I was reading the Bee this morning about the GOP Convention in San Diego over the weekend. The lead story was the GOP finally has a leader in Whitman. Even though some of the birthers and tea party, anti- immigration, Prop 8 activists are not happy with Meg, she seems to have unified the GOP party and will campaign as a team. Campaigning as a team will help the down ticket candidates if she has coattails at all.

 

What are we doing? Not much. We look at our candidate for Governor hanging around in his Oakland Hqts. Doing nothing. It is reported that Jerry does not want to campaign as a ticket. I don't know if that is true or not but we really need to get active and excited. We have a great ticket top to bottom. The threat to our progressive agenda is especially evident with the race for AG and of course the race for governor. If the Los Angeles DA is elected then you can forget an Attorney General who is at all LGBT friendly and who will work to support the proponents of Prop 8. If we lose the race for Controller you can forget an aggressive team member of the State Board of Equalization led by our great friend Betty Yee. If we indeed do lose John Chiang then we lose another of the bright lights in the party.

 

If we lose Barbara Boxer to Carly Fiorina then we lose yet another Senate seat during this strange election year. We lose our best shot at repealing DADT and DOMA and an aggressive leader in environmental legislation. We need Boxer now more than ever in the US Senate.

 

As the California Senate sits poised to vote on what could be game-changing legislation in the American battle to control plastic waste, the author of the Single-Use Bag Reduction Act (AB 1998), California Assemblymember Julia Brownley, delivered a blistering expose of the false figures being used by the plastics industry trade association, the American Chemistry Council (ACC), to oppose her bill.

Assemblymember Brownley appeared at UCLA's James Bridges Theater to address a crowd gathered for the Plastic Pollution Coalition's screening of the documentary Bag It! and other short films concerning the environmental and economic impacts of single-use plastic bags.

Brownley played radio ads, television ads and showed enlarged images of mailers all being employed by The ACC in an attempt to defeat the largest alliance of supporters ever amassed in California to support single-use bag reduction. Environmental groups like Heal the Bay, a Santa Monica based ocean protection non-profit that conducts volunteer beach clean-ups in the Los Angeles Area, have long been seeking legislative solutions to the plastic bag pollution that inundates California rivers, storm drains, beaches and our offshore waters.

However, the present legislative effort, Julia Brownley's Assembly Bill 1998, is the first to attract the support of the California Grocers Association, labor unions, and a wide variety of businesses. Even Hollywood has voiced its support for the legislation. The ACC is spearheading opposition to the proposed legislation.

The ACC advertisements are misleading in many ways, according to Assemblymember Brownley. The ads predict a loss of jobs when relatively few single-use plastic bags are made in California and there is the opportunity for new green jobs producing reusable bags in this state to meet a burgeoning need.

The national League of Conservation Voters has sent an email to its national members asking if California GOP Senate hopeful Carly Fiorina should be among the candidates for the League's infamous "Dirty Dozen" campaign. Vote here: http://www.lcv.org/feedback/choice/

Here's their write-up of the Fiorina nomination:

California Senate candidate Carly Fiorina (R-CA) - Failed former Hewlett-Packard CEO, Carly Fiorina, is challenging environmental champion and chairman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works Barbara Boxer. As Senator McCain's surrogate during the 2008 Presidential election, Fiorina repeatedly endorsed expanding domestic offshore drilling even though her state of California experienced one of the most destructive U.S. oil spills to date when over 100,000 barrels of oil spilled into the Santa Barbara Channel in 1969. Fiorina even ran a commercial against Senator Boxer's stance on global warming claiming that Boxer is "worried about the weather."

Fiorina is competing against several other Republicans for Dirty Dozen honors.

Here's an interesting press release from the Dr. Ami Bera congressional campaign that shows how Democrats can effectively use GOP attacks on state pensions to go after Republican officeholders.

On Saturday August 21, 2010, the California Republican Party is hosting their fall convention, which will feature a workshop on “The ‘Pension Tsunami Facing California.”  The agenda for the workshop states that it will address the issue of lavish pension packages: 

“How excessive are the pension packages given to government employees – and how you can best communicate with the public by using concrete examples of lavish pension packages” (California Republican Party web page, “Convention Info: Workshop Series,” http://www.cagop.org)

If California Republicans are really looking for “concrete examples of lavish pension packages,” they could look to one of their own: Rep. Dan Lungren.  In 2009, Lungren received $55,697 in pension income from the California Legislators Retirement Pension (LRS) for only eight years of service as attorney general. 

Lungren’s LRS pension has far exceeded the pension income earned by the average state employee in California. According to calculations by the Orange County Register, under the pension plan offered to typical state employees, an 11-year employee would be eligible, at most, for $40,738 annually.  (Orange County Register, 8/13/10)

Moreover, Lungren enjoyed a significant spike in his pension payments due to a 25.9% salary increase he received during his final month in office, which increased the maximum amount he could collect on his LRS pension by $11,546.40.  If LRS pension payouts are calculated using 40% of an individual’s maximum salary, then Lungren’s LRS pension would have only been $44,553.60 based on the $111,384 salary he received in 1998.  However, after Lungren received his 25.9% pay raise, the maximum pension benefits available to him increased from $44,553.60 to $56,100, based solely on the salary he received from December 7, 1998 until January 4, 1999. (California Citizens Compensation Committee, “Salaries of Elected Officials,” www.dpa.ca.gov, Orange County Register, 8/13/10)

A few years after Lungren took advantage of this form of "pension spiking," it was outlawed.  In 2007, the Senate and the Assembly passed SB 221 unanimously, which changed the pension benefit structure to close the payout loophole enjoyed by Lungren. Pensions are now based on the highest average salary during a 12-month period.  Lungren continues to draw a pension based on a salary he made for only a month. (SB 221, 2007; Sacramento Bee, 7/18/2007)

 

Radio spot follows San Francisco Chronicle investigation into thousands of dollars worth of gifts Cooley has taken during his tenure as D.A.

 

SAN FRANCISCO -- The Kamala Harris for Attorney General campaign today released a radio ad following news reports that Republican A.G. nominee Steve Cooley has taken "thousands of dollars in gifts" during his nine years in office as Los Angeles District Attorney, in spite of the fact that Cooley has "based his campaign for state attorney general in part on his record of fighting public corruption."

 

According to the Chronicle, Cooley has taken thousands of dollars in tickets to concerts, sporting events, liquor, cigars, and Italian designer suits from lawyers, businessmen, and others to whom the Cooley campaign referred as Cooley's "close personal friends." The "close personal friends" who have given gifts to Cooley also include the Commerce Casino, real estate developers, the City of Industry Manufacturers Council, and other special interests.

 

E.J. Schultz, the Fresno Bee's one-man band bureau in Sacramento, announced today that he'll be heading to Chicago where he'll be working for Advertising Age, the trade magazine of the advertising industry.

Schultz has had his hands full in the past several years he has been at the bureau. He's covered the press-savvy State Sen. Dean Florez, the Parra/Florez political battles, water wars, and Assemblyman Juan Arambula's bolting from the Democratic Party.

The reporting has been solid and fair, and there's not much that's happened affecting the Central Valley politically that E.J. hasn't been the first one to hear about. He will be missed.

In an email to me this afternoon, E.J. says he expects the Bee to hire someone to fill his shoes. To its credit, the newspaper's parent company has bolstered the Sacramento Bee's Capitol bureau when most other newspapers have downsized or eliminated theirs.

Godspeed E.J.!

According to the campaign of Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley, the Republican A.G. nominee is “someone whose integrity is beyond question.”

Unfortunately for Cooley, recent news investigations have raised very serious questions about Cooley, his character, and his fitness to serve as California’s Attorney General.

A California Watch investigation published Tuesday reports on the federal lawsuit filed by Cooley’s own prosecutors:
“A federal lawsuit filed by the Association of Deputy District Attorneys alleges that Cooley made it a policy to punish its members with punitive transfers, demotions, reduced benefits, and other disciplinary measures. The group has accused Cooley of destroying a member's 2008 campaign mailer and harassing a media outfit that was hosting a gang conference with the union.

“In a preliminary injunction filed in March, U.S. District Court Judge Otis D. Wright called the evidence provided by the union ‘striking and rampant,’ and ordered Cooley’s office to stop ‘discriminating or retaliating against members of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys on the basis of their membership in ADDA.’ …

.. With the new school year already underway and students facing unprecedented larger class sizes due to $17 billion in cuts to public schools over the past two years, California's lawmakers need to take urgent action to ensure that federal funding passed by Congress is distributed to schools immediately and not used to fix the state's budget crisis.

Under a law passed by Congress and signed by President Obama last week, the "Keep Our Educators Working Act," California is due to receive $1.2 billion in federal funding for education to help put teachers and teaching assistants back in classrooms, and to help put others working in California schools back on the job, including custodians and school bus drivers.

Our state lawmakers must take immediate legislative action to ensure that these badly needed federal funds go straight to California's 6.3 million students, many of whom are already packed into overcrowded classrooms and have seen vital programs slashed, school libraries closed and adult supervision on school campuses dwindle, as a result of layoffs of 30,000 educators in public schools - 16,000 last year and 14,000 this year. 

..

As many of California's students head back to our public schools across the state this week, the classrooms they enter are likely to look much different after enduring $17 billion in cuts statewide-starting with fewer teachers and instructional aides, and bigger, sometimes overwhelming, class sizes.

Many students will see playgrounds with fewer adults to supervise them, fewer bus drivers to take them to and from school, and have very limited access to their school libraries.   Their classes will not have as many basic supplies like pencils, paper and books, and computer labs will not be updated with current software.   And the school year will be shorter than it has been in decades.