(bumped – promoted by David Dayen)

Links!

• Last week, we said Justice Delayed is Justice Denied. Because of budget cuts, the Alameda County Public Defender said they can’t take more cases. This is very, very dangerous stuff.

• You’ll be happy to know that Arnold is planning on an ambitious 2010.  And what bold techniques, what out-of-the-box initiatives, what amazing knock-yer-socks-off ideas, will Governor Hoover come up with to round out his career?  “Details haven’t been firmed up, but a ‘large brainstorming’ session is imminent, says Matt David, the governor’s communications director.”  In other words, get back to us once we figure out what the Governor believes.

• We’re #4! Yay! There are three states with a worse percentage of insured residents: Florida, Louisiana, and Texas in dead last.  Well, at least we kicked the “up and coming” Texans’ ass

• The California Citizen’s Redistricting Commission has posted its initial reports, including the proposed regulations for participants and a tentative calendar for implementation.  From what I’ve read about this thing, given the vetoes that individual citizens can have over the process it’s not a bad bet that judges will end up drawing all the districts anyway, which will be hilarious.

• The next round of cuts will be municipalities after the state stole their money.  San Jose will have to cut almost $100 million.

• Will your kid get to keep their Healthy Families insurance? Better pray on it. Coming just a few months after President Obama signed an expansion of Healthy Families, this is very troubling.

• Seems like the CDP is finally paying attention to organizing a grassroots base–campaign training events are being held throughout the state, beginning the weekend of the 22nd in Ventura.  To sign up for one, check out the site.

Have a great weekend; here are some links to keep you occupied:

• The Bee has a database where you can see how much money Sacramento took from the municipalities across the state.  From SF, my home, they took over $75 million.

• Awww, shucks. Sarah Palin isn’t coming to Simi Valley after all. Well, there goes my plans for the day!

• The ACLU and United Farm Workers finally sued the state for worker safety violations against 650,000 migrants and farm laborers.  Ten farms have already been shut down this year for violations, but Cal-OHSA simply does not have the resources to carry out its mission of protecting employees from workplace hazards.  Most of the violations have to do with heat injuries; in the most egregious example, workers who were putting tarps over watermelons to keep them from burning had no access to overhead tarps themselves.

• Rep. Anna Eshoo (CA-13) has co-sponsored a net neutrality bill in the House with Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA).  The Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009 would write into law the current system of a free and open Internet and prevent telecom companies from becoming gatekeepers exacting a price for fast content.  Thanks, Rep. Eshoo.

• Fallout from the cuts to the state judiciary keep pouring in.

• Arnold hasn’t taken a position on the Harvey Milk Day bill as of yet. He vetoed it last year, but with President Obama posthumously bestowing the Presidential Medal of Freedom on him, perhaps things may change.

• An interesting website from the California League of Conservation Voters about an astro-turfing group that actually has some very, um, fishy motives.

• A non-profit has formed to consider buying the Orange County Fairgrounds from the state. Now there’s just the Herculean task of raising a boatload of money.

Links:

• I’m surprised it took this long: “A California vendor sued state officials Wednesday for paying bills with IOUs, calling the notes an unconstitutional dead weight on small businesses everywhere.”  Nancy Baird, a small businesswoman from SLO, brought the suit.

• Good DiFi: She offered a bill in the Senate to specifically ban aerial wolf hunting.  Whether it has to do with Sarah Palin or not, this practice has no place in civilized society.

• Bad DiFi: she misunderstands the reason automakers are leaving the state, not just because of race-to-the-bottom interstate tax breaks, but because of the crushing burden of health care costs in the US rather than Canada and Mexico.  DiFi is dragging her feet on the health care bill but trying to keep businesses in California who want to leave because of the crappy health care system.

• Hey, having trouble planning for all the new tax regulations that have come out of this budget “deal?” Well, you could call the Franchise Tax Board’s help desk.  But…they just cut their hours, so you better be able to call between regular business hours.

• Not cool: The Assembly expunged the record of the vote on the Tranquillion Ridge Drilling Project, which went down by a 28-43 vote. The funny thing about this is that Chuck DeVore is absolutely right that this only draws attention to the vote. CapitolWeekly has the story as well as the vote tally.  And if you want to look at the Assembly and Senate vote tallies for all the other trailer bills, reader California Condor has posted them. Assembly, Senate.

• Mark Leno was out in Washington today, attending events for single-payer health care.  Leno is carrying SB810, California’s single-payer bill.  Leno is in particular promoting an amendment by Dennis Kucinich that would allow states to explore single-payer alternatives no matter what national health care reform passes Congress.

• BART negotiations continue, but they are reaching a point of no return. If they don’t get a deal soon, BART plans on imposing terms. That, of course, will almost certainly result in a strike. Either way, expect some sort of major news on this by the weekend.

• Professors at CSU have agreed to take two furlough days per month. The trouble with professors taking furlough days is that the workload really doesn’t change, so they just have to spend their personal time doing the work. Crazy stuff really.

Bits and pieces from around the state this Wednesday:

• Jerry Brown took some heat over charitable solicitations. This story is rewritten every few months, just swap in a new name. Here it is for Fabian Nunez, and here’s oh, look, Rick Santorum. Either we need to regulate this stuff, or quit acting shocked when we hear about it. There are worse things for politicians to be doing than raising money for charities.

• A House ethics panel is taking a look at Rep. Laura Richardson’s Sacramento-area home, which you may remember she let it fall into disrepair and fell so far behind on the payments it fell into foreclosure, only when someone bought it at auction, Richardson allegedly used her clout with Washington Mutual to get the deed returned to her.  Why nobody is considering a primary against Richardson is beyond me.

• More news on the BART negotiations.

• HuffPo has a map of counties with higher unemployment than the national average. Guess which state is almost entirely in the wrong color.

• More maps!  Pete Stark (CA-13) has put together a tagged Google map indicating each appropriation to the district approved through the federal stimulus package.  This is innovative, but it’s hard to cut through the right-wing rhetoric that the stimulus has done nothing of value.

• Public comment at the Santa Cruz City Council looks like a transcendent experience.

• The Jewish Family Services condemned the Governor’s social services cuts (PDF).

• There’s a little tiff between Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, and Jack O’Connell, our own Superintendent of Public Instruction.  Duncan chided the state for not tying test scores to teacher assessments, O’Connell says that isn’t true.

• The president of Oaksterdam University and an East Bay marijuana group have submitted a measure to place legalization, regulation, and taxation of marijuana on the ballot.  If people want to seriously talk about this, they should at least take a look at Mark Kleiman’s compelling criticism of the state Board of Equalization’s scoring of the potential revenue benefits of legalized marijuana.

Other various items:

• CalBuzz has a slightly different take from me (Brian) on the exit of Eric Jaye. Look, it’s not that I think Newsom can win running to the Right of Jerry Brown at this point. It’s just that it is very hard to imagine a Newsom campaign managed by Garry South effectively embracing the progressive grassroots of the Democratic Party. I do have some background with the grassroots of the Democratic Party, Newsom here in SF, and with Jaye. He certainly is no darling of the Left here. That being said, he had a decent idea of how to talk to the grassroots. I just don’t know that South can do that.

• Steve Maviglio speculates about alternative candidates to Brown and Newsom on the Democratic side in the Governor’s race.  I personally think it’s fairly late in the game, but the grassroots certainly wouldn’t mind an additional choice, and some of those names – Jackie Speier! – are interesting.  And the John Burton flyer is kind of hilarious.

• The best and most concise document listing the (illegal?) line-item vetoes put forth by the Governor is at the Sac Bee.  Dig in.

• Good news on the home sale front, of a fashion. Mortgage defaults are down in California, but notices of foreclosure are up nationally, and banks are staffing up for more foreclosures this fall.

• Sandre Swanson talks about his mostly no vote on the state budget revision to Josh Richman.

• Thanks to Bruce Brugmann for quoting Calitics in his lead Bay Guardian editorial.  Who would have thought the guy whose head San Franciscans have seen on bus signs and newsstands for years would think the click over?

• Jon Ortiz at The State Worker tries to nail down the truth about public employee pay raises.  It’s a mixed bag.  Looks like salary raises and the Consumer Price Index are somewhat intertwined, but by no means out of control, and they’ve taken an extreme dive in the past year.

• UCSC won a legal tussle over federal funding vis-a-vis their position against military recruiting.

• The Port of Oakland is working on cleaning up some of the exhaust from the idling trucks.

News from around the state:

• To say public power is a politically explosive topic in SF is a huge understatement.  Today, PG&E wades into it again with a new committee.

• A small (126 members) band of Pomo Indians from Mendocino Country are trying to build a very large fancy casino in Richmond.  The City of Richmond supports the plan, but there are many who aren’t so enamored with the idea. There are a series of hoops left to jump through, so this is far from a done deal.

• Henry Waxman and the House Energy and Commerce Committee have released a district-by-district rundown of how the House health care bill will impact every single district.  The analysis “includes information on the impact of the legislation on small businesses, seniors in Medicare, health care providers, and the uninsured. It also includes an estimate of the impacts of the surtax that is used to pay for the legislation.” It’s a good resource for folks calling their Representatives.

• Sign of the times: the Osteopathic Medical Board cannot afford to buy toner for their only copier.  Once the real horror stories from this budget get out, this will be the least of our worries.

• Meg Whitman gets another endorsement, Bill Simon. Not sure if this one makes a huge difference, it’s not like Simon is really a huge name any more.

• Some longtime wingnut has served Alyson Huber with recall papers.  It isn’t clear to me exactly what she’s done wrong, but this was a contested district, and appears to just be a naked attempt to avoid a regular timeframe for a contested election in the hopes of stealing a seat in a low-turnout special.  We’ll see if enough people sign on.

• More negotiations between BART and the unions to try to make some progress in getting a labor deal.

• Sad news that Inola Henry, most recently a DNC member from California and the lead chair of the CDP Resolutions Committee, has passed away.  RIP.

Apparently other things have happened while the Legislature was pulling an all-nighter:

• Rasmussen is not a good pollster and they often skew right, but the trend looks better for Carly Fiorina against Sen. Barbara Boxer, with the latest show Boxer up 45-41, compared to 47-38 in March.  Those results are basically within the margin of error of one another, so I wouldn’t be too alarmed.  Meanwhile, did you know that anonymous sources find Boxer abrasive and outspoken?  I know because Politico told me.  Amazing how the anonymous commentary on successful women always seems to line up, huh?

UPDATE: Sen. Boxer is looking for health care horror stories at her website.

• Dianne Feinstein is still being a jerk on health care.  With the Senate due to recess before passing a bill, she’s going to have to be told by her constituents on that break that we want a good bill with a public option.

• Hopes of those who want to see marijuana legalized and taxed were dashed by the White House drug czar, who said today, “Legalization is not in the president’s vocabulary, and it’s not in mine.”  I would remind folks that there’s cost savings in decriminalization, too, savings to the prisons and the criminal justice system.  So that could be a fallback.

• The President also announced the “Race to the Top” contest for education stimulus funds today, but as long as California doesn’t use student test scores to evaluate teacher performance, the state will not qualify for the money.  Now that could spark an interesting debate inside the education community.

• Lots happening in the CA-10 race: John Garamendi took the coveted Cal Labor Fed endorsement as well as the Napa-Solano Central Labor Council (Solano County is in the district).  Mark DeSaulnier keeps picking up local endorsements.  Joan Buchanan took the endorsement of EMILYs List, though I thought their principle was that early money is like yeast – aren’t we five weeks out at this point?  And Anthony Woods, in a major coup, scored the endorsement of the Human Rights Campaign and the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, which should give him lots of money and volunteer support.  It was notable that DeSaulnier dropped endorsements of local LGBT leaders right after that announcement – obviously Woods has become a threat.  You can see Anthony Woods tonight on Real Time With Bill Maher on HBO.  And Calitics has interviews with Woods and DeSaulnier that they will roll out in the next week or so.

Some more news from around the state:

• In CA-10, Anthony Woods is hosting a town hall meeting in Fairfield. Info on events page here and on facebook.  Joan Buchanan is “on tour.” She’s visiting local businesses because “Buchanan means business.” Details in her “Buchanan Bugle e-Newsletter” or here. For his part, John Garamendi is working on expanding a bike trail, which is “healthy for us and the environment.” Sen. DeSaulnier continues to pick up local labor endorsements.  Adriel Hampton has created a NationBuilder site to allow citizens to supply him with ideas and priorities for Congress.  Also, a Republican left off the ballot is suing to get back on because of the mere 3-day period given to collect signatures in lieu of the filing fee.

• CA-48 challenger Beth Krom has jumped on Birther John Campbell’s Hardball appearance with an email to supporters.  An excerpt:

While we have preferred to focus our campaign on our strengths rather than our opponents weaknesses, the current Representative from the 48th District was featured on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews yesterday defending his decision to co-sponsor legislation requiring candidates for the Presidency to produce a certified birth certificate.

Apparently he considers this issue more important than healthcare, education, the economy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and any number of other legitimate issues.

• MediaMatters calls out NBC News for calling the budget deal “shared sacrifice” and not mentioning how the wealthy actually sacrifice anything in this deal.

• Apparently you can’t take away 15 percent of their income without affecting state workers. Huh, who knew? Well, not Arnold Schwarzenegger…or something like that.

• Kids Will Die.  A non-controversial statement of consequences to this budget.  They will.

• DiFi lead the effort to defeat Sen. John Thune’s attempt to radically change the way California and other states grant permission to carry a concealed weapon. It went down by a vote of 58-39.

• Sacramento’s office vacancy rate continues to rise.

• We noted the impending increase of CSU fees last week. It became official yesterday.

Some other news from around the state:

• CalPERS issued a report on the status of the fund.  And, well, it isn’t pretty. CalPERS holdings are down 23% for 2008. Meanwhile, CalSTRS is down 25% for 2008. Ouch. However, CalPERS spokespeople are saying that they will have no problem meeting their current obligations in the short term.

• Check out this video of John Yoo getting pranked by British TV at his Berkeley Law class.  Why is British comedy so much more daring than American comedy?  Or American news?

• If we go by the fundraising numbers, Barbara Boxer looks safe for re-election.  She has a war chest of $4.6 million dollars to this point.

• In the continuing saga of Delecia Holt, a former Republican Congressional Candidate, there are some new charges.  She’s facing fraud charges for allegedly stealing $56,000 from a number of people and companies.

• LA medical marijuana dispensaries are begging to be taxed rather than run out of business as the City Council closes a loophole that allowed them to proliferate.

• The City of Sacramento might try to purchase $10 million (or so) of California IOUs. A service to the public and an investment, all in one.

• Sen. Mark Leno has introduced a bill to recognize same-sex marriages from outside the state. There are a number of issues here. First, Californians who were married outside of California during or prior to the period of gay marriages last year were told they were now legally married in California after the decision went into effect. Then, a little more questionable is whether couples married after Prop 8 passed can be recognized.

Apparently there was something to do with a budget today? Hmm, well, here are some links:

• (Soon to be?) Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is coming to SoCal. If you are a member of the press and want to come, well, fugedaboudit.

• Apparently SF Supervisor Michaela Alioto-Pier is running for insurance commissioner. The timing of this is certainly interesting, as last week a slew of SF politicos endorsed Asm. Dave Jones. Other than her one successful election as an incumbent, she’s aslo been defeated in two attempts at Secretary of State and a run at CA-01 against Mike Thompson.

• Marianne Williamson wasn’t able to make it onto the ballot for the CA-10 special election. The spiritual advisor to Oprah will now have to try to run as a write-in candidate. As she has no party affiliation, it is unclear how this will all work with the run-off.

• The FDIC took over some banks in Southern California over the weekend: Vineyard Bank and Temecula Valley Bank