As an authentic investigative journalist, one who had the courage and integrity to expose Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's war on fish, fishermen and Tribes, I must say to the corporate media, "I could have told you so," in reference to the "relevation" that Schwarzenegger fathered a "love child."
The Los Angeles Times reported on May 17 that the former California governor admitted to Maria Shriver, his wife, that he'd fathered a child with the woman, who had worked for the family for 20 years. Schwarzenegger's admission to fathering a child with a household staff member resulted in his separation from Shriver.
"After leaving the governor's office, I told my wife about this event, which occurred over a decade ago," Schwarzenegger claimed in a statement. "I understand and deserve the feelings of anger and disappointment among my friends and family. There are no excuses and I take full responsibility for the hurt I have caused. I have apologized to Maria, my children and my family. I am truly sorry."
I bet Schwarzenegger is really "sorry" - as "sorry" as he was for his unprecedented campaign against the state's fish, fishermen and Indian Tribes!
Schwarzenegger, the worst Governor in California history, was shamelessly praised as the "Green Governor" by corporate "environmental" NGOS and political hacks for his support of corporate greenwashing efforts. The worst example of this pandering took place on April, 14, 2010, when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Chief Prosecuting Attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper, honored Schwarzenegger for his "environmental advocacy" at the "Riverkeeper's Annual Fishermen's Ball" at Pier Sixty on the Hudson River in New York City (http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2010/04/14/18644697.php).
Kennedy bestowed the award upon Schwarzenegger in spite of nationwide outrage by fishermen and environmentalists over honoring such an undeserving politician for his "environmental advocacy." Three courageous environmental activists including Robert Jereski were arrested for protesting at the event.
As corporate "environmentalists" and the media were praising Schwarzenegger for being the "Green Governor," the Austrian-born politician was screwing fish, fishermen, Tribes, the environment and all Californians. In reality, Schwarzenegger is a creature with no ethics or concern for other human beings or the environment.
He left a trail of destruction in his wake, ranging from his corrupt plans to build the peripheral canal and his privately funded Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative fiasco, to the destruction of the state's economy, to his collapsed marriage. Covering up the fact that he had a child with a staffer until now is just one example of a mountain of examples of his complete and total lack of integrity and ethics.
Schwarzenegger's real environmental legacy is much different from how Schwarzenegger and his collaborators portray it. What was his actual environmental record?
• Schwarzenegger allowed the Department of Water Resources to pump record levels of water out of the Delta from 2003 to 2007, resulting in the Central Valley salmon and California Delta pelagic species collapses.The largest annual water export levels in history occurred in 2003 (6.3 million acre feet), 2004 (6.1 MAF), 2005 (6.5 MAF) and 2006 (6.3 MAF). Exports averaged 4.6 MAF annually between 1990 and 1999 and increasing to an average of 6 MAF between 2000 and 2007, a rise of almost 30 percent, according to the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance.
• He constantly attacked two federal biological opinions, released in 2009, protecting Delta smelt, Central Valley steelhead, Sacramento River chinook salmon, green sturgeon and southern resident killer whales.
• His administration did nothing while tens of thousands of striped bass, Sacramento blackfish, Sacramento splittail and other species perished during a levee repair project at Prospect Island in the California Delta in November 2007.
• He vetoed numerous environmental bills, including vetoing a badly needed bill sponsored by Senator Lois Wolk (D-Davis) in 2008 that would provide for emergency fish rescue plans on the Delta.
• He consistently slashed funding for game wardens in the field while California has the lowest ratio of wardens to residents of any state in the nation.
• He constantly directed the Central Valley Regional Water Control Board to continue to grant waivers to agricultural polluters, in spite of the dire condition of Delta fisheries.
• Since 2004, he fast-tracked a controversial, privately-funded Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative filled with conflicts of interest, institutional racism and corruption. Rather than creating marine protected areas that truly protect the ocean, this initiative kicks sustainable fishermen and gatherers off the water while refusing to deal with pollution, coastal development, military testing, wave energy projects and other human uses of the ocean that imperil marine life and ecosystems.
• As Schwarzenegger fast-tracked the privately-funded MLPA fiasco, he twice vetoed two crab pot limit bills needed to preserve California crab fisheries.
• Schwarzenegger introduced a bill that would allow the lame-duck Governor to choose 25 development projects each year that would be exempt from the state's strict standards under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) (http://www.ecovote.org/blog/?p=1674).
• The Governor's Office of Pesticide Regulation on December 1, 2010 inexplicably approved methyl iodide to replace the soil fumigant methyl bromide, even though methyl iodide is even more toxic to animals, fish and people than methyl bromide (http://www.sacbee.com/2010/12/04/3231811/inexplicably-state-approves-new.html).
However, the "crown jewel" of Schwarzenegger's water policies was his campaign to build a peripheral canal/canal and new dams through his Delta Vision and Bay Delta Conservation Plan processes. This construction of a canal/tunnel, estimated to cost anywhere from $23 to $53.8 billion, is likely to lead to the extinction of Central Valley steelhead, Sacramento River chinook salmon, Delta smelt, longfin smelt, green sturgeon, Sacramento splittail and other species.
In his zeal to build the canal, Schwarzenegger attempted to sabotage the campaign by the Klamath, Yurok, Karuk and Hoopa Valley Tribes, fishermen and environmentalists to remove four Klamath River dams by including $250 million for dam removal in an unpopular water bond that creates the infrastructure for a peripheral canal and new dams. Because it would have faced certain defeat at the polls last November, Schwarzenegger and the Legislative leadership postponed the water bond until November 2012.
In addition, the Schwarzenegger administration granted agribusiness permits to divert water from the Scott and Shasta rivers, resulting in the de-watering of these Klamath River tributaries at tremendous risk to endangered coho salmon. Schwarzenegger's "scorched earth" policy towards the Scott and Shasta forced Earthjustice to file a lawsuit against the Department of Fish and Game on behalf of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, Klamath Riverkeeper, the Sierra Club, the Quartz Valley Indian Tribe, Northcoast Environmental Center and Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC).
While his record regarding fishery and water issues is the worst of any Governor in California history, Schwarzenegger's portrayal by the corporate media and corporate environmental NGOs as a relentless advocate for "clean energy" is also very deceptive. Former Senator Sheila Kuel eloquently exposed the myth of the "Jolly Green Giant" in her article, "A Lame Duck Governor Fabricates A Hoped-For Legacy," in the California Progress Report on July 29 (http://www.californiaprogressreport.com/site/?q=node/8010).
Where was the corporate media that is now so eager to talk about Schwarzenegger's "love child" scandal when Schwarzenegger's was waging his "scorched earth campaign" against fish and the environment?
The good news is that Schwarzenegger is gone from the Governor's office. The bad news is the terrible legacy that he left - the collapse of Central Valley steelhead, Sacramento River spring and winter run chinook salmon, Delta smelt, longfin smelt, Sacramento splittail and other fish populations, his many horrible appointments to state boards and commissions, and his consistent failure to enforce the state's clean water, fish restoration and other environmental laws.
While some are suggesting that Schwarzenegger, the former "Governator," has become the "Sperminator," he will always be the "Fish Terminator" and "Governor Greenwash" to me!
Six days left to go, and the chattering class is paying attention. Here's what they're saying.
• The Los Angeles Times is doing their take on the ethnic divide on the race, and presents something you probably never knew--that voters tend to prefer voting for candidates of their own ethnicity over those of other ethnicities! I guess Avenue Q was right. Especially telling is the final quote:
"Ethnicity is a factor," said Harry Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at USC. "But it's not the only factor."
My world has been rocked beyond belief. Sarcasm aside, though--if you're going to do a piece on ethnicity in the CA-32 race, you could at least include some of the juicier, more intriguing aspects of the race--things like, what type of support will Emanuel Pleitez draw and how will that affect the race? What will the impact of Betty Tom Chu be? You know--more like our coverage.
• If national media coverage won local Congressional elections, Emanuel Pleitez would be in really good shape. Following up on the positive coverage in the Los Angeles Times about his candidacy, National Journal has what amounts to a glowing review of Pleitez' online strategy in today's online version. While I think that calling Pleitez a "web candidate" in the title does him a little bit of a disservice, the point is that Pleitez has tried something relatively new for a Congressional seat: using social media to facilitate a more lateral structure as a major part of the organization.
To me, the most interesting part of Pleitez' run against two much better known heavyweights is the fact that if the same race had been run five years ago, someone like Pleitez would have struggled to even get off the ground, much less be talked about in the same breath as the major candidates in this race. But the creation of easy-to-use online fundrasing through ActBlue as well as the massive proliferation of social media has allowed for the creation of an entirely different element to politics that really used to only apply at a more national scale, starting with Dean and perfected by Obama. The most interesting thing will be to see what happens when today's Facebook generation become political heavyweights themselves--how will the traditional and currently non-traditional elements of politics interact? I expect that at some point in the future Pleitez' run for Congress will become a reference point for political experts about both the benefits and the drawbacks of dependence on social media as a key element in the campaign.
• Presuming that either Gil Cedillo or Judy Chu advances to the expected runoff and then proceeds to victory in July, the game of musical chairs will continue--either for Chu's Board of Equalization seat, or for Cedillo's 22nd District Senate Seat. La Opinión is reporting (Spanish-language) that if it's the latter, Los Angeles City Councilmember Ed Reyes (District 1) is going to take a shot at the seat. That, of course, would open up a seat on the City Council as well. Just one more reason for Democratic politicians to really support Democratic Presidents--it opens up all sorts of opportunities for career advancement.
• I'm glad we have better commenters than the people at Mayor Sam. This nugget is particularly entertaining:
I could dream that 3 Dems could split the enough so that the R can win but that is dreaming. If we were competitive in urban areas that scenario wouldn't be out of the question.
Some people just don't understand that this is a consolidated Primary election. Just to clarify: if nobody gets 50%, the top vote-getter by party will proceed to the July runoff.
Mickey Kaus, last seen publishing the contents of a private email list for his own amusement, has now come up with a new idea (he gets one a year that have nothing to do with "let's destroy teacher's unions"); he wants to see a newspaper covering the Westside of Los Angeles. It actually starts off rather good:
Over a million people live here. Affluent people. People semi-obsessively concerned with local issues like crime, traffic, development, city and state politics and ill-served by the magisterial L.A. Times in far off downtown, which has to cover all of Southern California and seems to think paying attention to the West Side is somehow elitist, if not racist. ... You could hire five reporters--cheap, these days--and you'd have about four more reporters covering the area than the Times has. If they're the right reporters it shouldn't be that difficult to steal the Times' richest readers and the advertisers who want to reach them. (Many of those readers already get the New York Times for its national and international coverage. You would be the local supplement.)
There's no question that the LA Times is too big and too poorly mismanaged to pay proper attention to the many communities of Southern California. And it's also true that cuts to staff at local papers leave the country open to political trickery at the local level. So there's a lot to like about a niche-marketed local paper serving a fairly well-off community that would pay for the privilege. Instead of newspaper bailouts, fostering increased competition at the local level makes sense.
Which leads us to what Mickey Kaus, a guy who is somehow a paid writer, thinks is a good use of local resources for a new newspaper:
We want to know whom Mayor Villaraigosa is dating, and we want to see her picture. And if John Edwards visits his mistress at the Beverly Hilton and gets chased into a bathroom by National Enquirer reporters--hey, you know, maybe that's a story! (The LAT didn't think so.) By covering politics in a way that got at least a few hundred thousand readers to pay attention, you could take the first, big step toward changing the apathetic culture of Southern California (the culture that lets Democratic interest groups fill the void and call the shots).
That's right, Mickey's conception of a paper that would change the apathetic culture of Southern California is one that is essentially a tabloid with a selective bias toward people Mickey Kaus hates. Amazingly, he thinks that would be a big seller! I'd bet they could call it "The Things Mickey Kaus Obsesses Over Tribune" and print tens of copies! What a well-informed citizenry that would engender! Maybe a free pair of panties (perfect for sniffing) could come with every edition!
Since Kaus apparently Googles his name repeatedly and has emailed me in the past when I've called him out on his nonsense (and a guy who links to random Tumblr pages on his own site seems to have a real sensitivity to this kind of thing), I'll repeat to him what he said to Ezra Klein: "All communications are on the record."
In both the Friday and Saturday editions of the Los Angeles Times, right on page A1 above the fold, there was a graphic of a "tax calculator," which projected the additional taxes an individual would pay based on certain factors like income, number of dependents and values of vehicles. They have a corresponding tax calculator on their website where users can type in the data and get the precise tax hit coming to them. The Sacramento Bee has the same thing. Talk radio was having a field day with these calculators over the past couple days, getting people to call in and disclose their statistics and telling them how much money they will owe. This led to perverse complaints like the lady making $126,000 a year ranting about an $800 tax increase.
In my life, I have never seen a "spending cut calculator," where someone good plug in the services they rely on, like how many school-age children they have, or how many roads they take to work, or how many police officers and firefighters serve their community, or what social services they or their families rely on, and how much they stand to lose in THAT equation. Tax calculators show bias toward the gated community screamers on the right who see their money being piled away for nothing. A spending cut calculator would actually show the impact to a much larger cross-section of society, putting far more people at risk than a below 1% hit to their bottom line.
But of course, people who are perceived to depend on state services probably don't log on to the LA Times and the Sacramento Bee websites very often to calculate their tax burden. In reality, we all depend on the state for roads and law enforcement and libraries and schools and county hospitals and on and on. And in Los Angeles County, one in five residents - almost 2.2 million people - receive some form of public aid. So wouldn't it make sense to portray the real cost of spending cuts in the same way that tax increases are portrayed?
Contra Dan Walters, it is completely untrue that "liberal Web sites" are unilaterally condemning cuts to education and health & welfare spending. We fully understand that a $42 billion dollar hole cannot be filled by revenue alone. We certainly condemn corporate tax cuts at a time of massive deficits, or counter-productive actions like selling the lottery, which will produce net losses in the long-term. But there is no question that the media mentality is to highlight the tax side of the equation over the spending side, and dramatically portray the tax increases - splashed across the front page - while relegating the spending cuts to further down the page. It feeds the tax revolt and distorts the debate. And it's completely irresponsible.
Under the stellar leadership of Sam Zell, the LA Times is cutting another 300 jobs and eliminating the California section:
Editor Russ Stanton said in a second memo that the cuts will include a 70-position reduction across the editorial department, or 11 percent, in the coming weeks.
Hartenstein said the paper will reduce the number of sections on March 2, folding the California section into the front section, which includes local, national and international news, while keeping Business, Sports and Calendar as daily fixtures.
The feature section lineup, including Health, Food, Home, Image, Travel and Arts & Books, will remain unchanged, he said.
Good thing there's nothing special happening in the state that would require coverage.
Anyone who thinks that the Times will continue to cover California in the same way by folding the section into the front page is delusional. The staff cuts will certainly come from the local beat. Keep in mind that this is the biggest daily in the state.
We have 38 million residents and maybe 10 full-time reporters making sense of Sacramento.
Let's not wonder why nobody will have good information on why they're getting IOUs in the mail in a few weeks instead of their tax refunds and public assistance checks.
A $5-million plan to replace 78 wood piles that support the pier is among the hundreds of California projects that stand to benefit from the federal stimulus measure. In fact, the first major initiative of the Obama administration could deliver as much as $63 billion to the state.
Some of the money would help ease California's budget crisis, although officials in Sacramento say it would cover only one-quarter of the nearly $42-billion deficit [...]
The $63-billion projection for California -- provided by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank with ties to President Obama -- includes about $44 billion to help pay for things such as infrastructure projects, healthcare for the poor and increased unemployment benefits.
The remaining $19 billion would cover the cost of the individual tax cuts to Californians.
To be fair, the story does make clear that state and local government relief would only directly impact about 1/4 of the budget hole. But I think it's dangerous to throw around $63 billion when there's still going to be a need for tough solutions on revenues and cuts in the budget. That number throws in the kitchen sink - it includes tax cuts to individuals and businesses, unemployment insurance extension, food stamp benefits, everything. The fact that more people have money to spend may positively impact the bottom line if California catches some of that cash in sales taxes, but the story - and really the projection by CAP - makes it sound like California will be handed a $63 billion dollar oversized novelty check. This will only serve to aid the radical Yacht Party agenda, allowing them to say that California just got a bailout so there's no need for tax increases. Every sane person knows that the federal windfall will help but not fix the budget, and talk of $63 billion like it's a sugar plum fairy really hurts the ability to make that fix happen.
For example, when citizens all over the state don't get their tax refunds in the coming months, with taxpayers on the low end of the income scale feeling the greatest effect, and they read stories about $63 billion flowing to the state, who do you think they're going to blame? And I'm sure the Yacht Party will be around to direct that blame, too.
It's fairly irresponsible to headline "$63 BILLION!" when we know only $10 billion of that will directly hit the budget.
That someone is Peter Schrag in yesterday's LA Times, calling the Yacht Party California's Kamikazes - a party in terminal decline in the state but determined to take everyone else down with them:
In a state where whites have been just another minority for the better part of a decade, and where Latinos will in another generation be an absolute majority, it may not be surprising that that GOP narrowness leads to a gritty sense of besiegement and a kamikaze mentality that seems ready to take itself over the cliff, and the rest of the state with it....
But in the current crisis, the Democrats have in fact agreed to major cuts; the Republicans remain adamant on revenue. That resistance, as most people must know by now, is made possible by California's nearly unique constitutional provision requiring a two-thirds majority in the Legislature to enact a budget or increase taxes. If five Republicans -- two in the state Senate, three in the Assembly, both of which have Democratic majorities -- broke ranks, there'd be no gridlock.
But that's only part of the story. In a survey last year by the Public Policy Institute of California, 52% of the state's Democrats identified themselves as liberals, 31% as "middle of the road" and 17% as conservative.
Republicans were far more rigidly conservative: 67% called themselves conservative, 21% called themselves middle of the road and 8% said they were liberal.
So Democrats are not quite as hard-line as the folklore suggests.
One wonders if the LA Times editorial board read Schrag's column closely. Schrag is making many of the points we have been making here at Calitics, but he makes them especially effectively, and hopefully the rest of the state's media will listen and stop lying to their readers that the problem in Sacramento is that legislators won't negotiate - that instead the Yacht Party is determined to claw back some political relevance at the cost of the state's viability.
The Republicans in California are the equivalent of a failed state. The party hasn't been viable on a statewide basis since 1996. 2002 and 2003 saw some momentary gains but those faded, and the only Republican with meaningful statewide success - Arnold - has made distancing himself from his own party a key to his electoral victories. So they exploit the 2/3 rule to maintain a semblance of power and arrest their slide into irrelevance - the Libertarian Party with a few more votes and some actual seats.
Schrag recognizes that the only way this death cult's death grip on the state will be ended is by eliminating the 2/3 rule:
The fastest way to restore responsibility all around is to rejoin the rest of the democratic world and bring back straight majority votes to enact budgets and raise taxes. That would break up the GOP cult, make both parties more responsible to the voters as a whole, force them to make the tough choices and take the heat for the consequences, and -- most important -- get on with the business of governing.
This is an eminently sensible conclusion. It's a shame it's taken weeks, if not months, for the LA Times op-ed page to start making sense on this, but they couldn't hide from reality any longer. The Yacht Party are now the Kamikaze Party, determined to sink the ship of state out of spite and desperation.
The LA Times today has a bizarre editorial in support of a proposed initiative that would fire all the legislators and the governor if they do not agree on a budget by the Constitutionally-mandated deadline of June 15:
Brad Morisoli of Livermore has proposed an initiative that provides, among other things, that if the Legislature fails to adopt a budget by midnight on June 15, every elected lawmaker's term ends. The governor's too. Right then, right there. See ya. None of those people could hold office again for at least two years. The "Pass Our Budget Act" is not just cranky, it's kooky. Simplistic. Destructive. Where do we sign?
What this would do is essentially turn California government into a parliamentary democracy, where a government falls and an election is called if a budget is defeated. I'm not entirely opposed to that concept. But this is not a solution to the budget crisis.
Once again the media, in the form of this LA Times editorial, ignores the elephant in the room. The budget crisis is being caused by Republican obstruction alone. Democrats have bent over backward to try and get a budget done. But instead of telling its readers that fact, the state's largest and most influential paper has this to say about the Legislature:
But no, Democrats, Republicans and the governor are acting like brats on a playground. "They started it!" "Did not!" "Did so!" "We did everything we could." No, folks, you didn't.
All those angry and irresponsible ballot measures Californians have adopted over the years have exacerbated the situation, but it's hard to believe that we deserve the childishness we are getting from the Capitol in this fiscal emergency.
Adopt a budget. Now.
This is one of the most ridiculous things I've read in a newspaper in quite a long time. Legislators aren't children - they're adults engaged in a political process. One side - the Democrats - are willing to piss off their base and cut a bad deal to balance the budget. The other side - Republicans - refuse to do anything, placing Grover Norquist above the economic security of 36 million Californians.
The LA Times editorial is the equivalent of a driver standing over a mechanic screaming "fix it! fix it! fix it! fix it!"
Except in this case, the state's paper of record could actually help fix it by refusing to mislead its readers about the situation in Sacramento, and tell Californians the truth - Republican obstruction is the only reason California lacks a balanced budget.
I've noticed a strain of thought which believes that all that is needed to achieve Democratic goals in the state is better framing and messaging, because that can get into the media and convince more Californians of the need to restore sanity to the budget process and reform state government. This assumes that there's any kind of substantial political media to begin with. There's shockingly little on local news and radio, and even the newspapers have scaled back their local political coverage. What is currently out there reaches at most 1% of the electorate, and cuts to Capitol bureaus in Sacramento have decreased that gradually over the last year. No media outlet is willing to carry information to the public, a dangerous scenario for a state in crisis.
And because of this breakdown, this provides an opportunity for those with an agenda, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and right-wing think tanks (or even the false equivalent nonsense of a California Forward) to pursue their goals under the cover of "news." They infect what little coverage there is and provide ready-made content in the form of editorials for papers to print. A sorry example of this showed up in yesterday's LA Times, when Bret Jacobson wrote a screed about Hilda Solis' choice as Labor Secretary.
Solis regularly sides with organized labor's demands, including the biggest of them all: union leaders' desperate campaign to boost their membership by getting rid of secret ballot elections. That privacy allows millions of American workers to vote their conscience when deciding whether to start paying dues to a union boss. Consequently, it's easy to see why union bosses prefer "card check" -- a dubious method that requires employees to sign a legally binding card stating their preference in a way that would allow anyone to know if they are pro-union or not.
The fight over card check has already been a precarious affair. And this week, with the announcement of Obama's pick of Solis, the situation got even stickier. Solis has a hypocritical history of demanding secret ballots for herself but not for working Americans.
I don't think I have to go too much further with Jacobson's propaganda. As I've argued elsewhere, what he calls a "secret ballot" is actually a flawed system of union elections that needs to be fixed. If labor elections were legitimate, there wouldn't be the need for legislation. Instead, think of it as your "secret ballot" Presidential election marred by: mandatory pro-McCain training sessions held across the country, mandatory meetings where "Obama is a Muslim" propaganda is foregrounded, threats to take away your job if you vote for Obama, and threats to close your workplace entirely if Obama wins. There is nothing democratic about these one-sided farces characterized by intimidation and harassment. That's why we need a new system for determining whether workers want to collectively bargain, and majority signup is simply the best practice out there.
But that's not my biggest beef with Jacobson's argument. It's that, at the bottom of his editorial, the LA Times credits him by writing "Bret Jacobson is founder and president of Maverick Strategies LLC, a research and communications firm serving business and free-market think tanks." What they don't say is that he has a long history of union-busting, partnering with the man who is leading efforts to fight the Employee Free Choice Act. Matt Browner Hamlin discloses the lack of disclosure:
"Prior to founding Maverick Strategies, Bret co-founded the Center for Union Facts, overseeing that organization's research activities, guiding its communications, launching its new-media capabilities, and helping plan its strategic national advertising and earned-media campaigns."
And just for those not paying attention at home, here's Sourcewatch:
"The Center for Union Facts is a secretive front group for individuals and industries opposed to union activities. It is part of lobbyist Rick Berman's family of front groups including the Employment Policies Institute. The domain name www.unionfacts.com was registered to Berman & Co. in May 2005." [...]
In short, the Center for Union Facts is the key organization in Big Business efforts to stop the progress of labor in America, most notably through fighting against the Employee Free Choice Act. One of their co-founders, Bret Jacobson, was given license to push the Center's anti-union, anti-worker agenda in an op-ed against the nominee for Labor Secretary, while the Times failed to disclose the only informative part of his biography. He's the founder of a research firm? What is that supposed to tell the Times' readers? Pretty much every person I know who works in politics does some level of consulting. The most important piece of Jacobson's biography - his professional connection to one of the biggest anti-union groups in America - is left out of a column that specifically pushes the Center's agenda. In an AP article three days ago, a spokesman for the Center attacked President-elect Obama's pick of Solis for Labor Secretary (though, amazingly, the AP cited the Center as "a group critical of organized labor").
Matt works for the SEIU. There, I just disclosed that. Congratulations to me for having more integrity than the Los Angeles Times!
The Employee Free Choice Act is a national issue. But when you have a corporate-run media (the LA Times editorial board has a history of anti-worker pontificating) combined with a nearly invisible political class so that Californians have no base of knowledge about their government, the ease with which propagandists can place their beliefs into what little political media exists is frankly breathtaking. There is plenty of blame to go around in California's current crisis, but the lack of any responsible (or even present) certainly contributes to it.
It's a good bet that 51% of the Legislature would have voted for a budget by now -- maybe even had one in place for the July 1 start of the new fiscal year. But 67% is required.
Only two other states have such a monstrous hurdle. And both are better positioned to deal with it because, unlike California, their legislatures are lopsidedly dominated by one party....
State Sen. Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks), a hero of fiscal conservatives, long has favored allowing a majority budget vote.
"The two-thirds vote for the budget has not contained spending, and it blurs accountability," McClintock says. "If anything, in past years, it has prompted additional spending as votes for the budget are cobbled together."
The rub is that while McClintock is willing to support a majority vote for a budget he is not willing to support majority vote for taxes. That is the one that really matters. If we had a majority rule for the budget but 2/3 for taxes, it would do nothing to change the current budget standoff as Republicans would still use their numbers to block a tax increase and therefore block a budget.
The column has some good quotes from Steinberg and Bass, who are showing welcome interest in fixing the odious 2/3 rule:
Both incoming Senate leader Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) and Assembly Speaker Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles) say they'll consider developing a 2010 ballot initiative to permit majority-vote budgets.
"I'm telling you, I'm very serious about it," Steinberg says. "We can't keep doing this. This is ridiculous. It's unproductive."
Bass figures there would be plenty of financial support for a ballot campaign from labor unions, healthcare providers and others who rely on public funds and are frustrated by incessantly tardy budgets.
"This budget crisis we're in is a perfect example of why we need to be like 47 other states," Bass says. "I'm not sure what we have in common with Arkansas and Rhode Island. . . .
"We would have had a budget by the constitutional deadline, June 15."
Both Bass and Steinberg need to move on a fix for the 2/3 rule. But since that won't happen until 2010, we need a solution to THIS budget crisis - a solution which will require voters to hold Republicans accountable for their hostage tactics.
Lest we let Skelton off easy today, he still shows he believes in the Media's First Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of Republicans:
Don't blame Republicans either. They're being asked by the governor to break their pledges -- however misguided they were -- not to raise taxes. Moreover, most are philosophically opposed to taxing people more -- particularly during a recession -- and are sticking to their principles. That's supposed to be an admirable trait.
Nonsense. The 2/3 rule isn't a problem unless one party makes it a problem. The Republicans are using the 2/3 rule as a weapon to destroy this state and make its residents suffer. Don't let them get away with it.
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.
• It's two days until the kickoff of Netroots Nation, and among the many luminaries attending will be Gavin Newsom, who is introducing green jobs expert Van Jones at the Sunday morning keynote. The fact that he's running for Governor has nothing to do with this, I'm sure... UPDATE: LA City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo will also be on a panel on health care, talking about his many investigations into insurance industry pratices. That should be an interesting panel for health care activists, as it features nyceve and Ezra Klein, as well as the mother of Nataline Sarkysian, who died while waiting for her insurer to approve an operation.
• The final numbers on the June election were miserable, with a record low (for a regular election) 28.2% turnout. A ridiculous amount of voters cast ballots by mail - 58.7%, also a record. VBM is far stronger in Northern California than in the Los Angeles area, and not surprisingly turnout is higher up there as well. This is really changing how elections ought to be conducted, as we move to a VBM state. Campaign operatives need to understand this quickly.
• Hey, we had a bank run at IndyMac yesterday. Fun! The FDIC insures up to $100,000, so consumers should be fine for the most part, but what you're going to see is eroding confidence in regional banks as the financial crisis widens.
• Another leader at the LA Times is out, this time publisher David Hiller. I'm sure Sam Zell and his team can make loads of money on the paper if they just fire everybody and go to robot reporters.
• AB 97 cleared the legislature yesterday, which would ban trans fats at California restaurants and bakeries. It now goes to the governor. He did sign a ban on trans fats in school cafeterias last year.
There was an extremely disturbing editorial in yesterday's Washington Post by Harold Meyerson, who used to be the executive editor of the LA Weekly, and thus understands the journalism scene here in Southern California. What is being done to the flagship newspaper, the LA Times, by real estate magnate Sam Zell, is nothing short of a dismantling of the biggest print outlet in the state and one of the biggest in the country. Zell was not the only owner willing to buy the Times last year; in fact, Eli Broad and Ron Burkle wanted to purchase it, spin it off from the Tribune Company, and return local ownership to the Southland. Instead, the Chicagoan Zell made the deal, and he's taking apart the newspaper bit by bit. It's a familiar story we've seen as the print journalism industry struggles through a disruptive time, and its top managers are responding in all the wrong ways.
During his first year in journalism, Zell has visited the city rooms and Washington bureaus of a number of Trib publications to deliver obscenity-laced warnings and threats to employees that whatever it was they were doing, it wasn't working. There was too much coverage of world and national affairs, he told Times writers and editors; readers don't want that stuff. Last week, the company decreed that its 12 papers would have to cut by 500 the number of pages they devoted every week to news, features and editorials, until the ratio of pages devoted to copy and pages devoted to advertising was a nice, even 1 to 1. At the Times, that would mean eliminating 82 pages a week.
As the company prepares to shed more reporters, it has measured writers' performances by the number of column inches of stories they ground out. It found, said one Zell executive, that the level of pages per reporter at one of Zell's smaller papers, the Hartford Courant (about 300), greatly exceeded that at the Times (about 50). As one of the handful of major national papers, however, the Times employs the kind of investigative and expert beat reporters not found at most smaller papers. I could name a number of Times writers who labored for months on stories that went on to win Pulitzers and other prizes, and whose column-inch production, accordingly, was relatively light. Doing so, I fear, would only put their necks on Zell's chopping block. So let me instead note that if The Post's Dana Priest and Anne Hull, who spent months uncovering the scandalous conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and whose reporting not only won a Pulitzer but caused a shake-up in the Army's treatment of wounded veterans, had been subjected to the Zellometer productivity index, they'd be prime candidates for termination.
Which is precisely, unfortunately, what's been happening at the Times. Voluntarily or not, large numbers of highly talented editors and reporters have left. The editorial staff is about two-thirds its size in the late 1990s, with further deep cuts in the offing. A paper that is both an axiom and an ornament of Los Angeles life, that helps set the political, business and artistic agenda for one of America's two great world metropolises, is being shrunk and, if Zell continues to get his way, dumbed down.
This is really hideous, and ultimately this will reduce even further the level of coverage on our state and its politics at this crucial juncture, in the midst of a housing crisis, a widening budget gap, and soaring energy prices. There are numerous problems here - bringing a businessman unused to the rigors of journalism in to run a newspaper, the effective elimination of the concept of the public interest, the commercialization of that which informs a citizenry, and all the rest. Conglomerates which control what news is disseminated and how it is presented not only interfere with the truth (really, read that Ruth Rosen article about her time on SF Chronicle editorial board in the run-up to war), but they have little ability to even manage the situation by their own narrow standards and turn a profit. Again and again we see major cuts to newsroom staffs, reductions in space for news, shrinking column inches, and the only result is that readers are turned off to the product and they drop their subscriptions.
We in the blogosphere slam the news media early and often, but we actually can't do what we do without them. And the electorate can't make the decisions in their political and personal lives that lead to progress when their sources of information are being chopped one column inch at a time. Sam Zell is a cancer on the body politic.
• 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.
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.
I know that the traditional press is experiencing budget cuts and staff shortages, but there's never a good reason to use Debbie Schlussel, the low-rent Ann Coulter, as a source. However, Peter Wallsten of the LA Times did just that yesterday in a smear of Barack Obama. Schlussel is someone who blamed Pakistanis for the Virginia Tech massacre. She's a fearmonger of the rankest kind who is so unhappy about her position in the sewers of the pro-hate insaneosphere that she routinely emails cable news outlets daily reminding them of her availability. She should not be within 100 yards of anything that makes its way into respectable newsprint. And yet she was a source for this terrible Wallsten article.
The evidence Wallsten presents is scant and hardly alarming: Obama said nice things about Rashid Khalidi at a going away party for the respected Palestinian scholar, who moved from the University of Chicago to the Columbia University; he attended a speech by the late Palestinian expert Edward Said in 1998; he occasionally made statements supportive of Palestinians to Palestinian activists he knew in Chicago.
Yet the implicit tone of Wallsten's article suggests that Obama is not to be trusted on matters relating to Israel. Left aside is the fact that one can be pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel (at least in Chicago). Or the fact that the majority of Israelis support a two-state solution to the conflict, the same position held by Obama. MJ Rosenberg brilliantly parodied the gist of the Times' article in a blog post at Talking Points Memo today: "LA Times Today: Obama Not To Be Trusted, Doesn't Hate Arabs!!"
I used to work for Sen. Carl Levin, a Jew and a strong supporter of Israel, who is a close friend of the Arab community (in part, because he represents more Arab Americans than any other senator). I've seen Carl at Palestinian dinners (last year I saw him at one with Condi Rice). In fact, Joe Lieberman, not exactly an enemy of the State of Israel, has always gone out of his way to keep an open door to Arab-Americans, Palestinians and others.
In other words, this article is utterly bogus. Yes, Obama has empathy for Palestinians, just as he has empathy for Israelis. The man is naturally empathetic which will help repair some of the damage inflicted to our country's image by the current xenophobic administration.
If Arab-Americans and Palestinians trust Obama and think he plays fair, he will have considerably more leverage with them than either of the other two candidates who are not perceived that way. As Congressmen Bob Wexler and Steve Rothman, both Obama supporters, like to say, an American President who can speak to and be heard by Arabs can do a much better job in helping Israel and the Palestinians achieve peace and security than a President who is considered utterly unsympathetic to their concerns.
This is something to pay attention to and not dismiss, because the "Obama is an anti-Semite" rhetoric has been amped up as we approach the general election. It's foul nonsense, and Peter Wallsten, along with the LA Times' editorial staff, ought to know better. Of course, they believe people off the street who tell them that P. Diddy killed Tupac, so I guess this isn't all that surprising or unbefitting of their editorial standards.
Again, I question the value of newspaper endorsements, but the LAT has chosen for the first time in a very, very long time. And they "strongly endorsed" Barack Obama.
With two candidates so closely aligned on the issues, we look to their abilities and potential as leaders, and their record of action in service of their stated ideals. Clinton is an accomplished public servant whose election would provide familiarity and, most important, competence in the White House, when for seven years it has been lacking. But experience has value only if it is accompanied by courage and leads to judgment.
Nowhere was that judgment more needed than in 2003, when Congress was called upon to accept or reject the disastrous Iraq invasion. Clinton faced a test and failed, joining the stampede as Congress voted to authorize war. At last week's debate and in previous such sessions, Clinton blamed Bush for abusing the authority she helped to give him, and she has made much of the fact that Obama was not yet in the Senate and didn't face the same test. But Obama was in public life, saw the danger of the invasion and the consequences of occupation, and he said so. He was right.
Obama demonstrates as well that he is open-eyed about the terrorist threat posed to the nation, and would not shrink from military action where it is warranted. He does not oppose all wars, he has famously stated, but rather "dumb wars." He also has the edge in economic policy, less because of particular planks in his platform than because of his understanding that some liberal orthodoxies developed during the last 40 years have been overtaken by history. He offers leadership on education, technology policy and environmental protection unfettered by the positions of previous administrations.
Go read the whole thing. It should be noted that, due to budget cuts, the LA Times Sunday Opinion section is kind of hidden. It's in tabloid format and tacked on to half of the Book Review section. Because of the significance, it's possible they will put it in a more prominent place.
UPDATE: Obama has left the state (for good, apparently) while Hillary continues to hold events here until Sunday, I believe. On Sunday Oprah Winfrey will come back out on the campaign trail, rallying in LA with Michelle Obama.
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.
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.
