The June election is just around the corner, and vote-by-mail ballots are being sent out this week. It’s time for progressives to make their decisions on the five ballot propositions. And the Courage Campaign, joined by our friends at CREDO, are here to help!

As with the November 2008 election and the May 2009 special election, the Courage Campaign – where I work as Public Policy Director – has produced a Progressive Voter Guide. This year we’ve partnered with CREDO to bring the guide to you. It includes Courage Campaign and CREDO recommendations on the 5 propositions, as well as the recommendations of 8 other statewide progressive groups such as AFSCME, the California Nurses Association, the California Federation of Teachers, the California League of Conservation Voters – and of course, Calitics. (We’ll have more on the Calitics proposition endorsements in a separate post sometime this week.)

You can click here to get the guide as a PDF and send it to your family and friends. You can also get a mobile version of the guide sent to your phone by texting VOTECA to 30644.

One of the primary reasons Californians – and progressives in particular – don’t vote in these primary elections is a lack of information about the choices on the ballot. By providing this voter guide, we’re providing information – and that translates to voter turnout.

So please download the voter guide, or get it sent to your phone, and share it with your family and friends.

As California’s budget deficit returns to the front pages, and with the financial crisis in Greece already getting global attention, it was only a matter of time before people started to make the careless “California is America’s Greece!” connection. When one of those people is Jay Leno, you know the idea is getting traction – and is complete BS:

California’s budget woes were the butt of yet another joke last night.

This one comes from Jay Leno’s opening monologue. The late-night host compares Greece’s financial crisis to the situation in the Golden State:

“See Greece is a relatively small country, it would be like a state over here. But it overspends, it over borrows, it promises expensive pension plans, it over taxes, it over regulates business. So the state it would be would be California.”

Dan Walters examines the comparison and, though noting that California’s current debt is FAR lower than Greece’s a fraction of GDP, says California is on track to become another Greece:

California’s official debt, mostly bonds, is not particularly high. State and local governments might owe something north of $100 billion in bond debt, around 5 or 6 percent of the state’s economy.

When unofficial debt is factored into the equation, however, the number climbs rapidly. That would include billions owed to the federal government for unemployment insurance loans, commitments of future spending on schools to make up for recent spending cuts and, most of all, the unfunded liabilities for public employee pensions and retiree health care.

But that future debt is paid out over a LONG period of time. It’s not due immediately. Some of the money owed to schools and local governments IS owed very soon – 2012 or 2013, depending on the creditor – but that sum still won’t push California’s deficit significantly higher.

More importantly, that money can be repaid through higher taxes. California annually leaves tens of billions of dollars on the table in lost revenues that we can get from the rich and large corporations. Doing so would not only avoid damaging our economic recovery, but would in fact fuel economic recovery by enabling more sustainable economic growth, powered by small businesses and a broader economic stability, rather than ever-greater dependence on a few large companies and wealthy folks to feel like giving jobs to the rest of us schlubs.

California also has resources Greece simply doesn’t have, besides the fact that our economy is much, much larger than theirs. California is not only part of a single currency, but has financial and monetary institutions to match that single currency (that’s what the US Constitution was all about – facing a situation in 1787 very similar to what the eurozone faces now, the US chose greater integration). The US government has the power to backstop California debt, and although the Obama Administration has been reluctant to use such power, they have been willing to help send financial aid to Sacramento and appear willing to do it again.

Ultimately the “California is Greece” comparison obscures the deeper problems we face. California isn’t facing a debt problem and we’re not facing a spending problem. Austerity has been tried for 3 years here in California and has merely deepened our recession and in turn worsened our budget deficit. It’s time we tried something else – like getting our money back from the rich through progressive taxation.

Dan Walters and Arnold Schwarzenegger agree on keeping the tax option off the table, even though it’s the most fiscally responsible solution we have. Let’s hope Californians demand that option be not only taken seriously, but actually employed, in order to avoid the economic catastrophe that further austerity would cause.

With just a few months left in his failed tenure as California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger is preparing to deliver the coup de grâce to what was once the Golden State. His May Revise, the updated budget document, is due out this Friday, and the governor’s own spokespeople indicate it will be catastrophic:

No specifics are out yet on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s revised plan to balance the state budget. But Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear offered two salient details today: There will be no tax hikes and “absolutely terrible cuts.”

In other words, Arnold plans to burn down what remains of prosperity and hopes for economic recovery in this state, as his “parting gift” to the people of California. The unspecified cuts – likely to hit schools, health care services, and what remains of the safety net – will pull the props out from under the slow recovery the state is experiencing. If we cannot educate our kids, or force already-strained households to pay more for health care costs, or lay off tens of thousands more workers, then that creates a deflationary and recessionary effect on the state at a time when that’s the last thing we need.

Californians want higher taxes to prevent these cuts. And they want the corporations and the wealthy to pay, instead of being told they’ll have to pay more money for their health care, or have their kid put into a classroom with 40 other students because the teachers were laid off.

But because of the 2/3rds rule, and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ideological dedication to protecting the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us, he’s going to burn California down. Let’s hope Democrats are willing to stop him.

Garry South strikes again:

According to a recent California statewide survey, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is the clear front-runner in the Democratic primary election for Lieutenant Governor. Newsom holds a 21-point lead over Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn in the initial vote, is much better known and has much higher favorability ratings, and performs strongly with Democratic primary voters across the state. With only one in four voters currently undecided, Newsom is extremely well positioned to win the Democratic primary for Lieutenant Governor in June.

The raw numbers are Newsom 47, Hahn 26, Undecided 27. Significantly, the crosstabs show Newsom has a statewide lead, including a tie in Southern California and a huge lead in San Diego. Hahn has a 43-32 lead in Los Angeles County, which is to be expected given her and her family’s deep roots there, but it’s clearly not enough of a lead to overcome Newsom’s strong showing across the rest of California, including a nearly 50 point lead for Newsom in the Bay Area.

Much of this appears to be Newsom’s higher name ID. And that in turn should cause people – especially Janice Hahn – to question Garry South’s negative campaign strategy. By attacking Newsom, Hahn is actually keeping his name ID high while doing little to nothing to improve her own name ID. That is helping preserve Newsom’s lead across the state.

Looks like Garry South’s record of failure will continue to be unblemished by success. Which is unfortunate, because Janice Hahn is a great person who could have made a compelling candidate. Instead she took Garry South’s flawed advice, went negative, and missed her chance to define herself in the eyes of the Democratic electorate.

There’s still a month left, time enough for her to drop Garry South and start running a real campaign that emphasizes her positives and why she should be Lieutenant Governor. Unless that happens, Newsom is almost certainly going to win the nomination.

Last week we reported that Steve Poizner’s campaign claimed they’d closed the gap on Meg Whitman, whittling her lead from 50 points to just 5. The Whitman campaign dismissed this and many others were skeptical, waiting to see independent confirmation of Poizner’s big move.

Well, we’ve got it.

KABC/7 in Los Angeles reported this morning on the results of a new SurveyUSA poll they commissioned, which shows Whitman now leading Poizner by just two points – 39-37. SUSA doesn’t have the poll up on its website yet, but these numbers are themselves a massive shift from just two weeks ago, when on April 22 they found Whitman with a 22 point lead.

In short, assuming this and Poizner’s internal polling aren’t outliers, there has been a dramatic collapse in support for Meg Whitman among Republican voters. Whitman has spent over $60 million dollars only to find herself essentially tied with Steve Poizner with less than a month to go to the June 8 primary.

This would seem to validate the conclusion I made last week that Whitman’s support was extremely soft, and that she was vulnerable to attack. Poizner has exposed her fundamental weakness – her ties to Goldman Sachs and other big banks that are responsible for our economic crisis – and shown that Whitman isn’t invincible.

Of course, she also has time to react and right the ship. Having a big money advantage helps close the deal in the final weeks, and we can expect her to ramp up her ad blitz and outreach to GOP primary voters. Poizner may have her beat here too, however – Whitman cannot demagogue against immigrants too strongly or else she has no chance whatsoever of winning the fall election against Jerry Brown, since she’ll alienate moderates and Latinos. Poizner, fighting for survival, has no other choice.

Last week I said “pass the popcorn.” Looks like we’re gonna need the large bucket for this one.

UPDATE: The complete SurveyUSA poll is here. Among other things it shows Poizner now leads among men and in the Central Valley, though Whitman still leads in the Bay Area (where Poizner has spent less money on ads) and in the Inland Empire. Poizner also leads among younger Republicans, whereas Whitman leads among older Republicans. That helps Whitman, since the most likely GOP primary voter in CA is over age 50.

SUSA also polled the CA-Sen race for Republicans, showing Tom Campbell with 35%, Carly Fiorina with 24%, and Chuck DeVore at 15%, with 23% undecided.

SUSA’s poll included both party primaries for AG:

With Facebook users in mass revolt over the abuse of their personal information and loss of privacy, Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly has likely peaked. His $10 million in spending won’t buy him a place as the Dem AG nominee when he can’t even protect the privacy of Facebook users.

The Brookings Institution is out with an important new study, The State of Metropolitan America, which illustrates that many of the changes I described yesterday are already under way. California is part of the great shift away from suburban living toward urban, dense living. But because California’s “institutional sclerosis” is so deeply rooted in the suburbs, and in a foolish and nonsensical desire to preserve the political and economic primacy of the suburbs, the Golden State risks failing to embrace this shift and falling behind the rest of a reurbanizing country.

The Huffington Post article about the Brookings report gives a good overview:

In a reversal, America’s suburbs are now more likely to be home to minorities, the poor and a rapidly growing older population as many younger, educated whites move to cities for jobs and shorter commutes.

Count me as one of those “younger, educated whites” who prefers living in a city to a suburb. I was born and raised in the middle of Orange County’s sprawl, but have since lived in Berkeley and Seattle. I now live in Monterey, which is basically a small town, but has more of an urban than a suburban feel. Everything I need is within walking or biking distance, as Monterey has preserved its prewar urban layout.

The study also shows the changing demographics of suburbia:

Suburbs still tilt white. But, for the first time, a majority of all racial and ethnic groups in large metro areas live outside the city. Suburban Asians and Hispanics already had topped 50 percent in 2000, and blacks joined them by 2008, rising from 43 percent in those eight years.

Suburbs are home to the vast majority of baby boomers age 55 to 64, a fast-growing group that will strain social services after the first wave of boomers turns 65 next year….

The suburbs now have the largest poor population in the country. According to the analysis, between 1999 and 2008, the suburban poor grew by 25 percent; five times the growth rate of the poor in cities. During that same time period, the median household income in the U.S. declined by $2,241.

It would be unfortunate if reurbanization would up turning the California suburbs into an American version of the French banlieue, where the poor are stuck isolated from the economic engines of city centers. But that does appear to be what is happening.

With a huge population of older people and poorer people, the suburbs will require massive new government programs to provide for basic human needs. Moreover, they’ll need major infrastructure work to retrofit some of the older suburbs to more effectively handle a post-oil future. As oil prices rise, the suburbs will become a very expensive place to live, and getting to work or to school or to services will be difficult without developing some kind of alternative transportation systems.

The Brookings report understands this:

Calling 2010 the “decade of reckoning,” the report urges policymakers to shed outdated notions of America’s cities and suburbs and work quickly to address the coming problems caused by the dramatic shifts in population.

Among its recommendations: affordable housing and social services for older people in the suburbs; better transit systems to link cities and suburbs; and a new federal Office of New Americans to serve the education and citizenship needs of the rapidly growing immigrant community.

In addition to that, we’ll need new investments in education, health care, eldercare, and job creation.

Will any of that happen as long as the older generation of suburban homeowners have a stranglehold on our politics? 1978 saw the creation of a homeowner veto over state spending policy, justified on the now-disproven theory that a reduction in government services and taxes would enable the 1960s suburban paradise to last forever.

But that was in another world entirely. Today, the suburbs are no longer the centers of California wealth and job creation, and no longer the center of the middle class. If we are to avoid turning the suburbs into American banlieues, more money will need to be spent there, but current suburbanites are convinced this is neither necessary nor desirable.

There’s going to be a pitched battle over the next 10 years in the California suburbs over whether the failed model of the past is preserved, or whether a new future is embraced. In counties and city councils across the state, older suburbanites will be fighting with younger suburbanites, in a battle that will too often be tinged (at minimum) with racist tones on the part of the older folks, over taxes and public services. There will be room to build new coalitions in support of the services and infrastructure that everyone in the suburbs will need, but those coalitions may not emerge quickly or easily, or may do so unevenly depending on where in the state we’re talking about.

More fundamentally, is the California state government prepared and able to shift away from 60 years of directing resources to the suburbs and instead moving it back to the cities? The Legislature has nearly destroyed urban mass transit systems – Muni just implemented service cuts, Caltrain and Metrolink are facing major funding shortfalls, OCTA had to eviscerate its bus system just as it was getting serious ridership growth.

California is starting to undergo major, profound change. Can we embrace it and use it to rebuild California’s prosperity on a shared, equal basis? Or will our institutional sclerosis lead us into further decline as some city centers prosper but the suburbs become slums?

In response to my recent post about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s spite decision to break precedent and not consolidate the SD-15 special election with the fall general election, Dan Walters today defends Arnold’s costly decision as being all the Democrats’ fault:

Cruikshank [sic] complained that calling two special elections on June 22 and August 17 would cost five counties in the 15th Senate District $6.5 million to prepare, receive and count ballots….

Had the Legislature acted quickly to confirm him, Schwarzenegger likely would have called a stand-alone special primary election in the spring and the runoff election would have been consolidated with the June primary, as he did when Republican John Benoit resigned from the Senate.

However, Democrats got greedy. They wanted the second election to coincide with the November general election when voter turnout would be higher and – they thought – their chances of capturing the Senate seat would be better. So they went through the motions of confirming Maldonado, but left him short of votes.

The stall continued until late April, past the date when it would be legally possible for the runoff to be called for November. But Schwarzenegger countered by calling two stand-alone special elections, thus doubling the costs.

Really? It’s the Democrats’ fault that Arnold chose to ignore the pleas of local elections officials to consolidate the special election with the fall general election? I don’t think so.

The fact is that Schwarzenegger and Maldonado failed to convince a majority of the Assembly to confirm Maldonado in February. But with a change of leadership among Assembly Democrats, and better outreach from the governor’s office, enough Assemblymembers did vote to confirm Maldonado last month.

But – and this is a significant fact – the Democrats chose to wait to confirm Maldonado until the SD-15 special election could be consolidated with the November election. Whether Maldonado was confirmed in February or late April, Democrats intended any special election to fill the SD-15 seat to be consolidated. They understood and heard the pleas from the five counties in the district that they didn’t have the money or staff to do a separate special election, and acted accordingly.

Yet it was Arnold Schwarzenegger who chose to break with precedent, ignore the pleas, and schedule the SD-15 special election separately from any other statewide elections. Nobody forced Arnold to do that. He made that decision all on his own, and apparently out of spite. And Walters shows himself quite willing to defend that cynical – and costly – decision.

Walters mentions, but fails to address, the fact that the special election cost of $6.5 million to the five counties of Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara, will almost certainly mean further job and service cuts in those counties. He also fails to mention that the election dates chosen will disenfranchise many voters, from active duty military to students to the Monterey County Latinos who have filed suit to force a change in the election dates.

None of those costs – financial or electoral – are justifiable. Walters should hold the governor responsible for making that choice, instead of making excuses for it and projecting that responsibility onto someone else.

Over the last couple of years, since the economic crisis began, American society – including our politics and our economics – has become defined primarily by a fundamental divide. One side is comprised of those that understand the status quo has totally failed, producing political paralysis and widespread economic misery, not to mention environmental catastrophe, and therefore significant change is necessary and inevitable.

On the other side are those who adamantly refuse to believe that change is either necessary or desirable, who believe that the status quo works just fine and absolutely must not be changed. Some of them instinctively know that change is coming, but because they have invested so deeply into the 20th century model of America – sprawling, dependent on oil, dominating the world yet delusional about the costs of maintaining that dominance and prosperity – they see any proposal to change as some kind of inherent attack on their America.

The primary form that divide has taken is between the “Tea Party” movement and progressives. But here in California, the divide manifests itself somewhat differently. It’s not between decent society and a bunch of wacko racists claiming that the president wasn’t born in the US. Instead the divide is between those who seek greater public investment in building the elements of 21st century prosperity – from high speed rail to universal health care to renewed investment in our schools – and those who refuse to see such investment as necessary or desirable and come up with reason after reason why we shouldn’t do it.

You can see it in Palo Alto where a bunch of people are fighting to kill the high speed rail project merely because they don’t like the way the trains will look. You can see it in those who advocate for privatizing public schools instead of investing more to ensure all of California’s children can learn.

Although the forms of the divide are different in California, the effects are the same. The defenders of the status quo – who are actively resisting efforts to produce change that can ensure greater prosperity for all – are generally people who already enjoy considerable political and economic privilege. This is not to say they are wealthy, although a good number of them are, but that they enjoy a kind of economic security most of the rest of us lack. They can look at something like high speed rail or affordable higher education and see it as unnecessary because, hey, they’ve got theirs. Why worry about the rest of us who look at rising oil prices, soaring tuition, and a lack of jobs and see a situation that threatens to permanently exclude us from prosperity?

This sort of situation isn’t new, unfortunately, and is familiar to those who study political systems for a living. And as we enter a period of major changes in how we live and how we make a living, where the 20th century status quo is swept away by something new (and still unformed), the forces protecting the status quo become a threat to us all.

In the coming days and weeks I’ll be writing more about this, influenced to a great degree by Richard Florida’s new book The Great Reset. Florida’s argument is very similar to the one I’ve been making on Calitics since at least 2007: that California is entering a period of significant change in how our economy works, how our land use policies work, and that we must act now to embrace the changes or be left behind.

Florida’s specific argument is that we’re entering the third “Great Reset”, with the Long Depression of 1873-1897 as the First Reset and the Great Depression/World War II of 1929-1945 as the Second Reset. The first reset produced an industrialized, urban America; the second reset produced a suburbanized modern America; the third reset’s outcome is still unknown but will not be built on unaffordable suburbs, unaffordable dependence on oil, or an unaffordable reliance on homeownership and financial sector.

Those places that prove themselves adaptable and willing to embrace change are those places that will thrive. And those places that do not prove to be adaptable – that resist change – are those places that get left behind.

As you’ll see over the flip, California’s “institutional sclerosis” – a political system that empowers those who resist change and block those who seek change – creates a very real risk that California will be one of the places left behind, and that instead of surging forward into a 21st century prosperity, we might instead be locked into a fatal dependence on the failed 20th century model, headed for a slow and steady decline.

Florida raised the concern about “institutional sclerosis” on page 19 of The Great Reset:

While Resets push some regions to the fore, others decline. Growing regions grab hold of new technology and attract new talent. But as these leading regions grow and evolve, some eventually fall victim to what the late economist Mancur Olson called “institutional sclerosis.”

Committed to old behaviors and social systems, old technologies, and, even more important, outmoded and hard-to-change institutions, organizations, and business practices, they are either too slow or literally unable to change.

This is what stymied growth in many of the early manufacturing cities, such as Paterson, New Jersey, the mill towns of Massachusetts and upstate New York, and older Rust Belt cities in our time. It’s why, Olson argued, new technologies and and new economic systems so often arise in locations that were previously less prominent. In this way, economic Resets provide the jolt that hastens these geographic shifts.

California in the 20th century was a direct beneficiary of the institutional sclerosis of the East Coast. The movie industry took root in Hollywood not because of a deliberate search for the ideal location, but because it combined sunny year-round weather with a continent’s distance from Thomas Edison’s lawyers, who had sued the industry into the ground back east to protect his monopoly in the 1910s. The aerospace industry took off in the same wide open spaces of Southern California.

Silicon Valley took advantage of new suburbs that had just replaced orchards and proximity to publicly funded universities (much of the research at Stanford was government-funded) to grow the high-tech industry.

All of that was supported by a state government seen in the 1950s and 1960s as one of the nation’s best. The State Water Project was backed by a population that understood the need to build and innovate our way to prosperity, who had no preexisting wealth to extract, not much preexisting infrastructure to rest upon. Instead they knew they had to create new things to prosper, and they did so.

Today’s California is a very different place. The combination of the desire to protect existing wealth from new taxation and the irrational, unrealistic belief that our economic and urban landscapes are ideal and can last forever and should never be changed, are producing institutional sclerosis on an alarming level.

Here are just four of the many ways California is paralyzed by institutional sclerosis:

• The 2/3rds rule. This not only gives a veto to conservatives over all new policy initiatives, but to those interests conservatives protect – those who already have wealth, and those who most adamantly refuse to part with the 20th century model. In other words, people who don’t want to be taxed to build high speed rail, or who refuse to accept that the game of endless sprawl is over, or who already benefited from affordable higher education and don’t want to pay to extend the same privilege to others, have in the Sacramento Republican caucus a group of people empowered to stop anything that can challenge those privileges.

• Prop 13. Related to the above, Proposition 13 was created specifically to lock into place the vision of suburban sprawl from people like Jerry Brown who were talking about the need to move to a denser, more equitable model of prosperity. As Brian pointed out, Prop 13’s primary beneficiaries are existing businesses. In other words, new businesses face obstacles that older ones do not, making it that much more difficult to innovate and create. Similarly, California’s high housing costs to newcomers will eventually stymie growth and creativity in order to privilege a small group of older homeowners. And of course, Prop 13 starves government of the funds to support the new infrastructure and programs needed to make the necessary changes to adapt to an economic Reset.

• Domination of politics by those with existing wealth. Detroit was strangled by the very auto industry it depended on, as the Big 3 controlled the city’s politics and refused to allow the city to pursue the path of innovation necessary to move away from dependence on the industry over the last 30 years. Will the same happen to California? Our political system, where corporate spending on ballot initiatives is virtually unregulated and financially unlimited, where wealthy donors call the shots in the legislature, protects the companies of the past while blocking new policies needed to sustain the economy of the future.

• California Environmental Quality Act. CEQA is well-intentioned but a total failure in practice, and the sooner progressives realize they need to support major reforms to it, the better off we will be. It is right to have rules requiring assessment of environmental impacts of new projects, but when those rules get used to do things like allow NIMBYs to block high speed rail because they don’t like the way it looks, or block wind farms, or block new density, then we have a serious problem. CEQA should be replaced by a statewide planning model that privileges new projects that reduce carbon emissions, similar to what is used in Washington State and Portland, Oregon. Without such reforms, the legislature will merely continue to exempt projects entirely from CEQA, which isn’t an ideal way to protect the environment or conduct new planning.

Many of those institutional barriers are sustained by a cultural or ideological barrier – the belief, in the face of all the evidence, that the California of the second half of the 20th century, where people spent their money buying cars, houses, gas, and consumer goods was the pinnacle of human civilization and that any change to it is a step on the road to ruin.

California used to be a place where individuals reinvented themselves and created new ideas, new products, and new prosperity. It’s what catapulted a former backwater to global prominence.

But unless we sweep away the institutional sclerosis, California’s fate could be that of Detroit, or of Rochester NY, or of some other place that history and prosperity have left behind as we cling to fantasies that have long been rendered obsolete. Some other place – Seattle? Austin? Minneapolis? Pittsburgh? – will take our place and lead 21st century prosperity.

The progressive vision is of a California where change is not only possible, but embraced. It is a California where economic security is shared by all – a diverse, sustainable, urban future supported by a strong public sector that takes care of our basic needs and preserves our natural beauty. A California where the injustices of the past are swept away by a way of living that prizes the right of all Californians to live a prosperous life with equality and dignity.

That vision must be what animates our work in California. It’s not just about beating back the right – but about eliminating the institutional and ideological obstacles that block our movement from achieving the goals we’ve always had, and learning how to contextualize those goals in a new century without losing their basic essence.

The personal sniping between the three Republican candidates for the US Senate nomination obscures a very important truth – they are ALL very right-wing candidates who share the same extremist views on the important issues of the day. Yesterday’s televised debate made that quite clear:

In their only on-camera debate, the three Republicans seeking to replace U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer did their best to run to the right, as each supported Arizona’s new immigration law and opposed California’s restriction on greenhouse gas emissions.

On major topics, Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina and former Rep. Tom Campbell were often in alignment Thursday. They all, for example, said hedge-fund managers shouldn’t pay higher tax rates.

Sure, they had a minor disagreement on whether people on the no-fly list should be allowed to buy guns (DeVore and Fiorina think yes, Campbell no), but that shouldn’t mask the fact that they are all basically singing from the same right-wing song sheet.

After all, they each believe we shouldn’t be taxing hedge fund managers more money. In case you needed any further evidence that today’s Republican Party is nothing more than the organized protection racket for the wealthy.

Tom Campbell still wants people to believe he’s some sort of moderate, but that’s nonsense. Rick Jacobs, chair of the Courage Campaign (where I work as Public Policy Director), put it well in a front page article in today’s SF Chronicle:

“Tom Campbell pretends he’s a mainstream moderate,” said Rick Jacobs, founder of the liberal online activism hub the Courage Campaign. “But any time he gets a chance to pander to the Tea Party base of his party, he’s done it.”

In fact, all three candidates have said they’d vote to repeal the recent health care reform bill, and would likely support a reckless scaling back of federal spending, the primary reason why there has been job growth and the hint of economic recovery over these last few months.

What Californians see in the Republican field of candidates is three more right-wing candidates who don’t share our values. And these candidates aren’t shy about letting us know it. Let’s not by shy in letting them know what we think of their right-wing extremism.

Monterey County is one of four California counties subject to US Department of Justice oversight of elections under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, due to historic discrimination against Spanish speakers in the Salinas Valley. That means any change to elections here in Monterey County must be signed off by the DOJ, which has 60 days to review such changes.

But because of the dates chosen for the special election here in the 15th State Senate district – June 22 for the first round, August 17 for the second round – the county couldn’t have submitted the paperwork to the DOJ for the 60-day review and still make the June 22 election date. Because of that, and because of the possibility that the special election would disenfranchise voters in Monterey County because of reduced resources at local election offices, 3 Latino residents of Monterey County are suing to challenge the election dates in federal court:

The suit will ask the court to issue a temporary restraining order to stop the county from preparing to hold the election until it gets pre-clearance from the Justice Department.

Of course, by that point it could be too late for the county to put on the special election. And by paralyzing one county’s election-holding capabilities, the suit would effectively put a district-wide hold on the contest.

If the request is granted, possible scenarios include Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger calling a new, later election date that would comply with the pre-clearance requirements or the county petitioning the court to step in and set a new date.

Seattle University School of Law professor Joaquin Avila, former general counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the San Francisco firm Rosen, Bien & Galvan have filed the suit on behalf of three Latino registered voters in the district. Legal fees are being covered by the state Democratic Party.

The suit counters Arnold’s naked ploy to not only screw the five counties in the district out of $6.5 million they don’t have, but his ploy to drive down turnout and reduce voter participation in elections. Although virtually every other special election that could be consolidated with a statewide election was indeed consolidated – including the runoff for the SD-37 seat that was folded in with the June 8 primary this year – Arnold made an exception here, for reasons known only to himself.

Regardless of the fate of the suit, it’s clear that the laws regarding special elections need to change. Either give the power to call these elections to the Secretary of State, or mandate that these special elections be consolidated with a previously scheduled election whenever possible.

UPDATE: Read the complaint here, via the SacBee.