This is from the press release:

Los Angeles, CA-The California League of Conservation Voters (CLCV) announced today their endorsement of Debbie Cook, the Democratic nominee for Congress in the 46th Congressional District.

“We’re proud to support Debbie Cook because she has shown time and again her commitment to protecting our coastal resources,” said CLCV’s Southern California Director David Allgood. “Mayor Cook has a long record of achievement on environmental, public health and other issues important to the people of the 46th District.”

In 1989, rather than see her city’s parks and beaches destroyed by private development, Cook led a group that collected 18,000 signatures for a successful ballot measure to require voter approval in order to build in Huntington Beach public parks and beaches.

After attending law school, she joined the Bolsa Chica Land Trust legal team, winning a case that protects sensitive coastal habitat throughout California to this day. As Mayor of Huntington Beach, she led the fight to stop the Orange County Sanitation District from dumping partially-treated sewage into the ocean, resulting in cleaner water for our beach’s recreational users.

Cook’s opponent, longtime Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, ignores science to deny that climate change is man-made, favors drilling off the coast of California and has spoken against the landmark Clean Trucks Program at the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles – which will slash toxic truck emissions by 50%, significantly reducing the port-related diesel pollution that leads to 2,400 premature deaths per year, according to the California Air Resources Board. He currently has a low 10 percent rating on the League of Conservation Voters’ congressional scorecard.

It’s not surprising that Cook would get the endorsement; what’s crucial here is whether or not she becomes a cause for the environmental movement the way that Jerry McNerney became a cause in 2006.  Rohrabacher’s rejection of port cleanup, which just passed the California State Senate, could be a really salient issue in this district, part of which covers Long Beach and most of which is situated on the coast.  Some hard-hitting ads and mailers accusing Crazy Dana of allowing kids to suffer and die from pollution seem to be in order.

UPDATE: Cook is also pivoting off of the historic nominating speech by Barack Obama at the DNC, holding 200 “Making History” parties in the district and raising money for Cook’s campaign.  This is really a local effort.  You can sign up at her website.

With this epic FAIL maneuver on the budget, Arnold Schwarzenegger signaling here that his little state employee wage cut gambit didn’t work.  It didn’t produce the kind of compromise he wanted and it sent him tumbling in the polls as he attempted to cynically hold innocent bystanders hostage in an unrelated fight.  So he had to cut off all bills instead.  Maybe now, he thinks, the legislators will take notice.

But let’s understand what he’s doing here.  Yesterday, as a culmination of four years of work, Alan Lowenthal’s bill to clean up the ports of Oakland, LA and Long Beach passed the State Senate.  Eliminating the toxic pollution at the ports would save 3,700 lives annually according to the California Air Resources Board.  The bill would enact a $30 container fee on every import, using that money ($300 million annually) for investment in reducing pollution and improving freight rail.  It’s a milestone bill that is sorely needed to improve the air quality of these communities.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Arnold’s latest stunt will actually kill thousands of people from reversible diseases.

There’s a bill pending in the Senate Appropriations Committee authored by Fiona Ma (AB 2716) which would deliver guaranteed paid sick days to all California workers.  This bill has the support of 73% of the public and would make the state the first in the nation to provide this to their residents.  Arnold would rather stamp his feet and issue ultimatums than improve the lives of Californians and do the bidding of the overwhelming majority of the public.

On health care, while we cannot expect a comprehensive plan to come out of this legislative session, there is a deal coming together that would improve health care for those who have insurance by mandating some strict rules for the industry:

In the final weeks of the legislative session, they are negotiating measures that would limit insurer profits on individual plans, require plans to provide a minimum set of benefits and restrict insurers’ ability to cancel policies retroactively […]

Three million Californians buy health insurance on their own rather than through employers. Insurers keep premiums low — and profits high, their critics say — on some individual policies by limiting the services they cover. Such plans may exclude prescription drugs and maternity services, for example; others may cover only hospital visits.

Many of the policies have big deductibles and require patients to pay large portions of their expenses, costing them much more than coverage obtained at workplaces.

The game-playing by Arnold on the budget means that, in all likelihood, these rules will not go into effect, and individual consumers of health insurance (like me) will remain incredibly vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the insurance industry, which has shown already a penchant to deny coverage and jack up premiums.  That too will put the lives of Californians at risk.

There’s a human cost to the bullshit that Terminator Boy isn’t accounting for.  His head is in the clouds, and he thinks he can bully the legislature liked he bullied people in scripted movies for decades.  But the recklessness will cost money, pain, suffering, and even lives.

Arnold Schwarzenegger didn’t just vow to keep taxes low, he ran an entire campaign in 2006 based on scaring people into believing that his opponent would raise taxes by $18 billion dollars.  None of it was true, but he hammered away at it.  In the one and only debate he chided Phil Angelides, saying “you love taxes” and other nonsense.  Dan Weintraub even remembered this spiel:

“They get into their car, they’re taxed. They go to the gas station, they’re taxed. They go for lunch, they’re taxed. This goes on all day long. Tax, tax, tax, tax, tax. Even when they go to bed, you can go to bed in fear that you are going to be taxed while you’re sleeping, that there is a sleeping tax.”

The admission of defeat, that there’s no way to balance this budget without revenue increases, is truly astonishing.  What’s more, the broad-based sales tax he’s proposing, the most regressive imaginable, really would tax Californians at virtually every point of the day.  He’s become a caricature (if he wasn’t one already).

The proposal amounts to an admission of failure. Running in 2003 as a novice politician after careers as a bodybuilder and actor, Schwarzenegger thought he could cut taxes, control spending and balance the budget, ending what he called “those crazy deficits.” But the fiscal and economic problem was more complicated than he knew, and the politics far more vexing.

Schwarzenegger did cut taxes. He campaigned on a pledge to roll back the vehicle license fee, or “car tax,” which his predecessor, Gray Davis, had tripled. And on Schwarzenegger’s first day in office, the new governor issued an executive order reducing the tax by two-thirds.

But controlling spending proved far more difficult, as, ironically, that first tax-cut order foretold. The car tax against which Schwarzenegger had railed, while controlled by the state, was actually a source of revenue for local governments. And so when Schwarzenegger reduced it, he also made good on a pledge to pay cities and counties what was then $4billion a year to make up for what they lost when he cut the car tax.

The state, however, did not have that money to spare, and the payments to cities and counties added to the deficit Schwarzenegger had vowed to eliminate. That obligation to local government has since grown to $6 billion – not coincidentally the same amount that would be raised by the sales tax increase Schwarzenegger now supports.

The VLF was the original sin here, but not the only one.  The problem is structural and the VLF would have only delayed the inevitable.  The truth is that the state is only built for success, never for a downturn like we’re currently having.  And so this results in gimmicks like slashing state employee salaries and putting them in the middle of a budget spat, or borrowing more and more to pass the deficit on to our children and grandchildren.

(The latest on the wage cuts, by the way, is that the governor is demanding that his order be followed, which John Chiang will refuse, leading to a likely lawsuit.  Chiang really is a hero in all of this, and he’s filling a leadership vacuum.  Marcus Breton has a nice profile today.)

Schwarzenegger has never concerned himself with the business of governing – he preferred slogans to policy.  And with the policy going to crap, the slogans sound more hollow – especially the one that goes “tax, tax, tax, tax, tax.”

I really don’t know where this came from other than the shrinking class of California political pundits just understanding common sense, but they are all gradually coming on board with the notion that what’s killing the state is the 2/3 requirement, and that until it’s fixed, nothing in the Capitol will materially change.

Most of George Skelton’s column today concerns the “dance of death” – a ritual slaughtering of budget proposals through the normal legislative process until one survivor comes out on top.  There is too much of a top-down approach in the legislature, with the Big 5 making the determination on the budget instead of the relevant committees having a crack at it.  But near the end, Skelton reveals the truth:

My nomination for additional budget reform: Eliminate the ludicrous requirement of a two-thirds legislative vote for passage of a budget. Only two other states suffer the same straitjacket. California would have had a budget weeks ago if it could have been passed by a simple majority vote. The governor still would have the final say with his paring knife.

This mirrors exactly what conservative Dan Walters said in his column the day before.  Walters wants to keep the requirement for tax votes, but he does seem to understand that without the accountability that a majority budget vote provides, there’s no way to peg the fortunes or failures of the state on any one political party.  Not only does it hinder legislators from doing their jobs, it impedes the opportunity for voters to determine the cause and effect.  It’s the “killer app” for governmental reform, and must be the first, last and only step in the short term to end the perpetual crisis at the heart of a broken system.

Now, this reform will not come easy.  Republicans will caterwaul at losing the only leverage they currently own.  The only path to this solution comes with actually getting a 2/3 majority in both chambers, and then offering the solution up for a vote in time for the next governor to reap the rewards.  The Drive for 2/3 is monumentally important (and it’s likely to be a two-cycle process) to restore functionality to Sacramento and allow legislators to do the work their constituents sent them to the Capitol to do.

It’s really the ultimate way for this state employee wage cut to end up – turns out that the payroll generation is so antiquated, they can’t change it to reflect the new salary structure for months.

State Controller John Chiang said Monday an antiquated state computer system makes it impossible to adjust the state payroll quickly to issue minimum-wage checks to state workers. He said it would take at least six months to make the change.

The Democratic controller has vowed to defy Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s executive order directing the state to pay workers the federal minimum wage of $6.55 per hour until a budget agreement is reached. He has previously asserted that the Republican governor’s order is based on an untested 2003 state Supreme Court legal opinion and that he will continue issuing full paychecks to state employees.

But in a meeting with The Bee Capitol Bureau on Monday, Chiang said that even if Schwarzenegger’s legal reasoning were sound, the state could not logistically retool its outdated payroll system in a matter of weeks, as the governor has asked. If the change were eventually made, Chiang also said it would take an additional nine to 10 months to issue checks to employees for their full back pay.

We’ve seen this in LA County with errors in paychecks to teachers, which resulted in major repayments and “treble” damages, which require the government to pay three times as much in damages to those affected.

Of course, the state could always update their payroll systems – which would require more revenue.  Or they could just throw more manpower at the problem – which would require hiring those state workers that Arnold tried to fire (which agencies are promptly not firing).

It’s really a tragicomedy over there in Sacramento.

A few nuggets for you:

• A Superior Court judge in Alameda County has ruled that cell phone companies cannot charge early-termination fees, and has ordered that Sprint return $18.2 million dollars to consumers.  This will probably get fought on appeal, but right on.  The concept of fee for service has worked pretty well for most of consumer capitalism, as has being nice to your customers instead of bullying them into compliance.

• There’s been a lot of outrage at the LA City Council’s ruling banning new fast-food restaurants from breaking ground in South LA for a year.  Actually, far from being an issue of infringing on freedom, it’s a little thing called land use, and every city has them – even the one that the outraged Will Saletan lives in.  

I’m pretty skeptical that these proposed South LA regulations will do any good. But it’s not unique or unusual for land use regulations to exist. And working class people around the country suffer dramatically larger concrete harms from the sort of commonplace suburbanist regulations that Saletan’s been living with, without apparent complaint, in Chevy Chase. Those kind of regulations are bad for the environment, bad for public health, and serve to use the power of the state to redistribute upwards. So if you’re going to rail against land use regulations, maybe pick the ones that really hurt people.

• In environmental news, Senate leaders like Barbara Boxer are calling for the resignation of EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson for his preferring ideology over science, defying the advice of his own staff, evading oversight and misleading Congress, particularly about refusing the California waiver to regulate tailpipe emissions.  They’re also asking the Attorney General to investigate whether Johnson perjured himself at one of the California waiver hearings in Congress.  In addition, Jerry Brown is suing the EPA for their refusal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions at the nation’s ports.

• And this is pretty interesting, turns out the Sarah of “Sarah’s Law” (parental notification) doesn’t have the squeaky-clean image her sponsors claim:

Backers of a ballot measure that would require parents to be notified before an abortion is performed on a minor acknowledged Friday that the 15-year-old on which “Sarah’s Law” is based had a child and was in a common-law marriage before she died of complications from an abortion in 1994 […]

A lawsuit co-sponsored by Planned Parenthood Affiliates and filed Friday in Sacramento County Superior Court asks the Secretary of State to remove the girl’s story and other information it deemed misleading, including any reference to “Sarah’s Law,” from the material submitted for the official voter guide.

“If you can’t believe the Sarah story, there’s a lot in the ballot argument you can’t believe,” said Ana Sandoval, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood and the campaign against Proposition 4.

Using someone’s life story for political means, and wrongly at that.  Good people.

Ok, your turn.

I was on a conference call earlier with State Controller John Chiang and Rep. Hilda Solis about the Governor’s callous executive order, and both delivered predictably strong comments.  Chiang, who has told the governor he will refuse to comply with the order, blasted Schwarzenegger, saying “state workers shouldn’t be put in the middle of a political battle,” and that this was a nakedly punitive attempt against California’s state employee unions, which the whom the Governor has always held a grudge (they helped deep-six his “reform” agenda in 2005).  Rep. Solis was even more outraged, saying “let’s put him on the federal minimum wage, and get rid of the special interests paying for his hotel room across the street from the Capitol, and see how he likes it.”  She rocks.  

Chiang has made his decision, and now only litigation can force him to carry out the Governor’s order (and Chiang discouraged litigation as a “waste of time.”)  But we expect these kind of statements from Democrats.  Take a look at this one from Republican Greg Aghazarian:

“While I appreciate the Governor’s leadership on this budget crisis, I cannot support reducing the salaries of our state employees to minimum wage.

If our state workers had the power to pass a budget, then it might be appropriate to hold them accountable, but that’s not where the responsibility lies according to our State Constitution. I cannot predict when a budget will be passed, but I do know this, when it does happen it will be because we worked to achieve bipartisan solutions.

I understand what the Governor is trying to accomplish with this action, but I must respectfully disagree and urge the Governor to reconsider his executive order.”

Now, Aghazarian is talking out of both sides of his mouth.  He’s trying to win a Senate election against Lois Wolk in SD-05, and he wants to be seen as some kind of moderate when his record suggests the opposite.  But the fact that he’s gone off the reservation means that there’s a lot of pressure to come out against the Governor on this one, putting him alone on an island of his own making.  It’s important to keep pounding away and make him completely unpopular and unable to help his party in the fall as a result of this stupid, heartless action.

The Governor has set up a Web site to answer employee questions about the wage cut.  Predictably, it has no interactive function.  If he allowed comments on it the server would be down.