I will be on KRXA 540 AM this morning at 8 to discuss this and other topics in California politics

Regardless of your stance on Proposition 11, the redistricting reform measure, hopefully everyone can agree that it shouldn’t be used to distort reality, right? Unfortunately that’s exactly what’s happening in the media’s coverage of both Prop 11 and the budget fight. Today’s column from George Skelton is a perfect example of how the media likes to let Republicans off the hook for their failures by blaming Democrats instead – in this case for the long budget delay.

Skelton buys hook, line, and sinker – without the skepticism a journalist should normally display – the bill of goods that Arnold Schwarzenegger sells him on Prop 11 and the budget. Although Skelton acknowledges the 2/3 rule is more important, he still buys into the long discredited notion that legislative redistricting is the cause of Sacramento gridlock:

But I wouldn’t argue with Schwarzenegger’s thesis: Gerrymandering tends to reward extremism in both parties and punish compromise, locking lawmakers into ideological corners….

Republicans pledge not to raise taxes. Democrats promise a laundry list of social programs the state can’t afford.

Then they come to Sacramento and can’t compromise.

“With the redistricting the way it is done, Republicans can only win [primaries] if they’re way to the right and Democrats can only win if they are way to the left,” Schwarzenegger lamented to a Los Angeles news conference Wednesday, pitching for his budget proposal that includes a sales tax increase, billions in spending cuts and budgeting reform.

Neither Arnold nor Skelton are telling the truth, and I leave it up to the reader to determine whether this is a deliberate lie. The Democrats HAVE produced compromise after compromise. They have consistently agreed to spending cuts over the last several years and the joint Assembly-Senate Democratic budget plan this year included several billion in spending cuts, alongside new revenues. That’s exactly the solution a new PPIC poll suggests Californians want. Dems even put it to a vote – and Republicans shot it down. Republicans have yet to offer ANY alternative.

It is undeniable that it is the Republicans alone who are responsible for this budget delay. Look at the email Republican Senator Dave Cogdill sent rejecting compromise:

“The Modesto Bee wants me to raise YOUR taxes!

“I just wanted to pass on this morning’s editorial from one of our local papers. They are calling on my friend Assembly Leader Mike Villines and me to consider raising your taxes. I don’t think that’s what you elected me to do. You elected me to represent you and to fight for a commonsense budget that is not balanced on the backs of taxpayers. California is already one of the most over-taxed states in the nation. With an additional tax increase, we’d vie for number one. That is not a distinction this state needs, especially with a slowing economy.

“This state has a spending problem, not a revenue problem. A tax increase would only encourage more irresponsible spending, cause the loss of over 56,000 jobs, smother the economy, and hurt hardworking Californians. Instead of a tax increase, this state desperately needs budget reform, measures to stimulate the economy and fiscal restraint now and into the future.

Both Skelton and Schwarzenegger allude to the reasons for Cogdill’s and other Republicans’ refusal to compromise – if they do they will be subject to a primary challenge by another wingnut who will say “the incumbent voted for a tax increase,” which makes Republican legislators skittish:

Sitting in his conference room, Schwarzenegger told me: “They are saying things in here — and I never want to repeat it because what we say in this office shouldn’t be repeated — but it’s clear that their hearts are sometimes in the right direction. But they’re afraid to go back to their districts because they’d get slaughtered.

“They could never win anything again. Their political career is over.”

Schwarzenegger was referring to the Republicans he has been trying to lobby for a tax increase. But he added: “Same thing with the Democrats. They have those kind of fears.”

With Republicans running so far to the right and Democrats to the left, the governor complained, “they can’t meet in the middle.”

The first part refers to Republicans and is entirely accurate. But Arnold can’t tell Californians the truth, that this budget crisis is entirely the Republicans’ fault, so he tacks on at the end “oh yeah the Dems have the same problem.”

But they don’t. Democrats have been willing to propose spending cuts. It’s not fear of the left that has prevented them from compromising but the fact that Republicans refuse tax increases. Arnold and Skelton are not being straight with the public here.

More fundamentally, their views on Prop 11 and the budget defy logic. As has been explained countless times – apparently falling on deaf ears – “gerrymandering” is NOT the cause of Republican extremism. Most of California is politically self-segregated. There’s no way to draw competitive districts in San Francisco, Fresno, and south Orange County.

The Republican Party nationwide is characterized by a far-right anti-government zealotry that pervades the voter base and the funding sources. Prop 11 won’t change that.

Finally, Skelton again repeats the discredited canard that California has a spending problem. Instead we have a structural revenue shortfall – we don’t raise enough money to pay for basic services. Republicans know this but don’t have the guts to implement revenue solutions because they’re scared of their fellow far-right freaks. Republicans and Republicans alone are responsible for the budget delay.

But instead of placing the blame squarely on their shoulders, look how Skelton ends his column:

Good people working in a bad system — some of it, the gerrymandering, self-perpetuated by Democrats.

He winds up blaming Democrats for Republican failures. And we wonder why the budget is so late. If I knew that I could screw around and not do my job and someone else would get the blame, I’d do it too.

Brian mentioned this in the open thread, but it really deserves its own post, it’s such a ridiculous column. George Skelton today made a full-throated but deeply flawed argument for offshore drilling that as far as I can tell boils down to “well we did it in the past, and it’s not going to help in the future…so why not?!” and winds up arguing that we should sacrifice the future for hardly anything in return. The column doesn’t start off on a promising note:

On some beaches around Santa Barbara, you could feel the oozing tar between your toes — and that was long before a Union Oil platform five miles offshore spilled crud all over 20 miles of coast in 1969. For centuries, the tar naturally had seeped up through the sand, providing the native Chumash with caulking for their canoes.

Calling it “crud” is deliberately misleading readers about what actually happened in 1969. From UCSB:

Animals that depended on the sea were hard hit. Incoming tides brought the corpses of dead seals and dolphins. Oil had clogged the blowholes of the dolphins, causing massive lung hemorrhages. Animals that ingested the oil were poisoned. In the months that followed, gray whales migrating to their calving and breeding grounds in Baja California avoided the channel -their main route south.

The oil took its toll on the seabird population. Shorebirds like plovers, godwits and willets which feed on sand creatures fled the area. But diving birds which must get their nourishment from the waters themselves became soaked with tar….

Grebes, cormorants and other seabirds were so sick, their feathers so soaked in oil that they were not difficult to catch. Birds were bathed in Polycomplex A-11, medicated, and placed under heat lamps to stave off pneumonia. The survival rate was less than 30 percent for birds that were treated. Many more died on the beaches where they had formerly sought their livelihoods. Those who had managed to avoid the oil were threatened by the detergents used to disperse the oil slick. The chemicals robbed feathers of the natural waterproofing used to keep seabirds afloat.

In all 3686 birds were estimated to have died because of contact with oil. Aerial surveys a year later found only 200 grebes in an area that had previously drawn 4000 to 7000.

Skelton’s blithe dismissal of the ecological consequences of drilling is appalling. It’s not as if our oceans are healthy – oceans face crippling ecological crises and they’re in no position to withstand drilling.

Skelton goes on to turn “Big Oil” into a nostalgia piece (I’m guessing someone didn’t see There Will Be Blood):

Oh, another thing: My dad was an oil field roustabout, or driller or whatever job he could fill on a given shift. So were his dad, brother and cousins. They left their Tennessee farms and followed the migration to California for the 1920s oil boom.

My first summer job out of high school was in a Ventura oil field, an experience guaranteed to prod a kid into college if nothing else would. (But the oil job paid better than newspaper work, I soon discovered.)

So “Big Oil” never has been a big bugaboo for me. It was the producer of a vital commodity and provider of working-class jobs. Although oil derricks annoy many people as unsightly, I’ve always marveled at how they work, especially all lighted up at night.

Nostalgic memories do not count as a sound basis for public policy – unless of course he thinks we should go back to the days before OSHA, dump our toxic waste into the drinking water supply, and drive without seatbelts.

Worse is the conflation of Big Oil with working-class prosperity. Perhaps at some moment in the past this was true, but Skelton here merely reveals that he, like all the High Broderists, does not live in the 21st century, instead assuming that the conditions of the 1970s remain true today. They don’t.

Here in the 21st century Big Oil sucks precious income away form working-class families while returning hardly any in the form of jobs, taxes, or anything else resembling prosperity. And as anyone living near the Torrance refinery knows, they tend to actually have rather debilitating effect on working-class communities.

More below…

Skelton’s main thrust of the article is some weird attempt to argue that offshore drilling will actually produce self-sufficiency – since California uses so much gas, shouldn’t we drill offshore for more?

This argument has numerous flaws. First, Californians are reducing their gas consumption which has been relatively flat over the last 8 or 9 years. Conservation, not wasteful and useless drilling, is what brought prices back from the brink of $5 earlier this summer, and it alone is what will produce long-term savings.

Skelton tries to dismiss the correct argument that drilling now won’t produce usable oil for at least ten years:

Offshore exploration opponents point out that if the federal drilling ban were lifted today, there’d be no immediate effect on gasoline prices. It could take 10 years to get any crude to the gas pump. Fine. Most people driving today still will be 10 years from now.

This is a statement deeply ignorant of how oil works today. He is assuming that the supply of oil and the demand for oil will remain static so that in 10 years, the oil we drill off our coast will make it to the pump and reduce prices.

He is wrong.

The fact is that the demand for oil is soaring around the world, and it is becoming difficult if not impossible to increase production to match it. That is the phenomenon of peak oil at work and that is why gas prices have climbed by 30% every year since 2002. Supply can’t match ever-rising demand. The oil off American shores is so small an amount as to not be able to dent oil prices that, ten years from now, are very likely to be much higher than they are today. As demand rises around the world, oil companies will sell the oil we drill off our coast on a global market. The chances it will bring down the price of gas here in CA is next to none.

The only thing offshore drilling will accomplish is fouling our already suffering oceans and wildlife while lining the pockets of oil companies that sell the oil to China and India. How is that useful again?

Skelton does deal with the argument that lifting the drilling ban detracts us from the necessary long-term investment in alternatives – by dismissing it almost entirely:

Alan Salzman, founder of VantagePoint Venture Partners…adds, “The car industry is going to switch over to electric, and that’s a certainty. Hundreds of thousands of electric cars will be on the road in 2011.”

Let me know when one is affordable, practical and in the showroom.

People didn’t give up their horse and buggy until Henry Ford began making affordable cars. We’re anxiously awaiting our next transportation mode. Meanwhile, we’ll need to keep pumping gas — some of it from the Santa Barbara Channel.

Skelton needs to get out of the LA Times offices and take a look at the city around him. He might be surprised at what he finds. Hundreds of thousands of his fellow Angelenos have found alternatives to driving. That’s what enabled them to reduce their gas consumption and in turn bring down prices, albeit slightly. They bike. They walk.

His own paper reported on Metro Rail’s soaring ridership and again on Metrolink’s soaring ridership. Nowhere in Skelton’s drilling article is the MTA sales tax discussed, which would have the Subway to the Sea open by the time the first oil from the Santa Barbara Channel reaches Chinese gas pumps. Nor is high speed rail discussed, or clean bus technology, or greater urban density, or any other alternative to oil that is ready to go, right now, stalled merely for lack of political will that is currently being wasted on drilling.

Al Gore said it best at the TED Conference here in Monterey last March: drilling is “like a junkie looking for veins in his toes so he can get one last fix.” Drilling distracts us from the real problems our state faces, and for absolutely nothing in return.

Skelton doesn’t have to live in a future where the oil runs out and Californians, instead of building alternatives when we had the time and money to do so, are left with no viable alternative to oil. Unfortunately the rest of us do.

His plan for more drilling isn’t letting go of the past, it’s clinging desperately to the past in a blind refusal to accept the need to change in order to produce a better future. Just as California has failed its offspring by kicking the tax and deficit issues into the future, so too will it fail the future by drilling instead of developing alternatives.

If Skelton wants to live in the past, he’s welcome to do so. But he should not condemn the rest of us to do as well. California must change if we are to have a prosperous future.  

Here are a few tidbits on this GOTV weekend!

• Obviously everyone is going to be working hard for their causes and candidates, so it may be a little quiet around here.  I’ll be out walking all day tomorrow.  Oh, and don’t vote for the racist guy, Bill Johnson, as a Judge of the Superior Court (Office number 125) in LA County.

• Yesterday was the deadline for bills to get passed out of their chamber of origin, and the Assembly passed major subprime mortgage legislation, without help from Republicans (6 of them abstained despite being seated right in the chamber).  This bill has some good homeowner assistance elements that will allow people to restructure their financing before foreclosure.  A mortgage bill has also passed the State Senate, so some form of legislation will hopefully get to the governor post haste.

• One of the biggest problems with the housing crisis is that, as home sale prices lower, homeowners are reassessing their value and getting their property tax lowered, decreasing state revenue yet more.

• Sticking in the shiv before riding off into the sunset, Fabian Nuñez writes a puzzling op-ed in the Sacramento Bee approving of the Governor’s horrible idea to borrow against future lottery revenue.  Considering that the only sustainable solution to the permanent crisis mode that we have in our budget is to reorganize the tax structure instead of constantly borrowing, I have no idea why any Democrat would veer so far off message and undermine the new Speaker’s ability to move forward.  What’s more, lotteries are regressive taxes on the poor.

• One spot where there will be a lot of action on Tuesday is in Ventura County, where Democrats now outnumber Republicans and which could have contested elections in the Assembly, Senate and US Congress.  However, the LA Times shows its political acumen by writing:

One of the more closely watched contests on Tuesday will be the Democratic primary in the 24th Congressional District. Insurance agent Mary Pallant of Oak Park; Marta Jorgensen, a Solvang educator; and Oxnard businesswoman Jill Martinez are running.

Marta Jorgensen quit the race over a month ago and endorsed Martinez.  Way to go, LAT.

• Excellent news out of Los Angeles: there’s been a $1 million dollar settlement with Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center for their dumping homeless patients on Skid Row.  They will also be monitored by a US Attorney for five years.  This unethical practice has reached a reasonable conclusion.  Hollywood Presbyterian deserved punishment.

• Trying to get rid of marijuana grow houses in Arcata is like trying to get rid of the Pacific Ocean on the California coast.

Enjoy!

The blogosphere has been talking a lot today, due to the release of Scott McClellan’s book, about the media whitewashes and their failures to properly inform the country in the run-up to war, due to corporate dictates or budget constraints or sheer laziness.  That has a residual effect everywhere.  The same problems we see with the media at the national level are magnified at the local level, where money is even tighter and cluelessness abounds.  I had to do a double-take when I read the LA Times’ paean “GOP maverick” Sen. Abel Maldonado, supposedly in the context of his re-election “campaign” for State Senate.

SANTA MARIA– — Sen. Abel Maldonado crouched to desk level and, with a mischievous smile, enlisted the help of sixth-grader Michelle Grahame to sweat the governor over the state’s looming budget cuts.

The 12-year-old was immersed in her computer animation project, an Earth-like blue sphere hovering behind a curiously grown-up message: “Please don’t cut Education.”

Maldonado, on a tour of Ralph Dunlap Elementary, persuaded her to tweak it to read: “Please don’t cut Education Arnold.” He left with a printout he promised to deliver to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is hashing over ways to close the state’s estimated $2-billion budget gap.

“We’re in some challenging times, but I’ve made a commitment not to cut education,” Maldonado, a Republican, told school officials and PTA members after the tour. “We’re going to have to get creative.”

It was a gentle jab at Schwarzenegger, but Maldonado has crossed the governor and his party leadership before, earning the scorn of conservatives and Republican loyalists. One party official writing on a conservative blog declared that the senator, one of the few Latino Republicans in Sacramento, “is not one of us.”

Those same maverick traits, however, have intrigued party moderates who are struggling to make the GOP more appealing to the fastest-growing segments of the California electorate: Latinos and independents.

I’m flummoxed at why you would publish this glowing profile, which reads like it came right out of Maldonado’s press office, without revealing some information that people might find helpful.  To wit:

• There is a fleeting reference to a “write-in campaign organized by Democrats,” but absolutely no mention of Dennis Morris and his quest to offer the voters in the district an actual choice to the as-of-now unopposed Senator.  Mark Buchman of the SLO County Dems is quoted blaming Don Perata for the lack of an opponent to begin with, but even though Buchman is Morris’ acting campaign chair, the story never allows him the opportunity to mention the write-in hopeful.

• There is NO MENTION AT ALL of the fact that Maldonado has crossfiled to run as a write-in candidate on the Democratic ballot in an effort to short-circuit that campaign organized by those scheming Democrats, no mention of the effort to run on both sides of the ballot.

• There is no mention of Maldonado’s actual record on anything but the 2007 budget, like his vote against the Global Warming Solutions Act, for example.

• There is a mention of Maldonado’s signing on to a plan even more far-reaching than the Governor’s, to SELL the California Lottery, a shortsighted and ridiculously stupid idea that amounts to borrowing against the future yet again, but there is no independent analysis of that proposal; it’s just stuck in there as the midpoint between two supposed extremes and therefore teh awesome.

This is just an abandonment of actual reporting in exchange for a gauzy personal profile.  And considering there’s an election coming up in less than a week, it’s an abdication of responsibility.

Now, the LA Times doesn’t have much of a presence in the 15th Senate District, they don’t have many full-time reporters covering California politics, so they stumble into these half-hearted attempts to inform before election time, and this is what they come up with – a hagiography of a guy who’s running as a Democrat and a Republican to shut down any efforts to challenge him.

This is the media we have in 2008.

I’m on my way over to Salinas for the “First Presidential Primary in the Nation” (a local straw poll event), but I thought I’d share with you an op-ed I have in today’s LA Times: “Why won’t The Times talk tax hikes?”

Obviously you’ll have to go to the link to read the whole thing, but the basic point is that the Times has, in its recent reporting, been framing the budget crisis as a problem on the spending side, while not being sufficiently attentive to structural revenue deficiencies. If we’re really going to fix the state budget without using this crisis as an occasion to further gut badly needed public services, we need to understand the entirety of the problem, not just one dimension of it.

This week the LA Times/Bloomberg poll was released, showing among other things that Americans are very deeply pessimistic about the economy. Perhaps because of this, the poll suggests Americans have begun to turn against the neoliberal economic agenda promoted for the last 30 years. Specifically, enormous majorities support higher taxes if it will pay for universal health care. From The Big Picture’s summary (linked above):

-A majority of Americans say they would tolerate higher taxes — if it paid for universal health care;

Universal Health Care
-60% said they would be willing to repeal tax cuts to help pay for a health-care program that insures all Americans;
-Most of the highest income group polled, those in households earning more than $100,000, support it.
-More than 80% of Democrats say they like the plan; most Republicans oppose it. -Independent voters also support universal health care;
-52% vs 36% favored health and education spending as a better economic stimulus than tax cuts.

This fits with other recent polls showing an increase in support for universal health care. It is worth noting that the language of “universal health care” is vague, and that there are any number of possible policies that could be considered under that umbrella (from a Clinton-style individual mandate to outright single-payer).

But what is significant about this poll is how progressive the public appears. Americans see right through the Republican “tax cut” ideology and prefer higher taxes to provide for a key social service. Further, they understand that universal health care and education spending are a far better economic stimulus than lower taxes. The entirety of economic policy in both California and the nation is predicated on the reverse.

As Atrios points out the main obstacle to universal health care in America isn’t public opinion, but the lobbying money of the insurance industry. They present a formidable political obstacle. But polls like this show us that their obstacle can be overcome, if the public can be mobilized in favor of the right kind of solution.

[UPDATE] The poll DID actually break down the specific health care proposals, and single-payer has the most support of any of them – though an “individual mandate” is not far behind:

-Requiring large employers to help pay for coverage: 62% yes, 31% no

-Extending Medicare to cover all Americans, creating a government-run system: 53% yes, 36% no

-A mandate that individuals purchase health insurance: 51% yes, 39% no

-Tax breaks to make insurance more affordable — a leading Republican idea: 44% yes, 45% no

Poll details (pdf)

The article explaining the poll results noted that independents lined up strongly with Democrats and behind Democratic solutions. Unfortunately, that same article also buried the numbers in favor of single-payer care.