Last week, Meg Whitman raised some eyebrows when she vowed to suspend implementation of AB 32, California’s landmark global-warming law.  This drew criticisms from the usual suspects, and also happens to be broadly unpopular in a state which supports action on climate change.  It was also a thumb in the eye of the current Governor and practically the only policy on which he can claim a legacy.  So Schwarzenegger came out today and said Whitman’s making an idle threat that she doesn’t mean.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger today dismissed a vow by Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman to suspend California’s landmark greenhouse gas law if she’s elected to succeed him next year as “just rhetoric that is going on among the candidates.”

“You will hear all kinds of stories,” Schwarzenegger told an audience at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. “What will happen in reality and what they will do when they go into office is probably a whole different ballgame, and I think she will probably reconsider what she said.

“I’m sure she does not want to be counted as one of those Republicans that will want to move us back to the Stone Age or something like that,” the Republican governor said. “So I would pay no attention to this kind of rhetoric.”

Of course, relics from the Stone Age are the target demographic for a Republican primary, so Whitman has to say what she said.  And she’s not being accused of political pandering by, of all people, Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Which should make for a fun weekend when the two appear together at the GOP convention in Indian Wells starting tomorrow.

Whitman’s more pressing problem is that she has virtually no voting record as a private citizen, apparently having not even registered to vote prior to 2002.  In an amusing moment of brazenness, Steve Poizner called on her to end her campaign as a result.

Poizner’s camp issued a statement in response to the story this morning, attacking the Whitman campaign for “refusing to answer simple questions and deliberately lying to cover up the facts” and calling for the candidate to “step aside” and drop out of the race.

“It’s understandable that Meg Whitman is ashamed of this record. But it’s unacceptable that she continues to run from the record and deceive voters. Though there is no shred of evidence she ever registered as a Republican before 2007, she insists she did, yet she refuses to provide any evidence. Her arrogant answer: ‘Go find it,’ ” Communications Director Jarrod Agen said in a statement. “In the history of America, no one has been elected governor of a state with Meg Whitman’s 25 year history of no-show voting. She is unelectable and has tried to cover her lack of honesty with millions of dollars.”

Hysterical.  By the way, if you think eMeg’s voting record is bad, take a look at iCarly’s.  Quite a team they’ll make on the GOP ticket next year…

Around 11:00 this morning some senior Yacht Party members and their acolytes will stand in front of microphones in Sacramento trumpeting a report about state labor regulations and small businesses.  They can be expected to say that the real problem with the California economy is all those gosh darn regulations, and if only businesses could free themselves from the iron boot of – I don’t know, the 40-hour work week, child labor, the right to have an employee saw off his fingers in a lathe without responsibility, it’s a different thing every week with these people – the state could be saved.

It’s worth understanding what this report that makes them go ga-ga is all about.  John Myers had a sketch of it the other day.

The document, wonkishly titled Cost of State Regulations on California Small Business Study, was quietly made public late yesterday. You can read it here […]

The summary says it all, at least in the eyes of the business community:

The study finds that the total cost of [business]regulation to the State of California is $492.994 billion which is almost five times the State’s general fund budget, and almost a third of the State’s gross product. The cost of regulation results in an employment loss of 3.8 million jobs which is a tenth of the State’s population. Since small business constitute 99.2% of all employer businesses in California, and all of non-employer business, the regulatory cost is borne almost completely by small business. The total cost of regulation was $134,122.48 per small business in California in 2007, labor income not created or lost was $4,359.55 per small business, indirect business taxes not generated or lost were $57,260.15 per small business, and finally roughly one job lost per small business.

Basically, regulations take your wives, enslave your children, throw your ice cream on the ground, and write “loser” on your chest in sun tan lotion when you fall asleep at the beach.  It’s amazing how in line this study is with standard conservative tropes about onerous regulations and big government.  I wonder why that is?  Here’s Myers.

So how do (authors Sanjay Varshney and Dennis Tootelian) reach their conclusions? The 33 page report (85 pages if you include the charts) relies heavily on Forbes Magazine and its annual report of the best — and worst — states in which to do business. The 2008 report ranks California #40 in the nation, and that’s the relative placement the authors used for their calculations.

“Forbes data is reliable,” says the study, “in that it uses credible sources of secondary data that are well recognized and respected as credible independent research in the business world.”

Perhaps, but Forbes’ proprietary methodology isn’t entirely transparent. Its website does note the sources for its rankings: data from both the federal government and nonprofits like the Tax Foundation and the conservative-leaning Pacific Research Institute.

This “academic” study cribbed their data from a MAGAZINE profile?  One owned by a movement conservative, which includes materials from wingnut welfare think tanks?  And we’re supposed to just let that go?

Myers goes on to note that the way Varshney and Tootelian transform the Forbes data into dollar amounts is entirely inscrutable, but designed to advance the proposition that every single state’s set of regulations are harmful to business.  “Even Forbes’ #1 state for business friendliness, Virginia, comes out with a regulatory climate that’s a net loss to the state of $4.4 billion.”  The study also neglects to determine which regulations harm business more or less.  It’s a partisan mess of a report and it should not be taken seriously.  Which is why the Yacht Party has taken to it so quickly, with classy headlines like “California Businesses Waterboarded by Governmental Overregulation.”

Look, labor regulations serve a particular purpose.  It’s true that they have a cost to business, but they also provide a significant cost savings to the individual, to the public health system, to the overall quality of life for the laborer.  We have made these trade-offs over hundreds of years.  The Yacht Party may think that The Jungle is a fantasy utopia, but in my experience, Californians and pretty much everybody else appreciate safe food and clean air and the minimum wage.

You can get a good sense of the intellectual honesty of a politician – and the media – by seeing if they bite at this crap sandwich of a report.

The deadline for filing an initiative that would make the November 2010 ballot is Friday (Just a quick update to that: Friday is a suggested deadline to maximize time for signature gathering) .  The initial measures to repeal the 2/3 ballot initiatives filed by Maurice Read failed at the end of July.  There is currently an initiative to lower the threshold from 2/3 to 3/5 in circulation, but it does not have any backing.

And that’s it.  There is no pending initiative regarding any two-thirds rule, with the institutional support needed to get on the ballot, and the deadline is Friday.

As has been mentioned in a Contra Costa Times article, the political leadership in the CDP appears to be moving away from it.

A split between Democratic activists and the political pros who run the party may be growing over how to approach the issue that has bedeviled the party for years: the two-thirds vote required to pass taxes and budgets in the Legislature.

Most Democrats in the upper echelons of the party apparatus are convinced it’s a fool’s errand to try to persuade voters to hand the majority party unchecked power to raise taxes. Instead, they’re gearing up for a campaign next year to lower the threshold – from two-thirds of both legislative bodies to a simple majority – on budget votes only, a path they believe voters can embrace.

But some grass roots liberals say they’re frustrated with the caution of party leaders and believe, if sold right, voters would hand over both taxing and budgeting powers to the majority party.

“This is a doable thing, but it requires getting Democrats together and deciding to really do it,” said George Lakoff, a UC Berkeley linguistics professor who has become a de facto leader of the cause and is preparing to submit by next week a ballot measure for the November 2010 election that would drop the two-thirds requirement on both taxes and budgets. “Either they want to give the state a future or they can let Republicans continue pushing it into disaster.” […]

But party leaders see him as quixotic, and dismiss his position as misplaced and uninformed.

“People are not ready to pass it,” said John Burton, the Democratic party chairman and a former Senate leader. “He’s got a theory. Good luck to him.”

Mind you, that another guy had a theory before he entered the CDP Chairmanship: John Burton.  At the time he committed himself to repealing the 2/3 majority for the budget and taxes, and listed it as a top priority.  But I don’t even know that the Burton fallback position is being considered; as of now, they have a little over 48 hours to file a 2/3 repeal on the budget.  And of course, this would immediately put half of what a budget is – revenues – off-limits, while taking responsibility for bad budgets that cannot be fixed.

What I have heard now is that, with statewide offices being decided in 2010, party leaders don’t want to put revenue on the ballot and increase GOP turnout against it, threatening their statewide officer candidates.

This is nothing more than a Friedman Unit strategy.  We cannot put such a proposal on the ballot in 2010 because it might hurt candidates, so we move it to the next election.  Which has candidates in it as well, so we have to just hold off past 2012.  But our Governor’s up for re-election/trying to defeat the Republican in 2014, so we have to hold off then, too.  As a result, nothing proceeds.

And it’s worse than that.  We hear constantly that the public is not ready for a conversation about changing the rule, but in the meantime nothing is being done to prepare the ground for that shift in public opinion.  It’s not that we have to give the war a few more months to succeed, as in the Friedman Unit; it’s that we have to give NOTHING more time for voters to, I guess, come up with their own ideas about state government.

The inescapable conclusion you must come to is that everyone in the system actually likes the system as it is. For Democrats, they personally prosper by getting elected and re-elected, and they can always blame the 2/3 rule for whatever failures occur. It’s accountability-free government complete with a scapegoat, and it rocks their world.

We can talk about how Democratic leaders tend to view the electorate as static and unchangeable, rather than the starting point from where opinion can be shaped.  We can talk about how small-bore goals or a major crisis can provide the spark for the change the state so desperately needs.  But this isn’t a failure of imagination.  It’s a general contentment with the status quo.

Which is why change will have to be imposed upon the system from the outside.  The most intriguing initiatives to date are the one pushed by Lenny Goldberg to repeal the $2 billion dollar a year corporate tax breaks, and the proposal for a Constitutional convention (though that has also not gone into circulation by the Bay Area Council, but only through an independent effort from Paul Currier).  This obviously cannot be left to anyone in Sacramento – they will always find a convenient excuse for delay.

Tom Campbell, among all the Republicans in the gubernatorial field, has at least been willing to lay out detailed plans for how he would fix the state.  Typically this manifests itself as the same old Hooverism.  But his health care plan at least gets points for creativity.

GOP gubernatorial hopeful Tom Campbell released a unique health care proposal Thursday that would redistribute $42 billion in federal and state funds already spent on health care in California to buy private health coverage for everyone in the state who’s “involuntarily” uninsured.

Under the former congressman’s plan, the funds would cover an estimated 2 million such people in addition to the 7.6 million already receiving public health coverage under the state Medi-Cal and Healthy Families programs.

“The astounding conclusion,” Campbell writes in his proposal, “is that, using only the money already being spent by the federal and state governments for health care in California, we could buy free market health insurance currently available and cover all involuntarily uninsured in California, and still have more than $700 per person left over!”

Instead of dedicating funds to services for the poor or children, Campbell would split the state into regions, and allow insurers to bid against one another to cover everyone in that region who earned below a certain level, along with everyone denied coverage for a pre-existing condition.  Insurers wouldn’t bid on price, but quality of coverage – the money would be fixed, and insurers would bid against each other based on what they would cover and at what rate.

I’m wondering why any insurer would bid for this right.  They deny people with pre-existing conditions because they are more likely to use health care, increasing their medical loss ratio.  And the poor are more likely to need health care treatment based on lifestyle and environment.  And the kicker to Campbell’s plan is, if nobody bids, the status quo would remain in place for that geographical area.  So basically, Campbell is touting a big plan that would do… nothing.  And he wouldn’t embark on it if the federal government enacts their own plan.

Mavericky!

Really, that interesting, if impossible (try getting a federal waiver to set it up and face Congressmembers with interests in protecting SCHIP and Medicaid), proposal is a cover for Campbell’s apparent agenda – to permit the interstate sale of insurance and to bring up the canard of tort reform as a panacea.  Medical malpractice is an insignificant percentage of total health care costs and states which have embarked on major medmal reform, like Texas, have seen no change in health inflation.  As for the interstate sale of insurance, you can do it now – only you’re responsible to comply with the laws of the state in which you sell.  This proposal would allow insurers to only be responsible to the regulations of the state where they are based.  Tom Campbell wants to do for the health insurance industry what this kind of proposal did for the credit card industry – send all insurance companies to a small state with no regulation, and gut all state-based regulation in the process, leaving California’s insurance customers at the mercy of the laws of South Dakota or Mississippi.

To his credit, Campbell wants to remove the anti-trust exemption on the insurance industry.  But really, that’s a means to an end here.  However, there is a point of consensus between conservatives and liberals to do away with the McCarran-Ferguson Act, that offers that anti-trust exemption.  Bills to this effect were just introduced in Congress.  If Campbell wants to talk them up to the California GOP delegation, go ahead.

Timm Herdt was on a conference call yesterday with a top official from the Department of Corrections, and that official acknowledged that the plan due to federal judges by midnight today on prison reduction will not meet the goal:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday will submit to a panel of three federal judges a plan that would reduce the inmate population at California’s overcrowded prisons by substantially less than what the court has ordered, a move that a top prison administrator acknowledged will place state officials at risk of being held in contempt.

Although the final plan will not be submitted until late Friday, administration officials have briefed other parties involved in the court proceedings on its major elements. They said exact projections of how much the prison population will be reduced have not yet been calculated, but the reduction would not lower the population to the court’s standard of 137.5 percent of the prison system’s design capacity.

“This plan will not meet the court’s requirements,” said Lee Seale, deputy chief of staff of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, in a conference call Wednesday with legislative staff members. “I certainly don’t think this panel will be thrilled by this plan. I think we recognize we may be held in contempt.”

Under the plan the state will submit, they will get to around 27,000 prisoner reduction.  The judges want something close to 44,000.

The question is how the three-judge panel will react.  They may mandate a release of enough prisoners to get to that number, at which point the state will challenge the ruling and throw it to the US Supreme Court.  This is precisely was Tough on Crime member emeritus George Runner wants.

Sen. George Runner, R-Lancaster, who has intervened in the court case in the hope of preventing a judicial mandate to lower the prison population, believes the administration is taking exactly the right approach.

“I would like to see the state plan be as easily rejected as possible,” Runner said.

If the administration submitted a plan that came close to meeting the court’s order, Runner said, that could lead to a negotiated compromise. This way, he said, the court will be forced to propose its own plan – one that would set up a showdown before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Where Runner would pitch the “I’m right because I say so” defense.  And with this Supreme Court, who knows, that may work.

We don’t know when the appeal would come in the process.  The Governor’s office seem to think that they can appeal the initial ruling as soon as they offer their alternative plan, while others believe that they’d have to wait for the three-judge panel to issue a final order with the full reductions.  At some point, everyone agrees, an appeal is allowable.  Kevin Yamamura has more.

I don’t want to put this entirely on the Governor, though he’s clearly dragging his feet.  The Assembly forced the weak proposal you’ll see from the Governor today by scaling back the reform plan that would have come closer to the judge’s goal of reducing the population by 44,000 prisoners.  But the Governor didn’t actually have to follow the Assembly in submitting their plan.  They could have come up with one of their own making, putting pressure on the Legislature to conform it.  They chose not to stand behind their own plan and do so.  So while there’s plenty of blame to go around, I think the Governor needs to own this one, although he and everyone else want to take the blame off themselves.

By the end of the week, it will be apparent what all the posturing accomplished: nothing. That may suit lawmakers just fine — they can blame the coming prison reforms on the federal courts rather than taking heat from voters for being insufficiently hard on criminals. But the episode is further evidence that if California’s prison system is a national disgrace, its Legislature is a national laughingstock.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that, in this environment, Schwarzenegger seems to be taking on the characteristics of a dictator. On Tuesday, he rejected the Legislature’s plan to promote renewable energy and said he’d impose his own by executive fiat. He’s on surer legal ground when it comes to the prisons because his actions will be backed by the federal court. But it’s dismaying to watch the state’s democratic procedures break down so thoroughly.

As long as he now appears to be king of California, we humbly beseech our lord and Terminator to finally do the right thing by the prisons. His proposal to the court should be modeled on the one approved by the Senate and include a commission to review the unsustainable determinate sentencing system. Meanwhile, it’s time to drop the appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court of the federal court order so we can get on with the business of fixing the prisons and out of the habit of defending the indefensible.

But that’s not going to happen.  Seeing the Department of Corrections reduce the very rehabilitation programs by $250 million, that even the Assembly plan used as a means to let inmates out for completing them, show how the mission of corrections has been completely lost in this.  What the state is fighting by appealing the judge’s order is their privilege to let people die in jail needlessly in violation of the Constitution.  Today, they will continue to assert that privilege.

The wingnutosphere has been in high froth the last week or so about ACORN, the community organization dedicated to helping low-income Americans.  The freak-out concerns a series of videos showing ACORN employees engaged in nefarious schemes (it took lots of shoots for the right-wing activists to get the footage they wanted, incidentally).  This has led to the Census Bureau distancing themselves from ACORN and the Senate to block HUD funding for the group.  It’s interesting in and of itself that the right has decided the source of all ills in America is a relatively small non-profit community organization and not the banking and financial interests who destroyed the economy and took hundreds of billions in bailout money for good measure (lots more on this here).  But never one to miss a pile-on, the Governor has requested an investigation of ACORN:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger apparently has been captivated by recent news stories about a conservative filmmaker who exposed misdeeds at ACORN, the national organization that serves low-income residents and has been involved in controversial efforts to register Democratic voters.

The Republican governor sent a brief memo Wednesday to Democratic Attorney General Jerry Brown asking him to investigate ACORN’s activities in San Bernardino. Two conservative activists have posted videos of their visits to ACORN offices around the country in which they posed as a prostitute and a pimp seeking advice.

In San Bernardino’s ACORN office, a volunteer who claims to be a former prostitute is shown offering advice to the two activists on how to set up a brothel using underage girls from El Salvador. She tells them that they would be breaking various laws, but also explains ways to get around those laws. At one point, she claims to have connections to various Democratic lawmakers in the state Legislature and Congress.

It’s amusing that the Governor has honed in on the San Bernardino case.  Because that would be at least one instance where the guerrilla filmmakers – and now, the Governor – got totally played.  John Santore explains:

Most critically, it is clear that Fox News has made virtually no attempt to verify the authenticity of the tapes before broadcasting them — something no self-respecting journalistic organization would dare do. Consider the case of the San Bernardino ACORN office, which was featured in the most recent video to be released. The words of ACORN employee Tresa Kaelke appear to be damning. Not only does she offer assistance to Giles and O’Keefe, but she claims that she murdered her former husband following a period of domestic abuse.

On September 15, Beck and Sean Hannity both broadcast Kaelke’s assertion. Beck, who had reported breathlessly on the supposed confession during his radio program, added on Fox, “She never spanked her kids, but she did shoot her husband dead.” Later that night, Hannity played the same clip before commenting, “Specifically, now, she goes into this scenario about her husband and the killing of him.”

The following morning, on September 16, Fox News’ Gretchen Carlson repeated the allegation, saying, “She killed somebody? Despite this, some lawmakers want to keep funding the group.”

The problem, of course, is that Kaelke was deliberately lying. The San Bernardino Police Department itself has now confirmed that her claim regarding her husband was untrue. A department statement released on September 15 reads: “The San Bernardino Police Department is investigating the claims made regarding the homicide. From the initial investigation conducted, the claims do not appear to be factual. Investigators have been in contact with the involved party’s known former husbands, who are alive and well.”

Furthermore, Kaelke has claimed that when she made the statement, she was seeking to mislead the undercover videographers, whom she was suspicious of. “They were not believable,” Kaelke is quoted as saying in an ACORN press release. “Somewhat entertaining, but they weren’t even good actors. I didn’t know what to make of them. They were clearly playing with me. I decided to shock them as much as they were shocking me.”

But none of these simple facts stopped anyone at Fox from running with the story. Any cub reporter would have thought to actually call the San Bernardino police before effectively alleging that ACORN was staffed by murderers. But such an act never occurred to people like Beck, Hannity, or Carlson. (In her defense, Carlson later added that the husband was still alive, “according to ACORN,” but ignored the police report.)

Some of the other allegations have shown what may be wrongdoing, if the tapes are legitimate and not doctored (they are certainly edited for effect, and we know they were in some cases obtained illegally and therefore inadmissable as evidence).  It may even warrant an investigation.  But Schwarzenegger is specifically riffing off the San Bernardino incident, in which the main offense described there has been proven to be a lie.  This apparently doesn’t matter.  I’m wondering what other provable falsehoods have led to the Governor urging a criminal investigation.

This is at least not as embarrassing as Tim Pawlenty, who ordered agencies in Minnesota to “cancel all state funding for ACORN,” when there… is no state funding of ACORN in Minnesota.  But it’s pretty weak nonetheless.  And par for the course for a headline-chaser like Gov. Schwarzenegger.  But if he wants to get in line with far-right extremists with an obvious racial agenda who want to demonize people of color and the organizations that provide help for them, go ahead.  It did a lot for Pete Wilson.

Senate Democrats have sent a letter to Governor Schwarzenegger asking him to reconsider his veto of the renewable energy standard and subsequent executive order.  The strongly worded letter has about as much currency as the eleventy billion-dollar bill, but it does explain why the Governor’s hypocritical action is a bad deal for California.

Respectfully, an Executive Order does not have the force and effect of law. Additionally, such a proclamation will only cause confusion and uncertainty to California’s energy markets, jeopardizing California’s role as the world leader in renewable energy development and green jobs.

As you noted when you signed AB 32, the landmark “Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006,” administrative actions are no substitute for a statute that is permanent and enforceable.

Directing the California Air Resources Board to implement an RPS program is a fundamentally flawed approach. The CARB is not an energy agency; it is an air quality regulatory agency. There are numerous provisions of law which impair the CARB’s ability to implement a renewable portfolio standard. Assigning this new responsibility to the CARB will not result in new renewable energy being built soon–it will only lead to litigation, regulatory confusion, and delay.

In our view, it is essential to green businesses and the renewable energy investment community which bring jobs and capital into California, that California’s 33% RPS be statutorily established and not subject to the whims of changing administrations.

There’s only one reason that Schwarzenegger gave the CARB the ability to implement a renewable energy standard – so he can go on talk shows and crow that he’s instituted an environmental achievement.  Except, as is explained here, it won’t.  It will get tied up in court challenges and confusion, without a clear mandate for the standard or penalties thereto.  

Schwarzenegger has responded to this by calling the Legislature’s bill “protectionist,” and saying that if we get water from the Colorado River, we should be able to get renewable energy from other states as well.  The difference is that a commodity is not the same as a job.  The twin goals of a renewable energy standard are to spur the usage of renewables as a means to lower greenhouse gas emissions, and to build a green-collar economy that will create millions of new jobs.  Schwarzenegger would rather give those jobs away.  And given the perilous state of the economy here in California, we simply cannot afford that.

Job losses in the public sector will prolong the economic pain in California through 2010 even as a recovery gets under way nationwide, two forecasters predict.

Jeff Michael, a forecaster at the University of the Pacific, said Tuesday that California’s recession will be over before the end of the year. But the cutbacks in state and local government, along with the continuing fallout from the mortgage meltdown, will make 2010 feel like another year of recession, Michael said in UOP’s latest quarterly forecast.

Similarly, the newest UCLA Anderson Forecast predicts a sluggish recovery because of the weak public sector. UCLA senior economist Jerry Nickelsburg is more optimistic than Michael about the housing market, and says California will outperform the U.S. economy starting in 2011.

Yet both economists say Californians can expect continued high unemployment for a couple more years or so. The unemployment rate is currently 11.9 percent in California and 11.8 percent in greater Sacramento.

And yet here is Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoing the only major bill that would produce any semblance of an economic recovery for California.