[Originally posted at NorCal Politics on January 30, 2006]
Today was a bad day in the United States Senate. Nineteen Democratic Senators chose to surrender, rather than fight for their country.
Our Senators were not among them. Both Senator Feinstein and Senator Boxer voted against ending debate on the confirmation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.
Please take a moment to thank both of them. They made Californians proud today.
[Originally posted at NorCal Politics on January 31, 2006]
I don’t know enough about the politics of the Public Utilities Commmission to know exactly how this happened (note to self: learn more about PUC), but it seems that they’ve done something good:
[Originally posted at NorCal Politics on February 7, 2006]
I’ve had this Dan Walters column bookmarked for several days now. It’s a discussion of AB 583, the clean money bill recently passed by the California Assembly, entirely without Republican support. The bill itself is modeled after recent legislation in Arizona and Maine, and essentially allows candidates who raise a certain amount of small donations to then run their campaign with public financing. The goal is to minimize the role of moneyed interests in California’s politics, which I believe is a worthy goal.
Continue reading [From NCP] Walters Scornful, Incoherent on Clean Money Bill
In a quick follow-up to yesterday’s post on AB 583, the clean money campaign finance reform bill, I offer two items:
[Originally posted at NorCal Politics on February 9, 2006]
The Proposition 73 people are back:
Backers of a failed special election measure that would have forced doctors to notify parents or guardians before performing abortions on underage girls are circulating petitions to have Californians vote on nearly the same measure next November.
Like Proposition 73, the initiative would require a girl younger than 18 to wait 48 hours after a parent or legal guardian is notified of her intention to get an abortion. Secretary of State Bruce McPherson on Monday cleared supporters to begin gathering signatures.
The text of the initiative is not yet up at the Attorney General’s office. We’ll watch for it and report back when we find it. Money says it’s pretty much exactly the same as Proposition 73, probably even including the stealth language turning an embryo into a person in the California Constitution.
What is interesting is the “rationale” the anti-choice crowd is using to explain the failure of Proposition 73:
Albin Rhomberg, a spokesman for the Parents Right to Know and Child Protection initiative, said the special election wasn’t representative of the California electorate because unions and Democrats mobilized supporters to turn out against the four measures promoted by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“The turnout was very high in the liberal areas of the state and surprisingly low in some of the more conservative areas,” Rhomberg said. “It would be foolish to not put it before the voters in a larger general election.”Statewide turnout for the special election was 50 percent of California’s registered voters, higher than expectations.
I don’t buy this. I think it was a deliberate strategy to put Prop. 73 on the ballot in an off year when the anti-choice crowd could get motivated and turn out. It’s a real shame that the turnout was so high, and Proposition 73 was shot down. Turns out the hope that Schwarzenegger and the anti-choice people had of piggybacking on each other’s issues backfired. Too many people of the wrong sort voted on issues that affected them directly. What a shame.
Progressives would do well to note the remarkable stubbornness of the anti-choice crowd though. They just keep bashing away at the same wall, no matter how badly they lose, and every defeat is spun away, because it’s not possible that they’re actually wrong.
[Originally posted at NorCal Politics February 11, 2006]
As a progressive, and more importantly, one of your constituents, I’m begging you to stop it stop it STOP IT! Stop what? Stop this:
State Sen. Carole Migden hopes the next official state “thing” will be eminently quaffable with hints of black pepper and a certain jammy quality.
She’s thinking, of course, about mighty zinfandel, which she would like to name the official state wine.
But the San Francisco Democrat – whose district includes grape-growing Sonoma Valley – apparently did not consult Wine Country’s makers of chardonnay, cabernet sauvignon, pinot noir and other varietals before introducing the legislation this week.
Seriously, of all of the things that you could be doing, how does the official state wine make the list? Who cares?
[Originally posted at NorCal Politics February 10, 2006]
I’m not a huge fan of term limits. I think they put too much power in the hands of staffers and consultants. This article from Capitol Weekly shows exactly how much power California’s term limits concentrate in consultants, using Richie Ross as an example. Some excerpts:
Ross, who once served as chief of staff to Willie Brown, the legendary wheeler-dealer who outmaneuvered opponents to rule the Legislature’s lower house for nearly 15 years, is running more candidates in open Democratic primaries this June than any other political consultant.
…
Alarcon has endorsed 21 different Assembly candidates this year, only seven of which are Ross clients–but he has not endorsed a single non-Ross candidate in a race that Ross has a client.
…
As term limits force a shuffle of new relative unknown candidates to Sacramento every two years, Assembly hopefuls are increasingly turning to top-shelf consultants like Ross or Gale Kaufman, who serves as Nuñez’s consultant, to provide instant legitimacy to their candidacy.
“To be taken seriously you have to have one of the brand name consultants doing the campaign,” said Allan Hoffenblum, a GOP consultant and publisher of the California Target Book that track legislative races. “If you don’t, you are perceived as having insufficient funding or as politically naïve.”
And because those consultants are often better known around Sacramento than the candidates themselves, labor groups and other large Democratic donors are sometimes more likely to open their wallet to clients of the leading consultants.
Sounds to me like we’ve swapped a set of politically-accountable incumbents for a set of entirely unaccountable incumbents, who operate invisible to the general public.
Tell me how that’s better, again?
[Originally posted at NorCal Politics February 14, 2006]
This Mercury News Article outlines an upcoming measure to limit growth in Southern Santa Clara County:
The Sierra Club, Greenbelt Alliance, Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society and other members of the coalition — which already has $300,000 in the bank — must collect 36,040 signatures from registered county voters to qualify for the November ballot, something they and their opponents expect will happen.
The measure, which farmers and ranchers fear would drive down the value of their land, would affect nearly half of Santa Clara County’s 839,000 acres.
The complex proposal would essentially do two things. First, it would reduce the number of homes that could be built in unincorporated, rural areas along the east foothills of the Diablo Range from Milpitas to Gilroy, the Santa Cruz Mountains from Gilroy to Los Altos and east of Mount Hamilton. On lands zoned for ranching, for example, it would allow only one home per 160 acres, down from up to eight homes per 160 acres now.
It also would set limits for new development in those areas: curbing the amount of square footage that could be built per parcel, reducing building on ridgelines and banning building unless adequate water is available.
The article has an interesting mini-profile of the author of the measure and a standard set of he-said, she-said quotes. The final quote of the article is interesting, though:
“Owners have been taking care of their land all these years knowing that at some point they’d be able to sell a piece or two and be able to retire on their land,” said [Jenny] Derry [executive director] of the [Santa Clara County] farm bureau. “We see it as a property rights issue.”
I’m incredibly sympathetic to the need to balance conservation, profitable use, and the traditional rural culture of America. I’m not, however, sympathetic to painting a rentier’s desire to speculate for extraordinary profit as a “right”.
Land use is where the knives come out in local politics, so this is going to be interesting. NorCal Politics will try to get sufficiently educated to be of use.
[Originally posted at NorCal Politics on February 15,2006]
I haven’t picked a dog in the Angelides-Westly primary fight. I may not pick one publicly. But I’m glad that Steve Westly is talking to the people out in Eastern California. One of the reasons that I wanted to start NorCal Politics is to try to bridge the city-suburb-agriculture-wilderness divides for progressives.
This post at Say No To Pombo really drives home why that’s important:
[C]onsider this. The Fish Sniffer has ~25,000 readers in the Valley. I would bet that most of the fish the Delta, or fish the mountain streams for trout. If someone is really upset about Pombo, you need reasons that get to people where they live and this is one for a population of sportsmen. If I were living in Lodi, or Brentwood, and I wanted to see Pombo gone, I would make sure that I visited all the little Marinas around…I might even leave a copy of the Fish Sniffer editorial.
The editorial in question rips into Pombo, and a host of other Republicans for their support of anti-conservation, anti-sportsman interests. One might also consider this editorial from the same magazine, which goes after Pombo again, and throws Republicans John Doolittle and Devin Nunes onto the anti-sportsman list for good measure.
There is common ground for urban progressives and rural people, if each side is willing to listen. The white noise of Republican smears and bogus “values” talk can be cut through, because the reality is that the Republicans don’t help very many people.
[Originally posted at NorCal Politics on February 16, 2006]
I don’t have too much to add to this BeyondChron story on the first run at ranked choice balloting in San Francisco. The long and the short of it seems to be this:
There’s also a strong argument that IRV tends to select candidates who reflect the true preference of the electorate, as:
All of which means, of course, that it threatens both of the existing party establishments and the pundit class who make their living on complaining about the status quo while doing their best to maintain it.