Links:

• The media is always verrry interested in the consultants on campaigns.  Not surprising really considering that these are the people they talk to most often.  It’s like high school gossip published daily rather than in the yearbook. It’s no different with CA-Gov, as Carla Marinucci takes a look at the consultants on each of the campaigns.

• The Supreme Court asked the Obama administration for their opinion on whether Healthy San Francisco is a violation of ERISA, a benefits law.  Obama has praised the program, but the Bush administration opposed it.  It would be very surprising to see Obama’s crew side with the Golden Gate Rest. Assoc. on this one.

• Michael Hiltzik calls the Tax Commission a waste of time, a sentiment widely shared around these parts. Instead of actually producing necessary changes, they shifted taxes from the rich to the poor, he writes.  In contrast, Dan Walters tries to blame the inevitable failure of the commission recommendations on a dysfunctional political system, as if any bill no matter the implications must be passed to prove the Legislature’s worth in Walters’ eyes.  And Reagan/Bush 41 official Bruce Bartlett just loves it.

• CalBuzz notes that for somebody claiming ideological purity, Poizner has a lot of past squishiness on his record.

• Orange County’s wastewater recycling (“toilet to tap”) is now pretty much at full capacity.  The system is actually one of the leaders in water recycling, and has gotten some good national press.  So far, the water quality has been better than the previous water that just came through the pumps.

• I (Brian) will admit to driving in San Francisco, and occasionally using the meters. However, I am happy to pay for them. The City was studying the idea of adding metered parking as well as adding hours on the meters. (The new meters were also supposed to be the fancy credit-card accepting kind.) Anyway, Mayor Newsom backed down from this idea, and as of yet, has no real plan on how to pay for MUNI going forward.  We need that revenue for public transportation, and the meters were a responsible plan to get it. It is disappointing to see the idea scuttled now when we need it more than ever.

• Matt Yglesias has been hammering the idea that gerrymandering is to blame for the nation’s woes.  We discuss this a lot at Calitics, so it seemed worth noting.

• Meg Whitman was scheduled to do a fundraiser for Bob McDonnell for VA Governor. Yup, the same guy who wrote that working women were “detrimental” to the family. Good to see that Whitman, a, um, working mother, had her priorities in line.  But the moment the media got wind of this, Whitman abruptly canceled, citing a “scheduling conflict”.  

It’s the weekend, so go enjoy the state parks. They’re going to stay open. But before you do, links!

• Good News/Bad News for former Assembly Member Mike Duvall. The Assembly dropped its investigation. The bad news, it was because they don’t have jurisdiction and the FBI is looking into the matter.

• The LA Times will no longer share a joint news service with the Washington Post, ending a long partnership.  Now Sam Zell might actually have to hire a reporter to write stories.

• Former LA Times scribe Jordan Rau penned an article for Kaiser Health News about the similarities between the national health care reform debate and California’s failed effort in 2007.  I’m not seeing the similarities, actually.  What killed that bill was that it didn’t offer affordable coverage. Period. Schwarzenegger offered such meager subsidies that Senate Democrats wouldn’t go along with it. There was no element of Republican fearmongering or middle-of-the-road centrist Dems succumbing to protecting the insurance companies, as has characterized the national debate. What’s more, even if it passed the Legislature none of the funding could have, because of the little minority rule setup we have here. So that would have gone to the ballot. It’s a completely different dynamic and I don’t think many lessons can or should be learned from it.

• eMeg Whitman strenuously endorsed Sen. Boxer back in 2003 for her 2004 election. I’m sure the wingers will love that!

• We mentioned yesterday that John Boehner slandered the glory that is the garlic milkshake, drawing a harsh response from the Gilroy Garlic Festival.  Now, the representative of Gilroy in Congress, public option supporter Mike Honda, delivered a basket of garlic to Boehner’s office and recited a limerick for the Republican Minority Leader:

Two things make for a strong healthy heart.

Gilroy garlic, for one, a good start.

Public option? Also high,

In the American eye,

65 percent n’er want it to part.

Ahh, parochial pride.

Welcome to October, but don’t expect the open thread to do any changin’ just because the calendar rolled over. To the links!

• Assembly Member Anna Caballero officially launched her campaign for Jeff Denham’s senate seat. Now, if we could only nab another Senate seat…

• While Carly Fiorina is supposed to be the high-spending candidate it is Chuck DeVore that’s been the one spending money so far in the Republican Senate primary. Meanwhile, DeVore accused Fiorina of selling nuclear parts to Iran. Ummm…just, wow.

• The DreamWorks crew (Geffen, Katzenberg and Spielberg) are all endorsing Jerry Brown for Governor and throwing him a fundraiser. Joe Garofoli thinks it may have something to do with a feud between Bill Clinton, who endorsed Newsom, and the David Geffen.

• Meg Whitman seemingly can’t dig herself out of this whole not voting for twenty years thing.  She essentially accused the Bee of making up the quote where she tells the Bee to “go find” her voting registration information.  To whit, the Bee editorial board said, we have the tape.  The whole thins is really quite shocking. I mean why would voters want a governor who thought governance was important enough to fill out a ballot for five minutes?

• Lots of rich Californians.

• John Boehner disses the public option by calling it “unpopular as a garlic milkshake.” That didn’t sit too well with Brian Bowe, executive director of the Gilroy Garlic Festival:

“I would invite him to our festival and would urge him to try the garlic ice cream,” Bowe, er, sniffed. “It’s the longest line of people at the festival every year. Everyone loves it.”

Bowe squashed Boehner’s doubts about garlic’s attributes as defly as a chef removing the skin from a clove. “That’s off base,” he told me. “Garlic is one of the healthiest herbs out there. It does wonders for the body and that’s proven. Whether it’s in a milk shake or not, you can’t go wrong with garlic.”

I [Robert] can attest to the utter deliciousness of Gilroy garlic ice cream. And apparently all America can attest to the idiocy that is John Boehner.

If you wanted to be woken up when September ends, here’s your cue.  To the links!

• Dave provided the link in his previous post, but if you were interested in listening to John Garamendi, George Lakoff, and David Atkins talk about the Majority Rule project for a full hour on Angie Coiro’s show on Green960, here’s the podcast.

• The CDP is asking its supporters to sign a petition urging our legislators not to adopt the ruinous recommendations of the Parsky Commission.  Cal Labor Fed chief Art Pulaski and CA Tax Reform Association ED Lenny Goldberg gave the Parsky Commission a failing grade as well.

• In a major settlement, PacifiCorp in Portland will decommission four hydroelectric dams which have blocked salmon migrations on the Klamath River.  It won’t begin until 2020, but if successful it would reverse one of the worst abuses of the Cheney Administration.

• Very interesting piece in the New York Times about workplace enforcement crackdowns on undocumented workers, in particular the firing of almost 1/4 of the workforce at American Apparel in Los Angeles.  It’s certainly more humane that workplace raids, but some community leaders, like Mayor Villaraigosa, still don’t seem to like it – he wants the Administration to focus on workers “exploiting” immigrants (which would still lead to them losing their jobs, no?).  We need a comprehensive solution, in the final analysis.

• Polling numbers in Maine regarding Question 1 are looking…well, decent.  50% no, 41% yes, with 9% undecided.

• This is just part of why Republicans just can’t seem to win over Hispanics.  I’ll start liberating my news releases any day now.

• A slew of LA County employees rallied outside the county administration building as their contract expires tomorrow.

• Dean Andal was fine $9,500 by the FPPC for failing to label a mailer he sent out in a 2004 school board race. The mailer actually went outside of his own district to attack a candidate in Stockton as an added bonus.

• The Governor, at least, has come out in favor of the Parsky Commission recommendations, but there’s not much love for it in the legislature, on the left or the right.  Still looks DOA from the reactions out there.

• Mark Yudof, president of the UC system, is taking a lot of heat for this interview in the NYT Magazine where he seemed to dismiss questions about runaway compensation and program cuts.  Looks to me like Yudof was trying to be a little too cute at a time of suffering for many students and faculty.

• Sen. Boxer’s version of the climate bill will have bigger emissions cuts than the House version. It’s great to see Boxer out on front of this issue.

• Apparently some elected leaders, including DiFi and Rep. Costa, didn’t get the memo about the fact that the Latino Water Coalition is a thinly veiled front for the PR firm Burston-Marsteller, who has been hired to push big construction projects within the California water sphere.

• LAANE (Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy), the venerable social justice and organizing coalition in Southern California, launched their new website today, signaling an entrance into online media in addition to their highly successful campaigns to organize grocery workers, get a living wage for hotel employees around LAX and push the Safe Ports program at the Ports of LA and Long Beach.  Madeleine Janis, the executive director of LAANE, has a blog up at HuffPo about poverty rates in Los Angeles and what we can do about it.

Links:

• Former Assemblyman (and all-around good guy) John Laird writes a blog of sorts for the SF Chronicle.  His latest installment takes issues with eMeg’s position on blocking implementation of AB 32.  You can grab his RSS feed here, you should definitely make it one of your RSS faves.

• Cutbacks at California parks may not lead to closures, but certainly reduced hours, as part of a decade-long trend.  And the biggest by-product of this has been skyrocketing crime at parks across the state, from theft to vandalism.  And with fewer rangers and more cutbacks, that’s certainly set to increase.

• Former Congressman John Doolittle has been named as a co-conspirator in a corruption case against one of his former staffers.  The complaint reads like a Who’s Who of corrupt Republicans in Washington.

• CalPERS is having another election, and SEIU is getting good at backing winners. The election is largely based in the labor movement, not surprising considering that most of the voters are union members or retirees.

• Sen. Rod Wright (D-Inglewood?) has been caught up in a controversy surrounding his residency. Under California law, the legislator is required to live in the district at the election, but is not required to stay there. It’s not clear if he is living in the district now, but the relevant question for the law is his election-time residency status.

• Lots of stories on the GOP semi-annual convention in Indian Wells. Fun!

Links for your weekend:

• Sen. Boxer is leading both Carly Fiorina and Chuck DeVore by leads outside of the margin. Chuck Devore is pretty pumped about this, because he’s one point closer to Boxer than Fiorina.  Woohoo, an accomplishment!  If you’d like some photos and interesting tweets, follow Josh Trevino, who is working for DeVore.

• Meanwhile, the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee has an an amusing retort to iCarly’s FAIL of a website.  Click on Carlyisdreamin.com for a chuckle.

• Arnold was cleared in his FPPC case. It was a big deal in 2003 right after he was sworn in, and basically dealt with income from his bodybuilding empire.

• Warren Hellman has plowed $5 million dollars as an initial investment into a multi-platform news operation for the Bay Area.  Always good to see the potential for new media outlets in media-starved San Francisco.  This could launch early next year.

• Exciting news for everyone who bought real estate at the peak of the market – Moody’s thinks it will take until 2030 to return to that peak in California.  Hold opportunity!

• The Dept. of Public Health cited 11 California hospitals for violations leading to “death or serious injury.”  These includes incidents like leaving two surgical clamps inside a patient in 2008, and pulling the tracheotomy tube out of another patient, who needed it for breathing.

• You know how we laid off all of our school nurses a long time ago? It turns out we really could have used them right about now while fighting the swine flu.

• Dave wrote about the Republican “report” yesterday pulling a number out of thin air for the cost of regulations.  Today, the Chronicle covers it, and others will surely follow. Andrew Ross is outraged that is sat in the halls of Sac for nearly a year.  Yup, it sure is a shame that junk “data” attained from Forbes Magazine languished.

• This is amusing.  The documentary Crude, about a $27 billion dollar lawsuit against Chevron in Ecuador, is premiering in San Francisco today.  Enviro activist Trudie Styler, Sting’s wife, personally invited every one of Chevron’s 6,000 employees in San Francisco to attend the movie for free.  Neat move.

• It seems the Arnold-eMeg back and forth about AB 32 is playing a little bit like a catfight in the media.

• The Public Utilities Commission is setting an aggressive energy efficiency strategy where utilities will invest $4.1 in projects in exchanges for being allowed to hike rates.  Residential retrofits are the linchpin to the strategy.

Links!

• Even Newsweek and John Wildermuth are making fun of iCarlyfornia. And really, why not? It’s just so easy.

• The Fresno Bee points out a new study in the Journal Ecological Restoration about why we should be restoring riparian habitats.  With the growing effects of climate change, this becomes more than an academic question.

• The Governor has officially lost their furlough fight with the State Compensation Insurance Fund, as a judge today forced the state to give back pay to workers.  The SCIF isn’t even paid with state money.  What a stupid act of grandstanding this was.

• Here’s an under-the-radar but persistent trend – the Governor typically appoints people to corporate boards people with whom he has a personal relationship.  His own dentist sits on the state Dental Board, to add another example.

• The groups authoring initiative language on a constitutional convention has decided to delay their filing while they continue to work out the details.  This would move them past the suggested deadline, tightening the window for signature gathering.  They plan to file within a few weeks.

• Whoops! The Lottery’s “Make Me a Millionaire” Show screwed up the payouts.

• CapWeekly sez to expect a special session starting the week of October 13.  Water would certainly top the agenda, along with the effort to qualify the state for education stimulus funding by changing policies on performance pay, and the dead-in-the-water Parsky Commission proposal.

• Dianne Feinstein didn’t take the bait on a Devin Nunes-led Central Valley water amendment that would have overturned federal agency decisions.  Of course, Nunes immediately attacked Feinstein and Barbara Boxer for not giving over their wallets in this particular stick-up.

• California will seek half of all the federal stimulus dollars for high speed rail.

Sorry for the tardiness. here are some links:

• Yippee! Occidental Petroleum found a bunch of oil near Bakersfield. It’s great that the oil companies can get all this stuff from our land and all, how’s about they pay for it?

• Very, very bad news for the community colleges. The amount of money that they had expected had been based on the 2008 budget, but cuts to the budget mean that we don’t draw down all these stimulus dollars.  

• An initiative to legalize marijuana has been approved for circulation. If the two East Bay advocates can get it on the ballot, it will be in November 2010.

• Huzzah! The list of parks to close has apparently been drastically cut, and will not be released for a long time. I suppose that memo stating that it would cost more to close them than keep them open made a difference? Or the letters from Republicans who didn’t want parks in their districts closed b/c of losses due to tourism.  To the first point, ya, logic is good. To the Republicans? Vote for a good budget, and you can keep your parks, until then, you’ll like what you get and take it.

Links!

• Governor Schwarzenegger signed the healthy Families legislation that the insurance companies had been dreaming of for so long.  Though they get a tax renewed, it is at a far lower rate and the insurance companies get to pull down some additional federal dollars. Must be nice…

• Well, if true, here’s an example of penny-wise, and pound extremely foolish. Sean McNeil, CoS to Sen. Wiggins (D-Santa Rosa), apparently had staff mine a legislative database for phone numbers.  Well, if this is true, it ain’t the smartest thing ever.  Such data, while not necessarily cheap, isn’t really that expensive.  Surely the Senator had enough money to buy a few phone numbers. But, the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat never lets a chance to hit a progressive between the teeth, so expect to see this story a few times.

• OC Progressive hears rumors that Sharon Quirk (D), a Fullerton City Council member, may enter the special election race to replace Spanky Duvall in AD-72, which is set for a November 17 primary and January 12 special election.  John MacMurray, who ran against Duvall last year, is also likely to make a go.  With such a fractured Republican field and the Duvall scandal looming Quirk may have a shot, but since the top Republican and Democratic vote-getters will move to a general election, it would be unlikely for Quirk to sneak through after the Yacht Party regroups post-primary.  Still, always good to drain some GOP money in the OC.

• Amazing how the oil company donations to the Governor just followed his announced veto of renewable energy legislation so directly, isn’t it?

• John Myers points out that the issues for which he said he was going to veto all legislation that passes his desk , prisons and water, haven’t really been solved. So, the Healthy Families signing shows that the blockade is over, and it was just another empty Arnold threat.  That being said, there are still a slew of pretty good bills waiting for the Governor. How many he signs is anybody’s guess.

• PG&E quit the US Chamber of Commerce today, becoming the latest to fall out with the organization over their extremist, anti-science viewpoints on climate change.  This is part of a larger split among business that can be exploited on a variety of issues, as the downside of conservative dogma catches up to them.

• Spot.us has had a pretty good run in the SF Bay Area, and they’re bringing their citizen funded journalism to LA. You may want to consider helping out. While it may not be the optimal model for journalism in the future, it is a model. And that’s better than many of the big guys have.

• Sen. DeMint (R-South Carolina) decided that he needed to stick his rather ill-informed head into the California water debate.  It seems he’s gotten most of his information from Sean Hannity and his similarly ill-informed friends who haven’t bothered to check out the North Coast fisheries and the effect the Bush administration water policies have had on those communities. Sen. Feinstein essentially told the junior senator from South Carolina to mind his own beezwax.

• Did the latest conservative smirker to try and play gotcha with the Obama Administration violate California law by illegally recording an NEA conference call without notifying participants?