Not a lot of California-related blogging going on today. Maybe it’s the weather. No teasers, no flip. It’s all right here.

• Frank Russo of California Progress Report does a pretty good job making flood control interesting and explaining the politics of it. It’s boring until the flood hits. Then it better be boring, or you’re hosed. This kind of grunt work on infrastructure is most of what a government should be doing, and exactly what the Republican Party does not do.
• BeyondChron is disgruntled today. Well, they’re generally disgruntled, but excessive gruntlement is a sign that one is not paying attention. In particular today, Media Alliance worries that the Google / Earthlink tag team that the City of SF picked for citywide Wi-Fi may not provide proper privacy protections and other good public interest provisions.
• Dan Gillmor tips us to a foreign takeover of a local media outlet.
• Alliance for a Better California doesn’t like Dan Walters’ Generic Union Bashing Column any more than I did, but they go into much more detail.
• Beep informs us that there’s a ballot proposition in Santa Barbara County to split the county in half. The history on this should be interesting, especially as the northern half of the county seems to want the split, but the southern half funds the county. This sounds vaguely familiar to me somehow…
• The Santa Clara County Dems have some endorsements for June.
• Progressive 11th just points us to a couple articles on dirty money that tell us more of what we already know about Dirty Dick Pombo.
• From My Left Wing: It’s funny because it’s true.
• Kingdaddy at Arms and Influence just doesn’t write about domestic politics much, and never about state politics. But he’s worth reading if you’re at all interested in military theory and history. Today he writes about the Diggers, Quakers, Levellers and a host of other sects that arose in England in the 17th Century and the our current theocrats. It’s just interesting.

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.

Well, I find myself agreeing with Dan Walters (it happens occasionally):

If nothing else, the comic opera collapse of the two-month political quest for a plan to improve highways, levees and other strained and deteriorating public facilities should finally convince Californians that their Capitol is a broken institution, endemically incapable of dealing with major policy issues.
***
Simply put, California’s dizzyingly dense mélange of ideological, geographic, cultural and economic subgroups interacts with a political structure that, in effect, gives every “stakeholder” a virtual veto power over the product. Under those circumstances, there are only two possible outcomes, both of which are bad. Either the product is a monstrosity that accommodates all demands but collapses of its own weight, or there is stalemate and no product at all.(Sac Bee 3/17/06)

Agreed! The fact that every interest can hold up the governing in our state is ridiculous.  It has lead us to the terrible result that we govern by proposition.  It led Arnold Schwarzenegger to work for Prop 10 for after school programs, it led Rob Reiner to work for Prop 82 for universal preschool.  Where does my finger point? Squarely at Prop 13 and its ilk. 

Now, Dan has a different idea.  He’s not concerned with changing the system, he just thinks that everybody should be good and do what’s right.  Uh…yeah…that’s gonna happen:

If there’s any hope of reviving the Capitol’s relevance, its occupants must have enough guts to keep it simple and to heed Nancy Reagan’s advice on drugs to “just say no” to all ancillary demands, no matter what their source may be.

Well, Dan, I’m not sure if your tongue is planted firmly in cheek, but I think we both know that  legislators and interest groups are not going to stop being self-interested.  What we need is a return of the simple majority to budgetary politics.