Meg Whitman was seriously on the ropes for her apparent lack of voting or even registering to vote until she was 46 years old. Her contradictory and downright puzzling alibis and statements after the fact were utterly mockable, and Chris Kelly did the honors, as he's wont to do. But all along, Whitman was looking for a lifeline - some discrepancy in the reporting that she could use to muddy the entire story, to "prove" that the Sacramento Bee was wrong in their reporting, even if 99% of the story remains true. She has found that lifeline.
Republican candidate Meg Whitman was registered to vote in Santa Clara County for nine months in 1999, Santa Clara elections officials said today, admitting that they supplied inaccurate information to The Bee and other news organizations on the issue.
The Registrar of Voters had previously told The Bee and other media outlets that there was no record of Margaret Cushing Whitman being registered to vote or voting in Santa Clara County in its current voter registration database, on its older microfiche records, or in a separate database of canceled voter registrations.
On Monday, Whitman's campaign said its own team had last week discovered a previously unknown record of Whitman being registered to vote. They said they found it in an archived Santa Clara County voter registration database [...]
DFM then found an archival voting registration record for Whitman on an old back-up file of the county's 1999 registration records not available to county staff, he said.
"The back-up file confirmed that Ms. Whitman was registered to vote in Palo Alto from February 8, 1999 to October 4, 1999," Moreles said.
Importantly, no votes took place in Santa Clara County between February and October 1999. And while Whitman, according to the Registrar of Voters, re-registered in a different county sometime after that, there is not yet a record of such a registration - at least not until 2002.
The point is that this doesn't fundamentally change the story about Whitman's voting record. She still hasn't produced the full records on her own; still hasn't confirmed any registration or vote prior to 1999, when she was 43 years old; still hasn't accounted for the "I clearly remember voting in 1984" remark she made on Fox News yesterday; still hasn't clarified numerous contradictions in her evolving set of stories; and still hasn't shown a voting record befitting any kind of engaged citizen.
However, she has one little data point where the Bee made a mistake. And she's sure to use that to try and discredit the whole article and the whole issue. Whenever asked about this from now on, she'll start with "The Sacramento Bee article was inaccurate." And she'll be technically right. And it won't answer the question.
The latest Big Five meeting is underway, and we could see a yay deal as soon as tonight. Digby, who I'm lucky enough to call a colleague over at Hullabaloo, has a great post about the budget debacle and the collective lack of perspective in politics. She references the 2003 special election freak show and how the media became seduced by marketing and reality-show gamesmanship into cheering on the "Who Wants To Be Governor Of California" spectacle (side note - I actually almost worked on the actual "Who Wants To Be Governor Of California" TV show produced at the time by Game Show Network). And while turning the recall into a game, everyone forgot about the insanity of the associated issue:
The "issue" that supposedly precipitated this little tantrum was the required restoration to earlier higher rates for car registration, brought about by a weakening of the economy. The media went wild, even friends of mine who know absolutely nothing about politics pretended to be enraged that they would be forced to pay $30.00 more a year and they all went out and voted to recall the Governor and replace him with The Terminator.
That recall was a political sideshow of epic proportions, featuring porn stars, Gary Coleman and even Arianna. It was great fun. Standing in line to vote that day -- the longest line I'd ever experienced at the ballot box --- was like being at an American Idol party.
But check it out. In an otherwise terrible George Skelton column, he does make one interesting observation:
Schwarzenegger had campaigned full throttle against Gov. Gray Davis' "outrageous" raising of the vehicle license fee. His favorite stunt was using a wrecking ball to smash an old jalopy that symbolized the tax.
Davis really had only bumped the fee back to its historic level: to 2% of a vehicle's value, rather than a recently enacted 0.65%.
Schwarzenegger's canceling of the fee hike actually amounted to the single biggest spending increase of his reign. That's because all the revenue from the vehicle license fee had gone to local governments, and Schwarzenegger generously agreed to make up their losses by shipping them money from the state general fund.
The annual drain on the state treasury was $6.3 billion until February. Then the governor and Legislature raised the fee to 1.15% of vehicle value, saving the state $1.7 billion. But it will revert to its lower level in two years.
Cutting the car tax plunged the state deeper into debt just as Schwarzenegger was taking the wheel. To cover it -- at least temporarily -- the new governor went on a borrowing binge. It didn't take much to persuade the Legislature and voters to authorize $15 billion in "economic recovery bonds."
Passing those bonds and a companion spending "reform," the governor promised, would mean "no more deficit financing." They'd live within their means. Sacramento would "tear up the credit card and throw it away."
The only thing thrown away was all the bond money, spent long ago on daily expenses -- the equivalent of borrowing to buy groceries.
I'm not saying the car fee issue is the reason the state is currently in chaos. It's far deeper and more complicated than that. But I do believe that the simplistic, downright silly approach Americans take to politics is largely to blame. It long ago became more about marketing and entertainment --- and preening, shallow self-gratification --- than serious consideration of responsible governance.
I would be remiss if I didn't total up the $6.3 billion a year in lost revenue from the vehicle license fee, along with the interest on those needless economic recovery bonds, and note that the total is surely more than the current budget deficit or even the last two combined.
But Digby's main point is correct. When the media in this state bothers to pay attention to politics, it's as a freak show, and they ascribe the same kind of reporting available in the sports section rather than give anyone the information they need to make serious choices about what kind of state they'd like to live in. The so-called "car tax" was the kind of populist pitchfork-fest that was perfect for Schwarzenegger, and he repeated enough movie quotes and manipulated enough emotions to prevail. Along the way, almost nobody challenged the thesis, nobody provided the truth about the VLF, nobody slid the debate from the zaniness of the recall - porn stars! - into the serious business of a government that works.
Digby thinks that "we are going to have to reform more than the state constitution to fix things. We need to reform politics itself somehow, convince people that it isn't American Idol or the World Series, or the ruling class will always be able to afford to put on a show whenever they need to manipulate the folks and the folks will probably fall for it." And I agree with that to an extent: for one, the system cannot be reformed without a responsible citizenry understanding the reasons why. But I'm enough of a goo-goo to believe that enough people can become energized by taking back their government so that the seriousness and the structure will be injected back into California's system. That's why I believe sweeping constitutional reform is in the end the only option - because a status quo system will only empower the types of shenanigans that brought us both the Governator and hundreds of thousands if not millions of residents left with no help and no hope. To get the circus out of town, we must offer an alternative to the sideshow that is our government. If enough of us wish to be a laughingstock no more, it can be done.
To: (insert fun and in no way dated Communist Party reference here) Comrades Phil Trounstine and Jerry Roberts
From: Dave
I read with interest your dripping-with-contempt response to my criticism of your reports on the Parsky Commission. Actually, 4/5 of the article concerned the Commission itself and not you, but I am reminded of the words of Carly Simon:
You're so vain
You probably think this song is about you
As a regular reader of Calbuzz, I admire your sources, if not your willingness to string an entire article together based on two politicians standing next to one another smiling, as well as an over-emphasis on horse-race politics and narratives. But clearly, you have a bit of an inflated view of your clear-eyed mission of "journalism," and the assumed objectivity that goes with it.
Allow me to be blunt: Calitics has been writing about the Parsky Commission since December of 2008, before there was such a thing as Calbuzz. We have followed up time and again, in particular when two weeks ago, Susan Kennedy tipped the hand of how this commission would go by stating that "Our revenue stream is way too progressive." So it was not exactly some kind of amazing scoop to report on a commission that has open meetings and presents all their material in public, which is why plenty of contemporaneous reports were written, based on the documents posted on the Internet that the Parsky Commission presented in anticipation of their open meeting.
Unlike you, I don't pretend to hide my opinions on the very clear economic and tax policy implications of the Commission's report behind some false veil of objectivity. Most of my comments were directed at the report itself, and the way in which a flat tax would quite obviously shift the burden of taxation to the middle class and the poor; but I couldn't help but notice clear language like...
the impending bankruptcy of state government should be sufficient to show players at every point of the political spectrum not only that sweeping change is needed, but also that everyone will have to compromise to keep California from sinking into the 9th Circle of Hell
...which certainly allows people, in my view, a window into how you determine the best policy, defined as the midpoint between whatever pleases those hateful hippies and the ranters on the right. That may be a nice and quick methodology, but it's anything but rigorous, and I'm pretty sure it's an apt description. After all, wasn't one of you the communications director for Gray Davis, who was not above bold expressions of centrism and a fear of the spectre of "The Left"?
(How did pumping out that daily message for ol' Gray turn out, by the way? What did that guy do after his two successful terms were up? Just curious.)
I mean, I'm very sorry for bringing up the inconvenient fact that so-called "objective" journalists can frame a story in such a way that they put their own thumbs on the ideological scale. You claim that your job is to "ferret out the facts" of the policymakers, you know, like hard-hitting reporting on an email to supporters and what one Republican said about another Republican in a press release, but it's fairly clear from the above-mentioned article that you view flat taxes and eliminating corporate taxes as pretty sensible and down the middle, and it colored your coverage. I should probably just have shut up about it and gone back to my Communist Party self-criticism sessions, which by the way is a hilarious and timely joke. Here's another one: In Soviet Russia, television watches you! You can use that!)
So this notion that I should just say thank you for illuminating a public document seems to me to be a bit too self-regarding, and your lashing out at me for pointing out the not-so-hidden biases in that particular article a bit too "the lady doth protest too much." But of course, I have an infantile disorder.
Which brings us to this criticism about the Barbara Boxer press conference and certain bloggers clapping at the end of it, something of a hobby horse for you folks. I am not going to speak for anyone in the room but myself, but I know quite for certain that I didn't clap, and I know what I asked. See, based on my notes (yes, I took them, just like a real live reporter) I know that I followed up a series of queries about torture (yours was some process question about how the Obama Administration "rolled out" the torture memos released a week before) with a specific question about a resolution before the state party seeking the impeachment of Jay Bybee for his role in authorizing torture, to which she answered "I'm very open to that," reminding those assembled that she voted against Bybee's confirmation as a federal judge. Now, at the time, I was involved in securing thousands of signatures from across the state endorsing this resolution, and when it came before the resolutions committee, I would argue that having Sen. Boxer's agreement that calling for the impeachment of someone who helped authorize torture was a reasonable request actually helped get that resolution passed. In other words, it was a combination of what the netroots community does best - using citizen journalism and activism in tandem to effect progress on progressive issues.
p.s. In the cited post, I used variations on the word "fetish" once, in a 1,400-word article. But it made for a smashing joke about therapists, so points for you!
If Dianne Feinstein really was backing away from supporting the Employee Free Choice Act, I'd be the first to blast her. But she never supported it in the 111th Congress to begin with. She remains the only Democratic member of the California delegation, in the House or Senate, not to co-sponsor the bill. And she signaled her support for a compromise bill, which has a kind of "early voting" card check where workers mail in their cards to the NLRB, and if 50% return they get a union, three weeks ago. So some reporter got fooled today by a Chamber of Commerce press release suggesting that DiFi "pulled her support" of the Employee Free Choice Act in a meeting with CoC folks from the Santa Clarita Valley.
Yeah, we get it. You want to break news. But at bare minimum, one Jon Dell should have:
Looked up the meaning of the word "cloture," which apparently he does not know, since Feinstein's vote for the bill isn't needed for its passage
Asked Feinstein for comment instead of taking the word of an organization spending millions of dollars to defeat the bill, and
[Diane Feinstein's] proposal would replace the card-check provision, which would allow workers to unionize if a majority signed authorization cards and strip a company's ability to demand a secret ballot election. "It's a secret ballot that would be mailed in ... just like an absentee ballot. The individual could take it home and mail it in," Feinstein said. If a majority mailed the ballots to the National Labor Relations Board, the NLRB would recognize the union.
What about that? Did she say anything about her own "compromise" bill? Well, we don't know, because a bunch of "breathless" delegates from the Santa Clarita Chamber of Commerce who know nothing about the history of the bill or Feinstein's position apparently didn't ask her about it, they just told their story to an equally incurious reporter who quickly decided that they "broke national news" in a "major turn of events."
This doesn't take Feinstein off the hook or anything - she ought to support the perfectly reasonable provisions of the bill as they stand right now. The California Labor Federation is engaging in a two-day hunger strike in front of her San Francisco office (1 Post Street) to bring attention to DiFi's position on Employee Free Choice. But this "breaking news" is, um, broken.
Arnold Schwarzenegger will not support a Democrat. He never has since he became Governor, and he never will. He said he could support Dianne Feinstein for Senate in 2006, and didn't. He said he could support Jerry Brown for Attorney General in 2006, and didn't. He markets an image of post-partisanship that the national media swallows whole. Republicans hate him, because they believe that crap, but Democrats are too smart to buy it, so they hate him too.
Darrell Issa has had an interesting position in the 111th Congress as one of the chief yarn-spinners on the Republican side. I guess it's because he's immune to any charge of hypocrisy. First he demanded White House compliance with necessary Presidential Records Act laws regarding email, after playing down the Bush Administration's major failings in this regard. Yesterday, he appeared on MSNBC with David Shuster to parrot the latest RNC talking point, that the stimulus earmarked construction of an LA-to-Las Vegas high speed rail train. Now, I'm not sure what's so horrible about this - LA to Vegas is a busy corridor, especially on the weekends, and the route essentially goes through desert so construction will be disruptive to almost no communities. But the fact is that it's completely untrue - LA to Vegas is not on the current DOT high speed rail lists and no money expressly goes toward construction of that corridor. A fact that David Shuster inconveniently pointed out. I particularly enjoy the smile after he knows he's been caught.
This zombie lie isn't going away, but at least some reporters aren't taking the bait.
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.
Just a thought or two on this whole mess while we wait for the Senate to reconvene. While I didn't think it was the best strategy to announce a deal and start voting on it before there was an actual deal in place (although the rumor that Dave Cox reneged on a handshake deal changes my perspective a bit), Darrell Steinberg seems to have backed into a strategy of playing Yacht Party obstruction out very publicly, so that the essential insanity of their anti-tax, sink-the-state agenda can be well-described by what's left of political state media. So George Skelton does the math and refutes the Yacht Party assertion that cutting spending alone can solve the budget crisis, and Dan Walters manages to describe the situation accurately.
And we all sit at our computers and type out our "even Dan Walters and George Skelton believe" articles, eternally hopeful that this is the corner-turning event, that the public will find the right people to blame for the sorry state of affairs, and punish them repeatedly forever more. Only it's wishful thinking. First of all, I hate to break it, but nobody reads George Skelton and Dan Walters. They are opinion leaders to about .001% of the electorate. Second, there was another audience watching Sacramento this weekend, and they were the bondholders, who would be crazy to allow California to borrow one more red cent from them given the political fracturing (and this budget calls for 1.1 trillion red cents, or $11 billion dollars, to be borrowed). Even if this passed tomorrow there would need to be lots of short-term debt floated to manage the cash crisis until new revenues actually reached state coffers, and with the bond rating the lowest in the country and the dysfunction being played out, I don't see it happening.
The other point is that this is, let's face it, a bad deal for Californians. Among the sweeteners thrown in the deal to attract that elusive third Republican vote are a $10,000 tax break for home buyers to re-inflate the bubble and set the state economy up for an even bigger crash; weakened anti-pollution laws that will cost the state additional public health and environmental cleanup spending in the long-term; a potential budget cap that will make it impossible for public schools and social services to meet demand; and much more. The tax changes, which are short-term except for a huge break to multinationals, tax things that we want to encourage in a downturn, work and consumption. What the federal government is offering to spur demand and get the economy moving again is exactly what the state government will be cutting to balance the budget. That's not an argument to kill it, but it's a reflection of reality.
So there will be at best a kind of zero-growth stasis, and at worst a further crumbling of the local economy, with shrunken revenues likely to require another round of this by summer. Ultimately, the media cannot help the Democratic Party solve this problem. The bill is coming due for 30 years of anti-tax zealotry and the belief that we can provide whatever citizens need without paying for it. There isn't a light at the end of the tunnel. That some opinion leaders are coming around about 20 years to late doesn't wash the blood from their hands. And that the Democratic Party is finally thinking that they should maybe fight against the 2/3 requirement that has relegated them to a functional minority in Sacramento since is was instituted doesn't absolve them for 30 years of inattention.
It gives me no pleasure to bear the bad news, but there's no wake-up call on the horizon. Even all 38 million Californians coming to the same "Hey, GOP is suxxor" conclusion at the same time doesn't change structural realities. Those must be fought for over years if not decades, and it is not defeatist to wonder whether it's too late.
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.
Yesterday the California Majority Report reported that Assembly Democrats unfurled a scroll of all their budget cuts that they have adopted over just the past 5 years.
Assemblymember Noreen Evans, Chair of the Budget Committee, along with
Assemblymembers Saldana, De Leon, and Hayashi, unrolled a 150 foot long scroll listing all the budget cuts the Legislature has adopted since the 2003-2004 budget. The scroll stretched from the Capitol Rotunda to the Governor's Office and displayed over 180 cuts totaling over $19 billion.
I'm pretty sure they didn't do this because they were proud of the cuts. They impact the least of society, and make it harder for those who are struggling at precisely the time they need to access basic services.
No, the Assembly Democrats did this in the hopes that bipartisan fetishists like George Skelton and Warren Olney and the Sacramento Bee editorial board and California Forward could maybe tell the truth for once about what is holding up the budget. As the CBP noted yesterday, California is the only state in the entire nation with a 2/3 requirement for both the budget and tax increases. The "solutions" they have therefore had to provide for past budget gaps are often gimmicky and simply delay problems into the future. But the other consequence is that Democrats have OVER AND OVER AGAIN authorized often painful cuts to state services. This is not a problem of "the legislature" - it's a problem of one side willing (sometimes too willing) to compromise and the other unwilling to do so, protected by the dysfunctional laws of the state.
With the proposed federal stimulus bringing as much as $21 billion to the state over the next two years, there's a lot of talk about a budget deal, and given the Feb. 1 deadline for action, that's positive. But the only specifics we've heard is another set of debilitating cuts, offered by Democrats as well as Republicans. This is asymmetrical warfare, where Democrats act in the interests of the state and magical thinking Republicans whine and cry. And nobody helps Californians sort it out. This budget crisis is a media failure. The blood is on their hands.
Just wanted to use the term "President Obama" at the beginning of this. Has a ring to it.
• A few days old, but this is an important story. We talk a lot about the Capitol news bureaus being thinned out, but if you think that's bad, look at the almost non-existent pool of reporters covering county governments, in particular the country's largest, LA County. The budget is bigger than most states, and yet the Board of Supervisors has five members and only FOUR reporters. There's a direct line that can be drawn between media invisibility and the current crisis in California government.
• Gil Cedillo, running for Hilda Solis' Congressional seat once it's vacated, has a website. Calitics hopes to talk with all the CA-32 candidates in the coming weeks.
• Here's a story about the political tightrope being walked by newly-elected candidates Alyson Huber and Joan Buchanan. Legislators like this are always given the bad advice to act like the more conservative elements of their districts even though they won election promising something wholly separate from that. The bias is that the campaign consultants of their OPPONENTS set their governing strategy. That's bogus. Make your case and the voters will respond.
• If you're into the deathly important business of which gubernatorial candidate talked to which inaugural ball participant, this is the article for you. I have to say that I cannot work up even a little bit of enthusiasm for the 2010 race, especially considering that "leader of a failed state" is about as praiseworthy an honor as "perpetrator of the smallest genocide." So you may be able to find 18-month-in-advance horse-race stories elsewhere. Go get them. Because the next Governor of this state is not likely to be a movement candidate and as such is probably destined for failure, and so any investment of my time seems foolhardy.
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.
Twelve Politicker political news sites around the country, including PolitickerCO.com in Colorado, were shut down and their reporters unexpectedly laid off Friday morning. The sites, billed as "Inside politics for political insiders," covered news in 17 states around the country and are owned by the Observer Media Group, based in New York.
Politicker.com sites in New Jersey, New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania will remain operating, according to a source with the company. Sites in Arizona, California, Colorado, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, Vermont and Washington state will disappear.
The sites were put up in a very aggressive way and appear to be coming down even more aggressively. PolitickerCA will definitely be missed. Their morning link-fest was perfect to keep up to date, and they had decent political reporting. But online media, always shaky in terms of their financial model, is likely to cut back very severely in the current environment.
The lack of transparency and accountability in the decisions made by government leaders in the state and the lack of news outlets reporting from Sacramento and throughout the state on local issues is in direct proportion.
Major congratulations to California Progress Report publisher Frank Russo, who will become the new chief of staff to progressive Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner.
This will be my third trip working under the Capitol dome in Sacramento-having worked in the 70's fresh out of law school as Administrative Assistant to an Assemblymember and in the 80's as Legal Counsel to the Speaker of the Assembly where I reviewed the work of the Judiciary and Public Safety Committees among other matters.
I can't tell you how excited I am to be working with Nancy Skinner and what a delight it has been to begin searching for staff and set up both the Sacramento and district offices with her. Technically she is not yet an Assemblymember and I am not yet hired, but the work has begun full throttle. With the voters' approval, she will be in the Assembly for a short six years under term limits and wants to hit the ground running.
For selfish reasons, this is bittersweet. For anyone trying to cover the byzantine twists and turns in Sacramento, Frank has been an invaluable resource. He's been one of the few journalists to cover the committee hearings, the press conferences, and the major legislation with anything approaching immediacy, delivering news and information you simply can't get anywhere else. He also achieved a milestone, becoming the first blogger to earn a press credential from a state legislature that vets their reporters. The state's political media has already withered to the bone, and Russo's departure shrinks that pool even more. However, there is a happy ending here.
I also have the good fortune to announce that a California nonprofit organization will be shepherding the California Progress Report from being published, edited, and written by me to a consortium of different organizations who see the value of having a daily reporting of California state news and opinion in this age of the decline of the established media. We will have more details about that coming out during the week.
That's very reassuring, and I hope whoever takes over has the tenacity and credibility of Russo. For now, I will just wish him the best in the future, and offer my sincere thanks for the fine job he has done building the California Progress Report over the past few years.
I just got settled in my seat here in the Pepsi Center. State Senator Leticia Van de Putte is calling the session to order. The room is more crowded than usual this early because there's going to be a roll call vote on the nomination around 3:45MT. The California delegation actually already did their vote back at the hotel, but any delegate who hasn't will be able to cast a ballot on the floor.
I want to thank the DNC for offering this type of access for state bloggers. I know that the national bloggers are stuck in some windowless room, a step backward from 2004. And that's not right. But the state blogger access is really a mirror of politicians going to the local press instead of the national press. They are getting great blogging press in the localities, and I think it's offering a far better perspective of the convention than the traditional media, which came up with their headlines two weeks ago and is now just filling in their words. Maybe it's because I'm here, but this is the most shameful job I've ever seen from the media in terms of a disconnect between their own paranoid fantasies and reality.
As for the local and state blog strategy, it's an extension of the Dean 50-state strategy. I hope they only increase the access in the future.
A lot of people are talking today about Sen. Obama's stance against Prop. 8; it's a recommended diary on Daily Kos. We had this on Calitics two days ago and nobody noticed. The Sacramento Bee reports on it and suddenly it's on everybody's lips.
I don't begrudge the Bee writing about the issue; it's newsworthy, and the result of a letter read to the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, not some secret. I'm glad they picked it up. But I'm very disturbed by the fact that progressive media is not supported to the point of being ignored, but when a dead-tree source goes with the same information it becomes a top story. I expect that out of the traditional media, but not the blogosphere. There is no question that Brian was the first person anywhere to report on Sen. Obama's letter to the club. And I can tell you that I did at least some behind-the-scenes work to promote the scoop to progressive media and blogosphere leaders. Didn't work.
I don't care that the Bee didn't report that Calitics was the first source to break this; would have been nice, but not totally necessary. But could bloggers at least note that we had this two days before the traditional media? If we aren't self-reinforcing we're never going to get anywhere.
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.
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.
