Today's news roundup on the flip. Teasers: Piggy banks at the trough, the profitability of being a Rovian acolyte, employment up, housing down, gas prices up, and minor skirmishes in the culture war.
Steve Schmidt, leader of the Schwarzenegger Bush-style, Rove-educated campaign team, is raking it in. Who says crime doesn't pay? (On a side note, the Republican Flash Report thinks both the paycheck and Steve Schmidt are just ducky.)
In economic news, jobs are up across the state, but most of our growth has been in home construction and related industries. Home sales are slowing, as everyone knew they eventually would, so clearly that's not a sustainable model. Silicon Valley is doing fairly well, but the lack of investment in affordable housing, transportation and education is a looming problem.
On the culture war front, a whole bunch of fundamentalist teens have descended on San Francisco for some kind of rally against worldliness. I hope they're staying in hotels -- their money spends just fine, I reckon. The targets of complaint called out in the article include MySpace and the sexualization of pop culture. I keep waiting for these folks to realize that Rupert Murdoch, their nominal ally, owns the sex-saturated Fox Channel and now MySpace. Update: Apparently, Fox News is a bit sex-saturated as well. I can't wait for the protests from the fundamentalists.
On the serious side, there's been a small victory for the equal treatment of gay Americans. Though I'm no fan of Proposition 13, it allows a surviving spouse to inherit property without triggering a reassessment. That benefit has been extended to registered domestic partners.
