation.  

The Attorney General position can be one of leadership in producing alternatives to our prison crisis.  Kelly has forfeited any ability to call himself a leader by playing to the least common denominator.  He can go back now to devising schemes to strip privacy on social networking sites.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Shock: Another Victory For Corporate Interests!

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Judy Chu was sworn into office today as the first Chinese-American woman to serve in Congress.  Her departure opens a whole at the Board of Equalization, a little-known four-member board that collects taxes and determines a lot of corporate tax policy.  The four districts are gerrymandered to produce two Democrats and two Republicans, with the state Controller making up the swing vote.  Today the Governor announced his choice to replace Chu, and boy are the richest companies doing business in California happy:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger today will appoint Jerome Horton, a business-friendly former Democratic lawmaker, to the state’s tax board, an administration official said.

The pick probably will shift the balance of power on the tax panel, which, despite its low public profile, holds broad influence over corporate taxes […]

Reliably liberal Democrats have formed a solid three-person majority on the five-member tax panel in recent years. But the moderate Horton, who was known during his tenure in Sacramento for abstaining from votes to keep himself in the political center, is expected to change that dynamic.

Well, good for the business lobby, right?  It’s not like they have had multiple victories in the past year, what with getting all sorts of permanent corporate tax breaks in the past two budget agreements and pushing the Parsky Commission in an effort to eliminate corporate taxes altogether.  They needed a leg up.

Horton needs both houses of the Legislature to sign off on the appointment, but much like with Supreme Court appointments, I fail to see how rejecting him would somehow yield a better result.

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CalPERS Goes After The Rating Agencies

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People are justifiably worried that credit ratings agencies like Moody’s, Fitch and S&P have lowered California’s credit ratings to near-junk bond status.  The nature of the way we pay our bills means that we will eventually have to access bond markets to borrow, and these low ratings will dramatically increase the cost of that borrowing.  I’ve said often that the risk of default on any bond issue, as a Constitutional matter, is infinitesimal, yet in this case, the rating agencies are being overly conservative and reflecting the fears of Wall Street.

And yet the rating agencies are not independent actors.  They are owned by banks who issue the securities they rate, and throughout the financial meltdown, they continued – almost until the end – to rate mortgage-backed securities filled with subprime loans at the highest quality, facilitating the buying frenzy.  In fact, the rating agencies structured many of the deals in order to ensure high ratings, intervening in the market for those securities instead of dispassionately assessing them.  Now CalPERS, the largest public pension fund in the country, which has been hammered by losses in the stock market, is suing those rating agencies for their gross negligence.

The lawsuit blames the three big Wall Street credit rating agencies – Moody’s Investors Service, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings – for effectively luring CalPERS into a series of disastrous 2006 deals by giving the investments “wildly inaccurate and unreasonably high” grades.

The investments have gone bust at a cost of “perhaps more than $1 billion,” said the California Public Employees’ Retirement System in the suit, filed last Thursday in San Francisco Superior Court.

The losses represent a small portion of the roughly $60 billion CalPERS has lost in the past year due to declines in its stocks, real estate and other holdings. The losses are so steep that CalPERS has served notice that it will demand higher contributions from the state and the local governments that rely on the fund for pensions.

As a large industry actor, CalPERS has some ability to move policy in the financial world.  And they are hitting one of the biggest targets here.  Barry Ritholtz explains further:

Now, here comes the fun part: Calpers doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the money. Sure, the financial instruments at hand (Cheyne Finance, Stanfield Victoria Funding and Sigma Finance) have  defaulted on their payment obligations. The losses to Calpers are – $1 billion.

But that’s not what’s going on here: These Left Coasters want their pound of flesh. They don’t care for the Ratings Agency folks, and consider them a blight on the investment landscape.

The goal of the litigation (as I see it) isn’t to make the rating agencies pay a financial penalty; rather, it is to publicly try them just as the regulatory rules are being rewritten. I also predict that CALPERS is going to attempt to not just win, but humiliate these agencies, call them out in the most embarrassing way possible, trash the senior executives, and make things very uncomfortable in general for these firms.

They don’t want them to merely suffer – they want to destroy their unique position as an Oligopoly, to remove them from having a special status under the SEC rules.

The credit rating agencies are a FRAUD, and I would argue that this downgrading of California bonds regardless of Constitutional dictates represents a furthering of that fraud.  CalPERS is fighting back on principle, because the relationship between the rating agencies and the financial industry they are supposed to serve is among the sleaziest on Wall Street.

Under Phil Angelides, CalPERS used its considerable clout to move toward progressive reforms in the financial industry.  Bill Lockyer has done less of this.  But I’m glad to see the fund standing up on behalf of not only its clients, but every investor, against the near-criminal structure of these rating agencies.

…Steve Wiegand throws this in the back end of a CapAlert update:

On Tuesday, Moody’s Investors Service downgraded the state’s general obligation bond rating to Baa1, following a similar move by Fitch Ratings the week before. That’s three grades above junk bonds, and the lower the ratings the more it costs California to borrow. It’s also less likely investors will deal in California bonds, even though the state has never defaulted or even been late on a bond payment.

Outright thievery.

Budget, Health Care

Successful Voter-Approved Program Steps In To Bail Out Failed State

On May 19, voters were asked to divert money from First Five programs to pay for General Fund expenditures.  The argument was that First Five had a reserve that was just “sitting around” and they should give up some of that money, earmarked for children’s programs, to pay for the budget.  At Calitics, we called this the “if it ain’t broke, break it” proposition.  First Five, financed by a tax on cigarette sales, was well-funded and able to make multi-year program projections, so that the programs started up were not in perpetual fear of being dropped.

One of the values of First Five is that they can seek out other programs affecting children and contribute to them, in keeping with their mandate.  And that is what they have voluntarily agreed to do with respect to the Healthy Families program, California’s version of S-CHIP.

Meeting in Sacramento this afternoon, the First 5 California Children and Families Commission agreed to help the Healthy Families Program, which faces a $90 million General Fund shortfall in 2009-10. But the Commission declined to commit to a specific level of financial assistance. As a result, it appears all but certain that the enrollment freeze approved last month by the Managed Risk Medical Insurance Board, which oversees Healthy Families, will take effect on Friday, July 17.

In a resolution, the First 5 Commission committed “to join with like-minded public and private partners, including but not limited to health plans and philanthropic organizations, to provide financial assistance in Fiscal Year 2009-10 to the extent practicable and feasible…to ensure young children have access to affordable health insurance coverage.” This commitment, however, “is contingent upon the availability of funds in the applicable First 5 California accounts.”

I wish that First Five would have chosen a specific funding level, which could have rolled back the enrollment freeze.  Still, they are making a commitment to help provide health insurance to needy children, one they couldn’t have made if the state clawed back some of their money in the May 19 election.  This way, First Five can target the money and keep in line with what the voters asked from them – to use their revenue to provide needed services for children.  The state could have used that money for anything if they skimmed it off the top.

People often wail about ballot-box budgeting and the broken initiative process in the state, and to an extent I agree with them.  But First Five is an example of GOOD ballot-box budgeting.  It has a dedicated funding source, it’s well-managed and well-capitalized, and it has the ability to make contingencies.  If the structure of state government fails to allow increased revenue to pay for needed services, it’s perfectly logical to go outside that process and produce dedicated sources of funding.  It shows the virtue of a balanced approach.  I don’t necessarily want the ballot to do all of Sacramento’s work for it, but the broken system of government sometimes leaves no choice.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Budget

Deal Talks Break Down Over Prop. 98

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Hopes for a deal on the California budget faded last night as the Big Five could not agree over the big issue of whether and how to suspend Prop. 98, the mandate for education funding.

The education money discussion is not new; much of it dates back to the February budget negotiations, which resulted in a ballot measure asking voters to offer blessings upon a supplemental payment. Voters rejected that measure, Proposition 1B.

And as with most education financing debates, this one lands squarely back at the maze of formulas and calculations that embody the 21-year old funding guarantee enshrined into the state constitution by voters, Proposition 98.

In a nutshell, the current debate focuses on whether schools are owed money in the future to make up for some of the recent spending reductions, and whether that obligation (the so-called “maintenance factor”) should be codified in law as part of the current $26.3 billion deficit deal.

“The Prop 98 law is so confusing,” said Senate President pro Tem Darrell Streinberg to a throng of reporters outside the governor’s office, “that we want to make sure that there is clarity.”

My belief is that education leaders will win this money in the courts, no matter how long Arnold and the gang put it off.  The lawsuit has already been filed.  The Democratic leadership want to just deal with the $11 billion dollars in essentially stolen money from schools inside the budget agreement by promising the money in the out years, while the Republicans and Arnold don’t.

So if you wanted a 2010 campaign slogan, you have the source material.

It looks to me like Arnold is holding out simply so he can prove a point.  His effort to insert privatizing social services eligibility at the last minute is flawed enough that even the Yacht Party might have trouble stomaching it.  The proposed cuts in the deal are really intolerable but not what the Governor promised at the outset.  It’s unclear whether the Governor will get his anti-fraud provisions, also inserted late into the process.  And it’s completely unclear, given the deal likely to come out, why we had to wait two weeks for virtually the same deal.

Whatever budget deal ultimately is passed — and in this economy it’ll only be a temporary fix, at best — virtually the same agreement could have been reached weeks ago […]

Democrats produced a stop-gap plan supported by Assembly Republicans that would have staved off IOUs. They proposed $3.3 billion in cuts to education and other programs that would have kept the cash flowing, at least for a few weeks. It would give them time to negotiate more cuts. Schwarzenegger rejected the idea and persuaded Senate Republicans to follow.

That’s where the governor began bobbling the ball, although his coaches figured he was playing to his fan base, what’s left of it.

Issuing IOUs will cost the state roughly $26 million in interest for July, the state controller’s office estimates. The IOUs also prompted Wall Street bond rating agencies to lower California’s credit to near junk status. That potentially could cost the state $7.5 billion over 30 years, according to the treasurer’s office.

Schwarzenegger, aides say, calculated that Democrats wouldn’t negotiate seriously without facing a deadline, such as the latest: most banks refusing to accept IOUs. Negotiating piecemeal would get nowhere, the governor believed.

But he might have dodged IOUs completely. Guess it doesn’t rankle much that the state he has governed for nearly six years must now pay bills with scrip.

Schwarzenegger’s clumsy attempt at the Shock Doctrine, when the deal Democrats were willing to agree to was painful enough, was about as irresponsible as a chief executive could be.

…just one more thing on this that the LAT article makes clear.  Schwarzenegger AGREES that education should be paid the money borrowed from them in the out years.  But Democrats suspect that his fingers are crossed and they want it in writing.  That’s the argument now.

Budget

Possible Deal

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If you check the #cabudget hashtag on Twitter, you’ll see that the Big Five are very close to announcing a deal on the budget.  Initially the Democrats offered $11 billion in cuts and the Governor $16 billion; the final tally looks to be in the middle:

KQED_CapNotes RT @ejschultz3 Assemblymn Tom Berryhill (R): Dems, “$14 bil in agreed cuts.” And the other $12 bil?”There will be some borrowing.” #cabudget

That probably signals borrowing from state and local governments under Prop. 1A, along with some other gimmickry.  Suspension of Prop. 98 education funding is said to be likely, but with $1 billion in cuts as opposed to $3 billion.

I’ll be discussing this and much more on the Angie Coiro program on Green 960-AM in San Francisco starting at 7:00pm tonight.

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CA Congressional Fundraising A Go-Go

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Brian is wrong, that does not take care of the horse race for the day! Today is the deadline for Congressional incumbents and challengers to declare their fundraising totals for the second quarter of 2009, and some numbers on the California candidates jump out.  If I write “incomplete,” that’s because their FEC report hasn’t popped up yet.  I’ll fill in when they become available:

We’ll start with the special election in CA-10:

John Garamendi: $300,000 raised, $260,000 CoH, $54,000 debt

Mark DeSaulnier: incomplete $212,000 raised, $136,000 CoH, $77,000 debt

Joan Buchanan: incomplete $64,000 raised, $179,000 CoH, $308,000 debt

Anthony Woods: $105,000 raised, $65,000 CoH

Adriel Hampton: incomplete $22,500 raised, $269.77 CoH, $346.82 debt

Waiting on more info on this one.  John Garamendi’s number came from 350 people, almost $1,000 a head.  That suggests no grassroots fundraising base.  Anthony Woods had over twice as many donors, who could be tapped again.  UPDATE: OK, this is interesting.  Joan Buchanan raised a fairly paltry amount considering the primary is in six weeks, but she took out a $250,000 loan and has a significant amount of debt.  She seems to be blowing through operating expenses too.  Likewise, Mark DeSaulnier, who raised a decent amount, has over half of his cash on hand in debt.  And I missed that John Garamendi has $50,000 in debt as well.  Suddenly, Anthony Woods has more debt-free cash on hand than anyone in the field but Garamendi.

CA-03:

Gary Davis: $34,000 raised, $30,000 CoH

Dr. Amerish Bera: $288,000 raised, $286,000 CoH

Dan Lungren (inc.): incomplete $233,000 raised, $322,000 CoH

Bill Slaton: $113,000 raised, $224,000 CoH, $116,000 debt

That is an eye-popping number for Amerish Bera, and lest you see it as a doctor self-funding, only $4,800 came from the candidate.  I was shocked by that total.  We’ll see what Dan Lungren ends up raising later today, but it’s entirely possible that Bera will have MORE cash on hand than the incumbent (Lungren only had $121,000 on hand at the end of April, with $12,000 in debts).  Wow. UPDATE So Bera outraised Lungren, but he ekes out a cash on hand lead.  As an incumbent, however, that’s a weak performance. UPDATE II: Bill Slaton claimed to some that he raised $227,000 in three weeks, but half of that comes in the form of a personal loan to the campaign.  His actual cash on hand is much less than Bera.  But $113,000 in three weeks isn’t bad.

CA-45:

Steve Pougnet: $201,000 raised, $203,000 CoH

Mary Bono Mack (inc): $166,000 raised, $448,000 CoH

Steve Pougnet outraised the incumbent in Q2, which is quite impressive.  Mary Bono Mack starts out with a bigger war chest, so he has some work to do, but this is an excellent start, and I think Pougnet has a natural fundraising base that will only expand once his story gets out.

CA-44:

Bill Hedrick: $65,000 raised, $66,000 CoH

Ken Calvert (inc.): incomplete $407,000 raised, $384,000 CoH

Certainly an improvement over the first quarter for Bill Hedrick, and all of the money came from Southern California, which means he has a solid fundraising and volunteer base locally.  He needs to spread that out nationally to maximize his potential in this winnable race.

CA-26:

Russ Warner: $60,000 raised, $58,000 CoH

David Dreier (inc.): $138,000 raised, $872,000 CoH

Believe it or not, Dreier actually had a much bigger war chest last cycle.  Russ Warner needs to do better to be competitive, but he’s actually in a slightly better position than two years ago.

CA-48:

Beth Krom: $76,000 raised, $98,000 CoH

John Campbell (inc.): $223,000 raised, $470,000 CoH

This was a tough quarter for Krom, with the tragic death of her son taking up a lot of time in the final weeks.  Campbell ramped up his fundraising a bit after Krom beat him in the last quarter.

CA-50:

Francine Busby: $160,000 raised, $136,000 CoH

Tracy Emblem: $22,000 raised, $15,000 CoH

Brian Bilbray (inc.): incomplete $325,000 raised, $388,000 CoH

A solid quarter of fundraising for Francine Busby, notwithstanding that police action at one of her fundraisers while guests were pepper sprayed.  UPDATE: Brian Bilbray had a good quarter.

CA-24:

Elton Gallegly (inc.): $42,000 raised, $831,000 CoH

The field is still getting together in this race, but I wanted to see Elton Gallegly’s fundraising output, which is somewhat pathetic.  He does have enough of a war chest that he doesn’t necessarily need to get moving on that yet, however.

UPDATE the last: Swing State Project has a full roundup with a number of other interesting tidbits.

• In CA-04, Tom McClintock raised a bundle – $341,000 – but he still has over $100,000 in outstanding debt and only $245,000 CoH.  Some fiscal conservative.

• In CA-10, one Republican is showing financial viability, David Harmer, with a $175,000 haul (but that’s based on the first six months, not just the quarter).  He has $144,000 CoH and $17,000 in outstanding debt.  And his ideological viability in that district is, shall we say, suspect, though he is likely to reach a runoff.

• In CA-11, which I think is safe, Jerry McNerney raised $288,000 and has $519,000 cash on hand.  One of his potential opponents, Brad Goehring, would seem to have a good financial position with $259,000 CoH, but he only raised $14,000 for the quarter and has $250,000 in debt due to a massive loan.  The same with Jon Del Arroz, who guaranteed a huge loan for himself and has as much in debt as he does in cash on hand.  These guys are wasting money, in my opinion.

• I added Ken Calvert’s numbers in CA-44.  Clearly the NRCC is protecting him by bolstering his fundraising.

• CA-47 is on the fringe of being competitive, but Van Tran had a good quarter, beating Loretta Sanchez (barely) in fundraising:

Sanchez: $242,000 raised, $714,000 CoH

Tran: $253,000 raised, $251,000 CoH, $10,000 debt

Tran gave himself $5,500 to boost his total.  And Loretta has a pretty large war chest from prior years.  

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Phil Angelides To Chair Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission

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As part of an earlier bill, Congress initiated the modern-day analogue to the Pecora Commission of the 1930s, named after its chief counsel Ferdinand Pecora.  That commission detailed the origins of the financial crisis that caused the Great Depression, and led to the passage of several banking reforms, including the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated investment banks and commercial banks.  The Pecora Commission was credited for the reforms that stabilized the financial system after a 19th century full of depressions.  After decades of neglect and deregulation, we needed a new Pecora Commission to examine the breakdowns in the financial system and recommend best practices to ensure it never happens again.  And the man who will head this commission is Phil Angelides.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid today announced six appointments to the 10-member Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, established by Congress to examine the domestic and global causes of the financial crisis.

Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid appointed Phil Angelides as chairman of the Commission. The statute requires the House Speaker and the Senate Majority Leader to jointly appoint a commission chair. Mr. Angelides, one of Speaker Pelosi’s three appointments to the commission, served with distinction as the elected California State Treasurer from 1999 to 2007. He has earned national recognition as an effective public and private sector leader with broad expertise and accomplishments in the fields of investor protection, housing, finance, and corporate and financial market reform.

The Commission will conduct a comprehensive examination of, and hold hearings on, more than 20 specific areas of inquiry related to the financial crisis, including the role of fraud and abuse in the financial sector; state and federal regulatory enforcement; tax treatment of financial products; credit rating agencies; lending practices and securitization; unregulated financial products and practices; and corporate governance and executive compensation. The Commission will also examine the causes of major financial institutions that failed or were likely to fail had they not received exceptional government assistance. The Commission will provide its findings and conclusions in a final report due to Congress on December 15, 2010.

Obviously this takes Angelides out of the running for any political races in the 2010 cycle.  But he’ll actually have a far more influential position – determining the causes of the financial crisis and how to fully reform the system.  I’m pleased that Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid went outside of Washington for this task, not to any of the typical high priests of bipartisanship.  I hope Angelides can get this job done, and it seems to fit with his skills.

The rest of the Democrats on the commission, including Clinton-era official Brooksley Born (who wanted to regulate derivates in the late 1990s) and former Florida Sen. Bob Graham, can be found at the release.

…The Republicans added a vice-chairman with a California connection: former House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Budget

Arnold So Bad At Governing, He Bungles The Shock Doctrine

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Meetings of the Big Five lasted late into the night, and reports are that a deal is very close.  Now, that deal won’t be any good.  The secretive Big Five process, which Democrats actually tried to counteract with 30 hours of public meetings, ends up leading to a deal that nobody reads and gets pushed through in the dead of night.  And the very structure of the California system, with its super-majority requirements, will never yield a good deal for anyone but the well-connected.

Any final deal is expected to include some of the sharpest cutbacks in government services the state has experienced. Programs that have not been cut deeply in years are likely to shrink considerably, with tens of thousands of Californians losing access to programs they have relied on. Some programs may be wiped out entirely. Large numbers of low-income Californians receiving healthcare through the Medi-Cal program are expected to be moved into managed care, and thousands of seniors who receive home healthcare would lose it.

That said, it looks as if the Governor will lose on many of his priorities.  He’ll lay back with a stogie in his Jacuzzi anyway, but he’s not going to get everything he wants.  For instance, a proposal to cut public employee pensions has been scrapped.

California will not impose a two-tier pension system promising lower benefits to future state workers as part of any wide-ranging deal to solve its $26.3 billion budget shortfall, The Bee has learned.

The controversial proposal by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been shelved in budget talks, but options for cutting pension costs are expected to be discussed again in coming months.

I’d expect that to come up again, but it should not have been wedged into a budget deal when it would offer almost no short-term fiscal benefit.

In addition, the Governor will not be allowed by the courts to slash worker pay for IHSS employees.

A federal judge on Monday ordered California to pay In-Home Supportive Services workers up to $12.10 per hour in wages and benefits immediately, suggesting the state had dragged its feet in response to her earlier injunction.

California lawmakers and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had agreed to drop the state’s contribution to IHSS wages and benefits to $10.10 per hour as part of their February budget deal.

In a lawsuit filed by the Service Employees International Union, U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken in Oakland ruled last month that the state did not analyze the impacts of the wage cut before approving it, running afoul of federal law. She blocked the wage drop to $10.10 that was supposed to take effect July 1.

This saved a pittance of money relative to the overall budget gap, around $100 million, and, you know, violated federal law.

As I speculated yesterday, the Governor’s foregrounding of “no new taxes” in his TV ad, a point already conceded by Democrats, was an effort to claim victory on something as the rest of his shock-doctrine agenda goes down in flames.  We’ll see if the anti-fraud measures stay in there as well.

As I said, this is going to be a horrible budget deal, and under the current system there can be almost nothing else.  But I don’t think the IOU issuance had the desired effect for the Governor.  He ended up having to play defense because his indifference to the state’s plight was seen as cruel.  And just like in 1992, the refusal of bailed-out banks to honor the IOUs led almost immediately to marathon talks arriving at a solution.

Arnold could have avoided all this and saved the state billions of dollars, with almost no difference in the final result.  

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CA-32: Judy Chu Becomes A Congresswoman Today

I almost forgot about this, but today was Election Day in CA-32, a runoff from the May 19 primary between the top vote-getters in each party.  Judy Chu and Betty Tom Chu, who depending on who you talk to either are or are not related, are the leading candidates, but given the makeup of the district it’s a near-certainty that Judy Chu will emerge victorious tonight and become a member of Congress.  LA County has reported the early vote totals:

Judy Chu 8,490 (61.12%); Betty Chu 4,623 (33.28%); CM Agrella 777 (5.59%)

This won’t be a results thread, just a congratulations to Judy Chu, who will make a great Representative.  Now, somebody ask her tomorrow about the public plan.

UPDATE: “Semi-official” totals from LA County:

Semi-final election night results: Judy Chu 15,238 (61.67%); Betty Chu 8,185 (33.12%); CM Agrella 1,287 (5.21%)…24,942 ballots processed.