The latest from the campaigns:

• General: Democratic challengers ought to take a close look at two bills passed through the House this week that make conservative priorities pretty clear.  HR 6983, the Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity Act, finally limits the ability of insurance companies to prohibit treatment of mental health in their policies.  John Campbell, Darrell Issa, Ed Royce and Dana Rohrabacher were among the 47 Republicans to vote against it.  HR 5244, the Credit Cardholders’ Bill of Rights Act of 2008, would severely limit predatory lending from an industry that is at least a partial cause of the current crisis in credit.  Brian Bilbray, David Dreier, Gary Miller, Jerry Lewis, Dan Lungren, Campbell, Issa, Royce and Rohrabacher were among the 111 Republicans who voted against that.  These ads write themselves.

• CA-03: Bill Durston is up with two ads, as mentioned by akogun.  It’s unclear how big the buy is.  One is a bio spot, and the other hits Dan Lungren for his, er, unique travel plans.

• CA-04: A lot to report here.  While Tom McClintock is off putting together propaganda blogs attacking Charlie Brown, and of all things, this website, he ought to be paying attention to his campaign manager problem.

The camp of Democratic candidate Charlie Brown claims evidence shows state Sen. McClintock, a Republican, effectively is a substitute Doolittle, and in particular asserts that McClintock campaign manager John Feliz’s connections to Doolittle are significant.

“John Feliz is the architect of Doolittle’s first known political-practices transgression,” said Todd Stenhouse, Brown spokesman. “The bottom line is McClintock claims not to be John Doolittle, yet he’s using his former campaign manager, and he has the same treasurer (David Bauer).”

McClintock campaign spokesman Bill George said, “John Feliz hasn’t worked for Doolittle in 18 to 20 years.”

Note that he doesn’t respond to Bauer, who is still the treasurer for an active Doolittle campaign committee.

Meanwhile, Charlie Brown has endorsed the Pickens Pledge.  I am in complete agreement that the Pickens Plan for energy independence is just a scheme for a rich guy to get richer, but the pledge merely calls for an energy plan to be enacted in the first 100 days of the next Administration.  There is a difference.

• CA-50: Al Gore was in the district to raise money for Nick Leibham.  The Leibham campaign hopes this will kick-start their efforts, but the Cook Political Report recently downgraded the race to “Solid Republican.”  Their belief is that these Republican districts have been injected with momentum with Sarah Palin energizing conservatives to vote.  We’ll see.

• CA-46: One thing is clear: Dana Rohrabacher may allow insurance companies deny treatment to the mentally ill, and he may let the credit card companies fleece his constituents, but he draws the line at the Wall Street bailout.  That’s nothing new – lots of lawmakers are opposed to the bailout – but of course, the fact that Debbie Cook was first out of the gate with her opposition forced his hand, to be sure.  Meanwhile, Cook was feted with a “Truth To Power” at the Association for the Study of Peak Oil conference this week.  On Sunday, there’s a small dollar fundraiser for Cook in Palos Verdes.  Details and tickets at the ActBlue page here.  I will be in attendance Sunday, so please come out if you’re in the area.

• CA-42: Ed Chau has put together a video about polar bears, which obviously is the most important issue affecting constituents in Mission Viejo at risk of losing their homes.  Or the ethical issues of his opponent Gary Miller, one of the most corrupt lawmakers in Congress.

• SD-19: Hannah-Beth Jackson has a new ad out with some personal testimonials about her leadership on a chemical spill in her district when she was in the Assembly, and I have to say I like it.

• LA Board of Supes: Bernard Parks is using his office to try to evict supporters of Mark Ridley-Thomas.  Mayor Villaraigosa has stepped in on the side of the tenants.

On Tuesday, Villaraigosa was forced into the fray – reluctantly, his aides said – after Parks had the city send a 60-day eviction notice to Strategic Concepts of Organizing and Policy Education, a nonprofit focused on community organizing and job training.

Parks said SCOPE was using the old fire station at 1715 Florence Ave. in South Los Angeles to help the Ridley-Thomas campaign, which the group denies.

I’m going to try and do these once a day.  No promises!

• CA-04: In partial response to the kerfuffle from yesterday’s deceitful attack ad, Charlie Brown released two radio spots and a TV ad today.  His wife Jan Brown narrates the TV spot, which foregrounds Charlie and his son’s military service. (Sorry, not embeddable)

The radio spots are both solid attacks on Venturian Candidate Tom McClintock.  Two men, two paths contrasts Brown’s service and leadership with McClintock’s life in politics, and his record on veterans (including donating 5% of his campaign funds) with McClintock’s (voting against veteran’s funding).  Vote is a humorous spot discussing how McClintock can’t vote for himself because he won’t move into the district.  There’s also a lot on McClintock’s per diem expenses from the State Senate.  “L.A. Tom” is the frame they’re going with, and they ask, “if he won’t vote for himself, why should we?”

• CA-11: State Senator Ellen Corbett and Assemblywoman Mary Hayashi sent a letter to women in Jerry McNerney’s district urging them to reject right-wing extremist Dean Andal.  His record on women’s issues is really retrograde.

To the Women of Congressional District 11:

If you are anything like us, you want a representative in Washington that not only reflects your values, but who also respects you.

Dean Andal just doesn’t qualify. In fact, Dean Andal’s record on women’s issues shows just how out of touch and extreme his views are.

In 1994, as a member of the State Assembly, Dean Andal opposed a common sense law that would have allowed women to wear pants in the workplace instead of being forced to wear skirts and dresses.

Andal also voted against requiring health insurance plans to cover cervical cancer screenings. He even voted against making sure that information about sexual harassment be included in mandatory workplace anti-discrimination posters.

Yet the most egregious affront to women he offered in his short term in the Assembly was his vote to restrict the definition of rape to exclude attacks where an incapacitated woman cannot resist.

And what’s worse, Andal’s was the only vote in the Assembly against expanding the definition. The only one.

Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, all women should be proud of the progress we have made. That’s why it’s so important that we don’t send someone like Dean Andal to Congress. Someone with a record like Andal’s can be counted on to turn back the clock on all we have achieved.

• LA Board of Supes: There’s a runoff in this seat between Councilman Bernard Parks and State Senator Mark Ridley-Thomas.  While Ridley-Thomas is a solid progressive who understands the fundamental dysfunction of state government and will fight for progressive values on the powerful Board of Supes, Bernard Parks has hired Republican fixer Steve Kinney to help him win the race.  Parks, who has a business-friendly record on the City Council, is receiving help from BizFed, a PAC notorious for pushing the same agenda.  The wingnuts at the Lincoln Club have reportedly offered him support as well.  At least the choice is now clear to voters – one candidate on the side of the corporate vultures, the other on the side of the people.

• Misc.  I should note that Chris Bowers’ House race forecast is up, and among California races, he lists CA-04 as a tossup, CA-11 as Lean D, and CA-26 & CA-50 as Likely R.  I think he’s selling a couple races short, but that’s a pretty good conservative estimate.

UPDATE by Brian: Video from current over the flip.

I know that we’re going to have a historic new Speaker today, and tomorrow the Governor is going to prevent a revised budget that will set the course for the next few months in the Legislature.  But for the moment I want to talk about taco trucks.

Los Angeles County has enacted rules basically banning the taco truck, the rumbling restaurants on wheels serving Mexican food to lunchtime office workers, day laborers and others throughout the city, particularly in East LA.  The previous order by the County Board of Supervisors was to force taco trucks to move every hour or face a $60 fine.  Most trucks paid it as the cost of doing business.  Now the supervisors have upped that fine to as much as $1000 and possibly jail time.

Make no mistake – the taco trucks are being harassed because restaurants don’t like the competition.  As one truck owner said, “We are hard workers and we pay taxes… we are poor people feeding other poor people.”  In a rare moment of perceptiveness, Dan Walters noted that this is a “new chapter in an old and dreary story of political interference with the economic aspirations of low-income and/or immigrant Californians.”  The restaurant lobby is maybe not as powerful in LA as in San Francisco, but it obviously had enough juice to eliminate their competition in this case.  Walters folds this into a stupid argument about how all business should be unregulated, but in this case he’s right – if you want to offer the opportunity for the new and struggling in our society to experience upward mobility, barriers like this are really restrictive and unnecessary.

Taco trucks are about more than a meal in Los Angeles – they truly are a culture, and one that has migrated onto the internet.  The Great Taco Hunt, a blog dedicated to the LA taco scene, has a loyal following.  People will drive many miles for a decent taco here, and given the traffic that’s a real commitment.  So some residents are fighting back.  Save Our Taco Trucks has also 6,000 signatories to a petition to rescind the law, which goes into effect on Thursday.  Tomorrow, they’re holding a final event at Tacos El Galuzo to raise awareness about the ordinance and share one last legal taco.

You can see the stirrings of how politics will be waged in the save-the-taco-trucks movement.  There has been a wave of local organizing this year, around the Presidential race, around the budget, around proposed education cuts and park closures, and even around hyper-local issues like the taco truck.  This is a new era for California, where technology reduced barriers to communication and allows those with like interests and concerns to find one another.  When the Board of Supes takes down this silly ordinance – and they will – they will have seen the power of modern organizing.

Yesterday I spent some time at an often contentious debate in the race for the 2nd District of the LA County Board of Supervisors.  The two most high-profile candidates for the seat, State Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas and former LAPD Chief and current City Councilman Bernard Parks, squared off in a pretty lively debate which featured a lot of sniping and criticism.

Why the heated exchanges in a county Board of Supervisors race?  Why is a state Senator and a very highly recognized City Councilman running in this race?  Why is Sheila Kuehl planning to run for the Board of Supes when Zev Yaroslavsky’s term is up in the near future?

Because these are unbelievably powerful positions.

Los Angeles County has 10.3 million residents, over a quarter of the whole state.  The county covers 88 cities and multiple unincorporated areas.  Ridiculously enough, there are only five seats on the county Board, meaning that each Supervisor represents over two MILLION people, more than 15 states and the District of Columbia.  I have to assume that these are the biggest districts in terms of population anywhere in the country.  Right now, seats on the board are held by Gloria Molina, Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, Zev Yaroslavsky, Don Knabe and Michael Antonovich.  LA County is immense and rich in diversity, the most in the nation according to the last US Census.  Burke, Knabe and Antonovich’s seats are up for re-election this year, but a sitting Supervisor actually getting challenged in a race is a rare event indeed.  Before term limits (now 3 terms or 12 years), the seat was practically a lifetime position.  The winner of the Parks/Ridley-Thomas race in the 2nd District will yield only the third Supervisor to hold that seat since 1952.

Given all this, what exactly does the Board of Supervisors do?  Well, the Board is the largest public employer in the state of California, serving 102,000 employees, including control of the pension funds.  They also provide services for the entire county, managing county lockups, county hospitals and a host of social services.  It’s a mammoth job and I can’t for the life of me imagine why it still contains only a 5-member board other than the fact that it increases incumbency protection.  When these seats are contested, the dollar sums are outrageous.  Parks and Ridley-Thomas raised well over six figures in the first quarter of 2008, and labor is spending immense amounts in favor of the state Senator.

Using a political tool that sidesteps campaign financing limits, Los Angeles labor unions have raised an unprecedented $2.5 million to elect state Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas to the county Board of Supervisors.

Before voters head to the polls in June, union officials say they will add an additional $1.5 million to the “independent expenditure committee” pot.

“It is a tribute to my colleagues and brothers and sisters in labor,” said Tyrone Freeman, the head of Service Employees International Union Local 6434, one of the contributors to the Alliance for a Stronger Community.

Obviously, an office with such sway over public employees and county service contracts will catch the eye of labor, and they’ve gone almost all in for Mark Ridley-Thomas.  Councilman Parks voted against creating a living wage zone around LAX-area hotels, and has a history of pro-business policies on the City Council.  In yesterday’s debate, he sidestepped the question by saying that the zone shouldn’t be confined to the LAX area, while Ridley-Thomas said outright that “a lving wage law is a tool to fight poverty” and any effort to extend it ought to be taken.

It’s a very interesting race.  Parks has the higher profile and the support of a lot of local leaders, including Yvonne Burke, who has held the seat for 16 years.  Ridley-Thomas has the support of the entire Democratic caucus of the State Senate (every single one of them is down on his endorsement list) and much of the Assembly.  Parks has Maxine Waters’ support, and Ridley-Thomas has Diane Watson’s (she ran against Burke for the seat 16 years ago and lost).  The district includes Mar Vista and Culver City all the way down to South LA and Watts, the majority of residents in the district actually have Spanish surnames, yet this is a major contest in the African-American political community.

And these two appear to really, really not like each other.  The first question in the debate was about gang violence and gang activity, and while Parks stressed youth development and afterschool programs, Ridley-Thomas slyly noted that “some would say that the Los Angeles Police Department acted as a gang during Rampart” (a reference to a major scandal that happened under Parks’ watch as police chief).  It went pretty much downhill from there, with Parks claiming that Ridley-Thomas applauded the closure of King-Drew Medical Center and made sweetheart deals with developers as a City Councilman; with Ridley-Thomas hitting Parks on all sorts of issues (health care, environment, labor) and saying “He will know what leadership looks like when it’s working,” and on and on.  There are differences between the candidates, particularly on issues like the living wage ordinance, but both are stressing economic development for their depressed district, investments in education and health care access, transportation issues (even congestion pricing).

The fierceness of the contest reflects the importance of the race, and the fact that they’re running for what amounts to a 12-year term.  It may not be a sexy seat for progressives to pay attention to, but it has an incredible amount of importance.

It looks like Carmen Chu has decided to take on the punishment that involves running for Supervisor in the 4th District, often called the “Sunset seat”.

San Francisco Supervisor Carmen Chu completed on Tuesday her transformation from a behind-the-scenes city employee to out-front politician, announcing that she would run for election in November.

Chu, who at 29 is the youngest member of the Board of Supervisors, was appointed to the board’s District Four seat on a temporary basis by Mayor Gavin Newsom in September and reappointed late Friday afternoon. She is filling the seat held by former Supervisor Ed Jew, whom Newsom suspended for alleged official misconduct and who last week resigned.

But during several hours Friday – after the point when Jew’s resignation took effect and Chu’s temporary appointment expired at noon and five hours and 38 minutes later when she was finally sworn back into office – it appeared the newest supervisor wasn’t ready to become the mayor’s standard-bearer in District Four.

I will admit that I gave her a hard time when she was first appointed. She had just moved to the district and I felt that she was just another Newsom hack who would warm the seat and follow his directions. However, she has proven to be honest, competent and by all accounts a genuinely down-to-earth person. Now, what remains to be seen, is whether she can navigate the shark tank that is the Fourth District, which is full of shadowy, ambitious characters. She has never before run for office and I don’t think she has much campaign experience. However, she is well liked and, after going through the Ed Jew experience, she may be a fresh face that everyone is looking for.  

Well, the depth of LA’s Hospital mess keeps getting clearer–now the LA Times is reporting that the construction of the new County-USC Medical Center is exploding, and will now be 22% over the original estimates.  Oh yeah, the project is now 1 year overdue and the clock keeps ticking.  (http://www.latimes.c…)

The sadest part of this is that this hospital is not really what LA needs: the county has long had too many hospital beds and not enough local clinics to meet pressing community needs.  Most recently, the Board of Supervisors and the mis-managed County government allowed the vital resource that is (was!) King-Drew Medical Center to die.  Or rather, they lynched it through years of incompetence–with the effect that thousands of residents in the most impacted communities of LA will now not have health care resources they need. 

Why would the Supervisors back such a nonsensical policy?  Because they see Hospitals as Politically beneficial–lots of union votes and contributions to support their uncontested elections, and the opportunity to grandstand around big buildings, rather than doing the tawdry work needed to actually lead or even just manage the nation’s largest local government. 

Equally important, not all Supevisors are created equally.  While Yvonne Burke snoozes in her Brentwood Hills condo, Gloria Molina, Mike Antonovich and Don Knabe have grabbed all the loot they think they can for their districts.  And Zev Yaroslavsky just waves his arms around, like “what can I do about it?”.  What a mess!

What is the solution?  Not only do we need to through these bums out, we need to change the way LA County is run.  We need a single, clearly accountable County Executive, balanced by a large, part-time County Legislature.  Until then, the self-serving Supes will just keep rolling over the same terrible decisions.