Today’s California News Roundup is on the flip. Teasers: Schmidt spins, Salmon season chopped, immigration mess, telco infrastructure in California, Angelides interviewed.

Schmidt Spins

• John Myers’ Capital Notes notes that Schmidt said both that the election will not be a referendum on Schwarzenegger and that Schwarzenegger will run on his record. Newspeak is alive and well in the Schwarzenegger campaign.
• This AP article running on Inside Bay Area focuses more on the contrast between the Schwarzenegger team’s Bush-Cheney roots and their insistence that Arnold is not that closely tied to Bush.
• Daniel Weintraub notes the number of attacks on Westly and the promise of negative campaigning, though without personal attacks from the Schwarzenegger campaign. That’s a promise, but not the promise it appears to be. The swiftboating of John Kerry was not done by BC04, though they didn’t stop it. Expect whisper campaigns and third party ads from people like the US Chamber of Commerce to do Schwarzenegger’s dirty work.
• Oh, and Carla Marinucci does some steno work.

Everything Else

• The Pacific Coast salmon season will be drastically cut back this year, based on the decimation of the Klamath coho run by excessive damming and agricultural water use. At least it’s not closed, and there may be some remedies over the next few years. Local ocean-caught salmon will be expensive this year, but if you can afford it, support the local fisheries. Farm-raised salmon is not the same thing, and it’s not particularly good for the environment. Tom Stienstra has the rules for anglers. [Side note: the best coverage on this issue today was from the LA Times — not a fishing town paper. Odd, that.]
• Something’s happening in the Senate on immigration. But nobody seems to know what. The SacBee says the bill is tanking. Knight Ridder (through the CC Times) seems more optimistic, but the quotes from the deport-them-all wing of the Republican Party are not encouraging. Either way, the proposal sounds like a mess, dividing up immigrants without a documented date of entry into different groups by length of stay with different citizenship tracks. And even if it passes the Senate in some form, it will go to conference committee, where the radical House Republicans will remake the bill in their image. Whatever happens, more marches are coming.
• Fabian Núñez introduces a bill to allow telcos to compete with cable companies for television services. It sounds like a good idea — more competition and all that — but the devil is in the details (some of which are laid out in the linked article.
• The OC Register has an AP syndication of an interview with Phil Angelides on a number of issues, with requisite counter-quotes from Westly’s campaign and former Bush adviser Steve Schmidt, now running Schwarzenegger’s campaign.
• Steve Westly will be returning $15,000 in campaign contributions raised by a VC fund he later recommended to CalPERS.
• The Chronicle has a brief piece on the upcoming renewal (one hopes) of certain portions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The three provisions up (1) require federal approval of new voting procedures in jurisdictions with histories of discrimination, (2) require federal observers in jurisdictions where there’s been intimidation of minority voters, and (3) require bilingual ballots in areas with substantial non-English speakers. These provisions affect different California counties to different degrees, but pretty much every county has the bilingual ballot requirement.
• A new form of Generic Dan Walters Column may have been spotted: Structural Problem X exists. Blame Union Y for it, even though the problem results largely from the anti-government constitutional amendments passed in the seventies and eighties. Today, X = School Funding, and Y = the California Teachers Association.
• This not important to anyone but me, but the Red Vic will now be allowed to sell beer.

California News Roundup on the flip. Teasers: Peter Schrag on California, Pelosi profiled, Schwarzenegger profiled, voter registration, Dean, salmon, emissions regulation, insurance, and of course, lots of immigration.

Not Immigration

• Shorter Peter Schrag: California is just very confused. Discuss at the California Progress Report.
• The Chron has the first in a three-part profile of Nancy Pelosi. This installment, at least, is very pro-Pelosi, and pro-machine.
• The LA Times profiles Schwarzenegger. I don’t have any idea what to make of the profile, except that I’m sure I would never want to work for this guy.
• Voter registration is still hosed, requiring registrars to manually confirm hundreds and sometimes thousands of new registrations in time for the June primary (and in CA-50, by April 11).
• Ballot Watch Graphic from the SacBee on the race to replace Steve Westly as State Controller.
• Capitol Roundup from the Merc / CC Times, showing what they thought was important in state politics last week. Oddly, that doesn’t include the minimum wage bills under debate.
• Two different views on Howard Dean’s recent visit to the area: one from the AP, focusing on his statements on immigration, and one directly from the local reporter focusing on the Asian-American Democrats’ conference.
• California steps up with emissions regulations to try to slow global warming. Of course, business interests want it ignored handled at the federal level. The Bush Administration apparently agrees, and is attempting to override both the EPA and state regulations with adminstrative rulemaking by the Transportation Department. Federalism and deference to the legislative branch are core principles of the Republican Party. No, seriously. Stop laughing. Stop it.
• Great piece from the San Francisco Chronicle laying out the constituencies affected by Klamath River damming and water usage decisions, and why now is the time that perhaps past mistakes destroying the salmon fishery can be rectified.
• The Sacramento Bee reports on a privacy screwup by the California State Employment Development Department. Before all y’all anti-government types get twisted up, though, the EDD’s screwup pales beside corporate screwups.
• Last, one of my hobbyhorses: setting auto insurance rates based on driving record, not zip code.

Immigration

• Gregory Rodriguez’s LA Times Op-Ed provides some additional context on the issue of Mexican immigration. Seriously, this is a complicated question, and there’s going to be a lot of “more context” stuff.
• A SacBee piece “analyzing” the effect of the immigration discussion on the California gubernatorial race. And by “analyzing”, I mean turning mostly to political consultants for each major party to criticize the other side’s approach.
• A series of pieces from New America Media about the interaction between black Americans and immigrants. I might read them slightly out of chronological order: (1) Straight Reporting, (2) Earl Ofari Hutchison (3) The Black Commentator / Bruce Dixon, and (4) The Black Commentator / Bruce Dixon again.
• Everybody running for CA-11 against Richard Pombo is more sane on immigration than he is. One finds this article as well, profiling the more nativist of the Republicans in California’s U.S. Representatives. Frankly, my head just spins when I hear Republicans from the House talk about “rule of law”.
• New polling says that in California, immigration is a partisan issue. Nationwide, not so much.

California News Roundup is on the flip. It’s brief — quarter-end is a drag. Teasers: Shwarzenegger team campaign finance violations, blogs in CA-50, solar power, salmon, Filson interviewed, Pombo too extreme for other Republicans, anti-government group loses in court, research to be done on CA schools. There’s immigration news, but nothing all that new, so not in the roundup today.

• ABC spanks Arnold for campaign finance violations in the failed Special Election power grab.
• CQ Politics has coverage on the blogs’ effect on the CA-50 campaign, mostly around the Kaloogian photo fiasco.
• Lake Elsinore, in SoCal, goes live with big solar power project.
• CQ Politics interviews Steve Filson. One wonders if they’ll do Jerry McNerney next.
• Capitol Weekly has dueling environmental position pieces by the two main Democratic candidates for Governor: Angelides | Westly.
• A Santa Clara County Judge dismissed a case from an anti-government group trying to stop the voters from deciding on a sales tax adder in June.
• Richard Pombo’s intended gutting of the Endangered Species Act may be too radical for the Republicans in the Senate. They’re scared of even touching the subject because of what he’d do in conference committee.
• There’s gonna be a big ol’ pile of reports on the California school system sometime around the end of the year. One hopes that they will be both nonpartisan and informative.
• Klamath salmon get some help going home to spawn: fish ladders. Closure of the fishery still looms, though.
• San Jose is hosting a conference for Asian-American and Indo-American Democratic leaders. This is a good thing.

Today’s California Blog Roundup is on the flip. Too much stuff for teasers. Just have a look.

California News Roundup for today on the flip. Teasers: Education spending, Angelides v. Westly, open space purchases in Sonoma County, lobbying “reform”, development, transit, parks, fish, and Prop. 82.

• California’s spending on education is still a train wreck, rife with inequality.
• The Mercury News Capitol Notebook has a good rundown of the good, the bad, and the silly from the last week in Sacramento. From the Contra Costa County Times, the Westly v. Angelides matchup can be summarized as bucks vs. backs. Westly has money, Angelides has union support.
• Sonoma County is discussing the extension of a .025 cent sales tax adder which has been (and will be) used to purchase open space preserves in the county.
• The SacBee has a point-counterpoint on the abortive effort to reform the lobbying rules for the House of Representatives: Dan Lungren (R-Gold River) and Doris Matsui (D-Sacramento). Then the Bee follows up with its own editorial: disclosure and FEC oversight. Did Dan Walters write that? Look, folks, from the outside, it all looks like vote-buying. Stop tinkering around the edges of the problem.
• East Contra Costa anti-growth advocates express concern about transit-centric development requirements. Sometimes the concern is phrased around resource usage (legitimate), and sometimes around nebulous lifestyle concerns (less so).
• From the LA Times, a good piece on development / sprawl vs. parkland.
• Again from the LA Times, a story I’ve been following in the NorCal papers: the likely closure of California’s salmon fisheries. I have a hard time approaching this problem objectively — I grew up with fishing, both for sport and money — but will try to treat it well. The long and short of the problem is resource constraints — mostly overdammed rivers and water-hungry agricultural uses.
• Soot may kill more Californians than we thought. Pollution bad. But we knew that.
• Last, a good summary of the current state of Proposition 82. The organized opposition seems to mostly be anti-government activists and business groups. Of course, one might ask what business groups are concerned about — Proposition 82 targets individuals earning more than $400K / year. It’s almost as if the business groups were representing the interests of the elite business executives…

[Originally posted by Chris Clarke on Norcal Politics, October 19, 2005]

Tracy’s congressional representative Richard Pombo is having a bad week. Today’s Stockton Record has a prominent story – echoed in a few other local dailies – about the House Resources Committee Chairman getting into hot water for not paying taxes on junkets to New Zealand and Japan given him by an anti-environmental front group, the International Foundation for the Conservation of Natural Resources.

This comes on the heels of speculation that he may have a formidable GOP challenger in the primaries. Pete McCloskey, a moderate GOP environmentalist and rancher in the Capay Valley west of Sacramento, is speculating that unless "someone better" pops up, he is likely to challenge Pombo for the Republican candidacy in 2006. McCloskey, who once represented Anna Eshoo’s district from a sort of Green Rockefeller Republican position, is probably best known for being the first Representative to call for Nixon’s impeachment over the Watergate scandal.

Pombo is currently pushing a "rewrite" of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) through Congress that would gut many important protections for wildlife, including the already-straightjacketed Critical Habitat provisions of the act. Though the ESA has long been a Pombo bete noire, a recent poll of his constituents indicates that his advocacy of gutting the landmark law may prove a liability in his increasingly urban district. The poll, commissioned by the environmental group Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund, found that nearly 60 percent of Pombo’s constituents support a strong ESA. A mere 31 percent of his constituents oppose the Endangered Species Act.

This support for the Endangered Species Act is so strong that even when respondents were read competing proposals for changing the act, a solid majority of 61 percent of constituents in Rep. Pombo’s district agreed with supporters of the Endangered Species Act. Pombo, the scion of a family that got rich buying ranches and subdividing them into bedroom communities for liberal-trending San Francisco Bay Area commuters, may yet find his family’s success has ensured his eventual political failure.

Arnold, during the recall and now, claims that he is trying to be an “enviromental governor.” He issues nice platforms  says that he is tough on global warming and makes some pretty nice speeches. And you have to give him some credit.  At least he doesn’t continue on with the lack of evidence baloney:

I say the debate is over – We know the science, we see the threat, and the time for action is now. World Environment Day 6/1/05

But unfortunately, you can’t have it both ways.  He wants to control environmental threats, protect Californians and not injure businesses.  But as they say in the world you can only pick two.  One has to be sacrificed.

And it’s the same with the levee situation in the Sacramento Delta. He says he wants to protect the people living there as well as potential people who want to move there and, of course, to protect development interests in the region.  But you can’t have it all.  So, he’s going to let developers continue building in the flood plain, even while acknowleding that we need to spend $6 Billion in flood protection.  Here’s his logic:

“The reason I don’t like to go toward not building — there are some people who believe that’s the way to go — is that, if you say to yourself, let’s not build in flood prone areas, what do we say about earthquake prone areas?” Schwarzenegger said in an interview with The Bee. “Then you say, the Bay Area, it has a lot of earthquakes…Should no one build in the Bay Area?”

Of course, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the flaw in that logic.  In the Bay Area, we have earthquake codes.  We do not build buildings anymore that do not meet a very strict level of earthquake stability.  In the Flood Plain, besides building every house on stilts (which I don’t see happening), what are you going to do?  If a flood comes in the next ten years before the money from the bond package is spent to protect the Flood Plain, what happens then?  Well, all of that development is destroyed with the possibility of death thrown in for the residents.  So, yes, I would not build a rickety building in the Bay Area, but nor should we build in the flood plain until we have given those communities the best possible shot of surviving the natural disasters that are sure to arrive.