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UPDATED TO ADD:
Governor Brown withdrew from discussions with the GOP Assembly and Senate members when it became clear that they delivered a list of 53 demands, many of which had nothing to do with the budget, at the very last minute.
WE STILL NEED TO VOTE.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
Almost 50,000 58,000 citizens can use a petition to call for a vote that will let them keep taxes at the existing level for five years, and 55% of the state's voters approve of raising corporate taxes, but only a handful of Republican legislators are required to block the vote and thwart the democratic process.
What's wrong with this picture? California's "supermajority" rule--with aid and comfort from the astroturf organization Americans for Prosperity, that's what. This, from a state Republican party that was delivered a shellacking in 2010 with no wins in important state seats and LOSSES in the State Senate and Assembly.
Last week's special election in my California state Senate district was SO under-the-radar, that as clued in as I like to believe I am, I didn't know it was happening until I finally listened to the robocalls on my voicemail - about an hour before the polls closed.
The place was pretty quiet. In fact, we were told that only 50 voters had showed up all day.
My candidate did not win - but that's politics. One would hope that whatever a legislator's party, he or she would do whatever possible to represent the needs of the District.
And all of California's districts are in a whole mess of pain right now. New Governor Jerry Brown has been visibly wrestling with our whopping $26 billion budget shortfall.
It's not an easy hole to fix; the Sacramento Bee lets you try it yourself here.
Brown has released a budget proposal with $12.5 billion in cuts that will affect all Californians: $1.7 billion less to Medi-Cal, $1.5 billion to California’s welfare-to-work program (CalWORKs), $500 million to the University of California, $500 million to California State University, and $308 million for a 10 percent reduction in take-home pay for state employees not currently covered under collective bargaining agreements.
But he recognizes that a budget deficiency of this magnitude cannot be closed through spending cuts alone; that the people of our state actually need some infrastructure and basic services - like public education.
Brown's plan depends on an extension of a previous tax hike that was supposed to end this year. Unfortunately, thanks to Proposition 13 - the fourth rail of California politics, and the root of our fiscal problems today - this cannot be done without the approval of the voters. Brown wants to give us that choice in another special election - and surprisingly, most Californians support him.
Predictably, Republican members of the state Senate and Assembly have formed a "Taxpayer's Caucus," vowing to vote against the proposal.
"When you folks say, 'No, no vote, no plan, no,' that's not American," Brown said. "It's not acceptable. And it's not loyalty to California. I don't expect you to agree with me. But I expect you to honestly say, 'I want to cut this.'"
In the meantime, the school board here in Los Angeles is preparing for the worst case scenario. Year after year, they've cut funds for teachers and workers... and the budget they passed last week would completely dismantle the District's successful magnet program.
Now we're talking pain that's really personal: My daughter is a ninth-grader at a high-performing magnet school. If this budget passes, it will pull the rug out from right under her - just when her grades and test scores are starting to count towards college.
Last week, magnet administrators all over the District urged parents to write to our state represenatatives. Yesterday, I got a form letter back from my new state Senator, Sharon Runner:
Dear Ms. Mills:
Thanks for your comments. I appreciate knowing how my constituents feel about the issues. It's going to be another tough budget year so it's important to get feedback from the people who are impacted by the decisions the legislators make, especially with regard to education funding.
In the next couple of weeks I'll be briefed by colleagues and consultants and lobbied by many interest groups and the Governor himself. I'll carefully consider the Governor's proposal but I'm not sure at the moment how I'll be voting. However, I do appreciate your input.
I don't like being cynical. I would like to think that people - even politicians - can be taken at their word.
I went to her website. Her bio describes her as "A lifelong advocate of education." That's good.
But in the second part of that sentence, it says she founded a parochial school that is now one of the largest in all of California. The cynical side of me can't help but think she may be less supportive of all those godless kids in public schools.
And today, I received the following information in her constituent newsletter:
During my campaign for Senate, I pledged to protect the interests of my constituents and vote no on tax increases of any kind. That is the reason one of my first acts as Senator was to join the Taxpayers Caucus;
Oh. So I guess she didn't need a couple of weeks to make up her mind, after all. In fact:
Yesterday, I participated in a press conference (see picture) announcing the caucus...
It goes on with the usual Republican Kool-Aid about balancing the budget by cutting "wasteful spending" and how instead of raising revenue for our schools, she will work to get more tax cuts. WHICH DOESN'T MAKE A LICK OF SENSE WHEN YOU'RE TRYING TO FILL A $26 BILLION HOLE.
We've had years and years of Republican governors and years and years of bad budget compromises (for which I blame both parties). I don't like paying taxes any more than anyone else. But I am just as much a taxpayer, and I want to have an opportunity to have a say on this.
In my email yesterday to Sharon Runner I let her know that I think refusing to allow us the vote is undemocratic. And I think all Californians should let their legislators know that, too.
Donna Schwartz Mills lives in Los Angeles. Her personal blog is SoCal Mom.
I think there's a musty old law somewhere that impels media outlets to produce some kind of year in review piece each end of December -- or maybe it's just an easy topic to riff on when all you really want to do is recover from one holiday while preparing for the next. At any rate, Karoli and I did our own Year in Review episode on this week's MOMocrats MOMochat radio show.
I prepared for the show by highlighting some of the posts here on the MOMocrats website for 2010, and even though I remember all of these events, I was surprised to see they had all occurred THIS YEAR. And what a year it's been.
Karoli summed up 2010 as "President Obama's Trial by Fire":
JANUARY
Health care reform had still not passed by the time of the State of the Union (for some reason, I had been remembering HCR as a 2009 endeavor - maybe because it took ALL of 2009 before spilling into the first quarter of this year).
Today's California Women's Conference included a 2010 election first: Governor Schwarzenegger conversing with Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown, the two people who are vying to replace him.
Matt Lauer moderated the discussion, which started out affably enough. Everyone paid tribute to their moms (this is, after all, the Women's Conference) and spouses. All the participants acknowledged the very real problems plaguing California right now: unemployment, education, Sacramento gridlock.
Whitman predictably blamed the GOP boogey-man "special interests," which is code for "unions" -- never big business. Brown talked about his days at a seminary a penchant for turning order into chaos (no, I didn't quite follow that either, but that's vintage Brown).
The bottom line is that no one really expected this session to be newsworthy. It turned out to be a delicious bit of political theater.
Apparently, Matt Lauer had other ideas. After all, the entire country knows that Whitman has spent a year - and a fortune - campaigning for this office.
The election is in one week. Lauer wondered if the candidates could be persuaded to get their campaigns and surrogates to pull all of their negative ads and spend the next six days just airing positive ones stating their qualifications and positions?
The audience exploded with applause, and if you've spent any time watching television here over the last few weeks, you'd understand why. This has been the meannest election cycle I can remember, and just when you think you've heard the nastiest ad a worse one comes along.
"Sometimes negativity is in the eye of the beholder," Brown said, almost making it a "define 'the'" moment. But then he relented. "If Meg agrees, we can talk about it."
Huge applause. Lauer looked expectedly at Whitman for a response.
"I will take down any ads that can be construed as a negative attack," she said. "But I don't think we can take down the ads that talk about where Gov. Brown is on the issues."
Lauer persisted, to the point where the session was about to end. That's when Schwarzenegger pointed out that he and Maria Shriver were hosting this little party. "Don't schvitz about the time," he said.
But the session ended without agreement. Brown scored major points by being willing to pull the negative ads.
In conclusion, Schwarzenegger talked about despite California's problems, it is still the Golden State. Whitman concurred, saying that she moved here 30 years ago because she fell in love with California, and that we could have that state again.
Brown laughed. "That sounds like my nextnew ad," he said. "Meg moves to California 30 years ago. And who was Governor then?"
The success of the Democratic Get Out The Vote (GOTV) campaign in this year's election is more crucial than ever. Guest blogger Sarah Auerswald reports on her experience in Southern California.
I did my first voter registration drive at the Abbot Kinney Festival in Venice. It’s largest street festival in Southern California and organizers had hoped to really capture a lot of new voters there.
The Democrats are aware of the reality: that people generally don’t care about mid-term elections and certainly won’t turn out to vote in the same numbers they did when President Obama was elected.
So their strategy is to make sure new voters get registered – and then empowered to vote – and to encourage people to request their own vote-by-mail ballots, eliminating any excuses like having no time to get to the polls.
I was inspired to volunteer when I heard Marta Evry speak recently. She’s a community organizer and the blogger behind Venice4Change, and she really hooked me.
She said that if Democrats don’t turn out in November, California will have Meg Whitman for Governor. And that’s all it took; I signed right up.
It was a ridiculously hot day in Venice, and of course, most people weren’t there to speak to a woman with a clipboard, but I did manage to sign a few people up – and Marta Evry had a whole team of people with clipboards there, all of whom managed to register over 300 voters.
And even though we didn’t actually register quite as many voters as we would have liked, we did of course remind people about the upcoming election.
Betsy Butler, the Democratic candidate for the 53rd district in the California Assembly (Ted Lieu’s former seat), was on hand to help, as well as one of her opponents in the primary, Nick Karno. It’s all for one and one for all now, among the Democrats. We’re uniting to see our candidates get elected.
You're probably starting to think about the November 2010 midterm elections now. Have you ever complained about how bad some moderated candidate debates were? Questions that made no sense or had nothing to do with your concerns, or responses that wandered off into set talking points? If you live in one of these 11 states--Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania--you can put questions directly to candidates who'll represent you and the people in your district.
Through a partnership with our friends over at the Personal Democracy Forum, MOMocrats.com readers can now ask questions of candidates in our local races via text or video. Here's how 10Questions.com works:
Anyone can post a question (video or text),
anyone can vote those up or down (one vote per question per IP address),
anyone can embed a question, a race, a state, or the entire country via
a fully functional widget, on any website they want. To post or vote on
a question, you just need a Google Account, as the site is powered by a
souped-up version of the Google Moderator question platform (and for
which we are grateful to our technology partners Google and YouTube.) No
personal user information is being retained, though the site will allow
anyone to view where questions and votes are coming from
geographically, and to track the daily up-down voting on any question.
If you live in one of these 11 states, you can urge others to vote up your questions with a click at 10Questions.com through September 21, and then the questions with the highest number of votes will be put to the candidate. They'll issue a video response on October 14 which will be posted on YouTube.
Then, you can vote on and discuss whether or not you thought the candidate answered the question.
This puts you in charge instead of the pundits. Nice change of pace, right?
As you can see from the clip above, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is a very capable, knowledgeable, intelligent woman. I don't live in New York, but from what I've seen and heard and read (in the news and here on MOMocrats), she is doing a terrific job of serving her constituents.
So I could not help but roll my eyes at the news that at a debate this week, one of the men vying to be her opponent in the November election characterized her as "an attractive woman."
Happy Equality Day, Senator Gillibrand. I bet you thought it was no longer acceptable to dismiss powerful women by focusing on their physical attributes.
You say you've never heard of Equality Day?
It's may not be an official holiday, but August 26 is an important date in our history. Today is the 90th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment which extended the right to vote to the women of the United States.
To paraphrase a catchy little advertising jingle from my youth: We've Come a Long Way. Maybe.
In 1979, only 3% of the people elected to the US Congress were women. Today, we've got 90 -- including 17 Senators.
That's still less than 17% of 535 seats in the combined chambers of Congress. After all, women make up nearly 51% of the population. We're nowhere near the point where we can claim equal representation.
We have some interesting races going on in my home state of California. We are already represented by two female Senators, with one of them in a heated re-election race against a female opponent.
And if GOP candidate Meg Whitman succeeds in her bid to become Governor, all three of our top elected offices will be filled by women.
My point is that today, women really are a political force. Imagine how much more we could do if we looked beyond what's reported on network news, learned about the issues and actually bothered to vote. It may come as a surprise to MOMocrats readers (who tend to be politically involved), but large numbers of women do not exercise their hard-fought 19th Amendment rights -- especially unmarried women.
In 2008, of the nearly 51 million unmarried women who were eligible to register to vote, only 35 million did register. That means 16 million women who could have voted did not even register.
Until recently, that figure included Meg Whitman, who famously didn't vote for 28 years.She says she was too focused on family and career to make the time. Sadly, those are the same reasons cited by most women who choose to stay on the political sidelines.
Few of them are billionaires like Whitman, or mere millionaires like Fiorina. I think it's commendable that these two former businesswoman want to serve the people of California. But as I am diametrically opposed to their stance on nearly every issue, they won't get my vote. (Both candidates are anti-choice, pro-Prop 8 and think tax cuts are the solution for everything; Whitman claims she can fix California's $19.1 billion deficit without raising taxes by running the state like a business -- a promise similar to what we heard seven years ago from Arnold Schwarzenegger. And we all know where that has got us.)
I think both Whitman
and Senate candidate Carly Fiorina would be nightmares if elected. But I
also think true equality means that women have the right to be
just as wrong on the issues as some men.
Happy Equality Day!
Donna Schwartz Mills can usually be found on her personal blog about life in Southern California, SoCal Mom.
A small, practical step that builds on what's been done before would be to have Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, two of the biggest federal loan guarantors, prioritize location-efficient mortgages in the products they underwrite. A bigger challenge will be to get big banks on board. Convince them this is a new market, and the greedy pigs profit-seeking banks'll probably jump at the opportunity to revitalize the moribund real estate market.
Let's wean ourselves off foreign oil. And as the BPGulf Oilspill disaster has shown us, domestic oil isn't the silver bullet solving our oil dependency problems either. Wouldn't you rather be able to take a high-speed train or light rail to work, instead of spending 2 or more hours a day in a car stuck in traffic (time out of your life you'll never get back to play with your kids or just relax)?
Greening our housing policy may just be the way to do it.
"Energy-efficient
mortgages" have been available for years, running on the premise that borrowers
who spend less on utility bills have more money available for mortgage payments.
But they've been an underused niche product that few buyers or even lenders know
about. The SAVE Act would take the concept and apply it to all government-sponsored
mortgage enterprises, such as Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Administration. Those three
entities currently guarantee more
than 90 percent of new loans, so the bill would have a profound effect on
ramping up home efficiency.
"The big news is that
this would become a part of every federally backed mortgage," said Cliff
Majersik of the Institute for Market Transformation,
an efficiency advocacy group that helped draft the bill.
Energy efficient homes would cost less to run, and thus affect how big or small a mortgage a borrower would need. Both energy efficient mortgages and location efficient mortgages (that value proximity to public transit), are tools for reshaping society and could really change how we live and work in positive, and sweeping, ways. Pay less for an environmentally-friendly house that has better transit options for getting around your community? Sounds great to me.
Some religionists and others who believe that discrimination against lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender folk should be legal will of course appeal. The fight isn't over.
But they'll be met with legions of us who believe in our hearts that equal protection under the law means everyone is included. That's who we are in America, that's who we really are.
One big question after the election: Who moved? Six weeks before the
vote, Proposition 8 was too close to call. But in the final weeks,
supporters pulled ahead, and by election day, the outcome was all but
certain.
...
The shift, it turns out, was greatest among parents with children under 18 living at home — many of them white Democrats.
...
The lesson: It's not enough to make the case for same-sex marriage. It's
also important to arm voters — particularly parents — against an
inevitable propaganda attack. And it's crucial to rebut lies so parents
don't panic.
We at MOMocrats knew this about parents--that's why we had post after post after post after post here on the site (maybe 9 or 10 in all) reassuring parents. We also knew religious conservatives who backed Prop 8 have made deep, dangerous incursions into Latino and Asian Pacific American communities via their churches, and we reached out to APA parents with bilingualvideoPSAs made on shoestring budgets to help counter this.
I just hope leadership on the marriage equality efforts can absorb these painful, but important lessons and take different steps in the future. When Prop 8 passed, we were horrified and hurt too. Maybe not as much as the people directly affected, but we were right alongside you. Mobilize your allies. We have to validate each other. We will do all we can, but we need your guidance, help, and resources.
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