OK, on Saturday the Secretary of State’s office released the final official canvass of the vote in California.  The statewide numbers are here.  The district-level numbers are here.  A few notes:

• Turns out that, in final balloting, Hillary Clinton surged to 62.88% of the head-to-head vote in CA-51, giving her a 3-1 split in that district.  So the final delegate numbers will be 204-166.  So Clinton got 54.4% of the head-to-head vote against Barack Obama, and 55.14% of the delegates.

• The final percentage spread between Clinton and Obama was 8.3%, noticeably lower than previous reports.

• We had over 5 million voters participate in the California Democratic primary.  That’s 55% of the total votes cast and over SEVENTY-FOUR PERCENT of registered Democratic voters.  Wow.  Those numbers are here.  We also received two million more votes in the Democratic primary than in the Republican primary.  The total turnout was the highest ever by raw numbers, and the highest as a percentage of registered voters since 1980, when some guy named Reagan was on the ballot.

You can get to all the numbers from here, a lot of fun stuff in there.

It looks as if the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights is planning on going to the ballot in 2010 with a proposal to basically do to the health insurance industry what Proposition 103 did to the auto insurance industry.

“We are going ahead with this,” said Jamie Court, president of the Santa Monica-based Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights. “The only thing that would block this is if the single-payer (universal health care) folks want to go ahead and go to the ballot, or if a new president wants to do something more ambitious. In that case, we would back off.” […]

The plan would remove HMOs from the regulatory authority of the state Department of Managed Health Care, which is headed by an appointee of the governor, and place them in the California Department of Insurance, which is run by a publicly elected commissioner. It would order HMOs and others to get their rates approved in advance by the state and force them to justify those rates; rates judged to be “arbitrary or capricious” would be thrown out. Rescinding coverage after an illness sets in would be outlawed. Extra costs for special services, the so-called “out-of-pocket maximums” – would be capped, as would prescription drug costs. Patients would not be penalized for changing doctors or care plans. The HMOs and others would be required to submit detailed financial information to state regulators, who would have the authority to penalize companies for violations and seize and operate companies whose fiscal condition was suspect. There would be language making it easier to sue HMOs and others, and those who bring lawsuits in furtherance of the initiative would be compensated for their time – as in Proposition 103.

This would spark maybe the most expensive initiative fight since Prop. 87 in 2006.  In general, if you’re going to remain with a for-profit health insurance system, then regulating it to provide for the fairness of California citizens seems apt.  Prop. 103 has somehow not left Californians without car insurance.  This is a valuable market for that industry, and the same with health insurers.

This could get interesting…

So as expected, Assembly Republicans killed a bill that would bring California in line with every other oil-extracting state and charge obscenely rich oil companies for taking our natural resources out of the ground.

With gasoline prices soaring, legislation to slap the oil industry with higher taxes died in the Assembly late Wednesday in the latest party-line battle over the state’s beleaguered budget.

Republicans killed the two-pronged oil tax proposed by Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, which they considered a threat to the state’s economy as well as political gamesmanship meant more for public relations than problem solving.

In turn, Núñez said at a news conference before the vote that the GOP could not continue to push “knee-jerk, no-tax rhetoric” without coming to grips with its effect on schools and other public services.

Speaker Núñez is in a tough spot, faced with a recalcitrant Yacht & Oil Party who is wedded to failed ideology.  The best he can do is to continue to offer these proposals, argue forcefully for them, and hold the opposition accountable for their votes in November.  On a blogger conference call earlier today, the Speaker talked about PTA members from red districts coming to the Capitol to protest these extreme education cuts.  The Yacht & Oil Party will absolutely face a backlash if they keep this up.  Democrats are making the differences clear, and that’s the best we can hope for at the moment.

Another thing – what exactly is up with this argument from the Yacht & Oil Party that the Speaker timed his proposal to coincide with layoff notices from school districts?  I didn’t realize that POLITICS was out of bounds in the political arena.  Of course it coincided; the only way you get people in this state to pay attention to what’s happening in Sacramento is by taking advantage of opportunities to show the stark philosophical differences.  Saying that “you’re not allowed to tell people the consequences of our policies” is a loser argument for a loser party.

So I’m watching Countdown, and Olbermann brings up the delegate math in the wake of Barack Obama’s victory in Mississippi.  He teases a discussion with Chuck Todd about “changes in the delegates in Texas, one week after the voting, and changes in the delegates in California, one MONTH later!”

So I think to myself, “Self, are you about to be mentioned on Countdown?”  Because, as has been well-documented, it was changes originated on this website that led to the national media meekly changing their delegate totals to reflect reality.

So Chuck Todd comes on the show, and Olbermann asks him about California, and Todd hems and haws about there being “a lot of absentee and provisional ballots counted late” in the state, which is true, and about how some 3-1 delegate splits in various districts changed to 2-2, which is also true.  Then he said, “and so when all the votes came in, it turns out Obama netted four delegates out of these districts in the last week.” (rough transcript)

Yeah, that’s actually kind of a lie.  There has been no movement in the delegate count since CA-53 flipped to Obama on February 15.  Most of the delegate changes happened very early.  MSNBC just turned away from the counting, neglected to pay attention, and now makes the demonstrably false statement that Obama netted delegates “in the last week.”

What actually happened was that my post about the real delegate counts got picked up by the Wall Street Journal and shamed the entire national media into getting it right.  But I guess that wouldn’t sound too good on Countdown.

It’ll sound good in my email to Keith.

We don’t have a state that’s given to paying attention to policy debates in Sacramento.  The political media is woefully thin and getting thinner, people are simply distracted by struggling to stay afloat economically, and any politics that actually does penetrate the state consciousness is national, like what surrogate said what about what Presidential candidate.  So it’s something of a shock to see so many flashpoints on the California budget fight, with particular respect to the potential defunding of education.  As notices about imminent budget cuts go out to state teachers, and school boards set their budgets for the 2008-2009 school year, Californians are waking up – almost entirely at once – to the enormity of this situation.  The idea that we can give pink slips to tens of thousands of teachers without exploring the far more sensible option of reviewing the structural revenue model in the state and making it reflect current needs and collective responsibility has really enraged parents, teachers, administrators and students.

It takes a lot to get California residents and voters interested in state public policy. But we may be on the cusp of something big here-of the magnitude of what led to Proposition 13 on property taxes in 1978 and the recall election in 2003 of Gray Davis that brought us Arnold Schwarzenegger as our Governor. In fact, when it comes to 2003, some are suggesting that Arnold is the same as Gray. If you have a couple of minutes, take a look at this local television news report and see how unhappy the Governor is with the comparison.

California is earthquake country and sometimes the ground moves slowly with a series of barely detectable minor quakes, but sometimes it shakes violently and new fault lines are seen. As the San Jose Mercury News put it:

“…there’s no denying the emotional power generated by thousands of teacher pink slips in schools all over the state.

“It’s difficult for people to grasp a debate over something as abstract as the budget,” said Fred Silva, a budget expert and fiscal policy analyst at Beacon Economics. “But how much your public school is going to have for an arts program, or a reading program, is not abstract at all.”

Frank Russo details the number of protests that have broken out statewide, mostly from grassroots groups.  When they line up with the growing coalition of traditional interest groups (education, labor, public safety, environment, health care and social services), the pressure on the Governor and legislative Republicans to recognize that California is worth paying for and that the public would be furious at across-the-board cuts will be enormous.  Just yesterday school superintendents, parents and kids rallied on the Capitol steps, and Jack O’Connell found something else to emphasize (over):

By the time Jack O’Connell, California’s state Superintendent of Public Instruction, made his way through the crowd to speak, he was greeted with thunderous applause and a warm hug. He fired up the crowd, telling them what they already knew-but his words were clearly destined for those in legislative session inside the building and to Governor Schwarzenegger, who was in Fairfield, delivering a speech on carpenter apprenticeship programs. He charged the Governor with an “abdication of one’s responsibility to set values and priorities” in proposing a 10% across the board set of budget cuts and characterized the $4.8 billion of cuts to education as a “hostile suspension of Prop 98,” noting that the voters in passing that measure had supported educational funding and had confirmed that priority 3 years ago-a reference to their rejection of a ballot measure in Schwarzenegger’s special election of 2005 that would have weakened it.

O’Connell was just one of the speakers who tied education to our future, our economy as a state, to reductions in imprisonment and crime, and to moral values. He said: “If you want to invest in the future, you invest in public education. If you want to shortchange the future, then you shortchange education. The cuts being proposed would be devastating to education. It would be a great step backwards.”

He directly challenged the Governor and Republicans on the framing of this issue: “We don’t have a spending problem. Our problem is with our priorities. When you hear people say we have a spending problem, you tell them we have a values problem. We have a problem with or priorities. That is why we need to make sure that the public policy document for the state of California is one that invests in the future.”

This is an unusual moment, where street-level organizing and grassroots action is really dominating the news.  The last time we saw this was when the Governor’s special election initiatives were thoroughly defeated in 2005.  A more confrontational politics is a direct result of a more confrontational grassroots.  Lines in the sand are being drawn.  This is an interesting time to be covering state politics.

The Wall Street Journal has a writeup on my findings of the discrepancy between the national media’s California delegate counts and, you know, the actual count.  

A California politics blogger has argued that Sen. Clinton won 36 more pledged delegates in the state than Sen. Obama, rather than the 44-delegate margin that has long been included in the news organizations’ tallies. A spokesman for the state party confirms the blogger’s numbers.

The shift, if validated once the state certifies its election results this week and the party chooses its delegates, is a reminder that the commonly reported delegate totals are mere estimates, subject to change as states finalize election results. It also highlights how a blogger with intense focus on the numbers may be faster than the established delegate counters.

David Dayden, who blogs at the site Calitics and serves on its editorial board, wrote last week that Sen. Clinton won 203 of the state’s 370 pledged delegates – and not the commonly reported total of 207. He relied on updated vote totals from the state, based on late counts of absentee and provisional ballots. Later, when he noticed that several major news organizations still were showing Sen. Clinton with 207 delegates, he wrote a follow-up post explaining his calculation and exhorting, “I know math is hard and everything, but get out your calculators, people.”

I’ve long since given up on trying to correct the misspelling of my name, the most misspelled five-letter word in the English language.  But the author did a good job describing the situation.  The “delegate counters” at the media outlets have pretty much ignored these states once Election Day ends.  As Bob Mulholland rightly points out in the piece, this count has been this way for at least two weeks.  There was ample time to catch up.  But it took public pressure to get them to do it:

The New York Times’s page for California results shows the 207-163 result, but a page listing delegate totals for each state showed the 203-167 margin. NBC and CBS still showed the 207-163 margin. An inquiry to New York Times polling editor Janet Elder wasn’t returned. An NBC spokesman told me, “Apparently, there are discrepancies between the state count and the individual county tallies.” Kathy Frankovic, director of surveys for CBS News, told me, “delegate allocation is a work in progress.” (UPDATE: Ms. Frankovic told me later Monday that CBS would update its totals to reflect the 203-167 margin. “Thanks for alerting us to the problem,” she said.)

NBC is spinning madly.  They just stopped paying attention.

The official canvass will be done on March 15, and we’ll know at that point what the final number is.  Until then, I wouldn’t trust anything on those “delegate scoreboards”.

Congressional Democrats are now trying to move legislation that would overturn the EPA’s anti-scientific decision which denied California a waiver to regulate their own tailpipe emissions.  Arnold Schwarzenegger is suing the EPA.  It seems that the only group of people who aren’t on board with this policy are Republican members of Congress.

Most GOP members of the state’s congressional delegation are siding with the Bush administration in trying to keep states from imposing stricter regulations on greenhouse gas emissions than the federal government. Without bipartisan support from the state’s representatives, the bill’s proponents say, the measure’s prospects are dim.

“I don’t support California thinking that it can act alone effectively,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), noting that climate change is a problem that extends beyond state lines.

A House bill to allow California and other states to implement their own tailpipe regulations was introduced last week, with the support of 27 of the 33 California Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco. Only two of the 19 Republicans — Rep. David Dreier of San Dimas, who is perhaps Schwarzenegger’s closest ally in the delegation, and Rep. Mary Bono Mack of Palm Springs — signed on as cosponsors.

In addition to Issa, John Campbell, Kevin McCarthy, George Radanovich, Devin Nunes and Wally Herger are quoted, all saying a variation of how global warming is a big problem and we have to have a unified solution.  Of course, 18 other states are signing on to California’s lawsuit, representing a majority of the population who actually wants to do something abut climate change.  

I really think this has the potential of politically isolating the GOP.  It’s notable that Dreier and Bono Mack understand that their districts are becoming more purplish, and that they need to stay out in front of them.  But the combination of hypocrisy among the state’s rights crowd and being on the wrong side of popular opinion (most California Republicans favor granting the waiver) and scientific rationality could make for a powerful wedge.  We know that people are finally starting to drive less.  Utilities are starting to block production of any and all coal-fired power plants.  And there’s a growing recognition that this is a public health issue as much as it is an environmental issue.  Those who are standing in the way of renewable projects, alternative energy solutions, and yes, government mandates to solve the problem are dinosaurs.  At the Congressional level, I believe this vote will resonate in November.

Incidentally, if you want to see some of that post-partisan leadership in action, check it out:

Schwarzenegger spokesman Bill Maile said the governor supports the legislation. By allowing California to implement “the nation’s toughest tailpipe regulations,” he said, “it will help us achieve our aggressive goals to reduce greenhouse gases.” But a number of California Republicans in Congress say that they have yet to hear from Schwarzenegger or his office.

Way to put the pressure on, Guv.