It may not happen this year, but CA-03 will be Democratic territory before too long.

Republican voter registration in California is on the decline, but nowhere is the effect more pronounced than in the Sacramento region’s 3rd Congressional District.

Incumbent Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Gold River, now has the slimmest registration edge of any Republican-held congressional district in the state.

According to district registration figures updated before the Feb. 5 primary election by the secretary of state’s office, the Republican advantage over Democratic registration has slipped below five percentage points, 41.6 percent to 36.9 percent. Before the 2006 general election, the GOP margin was almost 6.6 points.

This was made pretty clear when the percentage of Democratic turnout in the February 5 primary was 53.1%, also the largest of any Republican-held district in the state.  There’s something definitely happening in this district, most of which is located in Sacramento County.  The demographics are shifting and Democrats have been very aggressive in registering new voters.  Debra Bowen’s focus on increasing registration led to thousands of new voters placed onto the rolls before the primary, and the residual effect of that is more Democrats.  They of course need to be turned out.  But it’s clear that Lungren is paying attention to this development.  After Bill Durston launched an effort to highlight Lungren’s terrible environmental record (he has a 5% rating from the League of Conservation Voters), Lungren took a walk on the most recent environmental vote in the House – a vote to eliminate subsidies for oil companies and re-route those tax breaks to renewable energy companies.  He was the ONLY California Republican in Congress to miss the vote; everyone else voted against it.  Lungren obviously feels some vulnerabilities on this, and he need look no further than at Richard Pombo.  The LCV listed him as one of their “Dirty Dozen” in 2006, and that year, not only did Pombo end up losing, but 9 of the 13 “Dirty Dozen” (I guess it was a baker’s dozen) lost as well.

If Bill Durston could secure some outside resources like that, this could be the sleeper Congressional race of 2008 in California.  Keep an eye on this one.

Just a few things to get you through the weekend:

• If you’re interested in helping Barack Obama but aren’t flying to Ohio or Texas like Brian and Julia, the Obama campaign is urging supporters in California to make phone calls into Texas this weekend.  MoveOn is also running Yes We Can parties on Saturday and Sunday.

• Let’s not give the Governor a heap of credit just yet for accepting the Legislative Analyst’s suggestions to close billions of dollars in tax loopholes.  According to the Sacramento Bee he ran away from this proposal within a matter of hours.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told business leaders Thursday he supports a proposal by nonpartisan Legislative Analyst Elizabeth Hill to rescind $2.7 billion in tax credits, but he later softened that stance and said he doesn’t necessarily support all of her recommendations.

The Governor will be in Columbus this weekend for the Arnold Classic, an annual bodybuilding and fitness event, so if you get a minute, Juls, you can go ask him about this yourself!

• Tired of being bashed with the facts over the past several weeks, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson has come out swinging, defending his decision to deny the California waiver to regulate tailpipe emissions on the grounds that global warming is a global problem.  Which means, of course, we need to do less to fight it.  Also today the EPA turned over documents related to their decision, months after they were requested.

• On a somewhat different note, I’m interested in this protest by the environmental justice community against cap-and-trade solutions such as what is promised in California as unfair to low-income communities, which are disproportionately affected by polluting industries that would be able to buy their way into continuing to pollute those areas.  

EJ groups, long overlooked in the more mainstream environmental movement, fear that climate legislation will once again disregard the concerns of the communities who are already most affected by the factories and refineries responsible for global warming. In a cap-and-trade system, poor communities, where polluting plants are most often sited, will still bear the brunt of impacts if industries are allowed to trade for rights to pollute there. Instead of this system, they’re advocating a carbon tax, direct emissions reductions, and meaningful measures to move America to clean, renewable energy sources.

“[C]arbon trading is undemocratic because it allows entrenched polluters, market designers, and commodity traders to determine whether and where to reduce greenhouse gases and co-pollutant emissions without allowing impacted communities or governments to participate in those decisions,” says the statement.

I think it’s a powerful argument, and something the environmental movement has to seriously consider.  If we’re going to allow polluting industries to pollute, there will be an adverse affect.  How do we deal with that?

• In yet another reason why we should not allow the continued consolidation of media, new LA Times owner Sam Zell has now taken to the airwaves, blaming the coming recession on… Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama talking about the coming recession.  Yeah, shut up already!  This is the owner of the largest paper in California requesting what amounts to censorship, incidentally.

• Finally, a federal judge in San Francisco today lifted the injunction on the Wikileaks website, which allowed whistleblowers to post documents and anonymous information about government and corporate malfeasance.  A win for the First Amendment and the public interest.

Add your own links in the comments.  

I have a post up at Hullabaloo, where I’m proud to be writing, about the disturbing new Pew report which shows that more than 1 in 100 adults in this country are behind bars, and when you add in the parole and probation system it’s probably more like 1 in 50.  This is fast becoming the biggest problem that state legislatures face, and in California it’s magnified by soaring costs, overcrowding, and a continued fealty to “Tough on Crime” solutions.

I highlighted what two red states are doing as a novel solution, something we could certainly try in California instead of our haphazard collection of early release and building more jails and nixing independent sentencing commissions:

Kansas and Texas are well on their way. Facing daunting projections of prison population growth, they have embraced a strategy that blends incentives for reduced recidivism with greater use of community supervision for lower-risk offenders. In addition, the two states increasingly are imposing sanctions other than prison for parole and probation violators whose infractions are considered “technical,” such as missing a counseling session. The new approach, born of bipartisan leadership, is allowing the two states to ensure they have enough prison beds for violent offenders while helping less dangerous lawbreakers become productive, taxpaying citizens.

The comments over there are, as usual, great, and I wanted to open the discussion here.  Plus we haven’t had an open thread in a while, so here ya go.

UPDATE by Julia: Watch the video on the Yacht Party.

UPDATE by Robert: Arnold’s now getting in on the follies – the SacBee reports he said he agreed with Elizabeth Hill’s call to close $2.7 billion in tax expenditures but then backtracked a little while later.

Judy Lin at the SacBee took a look at the Yacht Party’s bankrupt arguments about how we simply have to enable tax evasion or poor people are going to starve.

“The immigrant who sprays fiberglass on a boat will lose his job. The small-business owner who installs avionics on an airplane will lose his business,” state Sen. Dennis Hollingsworth of Temecula told GOP members during a Feb. 15 floor debate. “Those are the people who are going to be affected by this. It’s not the rich.”

You know, never does a day go by that the Yacht Party doesn’t show its deep respect and concern for immigrants.  Somehow, though, I have the sneaking suspicion that they’re being, what do I call it, completely disingenuous.  The Legislative Analyst has correctly described this as tax evasion, the Governor has correctly described this as tax evasion, even the TAX EVADERS have correctly described this as legalized tax evasion.

Chuck Lenert, 57, of Sacramento saved nearly $30,000 in taxes when he bought a used 58-foot Kha Shing motorboat near Victoria, Canada, three years ago. It came with a docking slip in Canada, he said, so it was cheaper to leave it there and pay an attorney $2,500 to ensure his tax status was in order with the state.

“I was just following the rules of the state of California, so why should I pay sales tax?” Lenert said. “I wasn’t trying to do anything but follow the law.”

For a year, Lenert, who sells hardware for a living, would travel every few weeks with his family and friends and take the $376,000 vessel, named Knots and Bolts, around the waters off Vancouver Island to catch crabs, salmon, oysters and shrimp. After a year, he moved the boat to Washington state.

“I would say that the 90-day guys are more cheaters,” said Lenert, who has since brought the boat down to Sacramento. “I had a bona fide use.”

Not that it should even be a question, but contrary to the Yacht Party’s protestations, actually making yacht owners pay their sales tax would have no material effect on sales whatsoever.

The analyst’s report found that a longer exemption period had little impact on manufacturers and sellers because their products sell nationwide.

Tim DeMartini, owner of DeMartini RV in Grass Valley, said the length of the exemption doesn’t affect his business because two-thirds of his orders come from outside California. The average 40-foot big diesel, he said, sells for $150,000.

“It won’t make that much difference to us,” DeMartini said, adding that the impact might be greater for the buyer.

Due to this “conflicting” information, Yacht Party members are just so gosh darn confused about the issue that they’d rather just walk away from it, which has the added benefit of, you know, saving Commodore Ackerman’s yacht tax.

“I haven’t been able to conclude which argument makes the most sense,” said Assemblyman Roger Niello, R-Fair Oaks, who abstained from the vote.

As for Dan Walters’ predictable media “he said, she said” argument, I think there’s a slight difference between yacht owners avoiding sales tax and income tax credits for children for working-class families.  Call me nuts.

Yesterday I noted how the Governor is trying to lower the Medi-Cal rolls by increasing the paperwork for enrollees and hoping that they’ll get tripped up by the process.  This is officially a trend.

Midnight on March 1 — Saturday — recently became the deadline for students to apply to seven Cal State campuses that traditionally accepted applications months later. An even earlier deadline, Feb. 1, has already passed for 16 other Cal State campuses

The root cause of the time crunch is a multibillion-dollar state deficit. In his provisional budget for next year, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger set Cal State’s share of reductions at $386.1 million. If that figure holds, schools have much difficult budget-cutting ahead. As a precaution, Chancellor Charles B. Reed limited the number of students by shortening the application period.

“An effort was made to try to slow down what was otherwise going to be a record year in enrollment,” said Jim Blackburn, director of enrollment management services in the chancellor’s office. Blackburn did not know of another time when Cal State sought to curtail students in this fashion. He noted, however, that campuses frequently stop reviewing new applications when they reach enrollment thresholds. The priority application period ended Nov. 30, which was the deadline for Cal State Long Beach and four other especially popular schools. Three other campuses would have closed by Feb. 1 regardless.

What we have here is a coward of a Governor, who instead of cutting programs wants to throw up sneaky barriers to entry in an effort to take the blame away from himself and toward those who need the services.  It’s about as scummy as you can get.  Frank Russo shares my disdain.

Is this what the great state of California is coming to? I thought, apparently naively, that we celebrated and cherished the desire of our young wanting to further their education and attend institutions of higher learning. Instead, because of the budget proposed by Governor Schwarzenegger for next year, and difficulties the California State University (CSU) system expects to have with cut backs, they are, with premeditation (but propbably without malice aforethought) advancing the deadline for applying and hoping that many students miss the deadline.

Now we see the “Year of Education” and the “Year of Healthcare” turned into the “Year of Changing Paperwork and Deadlines So We Can Kick People Off Education And Healthcare.”  The Legislative Analyst has already deemed the Governor’s budget unworkable.  I wonder what she’ll say about these latest efforts.

So, let’s see.  You’re the New York Times.  You’re a national paper, but you have a significant readership in California, so you want to cover the Left Coast every now and again.  You’re not on the ground in California, but you have a few reporters hither and yon, and press releases a go-go from the Governor’s office.  There’s a space in the paper for a California story, something that can show to the world the innovation and forward-thinking at work in the nation’s largest state.  So you look over what they’ve done for the last few days.

On the one hand, the Governor, just months from failing in a quest to massively expand health care to millions of uninsured Californians, has decided to go in the complete opposite direction and force Medi-Cal enrollees to fill out all kinds of paperwork in the hopes of knocking thousands off the rolls to save money.

Administration officials expect the rule will result in 122,000 people being dropped from the rolls next year, saving the state $92 million – money that the governor’s staff has already counted against the state’s deficit.

The plan calls for about 4.5 million of the 6.5 million enrollees of the Medi-Cal program to file eligibility forms with the state four times a year. Under existing law, children, some disabled people and pregnant women must reapply once a year, while parents are required to report twice annually.

The chore of filling out a form and sending it to regulators might sound simple enough, but for Medi-Cal recipients such as Ernie Campbell of Novato, who has hemophilia, the danger of losing coverage because of an unanticipated problem, such as a form being lost or delayed in the mail, is a serious one.

“The renewal process is already a lot of paperwork and they warn you if you don’t get everything in on time you could lose your coverage,” said Campbell, 31. “I think this could probably affect me pretty negatively.”

Sounds like something you’d want to cover.  You know, the story has an arc and some drama, with a callous Governor claiming the mantle of universal health care in public and trying to cast off the sick and the poor in private.  

On the other hand, there’s this somewhat meaningless move to create a cabinet-level position for volunteerism, an effort to outsource normal government functions, and let them rise and fall on volunteer efforts.  Seems like not much of a program at all, and certainly of less importance to everyday Californians than this plan to purge the Medi-Cal rolls.  Anyway there are plenty of volunteer organizations that perform these functions all the time.

Of course, The Times went ahead with the volunteer story.

Under the change, the governor’s commission for volunteerism, California Volunteers, will maintain its staffing and budget. But its executive director will gain expanded duties as a cabinet secretary, playing a role in disaster-related planning and response efforts and coordinating volunteers at disaster sites.

The office will also manage donations that flow into the state for disaster relief, a responsibility now held by the state’s Office of Emergency Response. It is the first time a governor’s commission overseeing federal money to manage volunteers – panels required by law since 1993 – has been elevated to a cabinet role.

Really no change at all, aside from a change in the faceplate on somebody’s office door.

But that fit the narrative of the “Governator is teh awesome” much, much better.  So off it goes to the front porches of all the Grey Lady’s readers.

And some people blame the 2006 election loss on Phil Angelides.  Ho-kay.