Today’s Blog Roundup is on the flip. Teasers: Feingold in LA, CA-11, CA-50, CA-36, gas gouging, a little on the Dem Gov Primary, and a lot of neat stuff in “Other”.

Feingold Blogger Lunch

OK, first of all, some Los Angeles bloggers got to lunch with Russ Feingold yesterday. Here are their reports:

• Joseph Cannon of Cannonfire (a new blog to me, to be added to the big blogroll)
• Howie Klein of Down with Tyranny
• RJ Eskow of Night Light (and HuffPo)
• Steve of SteveAudio
• Brad Friedman of the BradBlog

CA-11

• Progressive 11th attended the Tracy Candidates’ Forum and reports back. Prog11 supports McNerney, near as I can tell, but assuming his report of Filson’s attitude toward the grassroots is correct, it isn’t very happy-making. More important, those grassroots are the people you need to run through brick walls for you in the general, so you might not want to dump on them in the primary.
• Jerry McNerney was interviewd on the Quake today.

CA-50

• In addition to the new polling data that WHP notes in his diary, Chris Bowers of MyDD has an interesting discussion about determining the baseline for success in CA-50.
• Busby reports that she’s got a narrow lead over Bilbray in her tracking polls. Interesting.
• Brian Bilbray refuses to repudiate the swift-boating of Francine Busby. Let’s check again. Nope, still won’t call for the ad to be taken down, even though he’s done it in a different campaign. Funny, we saw the Bush Campaign do the same nothing in the incident that gave rise to the term. Guess we know what kind of Republican Bilbray is: too chicken to do the dirty work, too nasty to call it off.
• Eric Roach may run against Bilbray in the Republican primary to be held the same day as the special election runoff. I think that’s a good idea: primaries are healthy.

CA-36

Marcy Winograd, the primary challenger to Jane Harman in CA-36, introduced herself at MyDD (and yes, we need to send them an email). The comments are interesting. Down with Tyranny is all for Marcy.

Black Gold! Texas Tea!

• Arnold. Oil. Beholden much? And even more fun, the guy that Arnold wants to look into price-gouging is a pro-extractive industry, anti-regulation lame duck. It’s impressive that Arnold could take action that’s ineffective on almost every level.
• Frank Russo has a rundown of current efforts to tax oil windfall profits and push back the price gouging.
• You’ve seen it all over the place, but I’m going to give D-Day the link for Nancy Pelosi’s short sermon on the effect of putting two oilmen in the White House.

Dem Gov Primary

• ABC has videos of the new ads for Angelides and Westly.
• ABC draws a contrast between Bill Bradley’s negative take on the Angelides campaign with the Washington Post’s take.

“Other”

• Terry Preston of Blue Bear Republic got the same robo-call I did from the forced-breeding lobby in their attempt to resurrect Prop 73. (Also, remember Proposition 75, intended to reduce the power of public employee unions? If you check the Secretary of State’s initiative website, you’ll find pretty much that propostion all over again.) There’s an important lesson here for progressives: the Republicans never consider a matter settled, and neither should we.
• Jesus’ General (not a California blog) comes to the defense of 15% Doolittle.
• janinsanfran reports the immigration discussion from a meeting between the Episcopalian laity in San Francisco and the candiates for the bishopric thereof.
• Mayor Sam’s Sister City reports on some poo-flinging in the race for AD-38. More poo-flinging ensues in the comments. And people say we aren’t related to apes…
• The Assembly Health Committee has been busy with a whole boatload of pro-consumer bills.
• Terry Preston again with an explanation of why teachers teach where they do.

Today’s California Blog Roundup is on the flip. Teasers: the independent expenditure campaign for Angelides, a bit more on the Angelides/Westly matchup, Governor Schwarzenegger’s manifest and multitudinous failings, the import of CA-50 and the Republican swift-boating of Francine Busby, more 15% Doolittle and his defenders moral relativism, Paid-For Pombo’s self-dealing and propaganda, and some miscellaneous commentary I found interesting on Di-Fi, Bush’s visit, California Senate Staffers, etc.

The Angelides / Westly Matchup

• I was away for a long weekend and return to lots of commentary on the independent expenditure effort on Phil Angelides behalf. I rather like Shane Goldmacher’s California Observer post, which has a good summary of what’s happening and notes, sensibly, that most of the carping and speculation that one hears is really all inside baseball which likely won’t affect the voters. Bill Bradley has a bit more on the genesis of the IE campaign, as well as a lot of inside baseball and personality gossip, for them as are interested in that sort of thing.
• Bill Bradley also notes that Steve Westly has bought a fair bit of cable TV advertising. That’s likely to be pretty closely targeted, so if someone has an insight as to which channels, that would be interesting.
• Another day, another Bill Bradley critique of the Angelides campaign.
• Angelides is green. No, wait, Westly is green. OK, they’re both all Kermitesque. So are the Dems in the State Senate.

Governor Schwarzenegger

• Richocheting off of a piece by Frank Russo, ABC notes that Governor Schwarzenegger’s workers’ comp reform seems to have worked pretty much in favor of the insurance companies at the expense of the workers. Why is anyone surprised when a Republican initiative hoses working people? It’s as predictable as gravity . . . maybe more so.
• Arnold good with California’s prison system? Not so much.
• Arnold getting some federal help to donor-state California to strengthen the levees in the Sacramento Valley? Not so much.
• Arnold enforcing laws intended to help the working poor? Not so much.
• Frank Russo asks if Governor Arnold “5 Hummers in my garage” Schwarzenegger will do anything about what looks very much like gasoline price gouging? Hey, the man owns five Hummers. If he can take it, surely the rest of us can. Wimps.

CA-50

• Chris Bowers at MyDD ponders whether a Busby win in the runoff would be a harbinger for realignment, and whether a loss would indicate the opposite.
• Francine Busby responds to the Republican swiftboat-style ads in CA-50. Turns out those ads are pretty much all lies and distortions. Whoda thunk it?
• Words Have Power notes that the NRCC, which is paying for the ad, seems to have no-one able to comment on it. Apparently the ad sprang organically from the Republican party infrastructure in the dark of night (rather like a mushroom).

15% Doolittle / CA-04

• Can 15% Doolittle stop lying? Now it turns out that a 15% commission paid (to the candidate’s wife) on amounts raised is not actually standard practice in the fundraising industry. See also the SacBee editorial that Dump Doolittle points toward. Seriously — this is a flat-out bribe. B.R.I.B.E. Doolittle might as well have had a menu like Cunningham’s printed up.
• Oh, wait a minute: maybe 15% Doolittle does have a menu. Here’s WHP again with a 15% Doolittle connection to Duke Cunningham’s favorite bribe source.
• And in 15% Doolittle’s defense, we get another Republican saying “as long it’s legal”, it’s ethical. That explains a lot about the modern Republican party: both their corruption and their burning desire to pass laws to regulate private behavior. They’re just trying to stop themselves before they sin again.
• But wait, there’s more. Words Have Power finds Jon Fleischman of the Flash Report (also former Executive Director of the California Republican Party) joining the fan club for 15% Doolittle. Seriously, these people have no moral compass.

Paid-For Pombo / CA-11

• Progressive 11th has a pretty good litany of Paid-For Pombo’s self-dealing as the nominal representative of his constituents. Look, if one is a doctrinaire movement conservative like Paid-For Pombo, believing that government has no real purpose, why not strip-mine it?
• Again from Progressive 11th, a roundup of links concerning Paid-For Pombo’s use of public money to distribute anti-conservation propaganda. See also Seeing The Forest.

Smörgåsbord

• The mighty King of Zembla looks, briefly, at Dianne Feinstein’s financial ties.
• Martini Republic wasn’t all that excited about Ned Lamont dropping in for a fundraiser in Oakland.
• janinsanfran has a useful categorization of political types, jumping off from a reading of Crashing The Gates.
• The California Observer profiles the top Democratic staffer on California budget issues. Craig Cornett sounds like an impressive guy, but I am reminded again of the extent to which term limits force us to rely on staffers and lobbyists for institutional memory.
• Also from The California Observer: a net loss in the absolute number of jobs in California, with a particular weakness in the building industry. The reader is left to make his or her own inferences.
• left i on the news has a brief and piquant critique of the Washington Post’s reporting on President Bush’s visit to California. liotn also has some coverage of the protest of Bush’s presence at Cisco, which is most notable for the photo showing the distance of the “free speech zone” from Bush’s august person.
• Last, the SF Chronicle endorses Debra Bowen, as reported by … Debra Bowen.

Today’s California Blog Roundup is on the flip. Teasers: No cash for levees, Bush visits, Arnold photo-ops, clean money, minimum wage, education, public health, Rovism resurfaces, Paid-For Pombo, outside influence in CA-11, CA-50.

P.S. Yr. Humble Editor will be unavailable for several days; the Blog Roundup will return on Monday.

Pot-Pourri is at the top today

• California will get no federal help for the levees in Sacramento. Big shock. Not that the levees are likely to fail, or anything.
• AB 583, the California legislature’s clean money bill, is up for a hearing in the Senate Elections committee today. We’ll keep an eye out.
• on pretty much every aspect of the indexing of the minimum wage to inflation: political, moral, exponential.Shame on us.
• Dunner’s Stunners has some thoughts on the Sheila Kuhl bill on including GLBT individuals in public school history courses.
• Take that, free market fundamentalists!
• The Mad Professah notices that HIV+ diagnoses are now to be reported to the state by name, no longer by unique (but anonymous) identifier.