Last week, OC Progressive (which has really attracted a good group of writers and provided a vital progressive voice in Orange County) revealed that Beth Krom, an Irvine City Councilwoman, is considering a run against Rep. John Campbell.  In a subsequent post, Joe Shaw explained why Krom would make a worthy challenger.

She can win elections.

Beth Krom has won five campaigns, In 2006, she garnered 60% of the vote in her re-election as Mayor and in 2008, won her current City Council seat with 8000 votes more than the next candidate.

She gets things done.

We need elected officials who have experience getting things done for their constituents. Beth Krom is a strong advocate for environmental stewardship. Her vote was instrumental in cleaning up the water along the Orange County coast: she was the first “inland” representative to advocate for full secondary treatment of the effluent the OC Sanitation District pumped out into the ocean and was the “swing vote” in getting the board to fund implementation.  

She’s a visionary.

Beth Krom understands that Orange County needs leadership that will advance innovative, integrated transit solutions, sustainable development practices and green technology and jobs initiatives.

She can work across party lines.

Beth Krom has the respect of so many people throughout Orange County because she works with people, regardless of political affiliation, to get things done.

Irvine is one of America’s best run cities.

What other Orange County elected, at the local, state or federal level, can lay claim to the legacy of forward-thinking leadership that Beth Krom has provided in the City of Irvine? “Safest City in America” four years straight; a balanced budget and more than tripling city reserves during her term as Mayor, and advancing a project of regional importance – the Orange County Great Park.

I’m a little gun-shy to out and out predict victory in these California Congressional races.  We are know that they are tough slogs, and were disappointed by the performance of many promising candidates last cycle.  Nonetheless, we cannot leave these red areas behind, and there’s no question that the threat of candidates like Bill Durston and Debbie Cook forced the national GOP to spend money where they didn’t want to spend it, leading to other losses around the country.  Everything is connected, and thus solid candidates should continue to be recruited everywhere.

What’s more, President Obama actually beat John McCain in CA-48, despite the district’s Republican tilt.  And, far from distinguishing himself, Campbell has most recently looked to Ayn Rand novels for inspiration in setting public policy:

Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.), who gives his departing interns copies of Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged,” told me today that the response to President Obama’s economic policies reminded him of what happened in the 51-year-old novel.

“People are starting to feel like we’re living through the scenario that happened in ‘Atlas Shrugged,'” said Campbell. “The achievers, the people who create all the things that benefit rest of us, are going on strike. I’m seeing, at a small level, a kind of protest from the people who create jobs, the people who create wealth, who are pulling back from their ambitions because they see how they’ll be punished for them.”

It would be a terrible thing if the titans of industry that have burned through trillions of dollars in American wealth were to pull back and not be so ambitious, wouldn’t it?  And it’s certainly a rational reaction, to forcibly crumble what’s left of the American economy due to an increase of 4 cents in the top marginal tax rates.  Even more certainly, there’s no question that it would turn out just like the fictional novel – that every high-earner would leave their job and nobody would pick up the slack.  Conservatives are nothing if not selfless.  And daring, rational men who live by their minds.

This guy is obviously a buffoon, but we know that is sadly not enough in these districts.  And repeat candidates, who have built up their name ID and volunteer base, always have a better shot.  If I were to forecast the early prospects for a flipped seat in California right now, I would go:

CA-44: Bill Hedrick is already announced as a candidate, and he lost by just 2.6% to Ken Calvert last time.

CA-03: The trendlines in the district are favorable, but it’s unclear if Bill Durston will make a third try.

And then, pretty much, nothing, until there’s clarity about who’s running.  Charlie Brown writing an op-ed in the Auburn Journal trashing Tom McClintock suggests he might try again in CA-04, but I’m not sure.  Given the current state of affairs, I’d say CA-48 isn’t looking too badly, though it’s early.

Yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Patrick Leahy’s call for a truth commission to investigate the crimes of the Bush Administration.  Obviously the events of the past couple days, with the release of OLC memos that really transformed the concept of democracy in the Bush era, is revitalizing this debate.

Justice Department officials said they might soon release additional opinions on those subjects. But the disclosure of the nine formerly secret documents fueled calls by lawmakers for an independent commission to investigate and make public what the Bush administration did in the global campaign against terrorism.

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, said the revelations, together with the release of new information about the Central Intelligence Agency’s destruction of 92 interrogation videotapes, had underscored the need for a commission that would have the power to subpoena documents and testimony.

The OLC memos are still extraordinary, so horrifying in the picture they paint of executive power that the head of the OLC, Steven Bradbury, felt the need to disavow them near the end of the Bush regime.  It’s likely that he did so to take the heat off of himself.  But there ought to be no get-out-of-jail-free card for the actions taken as the result of these memos.  Glenn Greenwald looks at one of the documents.

The essence of this document was to declare that George Bush had the authority (a) to deploy the U.S. military inside the U.S., (b) directed at foreign nationals and U.S. citizens alike; (c) unconstrained by any Constitutional limits, including those of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.  It was nothing less than an explicit decree that, when it comes to Presidential power, the Bill of Rights was suspended, even on U.S. soil and as applied to U.S. citizens.  And it wasn’t only a decree that existed in theory; this secret proclamation that the Fourth Amendment was inapplicable to what the document calls “domestic military operations” was, among other things, the basis on which Bush ordered the NSA, an arm of the U.S. military, to turn inwards and begin spying — in secret and with no oversight — on the electronic communications (telephone calls and emails) of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.

As Harper’s Scott Horton says, “We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship.”   More on the memos from Jack Balkin and Anonymous Liberal.

Yoo, who is hiding out in Orange County at Chapman University, admitted in an interview to the OC Register only that his memos “lacked a certain polish,” in a profile more concerned with how he’s enjoying the beaches and Vietnamese food of Southern California rather than the “hippies, protesters and left-wing activists” of Berkeley.  Somehow, he’s still teaching law.  Jay Bybee, the other major player in the composition of these memos, is a 9th Circuit Appeals Judge in San Francisco.  Bruce Ackerman recommends impeachment.

Despite the calls of apologists to the contrary, we have to have a reckoning on this.  The previous President, aided by his allies, asserted broad executive powers far outside Constitutional strictures, and the results were illegal wiretapping, torture, extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention, and a series of other crimes against the state and violations practically every amendment in the Bill of Rights as well as international law.  

But one member of the Judiciary Committee wasn’t at the truth commission hearing yesterday – Dianne Feinstein.  Through a spokesman, she sidestepped whether or not she supports a commission, saying she “hasn’t seen a proposal.”  But she is instituting a competing investigation, from her perch at the Senate Intelligence Committee, that is bound to be a whitewash:

The inquiry is aimed at uncovering new information on the origins of the programs as well as scrutinizing how they were executed — including the conditions at clandestine CIA prison sites and the interrogation regimens used to break Al Qaeda suspects, according to Senate aides familiar with the investigation plans.

Officials said the inquiry was not designed to determine whether CIA officials broke laws. “The purpose here is to do fact-finding in order to learn lessons from the programs and see if there are recommendations to be made for detention and interrogations in the future,” said a senior Senate aide, who like others described the plan on condition of anonymity because it had not been made public […]

The senior aide said that the committee had no short-term plans to hold public hearings, and that it was not clear whether the panel would release its final report to the public […]

Senate aides declined to say whether the committee would seek new testimony from former CIA Director George J. Tenet or other former top officials who were involved in the creation and management of the programs.

The Senate investigation will examine whether the detention and interrogation operations were carried out in ways that were consistent with the authorities and instructions issued in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, officials said.

The panel will also look at whether lawmakers were kept fully informed. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the committee, and others have said that the Bush administration improperly withheld information from Congress on the CIA’s operations.

This is basically a turf war.  Feinstein wants control of the investigation process in her committee, over Patrick Leahy.  And she wants the hearings to be private as well as the final report.  Emptywheel writes:

Pat Leahy will have an investigation regardless of what DiFi says–and he’s going to start it now. So DiFi issues a vaguely formulated leak saying that she’s going to cover the CIA’s role in torture. And, voila! Now the CIA and DiFi can say try to circumscribe Leahy’s investigation. And of course, by doing an investigation that starts with the premise that it is “not designed to determine whether CIA officials broke laws,” even while admitting that CIA officers may have gone beyond the “instructions issued in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks,” it ensures no accountability even for those who went beyond Cheney’s torture regime. And, finally, absolutely no current plans to make public the results, either through public hearings or by releaing a report.

Call DiFi at (202) 224-3841. Thank her for recognizing the importance of understanding the mistakes we made in the past. Remind her that even Pat Roberts’ investigation into CIA Iraq intelligence was released publicly. Demand that she meet at least the level of transparency adopted by her Republican predecessors as SSCI Chair.

Agreed.  This is too important for it to be done in the secret bowels of official Washington as a “fact-finding mission” yielding a white paper that will wind up collecting dust on a shelf.  Feinstein is trying to let criminals off the hook, plain and simple.  History tells us that the inevitable return of criminals like this will only be emboldened to go further as a result.

First of all, the turnout was indeed 15%, down from 28% for the primary just four years ago.  That’s mainly due to the top of the ticket, which was competitive last time around and featured just Antonio Villaraigosa and a bunch of tomato cans this time.  But I don’t think Villaraigosa should be celebrating about his performance.  Despite 4 years of work as the Mayor, despite a field of underfunded nobodies, he actually got LESS votes in 2009 than he did in 2005.  His support has diminished and not increased.  And the seas are about to get a lot choppier.

Flanked onstage by Weiss, sometime-rival City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo and labor leader Maria Elena Durazo, Villaraigosa turned to the mounting challenges ahead from the city’s looming $1 billion deficit to the possibility of widespread layoffs.

“I know these are troubled times for many of our families — you see I’ve traveled around the city for the past few months and I witnessed the anxiety rising,” Villaraigosa said. “I have a simple message for Los Angeles tonight, we’re going to rebound out of this economic crisis and we will emerge stronger than ever.”

The guy who is less likely to emerge stronger than ever is Villaraigosa.  He ended up with just 56% of the vote after running a dismissive non-campaign where he refused to debate and spent almost no time in the city.  One of his top lieutenants, Jack Weiss, is now in a runoff for city attorney despite spending millions on his campaign.  And Measure B, the solar power initiative which the mayor backed, is too close to call at this hour, as provisionals and late absentees are tabulated.

That’s an objectively terrible performance.  And it should stop the Mayor from thinking about his next campaign so quickly.  The enduring image of the Villaraigosa tenure is a crane alongside a half-built skyscraper.  He is full of good ideas that never get the follow-through they deserve.  That’s what this election was like – he was already thinking about the Governor’s race before finishing his re-election campaign.  This may now be a fatal blow, but it doesn’t look good for him.  The Mayor of Los Angeles is a challenging, maddeningly complex position.  It would be nice if the current occupant paid more attention to it.

Today is Election Day in LA City, and given the turnouts we’ve seen in other off-year elections, as well as the fact that the mayoral race, the biggest ticket on the ballot, is basically a coronation, turnout is likely to be very small, save for the wide-open 5th District City Council race, which is really anybody’s to win (very unusual in LA politics).  The expectation is about 15%.  Despite the fact that Los Angeles actually has a fairly rich culture of political activism, from the Latino student sit-ins to recent Prop. 8 actions and hundreds more, the recent history is that city elections do not draw much of a crowd.  That’s a shame in a city that’s larger than the total populations of many states, and it reduces accountability on the elected officials.

I don’t live in Los Angeles, but I work here, and I have a conflicted view about the way the city runs.  I think if every resident were forced to watch The Garden, the Oscar-nominated documentary about South Los Angeles residents being forcibly evicted from a community garden, nobody would vote for anyone currently on the City Council, least of all Mayor Villaraigosa.  The film, almost a real-life version of The Wire, revealed a city government of backroom deals and power-brokers able to make their voices heard well beyond the needs of the community.  You can add to that the rare bit of journalism from the LA Weekly about the City Council, and you could be convinced that the lack of accountability from the electoral process has bred a toxic atmosphere at City Hall.  The likely consolidation of power that would result from Villaraigosa allies in the city attorney and city controller offices would lead you even closer to that conclusion.

Yet among the morass, there are some very earnest public servants trying to manage a very unwieldy city, with a host of unique problems and challenges that would vex any lawmaking body on Earth.  Set aside this year’s $1 billion dollar budget; the problems of immigration, gang violence, income inequality, traffic, health care, air pollution, education, and much, much more all converge in this city.  From 10,000 feet these problems look intractable, and yet there are gradual, slow steps toward mitigation, and even areas where Los Angeles is a national model.  The sales tax receipts from Measure R may finally bring sustainable transit infrastructure to fruition for more than a handful of the city’s residents.  The Green Trucks Program is an innovative, first-in-the-nation effort to bring labor and environmental groups together to reduce pollution, create living wage jobs and help save the planet.  And the city’s Green Jobs Training program is seen as so potentially game-changing that it was used as a model in a White House staff report from their Middle Class Task Force:

The City of Los Angeles has undertaken or is in the midst of undertaking several initiatives that, together, begin to constitute a model for how cities can maximize the benefits of “going green” for working families.  As is often the case, necessity was the mother of policy innovation.  A few years ago, the city faced a number of stark challenges including: a state renewable energy mandate (a statewide “portfolio standard” requiring 20% renewable energy by 2017) and a state cap on greenhouse gas emissions; an impending shortage of skilled construction workers; entrenched poverty and joblessness in many low-income neighborhoods; and toxic levels of diesel pollution that were imposing huge health costs and blocking the growth of the nation’s largest port complex.  

In the past year, Los Angeles has adopted a comprehensive approach to redevelopment which will ensure that city-subsidized development projects are built green and serve as vehicles for moving low-income residents into middle-class construction careers.  The Port of Los Angeles has also begun to implement a comprehensive solution to freight-related air pollution that will increase efficiency, enhance security, and improve work conditions and living standards for port truck drivers.  Most important is the fact that these initiatives are being undertaken on a large scale: the city’s construction policy is expected to impact 15,000 jobs over five years while the Clean Trucks Program (discussed below) could affect as many as 16,000 port truck drivers.

In 2008, the City of Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) adopted a landmark policy designed to protect the environment, safeguard the interests of taxpayers, and ensure that city-supported projects create good construction jobs and career pathways for city residents.  The Construction Careers and Project Stabilization Policy establishes minimum labor standards and a process for avoiding labor disruptions by means of a master agreement between the CRA and local building trades unions.  The policy requires participating contractors and unions to make construction job opportunities available to local residents, including individuals who face barriers to employment such as a criminal record or a limited education.

The policy is being implemented alongside a requirement that large subsidized projects meet the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards.  In this way, city leaders have begun to lay the foundations for building a green-collar construction workforce in Los Angeles.  The UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education projects that the policy will make at least 5,000 apprentice-level construction jobs available to residents of neighborhoods with high levels of unemployment over the next five years.  At least 1,500 jobs are expected to go to individuals who might otherwise remain homeless, unemployed, dependent on welfare programs, or caught up in the criminal justice system.  But the most important result of the Construction Careers policy will be to leverage public investments in economic development to turn short-term jobs into long-term careers in the construction industry.

I wish there was more structural accountability in Los Angeles, from the Mayor on down.  I wish the city wasn’t so dominated by big-city machine politics and red-letter projects that often fail to follow through on their promise.  And where criticism is warranted, I’m sure to be first in line.  But Los Angeles is a very complex and hard-to-pigeonhole place, and that is true of its politics as well.

Late last week, Democrats temporarily shelved a bill that would allow bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of mortgages on primary residences (also known as “cram-down”).  Moderates who put the hold on this legislation, particularly former Wall Street investor Ellen Tauscher, crowed about it to the media.

This hardly amounts to a breakthrough win for party moderates – or a major concession by the speaker. But it was a consequential moment in the minds of moderate leaders who often find themselves marginalized in a caucus dominated by liberals.

“It shows we have bench strength, and it shows we can flex,” said California Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher, who chairs the New Democrat Coalition and played a central role in negotiations over the bankruptcy bill […]

Moderates worry Pelosi is routinely staking very liberal positions to push House versions of big bills as far to the left as possible to enhance their standing in negotiations with the historically centrist Senate. This might be a smart tactic, but it often hurts Democrats who rely on Republican votes to win reelection. Put bluntly, it makes them look too liberal […]

That prompted lawmakers, like Tauscher, to limit the scope of the bankruptcy bill as much as possible, even though this measure is only loosely related to the president’s broader proposal.

Tauscher’s New Democrat Coalition teamed with their natural allies in the Blue Dog Coalition to impose 10 significant changes, including requirements that bankruptcy judges use federal guidelines to determine the fair market value of a home and that modified loans must be “unaffordable and not just underwater” to prevent wealthy homeowners from taking advantage of the process, according to a widely distributed e-mail from Adam Pase, executive director of the New Democrat Coalition.

This, of course, angered some liberals. “The New Dems’ position is the banks’ position,” a senior Democratic aide involved in the bankruptcy negotiations complained on Friday. “New Democrats are shills for the banks.”

It’s confounding that any New Democrat thinks their constituents give a ring-a-ding about banking industry concerns, and are not in fact the very people struggling to keep their homes that this legislation would help.

More, including Tauscher staffers lying to bloggers, on the flip…

When Chris Bowers used Tauscher as the face of the moderate backlash against working people facing foreclosure, her office responded by saying they supported the rule on the bill (HR 1106), and that their changes would “strengthen” the bill, and that they didn’t meet with anyone in the financial services industry about it.  But David Waldman explains why that, simply put, is a crock – she voted for the rule because it incorporated the changes she wanted to make.  And if that was the only hurdle, why didn’t the legislation get a vote last week?

Now, that amendment was approved by the Rules Committee last Wednesday night, the 25th of February, and the rule was adopted on Thursday morning, the 26th. That locked in place that the voting on the bill would include a vote on an amendment incorporating Tauscher’s list of changes.

So why, if she supports the bill, would work on it be suspended on the afternoon of Thursday, the 26th? She “supports the bill,” and voted for the rule that locked in a shot at making the changes she proposed to the Judiciary Committee, and yet here we are, waiting over the weekend for… what, exactly?

Ellen Tauscher supported the rule because it made an amendment in order that would incorporate her list of demands. That’s all. But she must clearly want more changes, because even after winning these concessions, the bill is still stalled, and the news reports on the stall have Tauscher’s name all over them.

Jane Hamsher has a lot more on Tauscher, who is clearly putting banking industry interests ahead of her constituents’.  She doesn’t have to necessarily talk to anyone in the financial services industry personally, because Adam Pase, the chairman of the New Dmocrats, works out of her office:

Pase is is a former lobbyist for the Twenty First Century Group, whose client, the Coalition for Fair & Affordable Lending, is an astroturf group, financed by the banking industry, that lobbied on behalf of. . . you guessed it. . . sub-prime lenders. Contrary to what you might hear on Morning Joe, it was national civil rights leaders who joined together to fight the Coalition’s predatory lenders as they tried to pass the Ney-Kanjorski bill, which would have enabled banks to get around predatory lending laws and make more bad loans. This they justified based on the oh-so-high-minded need to provide loans to low income and minority borrowers. It was true scumbaggery.

Pase was also the senior policy adviser for Dennis Moore when Moore organized Blue Dogs to oppose mortgage write-downs on behalf of the banking industry in 2007, and he is evidently the one driving policy on this one for the New Dems. But one has to wonder — what is Tauscher thinking? Her district is one of the hardest hit by the mortgage crisis, as you can see from the map. Why is she trying to limit mortgage write-downs to subprime loans only, on behalf of banks, when every foreclosure brings down the value of all houses in a neighborhood? Her claim to care so very much about people still struggling to pay their mortgages rings hollow.

Shaun Donovan, the HUD Secretary, is headed to the House today to whip support for the bill.  This legislation would save perhaps 800,000 families from foreclosure without one penny of cost to the taxpayer.  All the bill would do is give leverage to homeowners who have been screwed by their lenders at practically every step of this process.

Homeowners burned by Blue Dogs and New Dems like Tauscher are not likely to forget the treachery.  Firedoglake has some action items.

We’re asking you to do two things:

Write a letter to the editor of your local papers (just enter your zip code) saying you expect your Member of Congress to represent you, not the banks, and you’ll be watching to see if they oppose Tauscher and her bank lobbyist cronies.

Sign a petition to Nancy Pelosi telling her not to “buckle” to pressure from bank lobbyists working through greedy corporatist Members of Congress, and to act swiftly to give judges the authority they need to write down mortgages.  The banks must take responsibility for their own bad judgment; taxpayers shouldn’t be expected to pick up the tab.

These same people killed efforts in 2007 to allow bankruptcy judges to write down mortgages at that time, which could have helped us from ever getting to this place.  It’s time they stop pretending that they care about their constituents when they’re only being tools of the banking lobby.

I think it’s more about telling Pelosi we’ll have her back if she stands up to these cretins.  You know what to do.