California should get ready for scenes like this:

Five convicted sex offenders are living under a noisy highway bridge with the state’s grudging approval because an ordinance intended to keep predators away from children made it nearly impossible for them to find housing.

Some of them sleep on cardboard raised slightly off the ground to avoid the rats. One of the men beds down on a pallet with a blanket and pillow. Some have been there for several weeks […]

The conditions are a consequence of laws passed here and elsewhere around the country to bar sex offenders from living near schools, parks and other places children gather. Miami-Dade County’s 2005 ordinance – adopted partly in reaction to the case of a convicted sex offender who raped a 9-year-old Florida girl and buried her alive – says sex offenders must live at least 2,500 feet from schools.

“They’ve often said that some of the laws will force people to live under a bridge,” said Charles Onley, a research associate at the federally funded Center for Sex Offender Management. “This is probably the first story that I’ve seen that confirms that.”

Am I asking for sympathy for sex offenders?  Absolutely not.  But putting people into desperate situations like this only exacerbates their despair and will do nothing but lead to more crimes.

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Statistics show that it doesn’t matter where sex offenders live relative to where their sex crimes are committed.  Laws like Prop. 83 are pieces of feel-good legislation that does nothing to actually protect minors and does violate the civil rights of the perpetrators, if we care about that anymore.  And last year’s sex offender initiative, passed by the voters last year and subsequently ruled partially unconstitutional, will lead to this kind of scene in urban areas.

Everyone feel safer now?

It is very critical that everyone in Southern California who is interested in breathing decent air at some point in the next century attends a meeting on Monday, April 9 in Oxnard.  The details on the meeting here:

California State Lands Commission Hearing:
Monday, April 9, 2007
Location: Oxnard Performing Arts Center
800 Hobson Way, Oxnard, CA 93030
Times: 10:00am and 5:00pm

The details on why it’s so important, and what you can do no matter where you live in California, on the flip.

The largest mining company in the world, BHP Billiton, wants to build a massive LNG (liquefied natural gas) storage and processing terminal 14 miles off the coast of Malibu, at the Los Angeles/Ventura County line.  This fossil fuel terminal is not necessary; the US has plenty of natural gas reserves, and this terminal would mainly import natural gas from abroad for processing.  What this terminal would do is:

• cause 20 “Class One” impacts to air and water quality, public safety, marine wildlife, views, recreation, noise, and agriculture;

• based on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates, “the Cabrillo Port project will emit over 200 tons of smog-producing pollutants (NOx and ROC) each year,” which would make it the largest smog-producing polluter in Ventura County.

• put a giant terrorist target 14 miles off the coast of Los Angeles and Ventura counties;

• be a fixture off the Pacific coast for at least the next 40 years (actually, the license has no firm expiration date, so this could be forever or until California falls into the sea, whichever comes first).

There’s much more here.

Despite the EPA draft report on the environmental impact of this terminal, the agency actually reversed its initial position and granted BHP Billiton an exemption from Clean Air Act restrictions, enabling them to continue moving forward.  At this point, all that can stop this project… is you.

The April 9 meeting in Oxnard will be one of the last opportunities for public comment on the LNG Terminal project.  Staff members of the California Coastal Commission are recommending rejecting this project, and local lawmakers are fighting to keep BHP Billiton off the coast.  But the State Lands Commission will be vital to making the decision.  There are actually two statewide elected Democrats that sit on this baord: Lt. Governor John Garamendi and State Controller John Chiang.  Based on what I’ve heard from activists, NEITHER HAS COMMITTED to blocking this proposal.  They need to be heard from.

Lt. Governor John Garamendi
(916) 445-8994

California State Controller John Chiang
(916) 445-2636

In addition, if all else fails, the Governor can show his commitment to the environment by vetoing the proposal, and you can tell him why he should at the link.

We need to mass support to get this destructive environmental hazard away from our coastline.  I’ll be attending the April 9 meeting and will have a full report.

This was surprising to me: grassroots action last week protesting the Governor’s prison policy.

Busloads of protesters fighting the construction of new penitentiaries swarmed the Capitol on Wednesday, while inside the statehouse, the simmering politics surrounding the prison overcrowding crisis boiled into full view.

The protesters attacked Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s plan to build 78,000 new prison and jail beds, saying that $11 billion worth of “bricks and mortar and debt” are no substitute for true reform.

Instead, the demonstrators – some dressed in orange prison jumpsuits and standing in makeshift cells – said lawmakers could quickly thin the inmate population by releasing geriatric and incapacitated convicts and by sanctioning thousands of parole violators in their communities rather than in state lockups.

I would add revising sentencing guidelines through a newly-created independent commission, but just the presence of these protesters at all suggests that this issue will not be as invisible as it has been in previous years.  Which makes sense, as we’re two months from a court-imposed deadline to do something about overcrowding.

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And good for Gloria Romero for stepping out on something that will win her no friends in the voting public, but is simply the right thing to do.

Meanwhile, political fireworks were flying over a decision by Senate Democrats to place a moratorium on bills that would lengthen criminal sentences and thereby exacerbate prison crowding.

The maneuver infuriated Republicans, but Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), chairwoman of the Senate Public Safety Committee, said it could not be “a business-as-usual year” in Sacramento given the overcrowding emergency.

“The Legislature bears a share of the responsibility for the crisis, and we must accept that,” Romero said. “We can’t keep having bills fly out of committee like pancakes just because we want to appear tough on crime.”

There have been over 1,000 such bills in the last 30 years.  They look good on glossy mailers and they can easily be used as a club to damage opponents.  But they have a major indirect impact on our quality of life.

And this mass incarceration is a symptom as well, a function of increasing inequality in the Bush years.  As the chasm between haves and have-nots grows, desperation leads to increased crime.  And then the imprisonment itself keeps the snowball rolling down the hill:

Imprisonment does more than reflect the divides of race and class. It deepens those divides-walling off the disadvantaged, especially unskilled black men, from the promise of American life. While violent criminals belong in jail, more than half of state and federal inmates are in for nonviolent crimes, especially selling drugs. Their long sentences deprive women of potential husbands, children of fathers, and convicts of a later chance at a decent job. Similar arguments have been made before, but Western, a Princeton sociologist, makes a quantitative case. Along the way, his revisionist account of the late 1990s detracts from its reputation as an era of good news for the poor…

The 1990s were said to be a time when rising tides finally did lift all boats. Western warns that part of the reason, statistically speaking, is that many poor men have been thrown overboard-the government omits prisoners when calculating unemployment and poverty rates. Add them in, as Western does, and joblessness swells. For young black men it grows by more than a third. For young black dropouts, the jobless rate leaps from 41 percent to 65 percent. “Only by counting the penal population do we see that fully two out of three young black male dropouts were not working at the height of the 1990s economic expansion,” Western warns. Count inmates and you also erase three quarters of the apparent progress in closing the wage gap between blacks and whites.

The increased recidivism rate and the drive to incarcerate more and more for longer and longer walls off opportunity to families on the wrong side of the race and class divide.  Prison policy is job policy, poverty policy, family policy, education policy, and so on.  It took a massive crisis to get anyone to focus on it, but I hope that in the future, we can understand it in these terms.

One of the big stories on the blogs this weekend was this mea culpa by Matthew Dowd, a former Bush-Cheney campaign strategist in 2000 and 2004.  In the article, Dowd details his loss of faith in the President and his disappointment with the policies he helped put into place.

Of course, you need only look at who Dowd decided to campaign for next to see this story for what it is.  On the flip…

In a wide-ranging interview here, Mr. Dowd called for a withdrawal from Iraq and expressed his disappointment in Mr. Bush’s leadership.

He criticized the president as failing to call the nation to a shared sense of sacrifice at a time of war, failing to reach across the political divide to build consensus and ignoring the will of the people on Iraq. He said he believed the president had not moved aggressively enough to hold anyone accountable for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and that Mr. Bush still approached governing with a “my way or the highway” mentality reinforced by a shrinking circle of trusted aides.

“I really like him, which is probably why I’m so disappointed in things,” he said. He added, “I think he’s become more, in my view, secluded and bubbled in.”

This is perceived as noble, as Dowd going public with his criticisms of Bush is a kind of apology for helping him get elected; he calls it “karma.”

So, what has Matthew Dowd been doing since 2004, to set right his cosmic imbalance and help move the country on a better path?  After all, in the article he claims that he was starting to have his own doubts about the President even during the election.  And then after Hurricane Katrina, and Bush’s refusal to meet with Cindy Sheehan, Dowd’s disappointment reached its apex.  So surely he would move in his professional life to right his personal wrongs by standing up for honest, principled, forthright leadership.  Right?

Mr. Dowd spent 2006 in the Arnold Schwarzenegger for Governor campaign.  During which time:

• Schwarzenegger campaigned in a series of staged town-hall meetings and closed-door sessions, just like the President, including closing the campaign to certain reporters while giving briefings to those newspapers whose owners gave him campaign money…

• Spent the entire campaign lying about his opponent’s record on taxes, claiming that he would raise them by $18 billion when the truth was nothing of the sort…

• During the election, he used executive orders to weaken the landmark global warming law, no different than a Presidential signing statement, a move which prompted the Democratic legislature to force Arnold to stop talking about what a great job he’s doing on the environment and start actually doing something…

• Schwarzenegger refused to give the details of his health-care plan until after the election, forcing voters to decide blind on what he actually would do on his signature issue if elected (sound like the Social Security plan of 2005?)…

• The campaign accused Phil Angelides and his team of “hacking” into a secure Schwarzenegger database to “steal” audio of Arnold talking about his fellow lawmakers.  At the time, this rocked the Angelides campaign on its heels and really ended the race, even though a later report determined it was a complete lie, that this “hacking” consisted of erasing the end of the URL to find the parent directory, and that the Schwarzenegger camp knew there was no wrongdoing here.  It’s akin to a Rovian tactic of bugging one’s own office and blaming it on the opponent.

• Arnold paid staff members massive bonuses for doing political work on the campaign, money that comes from the taxpayers and not his campaign accounts, and then raised all their salaries while trying to stop automatic pay raises for working-class state employees…

• To add even more cronyism, Arnold just received half a million dollars in his after-school charity fund from AT&T, after signing a law that would allow them to roll out their own TV service throughout the state.  And then we just learned that Arnold hired his personal dentist and chiropractor to sit on state boards, even though they are completely unqualified for the position and have meddled in state legislation despite conflicts of interest.

This is the guy to whom Matthew Dowd turned to try to restore confidence in government.  Someone who campaigned in secret, used executive orders to govern, promoted his friends to top positions and stoked them with taxpayer dollars, and used a dirty trick to finish off the campaign.

So spare me the “come to Jesus” act.  Matthew Dowd is just another lover of authoritarians who’s lingering legacy will be the ruthlessness with which he brought them into the lives of all Americans, to damage this great country.

In preparation for his upcoming appearance on MTV’s Cribs, California Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez has constructed perhaps the most state-of-the-art home entertainment system that anyone has ever seen, using equipment exclusive to AT&T and costing a whopping $4 million dollars – in fact, exactly $4 million dollars, to the penny.  Nuñez reportedly paid with a co-signed check.

“This system’s got it all,” said an ebullient Nuñez while introducing the system to reporters at his downtown LA condo.  “There’s complete wireless Internet throughout the place, unlimited long distance and cellular service through Cingular, an iPhone, IP television through AT&T U-verse (just OK’d by the state Public Utilities Commission), and we even threw a cell tower on the roof so we’d never drop a signal.”  AT&T doesn’t currently make computers or television monitors or what Nuñez described as “kickass” speakers, but they made a special dispensation for the Speaker, creating limited-edition electronics and hiring some of the best engineers from Sony and Toshiba to do it.

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Amazingly, the bill for this service came to precisely $4,000,000.00, coincidentally the same cost that the California Democratic Party refunded to Nuñez last fall after the 2006 elections.  AT&T spokesman Donald Ralston denied that this home entertainment system was simply the final piece of some secret deal made between the company, Nuñez and the Party.  “Hey, if I had a spare $4 million lying around, I’d get myself this same deal,” Ralston said.  “You can get Internet in the bathroom.  Did you hear me?  The bathroom!”

The home entertainment center may prove an asset in the upcoming statewide initiative over relaxing term limits for state legislators.  Nuñez plans to offer voters free nights in his “tricked-out” Web-enabled condo, so they can obtain more information on the term limits battle and why state lawmakers need the wisdom of experience to negotiate the difficult straits of Sacramento.  He also is using the AT&T deal itself as a selling point.  “Do you think some rookie lawmaker could get himself this kind of setup?  Did the spokesman tell you that you can get Internet in the BATHROOM???”

Other amenities in the condo include a Web-based kitchen with cooking timers and automated appliances “like the Jetsons,” in Nuñez’ words.  The bathroom reportedly is also Internet-enabled.  A text message from Nuñez’ iPhone can also unlock the front door.

Fellow lawmakers in the Assembly have offered tepid but mildly jealous support, although Minority Leader Mike Villines claimed that the living room blinds with a giant representation of the AT&T logo on them was “a bit much.”