We’ll have him for about two hours while Arnold is under anaesthetic during his leg surgery. It must have been quite a nasty fall to break the femur, one of the strongest bones in the human body.
I want to see Bustamante’s two-hour plan for fixing the deficit, NOW.
Any executive orders you’d like to see him sign? Consider this an open thread.
Over the last few months, the LA Times has been documenting the sordid dealings of Republican Rep. Gary Miller from the Inland Empire area of Southern California. Miller, a developer, bought property in Monrovia which he claimed the city took from him through eminent domain (which they didn’t, he just said that so he could shield the $10 million sale from capital gains taxes), paid himself $25,000 in rent from his campaign funds to run a re-election office on the site, even though he was running unopposed, and tried to appoint a Monrovia city councilman to the National Park Service Advisory Board as a kind of bribe to get the city to buy that property.
Well, judging from today’s story, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
You should really go read it in full to appreciate what kind of a slimeball Rep. Miller is, but I’ll summarize the highlights (or lowlights). It’s almost comical in terms of its cruelty and greediness.
In addition to the Monrovia property, Miller bought some farmland in the foothills around Rancho Cucamonga. It used to be a place where locals would go to chop down Christmas trees for their families. Miller locked up the gate to the farm, and made plans to turn the whole area into a development of 110 McMansions (all 4,000 to 7,000 square feet), which would entail KNOCKING DOWN AN ENTIRE SECTION OF THE HILLSIDE and building a plateau on which to build. You can’t even build that many homes in this area, but Miller is trying to get Rancho Cucamonga’s municipal government to change the rules for him. This is wildfire country, and any family who would buy a home in this place would be in an incredible amount of danger.
The plan calls for homes ranging in size from 4,000 to 7,000 square feet and in price from $1.6 million to $4 million. With a change in rules, Miller would be able to increase the number of homes allowed by about two-thirds.
“He’s talking about cutting off the top of the hillside, covering up a waterfall and moving 1.7 million cubic yards of dirt,” said Sandra Maggard, who has a view of the waterfall from her house. “The rules don’t allow it, so he’s going to get the city to change the rules. Who can fight someone as big as he is?”
She and other opponents of the project have three main concerns.
First, they argue that altering the hillside to that extent will mar its natural beauty and drive out deer, bighorn sheep and other wildlife. They worry that blocking a waterfall and making other changes to the contours of the land will destabilize the hillside and lead to a mudslide. And they fear that the one access road to the property could become jammed if a mudslide or fire occurred, despite assurances by Miller that the plan would include a second emergency access road.
So he’s proposing what amounts to a death trap, and tearing down a local landmark (the tree farm) to do it. Some preservationists are trying to get environmental groups to pool some money together to buy Miller out. But here’s the thing; there is suspicion that Miller is proposing the worst possible kind of development ON PURPOSE so he can get just such a payout. And there’s precedent from Miller for this kind of maneuver.
Residents who live nearby say that Miller is trying to force the city to buy his land by raising the specter of a development that would make the hillside unsafe and unsightly.
“You don’t have to be an environmentalist to be angry about this project,” said Frank Schiavone, a freelance grant writer for public lands projects. “He has no intention of building on this land. He’s deliberately made this project so distasteful that people are bound to push the city to buy it from him. That’s what Monrovia did.”
Miller’s game plan, Schiavone and other critics said, is similar to one he successfully used four years ago in Monrovia, about 25 miles west on the 210 Freeway, where a plan for hillside development met with fierce local opposition. Ultimately, Monrovia citizens voted to tax themselves to buy the property from Miller and preserve it as open space.
How sick is that? Blackmailing municipalities into buying him out of property by threatening to build eyesores and deathtraps on it? And then, falsely claiming that the property was sold through eminent domain so he can build an enormous tax shelter for his windfall?
But you don’t have an appreciation for what a shitbag this guy is until you read about how he acquired this property in Rancho Cucamonga in the first place, preying on a family’s grief and outright lying about his intentions:
Miller bought the land from Joe and Charlotte Carrari, siblings who had inherited the land from their parents. The Carraris were asking for $3 million.
The Carraris declined to comment, saying that they had signed a confidentiality agreement with Miller.
Charlotte Carrari’s daughter, Maria Fernandez, said that Miller told her mother and uncle that he would build a $1-million bridge spanning a drainage ditch on the property and name it after their brother, Barnard Carrari, who had just died, if they would lower their price by $1 million. Still grieving, Fernandez said, they agreed and sold him the land for about $2 million.
Five months later, Miller reported on his congressional financial disclosure statement that the land was worth at least $5 million.
Miller initially told the Carraris he was only going to make modest adjustments to the land and build about 30 homes, Fernandez said. When the family saw his plans for 110 homes – and no bridge named after Barnard Carrari – they were distraught, she said.
“That farm was a family tradition where people went up there and made a day of it,” Fernandez said. “And when he broke his word and didn’t do all the things he said he would, it just broke our hearts.”
There are MORE disgusting revelations in the story, but really, you should take a look for yourself. This guy is not just an example of the culture of corruption in Washington, he’s freakin’ Mr. Potter. There is NO WAY this guy can be allowed to run unopposed in 2008. Neither Monrovia or Rancho Cucamonga is in his weirdly-shaped district, but a very powerful narrative can be created from these despicable actions. Jerry McNerney and Charlie Brown proved that, despite the best efforts of gerrymandering, there is nowhere in California that is untouchable, especially when the incumbent is a corrupt crook. And Gary Miller may be the worst in the entire state.
I have to say that I don’t understand the outrage generated by this story about California prison guards earning massive amounts of overtime. I guess it ties into the conservative culture of victimhood and the belief that someone’s always scheming to steal from them.
Here’s the deal. Prison guards are getting a lot of overtime because they’re working a ton of hours. Overtime is DESIGNED to increase exponentially with more hours worked. The reason they’re working so much is that, a) inmates are stuffed into common areas where they need to be watched more closely than if they were all locked away in cells, and b) there aren’t enough guards for this extra workload. The overtime isn’t “out of control,” as the President of the astroturf-like “National Tax Limitation Committee” said in the article; the prison system is out of control. Would you rather there be no guards? Would you rather everyone worked 40 hours a week and there was nobody on the job in common areas at night?
more on the flip…
The director of prisons is exactly right.
While relatively few officers are required to guard inmates housed in cells, far more are needed to watch those housed in gymnasiums and other areas not meant for sleeping, said Scott Kernan, acting director of adult prisons.
“Population is the biggest driving force” in the soaring overtime, Kernan said.
Corrections officers have a difficult job, made all the more difficult by overcrowding, gang warfare, a complete lack of health care which angers the prison population, and having to work all this overtime, which wears on anyone. This isn’t a case of lucky-duckies living off the fat of the taxpayer. There aren’t enough corrections officers, bottom line. And if you want to blame somebody, blame whatever idiot thought this was a good idea:
(executive vice president of the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. Chuck) Alexander said the state could reduce overtime by hiring as many as 4,000 people to fill vacancies.
He blamed the guard shortage on a decision to shut the academy for new recruits for eight months in 2004.
At that time, the prison population had dipped, and some officials believed the decline would continue.
The drop turned out to be temporary.
Attorney Don Specter, director of the Prison Law Office, which is suing the state over prison crowding, agreed that the decision to shut the academy was a “mistake.”
“They don’t have enough officers to safely man the prisons,” Specter said.
I guarantee you that the Governor’s office was responsible for that stupidity. “Hey, the population dipped for one year, let’s close the academy down!” Brilliant! It cuts costs, and fits a pattern of wishes turning into policy. If we just BELIEVE that the prison population will go down some more, surely it will, right?
Meanwhile, the LA Times article from which this all comes flat-out lied about the Governor’s new plan, saying it focuses equally on building new facilities, rehabilitation and changing sentencing guidelines, while most of the money goes to building, little to rehab, and the only sentencing guidelines that will be reviewed in the first year will be parole sentences.
Gray Davis gave a very bloated contract to the prison guards’ union in exchange for campaign support, the results of which are being felt now. Indeed it looks clear that Governor Schwarzenegger gave in to the guards’ union on whatever they wanted in an election year, and that wasn’t even enough to earn their support. But let’s not demonize the corrections officers themselves for having to deal with a crisis that is not of their own design.
We wish him well. In fact, if he wants to take off the year to heal up, I like the sound of Governor Garamendi… 🙂
Seriously, we wish him the best.
So the Governor’s borrow-and-build solution to the current prison crisis yielded a surprising couple of paragraphs from the chief Democratic legislator on the committee that would oversee it. I don’t know what to make of Gloria Romero’s statement:
Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), a longtime advocate of expanded rehabilitation programs in the state prison system and chairwoman of a legislative committee that oversees corrections, stood with the governor as he unveiled his proposal. Romero said she was optimistic that Schwarzenegger’s plan would help foster the kind of reforms she seeks.
“We have historically paid little attention to what happens after [inmates] get that $200 and the bus ticket out,” she said. “We will never merely build ourselves out of this problem.”
Little of the new spending the governor is proposing would be used for rehabilitation.
Why exactly is she rolling over on this one? The proposal accomplishes the opposite of her goals.
In fact, it devotes most of its spending to more beds, and not rehabilitation and reform. In addition, the Governor will set up a 17-member sentencing commission consisting of the Attorney General, legislators, citizens groups, the corrections secretary and a judge. Their ostensible directive is to review sentencing guidelines, but the Governor has already made clear that three-strikes is off the table, and look what they’ll be spending their time on in the midst of a time where we may face a cap on inmates:
Commissioners would spend their first year examining whether the state’s mandatory three-year parole period could be safely shortened for some ex-convicts. The governor is also proposing an $11 billion building program to add space for thousands of additional inmates and changes to the state parole system.
Shouldn’t we be looking at the sentences of the people actually GOING TO JAIL to solve the problem of too many people in jail? Wouldn’t that be the smart thing to do in the first year?
I still believe that you will not build your way into a solution on prison reform, and any proposal that primarily borrows money to sink it into more brick and mortar ends up making some people rich, more people incarcerated, and the same problem in five years. The recidivism rate in California is 70%, the worst in the nation. The Governor described this as “unacceptable” but gave no step to actually reducing that rate other than giving the recidivists a better place to sleep when they come back.
Jennifer Warren writes in the LA Times today about two former prison officials who claim that the corrections officer’s union and the governor conspired to stymie any efforts to fix California’s condition-critical prison system. The officials claim that Chief of Staff Susan Kennedy was tasked with handling the labor contract between the prison guards and the state, and that top Schwarzenegger aides were willing to give the union whatever they desired in order to support them in the gubernatorial election (which they did not; they endorsed Angelides, but did not run the barrage of ads that were initially expected). The union was repotedly given veto power over the nominations to top posts in the corrections department (Union officials deny this). These paragraphs are indicative of the general tenor:
Beyond such events, (former Corrections secretary Jeanne) Woodford said she thought her agenda for the department – one that included reform of the parole system, more education and drug treatment programs for inmates, and a fresh look at who goes to prison and for how long – clearly was not popular with Schwarzenegger aides consumed with his reelection.
In April, Woodford said, she laid out her plan for sentencing reform and other changes to the governor, recalling that he responded, “That sounds reasonable.” But, according to Woodford’s testimony, Kennedy and Aguiar told him, “Governor, it’s an election year.”
Now, it should be noted that these two officials were testifying in federal court which is functioning as a kind of oversight hearing. Why this is happening in the judicial rather than the legislative branch is unclear. But certainly, Woodford and Roderick Hickman have a very good reaason to shift blame for the current problem: they’re implicated in it up to their eyeballs. They were the corrections secretaries for the last few years. So I’m thoroughly unconvinced that the Governor was the only thing stopping that wonderful reform agenda that these two were oh-so-willing to implement.
But if you want to understand exactly what Arnold’s plan is for getting out of this mess, it is clear that it bears no resemblance to the kinds of reform needed, and it will be a financial windfall for the corrections officers. He wants to build his way out of the mess:
“Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is preparing to roll out a plan next year that will call for about $10 billion in construction for prisons, jails and medical facilities, and include support for a sentencing commission, according to sources familiar with the proposal.
Sources said the breakdown on funding would allocate about $4.4 billion to prisons and re-entry institutions, $4.4 billion for county jail and juvenile beds and $1 billion for medical facilities to satisfy court monitors in two federal cases overseeing health care and treatment of the mentally ill.”
I’ll cite Doug Paul Davis’ take on this, as it aligns with my own.
We spend around $6 billion per year just on correctional facilities. Do we need improved prison facilities? By all means. But this is a question about budget priorities and the distribution of very scarce resources. The governor is threatening to cut money to the poor while additional money is going to correctional facilities.
The thing about correctional facilities is that they are a black hole. When you put money into education, you are making an investment–you are putting money into educating our youth now, so that they can be more productive. When you put money into health care, you are making an investment–you allow people to get medical treatment which allows them to live better and more productively. When you put money into prisons, you are throwing it into a black hole. It bandages the problem of having too many inmates, but it does nothing to prevent people from ending up in prison to begin with.
Prevention and saner sentencing (so the existing prisons aren’t clogged with nonviolent offenders) are the formulae for reform. The Governor’s proposal is a formula for an increasingly incarcerated society, where the focus is not rehabilitation and treatment but where to stash people. You cannot build your way out of the current problem. It’s not possible.
As a tangent, the much-maligned (by me) LA Times editorial board deserves kudos for speaking straight on the death penalty and the Governor’s reaction to Judge Fogel’s verdict ruling the current lethal injection procedure inconstitutional.
That focus on propping up the death penalty is one problem with the governor’s response to Fogel’s decision. Another is that Schwarzenegger seems unwilling to entertain the possibility that what is really inappropriate about a civilized state’s embrace of capital punishment – by lethal injection or any other means – is not the infliction of pain but the extinguishing of human life.
Contrary to Fogel’s assertion in his opinion that the propriety of capital punishment is a matter for the Legislature, there was a time when judges took a broad view of whether the death penalty in its totality – and not just in a few botched executions – amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.
In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down state death penalty laws then on the books. In a much-quoted opinion, Justice Potter Stewart said that capital punishment was imposed “wantonly and freakishly,” adding that “these death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual.” The same is true, we believe, of the selective, even capricious imposition of the death penalty at the present time, whether or not the chemical cocktail administered to a prisoner is mixed in a way that minimizes pain. Tinkering with the machinery of lethal injection is only the beginning.
That’s the kind of clear-eyed reason I don’t expect from the editorial page. This adds fuel to the Courage Campaign’s belief that California, and in the larger sense America, is coming around on the idea of what’s cruel and unusual. I would add this into the proposal for building more prisons, which is heartless in the sense that it provides not for hope but for fear, and makes a society more terrifying rather than more purposeful and inclusive.
California’s legislature has already passed a law allowing for same-sex marriage. The Governor vetoed it, citing a prior initiative (Prop. 22) that banned it as “the will of the people” (I guess that the legislators choose themselves). At the time, Schwarzenegger also said that a variety of challenges to Prop. 22 were working their way through the legal system, and that the courts should decide. Here’s the relevant passage in a story about his veto.
In 2000, voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 22, an initiative that banned same-sex marriage in California. Several court cases on the constitutionality of banning same-sex marriage are making their way through the court system.
Schwarzenegger said the ultimate decision will be made by a court.
Well, the Governor is getting his wish. On the flip…
The California Supreme Court agreed unanimously Wednesday to decide whether same-sex couples should be permitted to wed, prolonging the legal battle for another year.
Meeting in closed session, the state’s highest court voted without comment to review an October appeals’ court ruling that upheld the prohibition on same-sex marriage. The court is not expected to issue a ruling until the end of next year.
Here, then, is the question. Now that the Governor has essentially given the court final say on the question of gay marriage, when they render their verdict (which, depending on which legal expert you talk to, appears to be before a court that is inclined to overturn the appeals court and legalize it), will he declare that the system has worked, or will he complain about “activist judges subverting the will of the people,” the same judges he asked to solve the mess in the first place?
Another nugget in the LA Times article is that the anti-gay marriage crowd is seeking to put an initiative banning it on the 2008 ballot. Now, will Schwarzenegger support that effort, or, since the ultimate decision is supposed to be made by a court, will he oppose it?
You see what happens when you have no principles? You end up talking yourself square into a corner.
On a separate front, this is a good day for those who believe in equality and fairness, and although it’ll take at least a year, it’s going to be a true test of how seriously this overwhelmingly Republican court (6 Republicans, 1 Democrat) takes the idea of civil rights.
Shorter Arnold Schwarzenegger: We MUST change this system a federal judge has told us to change!
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday ordered his administration to fix problems in California’s lethal injection protocol “to ensure the death penalty procedure is constitutional.”
Schwarzenegger acted in response to a stinging decision issued Friday by U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel in San Jose, who said the state’s system “is broken, but … can be fixed.”
Fogel, who earlier visited the death chamber in San Quentin and held a four-day hearing in September, said the evidence “is more than adequate to establish” that the state’s implementation of its lethal injection procedure violates the Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The judge gave state officials 30 days to let him know what they planned to do and he urged the governor to get involved.
Why is this news?
…by the way, time is running out, but you can still get your Arnold holiday stocking stuffers. Good to know that the highest constitutional officer in the state sells shit on his website like he’s Bill O’Reilly.
In district court today, Judge Jeremy Fogel, who earlier imposed a moratorium on all executions in the state, ruled that the current method of imposing the death penalty via lethal injection risks violating the Constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The judge did say that “California’s implementation of lethal injection is broken, but it can be fixed.”
This is the second state in recent months to rule this particular type of lethal injection unconstitutional, joining Missouri. In addition, this comes on the heels of a report that death penalty cases are at their lowest number in decades, 60% below its peak in 1999.
I’m wondering exactly how the situation could be fixed to minimize the amount of pain and suffering. The issue, as I remember, is that the anaesthetic administered was not sufficient to definitively eliminate pain.
This is yet another capper on the troubled legal system in the state, including the prison overcrowding problem, where the judiciary has stepped in and demanded a fix within six months or prisoners must be released.
More as it develops.
Today, Matt Stoller wrote a list of eight rules for building a progressive America. One of them concerns putting progressives in charge of the Democratic Party at all levels.
In one month, the California Democratic Party is holding elections for the DSCC (Democratic State Central Committee). There will be 80 separate caucuses, one for each assembly district, on the weekend of January 13-14. The 6 men and 6 women who win these elections will become 1/3 of the delegates to the CDP, and will as part of their duties become delegates to the state convention in April, where they can vote on the party platform, party operation and machinery, and specific candidate endorsements. This is a real opportunity to get progressives and reformers into the state party to attempt to steer it in a direction that is more responsive to the grassroots, more engaged with the electorate, and generally more functional and successful.
I’m going to be running in the 41st Assembly District, and everyone in California who wants to help take back the party should do so as well. On the flip, I’ll tell you about some of the structures that are already in place to help get progressives elected.
First, there’s a little background you may need to know. This is not a situation where progressives are starting from scratch. In the 2005 CDP delegate elections, the opportunity to take back the party was seized by groups like DFA and PDA (Progressive Democrats of America), and was fairly successful. In fact, the Progressive Caucus of the CDP is the largest caucus in the Party. But clearly, this was not successful enough to impact real change. The CDP refused to endorse Prop. 89, the Clean Money Elections initiative, despite the fact that virtually every progressive organization and Democratic club endorsed it. The number of contacts with voters was, in a word, abominable. The Democratic wave breaking across the country appeared to end somewhere in Reno. Democrats did not perform at the level they should have given the mood of the electorate.
There are 3 components to the CDP. 1/3 of the delegates are elected officials, nominees, and appointments. 1/3 come from the county committees, which are weighted by populations. The final 1/3 are elected in the assembly district caucuses. So, in order to maximize the impact of these elections, the Progressive Caucus is seeking to run full 12-person slates in each assembly district. Many of the major grassroots organizations
(Progressive Democrats of America, DFA-Link, SoCal Grassroots) are partnering to help form these slates. The idea behind the slates is simple: each person brings a certain number of people to the delegate elections, and gets them to vote for everybody on the slate. If each candidate gets around 10 people, in most districts that will probably be more than enough to put everybody into office. In some districts, they’re lucky to get 12 people TOTAL to these elections. The times and locations of the elections are publicized on the Web but not really anywhere else. It’s a deliberately closed process that seeks to keep power in the hands of those who control the party. This is an opportunity to distribute that knowledge and use the democratic process to take the party back.
It’s important to note a couple things. The Progressive Caucus is doing this in a very open-source manner. They are collecting names from assembly districts all across the country. Once they have them, they will put out an email to connect those progressives together, so they can discuss how to most effectively get out the vote. The various district slates will also be able to pick the platform they’d like to have on the back of the slate card. There’s been a lot of controversy about this. The initial meeting I attended seemed to suggest that the Progressive Caucus was basing participation on whether or not prospective delegates will agree to vote with the caucus on 5 core issues. It seemed like the equivalent of a loyalty oath in return for their endorsement and the resources therein. The five issues are:
-universal health care
-clean money elections
-immediate withdrawal from Iraq
-elimination of poverty
-investigation toward impeachment of the President
That last one was the source of major controversy within the caucus. I was at the caucus meeting last Friday as part of the CDP executive board meetings in Anaheim, and what amounted to a live version of the impeachment flame war we see here on a daily basis broke out. Some wanted the last item to read “impeachment”; others wanted “investigation.” There was vigorous debate and eventually “investigation toward impeachment” won out by a resounding margin.
But here’s the point. These are the issues that the Progressive Caucus will focus on when it comes to determining a platform. But they are also the true reformers in the party. They have actively started a “Red-to-Blue” program to engage Democrats in rural and conservative areas of the state. Procedurally speaking, they do want to make the party more small-d democratic. And as for the litmus test, they are leaving it up to the individual progressive slates to decide what issues they want to run on. It’s democracy in action. The Progressive Caucus would hope that everyone they decide to endorse would support these broad goals. But I think they took a lot of heat with their initial rigidity and have opened the tent a little bit, as long as the delegates are committed to progressive principles and the idea of reform in the party.
If you want to take part in this process, the Progressive Caucus has already set up a website, ProgressiveSlate.com, as a clearinghouse for all the information you need to run, an explanation of the duties and responsibilities of a delegate, how to find your assembly district, everything. Through the site you can contact the people who are collecting all the information about potential candidates. What you need to know is that the deadline to file your candidacy is January 2, 2007. The elections will be held the weekend of January 13-14, and the CDP has all the information on time and place centrally located at this site.
I think it’s important for the netroots to get on board with this project. The grassroots is actually far ahead of us at this point. But this is a way to strengthen that bond between the two groups, as well as become unified in advocating for reform within the California Democratic Party and a more effective, 80-assembly-district, 53-Congressional-district, 58-county strategy.