While I was at Camp Courage in Fresno all weekend (much more on that transformative event later today) I missed out on some of the stories happening in state politics, including this gem from Willie Brown’s Sunday column in the San Francisco Chronicle where he explains one reason for Maldonado’s pursuit of an open primary:

State Sen. Abel Maldonado, the deciding vote in the big state budget morass, came to see me last week with a very interesting story about his fellow Republicans.

I was telling him what a good name he has, because no one can figure out if it is Spanish, Italian or Portuguese.

He proceeded to tell me that when he was running for state controller in 2006, he commissioned a poll to gauge the feelings of Republican voters in Orange County.

The poll came back showing him losing to the Democrat by almost 2-1.

“This is impossible,” Maldonado said. “Orange County is loaded with Republicans.”

They did the poll again and the results were the same – the Democrat won.

So Maldonado ran a little test. He had the pollster go back and give voters the same information as before – his age, that he’s a rancher and the like – but this time, he said, tell them the candidate’s name is Smith.

The result: Smith came out ahead.

So he ran another poll, a Republican named Garcia vs. a Democrat named Smith.

Smith won again, even among Republicans.

At that point, Maldonado said, “We’re not spending another nickel – there ain’t no way that anyone with a Spanish name is going to win anything in a Republican primary in this state.”

He was right, in his case at least – he lost the primary to Tony Strickland.

I wish I could say I’m surprised by this, but of course I’m not. As someone with deep familiarity with Orange County Republicans this story rings all too true to my experiences. They just don’t like Latinos. For many OC Republicans, their anti-immigrant sentiment is thinly veiled racism. In public it may be about “the law” but at block parties or conversations with neighbors at the mailbox or even the dinner table, it’s really about fear of a brown planet.

“Did you hear that some Mexicans bought a place on the next street over?” “Yeah, there go our property values.” [I’ve heard variations on this conversation several times in the last 20 years in Tustin.] “Do you remember when Santa Ana was full of English speakers?” “Yeah, now it’s full of Spanish billboards. It’s like Tijuana!” [Another frequently overheard conversation, one that neatly ignores the continuous presence of Spanish-speakers in that city dating to at least the 1860s.]

Racism against Spanish speakers and those with Spanish-sounding surnames in Orange County remains endemic. And so it’s quite understandable that Maldonado would discover these kind of poll results.

Of course it’s worth noting that “Orange County” is a diverse place and that there are large swaths of the county where this hasn’t been a problem, as Loretta Sanchez can attest (though her 1996 and 1998 campaigns against Bob Dornan unfortunately brought out a lot of racism and attacks on her Mexican last name, with the irony here being that Dornan told me at the time she merely used her maiden name “Sanchez” instead of “Brixey”, her then-married name, to win votes!).

Still, this is indicative of the problems that Maldonado has as a slightly less conservative Latino Republican in a state where conditions of membership in the Zombie Death Cult appear to still include not having Latino heritage.

Not to mention the obvious point that this is further evidence that Maldonado was merely seeking personal gain through the budget standoff and is further evidence of why the 2/3rds rule must go…

The Field Poll has been busy this week with a spate of polls on state politics, topping it off with this look at the 2010 Senate race which suggests that Boxer is in a good position given the potential challengers she might face – Arnold Schwarzengger and Carly Fiorina:

Boxer: 54 (43)

Schwarzenegger: 30 (44)

Undecided: 16 (13)

(Numbers in parentheses are from the October 2007 Field Poll)

Boxer: 55

Fiorina: 25

Undecided: 20

Of some concern might be Boxer’s overall “inclination to reelect” numbers, but a comparison with previous polling at this state of the race (18 months before the election) suggests this is a somewhat normal state of affairs. The first number is the March 2009 poll result, and the numbers in parentheses are from April 2003 and May 1997.

Reelect Boxer: 42 (38) (41)

Don’t reelect Boxer: 43 (43) (46)

No opinion: 15 (19) (13)

One of the most hilarious results of this poll is how crappy Chuck DeVore fares. As our friends at OC Progressive point out DeVore’s activity on social networking sites doesn’t really seem to be paying off. He gets 9% in a GOP primary that includes Arnold and Fiorina and only 19 when it’s just himself against Fiorina. joeesha put it well:

Even more devastatingly, 82 percent of the electorate has NO OPINION of DeVore and that includes 80 percent of Republicans.

The coup de grace is that DeVore’s results were so dismal, the Field Poll didn’t even poll him directly against Boxer, who easily defeats both Schwarzenegger and former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina.

Last month, DeVore was awarded the “Shorty Award” for best political use of Twitter, an instant text messaging service.

I guess he’s still coming up a bit short.

The 2010 elections may see an interesting dynamic – Republican female CEOs trying to convince a state that’s had enough of Republicans and corporations that they should in fact give them the reins of power. As the Field Polls suggest, that’s not likely to happen.

Crossposted from the California High Speed Rail Blog

In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade the hero must choose from a collection of drinking vessels to determine which is Holy Grail and which leads to certain death. When the Nazi-collaborating villainess picks the wrong cup the knight says “she chose…poorly.”

Unfortunately the Palo Alto City Council has chosen poorly as well, preferring to fuel a broad-based attack on the high speed rail project to a more reasonable set of suggestions about how to effectively build HSR in Palo Alto. They adopted the anti-HSR recommendations that this blog implored them to reject, turning an understandable debate over the visual and physical impact of a structure to a more fundamental attack on the concept of high speed rail itself. Palo Alto could have limited itself to asking for a tunnel. Instead they want to buck the will of the voters – including their own residents – and insist that the HSR project be imperiled because of a small handful of NIMBYs and HSR deniers.

As reported by the San Jose Mercury News:

The council responded [to NIMBY protests] by unanimously approving a formal letter to the high-speed rail authority calling for it to study the possibility of building a rail tunnel under the city. Despite Diridon’s comments, the letter will also call for the rail authority to reopen the possibility of running the trains through the East Bay or along the Highway 101 or Interstate 280 corridors rather than along the Caltrain tracks. Another suggestion is to stop them in San Jose, forcing riders to transfer to Caltrain to get to San Francisco.

“That’s not the end of the line,” Council Member Larry Klein said of the authority’s 2008 decision on how to route the trains. “Laws do get changed. That’s what our legislature is for, that’s what the initiative process is for, and that’s what the courts are for, in some cases.”

Larry Klein is basically trying to force adoption of the previously-rejected Altamont Pass routing, and cut out of the HSR project entirely the city of San José, the third largest city in California and the largest city in the San Francisco Bay Area. Failing that he wants to destroy the entire system by forcing it to terminate at San José Diridon and forcing intercity passengers to transfer to a commuter rail service to finish the journey to SF – something most passengers WILL NOT DO. This would weaken the system by reducing ridership below the number necessary for the system to be financially viable.

Klein seems willing to ignore the democratically expressed will of the people and risk the entire HSR project, which he presumably supported when Palo Alto’s City Council endorsed Prop 1A last year, because of a few ignorant people. As we have explained at the HSR blog they believe, in spite of the available evidence, that the tracks will form an unsightly “Berlin Wall” that will make their communities look ugly.

Because of that, they’re willing to destroy the entire project. Consider that for a second, and then read more over the flip:

Rod Diridon called out Klein and other members of the Palo Alto City Council for their hypocritical and reckless stance:

If Palo Alto didn’t want bullet trains racing through town, it should have spoken up earlier, California High Speed Rail Authority Board Member Rod Diridon told the city council Monday. The decision to run the 125-mph trains up the Peninsula via the Caltrain corridor was made in 2008 after years of debate, and revisiting it now could cripple the $40 billion Los Angeles-to-San Francisco project.

Instead, the city ought to focus on how to make the train work now that it has been approved by the state’s voters, Diridon said. The rail authority has heard the city’s desire to study running the line underground, and it will study that possibility, he added. No decisions about the specifics of the tracks’ design will be made until after an environmental review.

This is an eminently sensible approach – but it only works if you are working with people who want to be constructive and sensible. By endorsing these anti-HSR proposals, Larry Klein and the Palo Alto City Council have shown they do not want to be sensible, and instead prefer to try and destroy the HSR system.

Klein shows that he basically doesn’t care about the HSR system at all:

Klein rejected Diridon’s warning that any delay could cause project costs to skyrocket, noting that construction costs have actually declined in the past year. “If this goes forward, it is going to be in existence for 100 years, 200 years,” he said. “So if it gets delayed by a year or whatever, I don’t think that makes too much difference. It’s much more important this gets done absolutely right.”

What Klein willfully refuses to understand is that if Palo Alto is successful in fatally weakening the project, it will be difficult to fund the project. The delay will hurt our chances of getting federal and private sector funding. And Klein conveniently hasn’t said where he thinks money for a tunnel will come from.

Thanks to HSR deniers like Larry Klein, here is what the city of Palo Alto is now planning to oppose:

• Reduce carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to removing 1.4 million cars from the road, and take the place of nearly 42 million annual city-to-city car trips
• Reduce CO2 emissions by up to 17.6 billion pounds/year
• Reduce California’s oil consumption by up to 22 million barrels/year
• Finally move California away from dependence on fossil fuels and freeways for intercity travel

It is a tragedy to see Palo Alto join the realm of the HSR deniers, especially as they appear to have been swayed by lies, distortions, and ignorance. They have joined Bobby Jindal and Sean Hannity in attacking action to mitigate our climate crisis and now are de facto supporting pollution and sprawl, all because a tiny group of people can’t handle the fact that Palo Alto is going to have some changes and improvements to its community because of this.

The city of Palo Alto is not full of HSR deniers. Neither are Menlo Park or Atherton. But their city councils have chosen to enable those few voices in order to kill a project California voters approved. Palo Alto’s city council deludes itself if they think the rest of the state will go along with their hissy fit. We’re not going to reopen the Pacheco vs. Altamont argument for them. We’re not going to do something so obviously stupid as entertain a routing down freeways. And we absolutely will not terminate the route at San José.

California is going to build high speed rail. Palo Alto will not be allowed to block that. We believe they can and should try to work constructively to implement HSR in their community. But if they choose HSR denial, then we can and will push back against them.

Recent storms have eased our water worries to a degree – the state Department of Water Resources reports that the Sierra snowpack is at 80% of normal. But because of the dry winters of 2007 and 2008, California still needs much more precipitation:

Elissa Lynn, a meteorologist for the Department of Water Resources, said the water content in the snow would have to be between 120 to 130 percent of normal by April 1 to replenish the state’s reservoirs, the largest of which are less than half full. “That’s just the snowpack,” Lynn said. “We need to have rainfall in the mountains continuing through the spring, contributing to the total water supply. That’s what we had hardly any of last year.”

Rain and snow would have to fall virtually every day this month to get back to normal, a highly unlikely scenario, according to Steve Anderson, meteorologist for the National Weather Service.

The LA Times uses these numbers to explore whether proponents of new dams and canals are overstating the crisis in order to generate support for their favored water projects:

The water interests who have spit out grim news releases the last two months were silent Monday in the face of the growing snowpack.

Those who would like to build new reservoirs and canals and to weaken environmental regulations have invoked the drought like a mantra in recent weeks…

Sen. Dave Cogdill, a Republican who represents agriculture-dependent Modesto, called the drought “epic” when he introduced a $10-billion water bond package last week that includes funding for new reservoirs and other infrastructure.

There’s no doubt that folks like Cogdill are trying to take advantage of the crisis – but the water crisis is real, even if it’s not quite as bad right now as it looks. On a regional basis the situation is still serious – the Monterey Peninsula, for example, overshot its carrying capacity long ago and has been overdrawing the Carmel River for decades. Growing propulations and more water-intensive agriculture have strained existing resources. And global warming will lead to less water availability for California.

Still, it’s important to refuse to let California get shock doctrined by those pushing bad water solutions using the drought as a cover. That was the message Debbie Cook delivered on desalination in a post at The Oil Drum:

The next worst idea to turning tar sands into synthetic crude is turning ocean water into municipal drinking water. Sounds great until you zoom in on the environmental costs and energetic consequences. It may be technically feasible, but in the end it is unsustainable and will be just one more stranded asset.

We’re debating desal here in Monterey as well, and Debbie Cook’s criticisms of the concept are extremely valuable to us – and to a state that, despite this week’s rain, still has to figure out how to secure its water future.

Say what you will about Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Zombie Death Cult – they learn from their mistakes.

In the 2005 special election they made it easy for labor unions and progressives to unite to defeat his proposals. The attacks on unions were like red cloth to a bull, and that enabled a big and broad coalition to come together to deal Arnold a significant defeat.

Arnold never abandoned his goals of breaking the power of his Democratic and progressive enemies. This time he and his Republican allies in the Legislature decided on a different approach – offering unions a Faustian bargain designed to screw them no matter which option they choose, as today’s Sacramento Bee explains:

Unions last month were attacking the budget deal for including a limit on future state spending growth and $15 billion in cuts to state programs. The spending limit must be approved by voters in Proposition 1A to take effect.

Fearing that unions could mount a successful opposition campaign, lawmakers and Schwarzenegger crafted the budget deal so that increased taxes on income, sales and vehicles would last up to an additional two years if Proposition 1A passes.

The strategy assumed that the additional state tax revenue, worth as much as $16 billion between 2011 and 2013, would provide enough incentive for unions to let Proposition 1A go unchallenged.

The deal even included a specific deal with the devil for the California Teachers Association – Proposition 1B, which would restore $9 billion in educational funding in 2011 and afterward, which is also predicated on the passage of the spending cap. CTA has taken an “interim support position” on Prop 1B but like SEIU has not taken a position yet on Prop 1A.

These tactics on the part of Arnold and the Republicans is part of a broader strategy to force progressives and Democrats to defend bad deals, and leave room for conservatives to score points by opposing them. The Howard Jarvis Association and Meg Whitman have both come out against Prop 1A and may spend some money to try and defeat it.

To me the answer for progressives seems clear – reject the deal with the devil and strongly oppose Prop 1A. (In fact, there is a strong case for opposing all the propositions on the May ballot but right now my focus is the spending cap.)

The tax increases would not immediately disappear, but would expire in mid-2010 along with the rest of the current budget deal. Since we’re going to have to mount a big fight anyway at that time, why agree to a crippling spending cap that will at best provide just a few years of new revenues at a truly enormous long-term cost?

Keep in mind this chart from the California Budget Project on the likely effect of a spending cap on future budgets:

Those are enormous cuts that we’ll face in the next decade. If Democrats, progressive activists, and labor unions don’t oppose this thing, then we’ll be letting the devil get our soul.

Today’s LA Times contains a “news analysis” by Evan Halper that seeks to explain why taxpayers seem to be getting less for their tax dollars. But the most obvious point goes almost totally ignored – that tax cuts have reduced the ability of government to provide for basic services. Since that isn’t part of this article, the effect is to mislead readers into thinking government is misusing tax dollars, and thus winds up reinforcing right-wing frames.

Reporting from Sacramento — Middle-class Californians have long griped about paying more taxes than they might pay elsewhere, but for decades this state could boast that it gave them quite a bit in return. Now that contract is in doubt.

A modern freeway system, easy access to superior universities and progressive health programs used to be part of the compact. Even local schools plagued with financial problems continued to offer small classes, innovative after-school programs and advanced arts and music curricula.

These opening paragraphs set the tone for a flawed article. That “social compact” has not really functioned as Halper suggests since 1978. Our freeway system was largely in place by that time. Additional freeways were mostly paid for by higher taxes – even Orange County has voted to tax itself twice since 1990 to build and expand freeways. The “innovative after-school programs” were created by ballot-box budgeting. Advanced arts and music curricula have been absent from most districts in the state since the 1980s.

In short, Halper starts from a flawed premise.

But at a time when taxes are about to rise substantially, the services that have long set this state apart are deteriorating. The latest budget cuts hit public programs prized by California’s middle class particularly hard — in some cases at the expense of preserving a tattered safety net for the poor — following years of what analysts characterize as under-investment….

“Twenty years ago, you could go to Texas, where they had very low taxes, and you would see the difference between there and California,” said Joel Kotkin, a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University in Orange. “Today, you go to Texas, the roads are no worse, the public schools are not great but are better than or equal to ours, and their universities are good. The bargain between California’s government and the middle class is constantly being renegotiated to the disadvantage of the middle class.”

And here you see the right-wing framing – in some cases made explicit, that programs benefiting the middle-class have been cut to “preserve a tattered safety net for the poor.” Kotkin, a high-profile conservative think tank figure who has blamed “greens” for the state’s current crisis is never going to explain how tax cuts have caused California to fall behind in maintaining its once-great systems of education and health care.

The closest Halper gets to acknowledging the true nature of the problem is here:

The reasons are varied. The cost of services continues to outpace inflation. Programs are being squeezed out by things the government was not providing in the halcyon 1950s and early 1960s, including Medi-Cal and some welfare programs. And the state has been reluctant to embrace new ways of funding services while holding back state money to plug other holes in the budget.

In fact Medi-Cal’s earliest origins lie in the 1959 legislative session, as do some welfare programs. Halper gingerly discusses a state “reluctant to embrace new ways of funding services” but this is the closest his article will ever get to the truth, which is that the conservative veto has prevented California from raising taxes to keep the services flowing to the middle class. Even Ronald Reagan did this in 1967 but you would never know it from Halper’s article.

Nor does Halper explain, anywhere, the billions in tax cuts that have been made since 1978 – a structural revenue shortfall that costs California at least $12 billion a year. Halper does a good job of showing how our basic services are underfunded but totally fails to explain the reasons why. As a result he closes his article with comments from conservatives like Mitt Romney and Joel Kotkin that not only go unanswered by any progressive voices, but go unanswered by reality:

Former presidential candidate Mitt Romney spoke to the frustrations of many California parents during a speech at last weekend’s state GOP convention in Sacramento. Pointing out all the taxes Californians are now paying, he asked, according to the Sacramento Bee: “With all that money, how are your schools?”

The simple answer is: Not what they used to be. And now the state is cutting billions more out of them, including money set aside to keep classes small and to fund arts and music electives.

“The social compact is: I pay taxes and good things happen,” Kotkin said. “But I pay a lot of taxes and can’t send my kid to our local public schools because they are terrible.”

Conservatives broke that social compact by telling Californians “you can pay less taxes and good things will happen.” It’s wrong for conservatives to turn around and say “oh gee the system’s screwed up” when they are responsible for the mess.

And it’s inexcusable for the LA Times to reinforce such right-wing sentiments with such an article that refuses to point out what actually went wrong, and who is responsible for it.

That’s California’s unemployment rate as of January, a 1.4 percentage point increase (i.e. an enormous leap) over the December numbers, and a big increase over the 6.1% rate as of January 2008.

The Employment Development Department will not release the county-based stats until next week, but based on earlier reports we can assume that the hardest-hit parts of the state are those that happen to be represented by Republicans – the Central Valley, which is suffering from a grapes of wrath kind of economic crisis as well as Sacramento, which is being hit hard by the Republican attack on government. Spending cuts have wide consequences.

This is the bitter harvest of 30 years of flawed  policy. Since 1978 California has not only embraced an economy based on debt, but thanks to Prop 13’s tax rules and its conservative veto, has forced the state government to rely on that debt.

That has made California more vulnerable to this crisis than almost any other state in the union, aside perhaps from Michigan (which has been in a Depression for a few years now).

Just as President Obama reminded Americans earlier this week that the current crisis was created by Republican policy, we have to remember that because of the conservative veto and a Republican governor, we too are suffering.

Something to keep in mind when Meg Whitman or Steve Poizner come calling, offering cures worse than the disease.

Dean Grose, the mayor of the small OC suburb of Los Alamitos (located just east of Long Beach) and who sent a racist email to a black businesswoman showing the White House lawn replaced with a watermelon patch, now plans to resign:

Grose said in an e-mail sent to the Orange County Register on Thursday that he will resign at Monday’s City Council meeting.

“The attention brought to this matter has sadly created an image of me which is most unfortunate,” Grose wrote. “I recognize that I’ve made a mistake and have taken steps to make sure this is never repeated.”

Grose sent out the original e-mail from his personal account. It shows the controversial picture of the White House. On its lawn are a row of watermelons, and the caption reads, “No Easter egg hunt this year.”

But no amount of apology or resignation can hide the fact that Orange County has a reservoir of racism a mile wide and a mile deep. OC Progressive collects some links including that of one of my favorite OC writers, Gustavo Arellano, who delved into the KKK history of OC (and didn’t even mention the huge Klan parades in Anaheim and Santa Ana in the 1920s). Huntington Beach has had notorious problems with skinhead gangs going back to at least the 1980s, and immigrant-bashing protests led by the Minuteman movement brought out OC racists in this decade.

Just as important as those more overt expressions of hate is the casual racism that defines life in Orange County, folks like Mayor Dean Grose who would never consider themselves to be anything like a Klansman but who nevertheless see no problem forwarding around emails that traffic in racial hate, or try and dismiss its offensive nature by saying “can’t you take a joke?” It would be unfortunate if the lesson drawn from this was to hide your hate away. But it should be a reminder of how much work not just OC, but California as a whole, still has to do to eliminate racism in our lives.