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My last day in DC was somewhat fruitful, I’ll be flying back tomorrow morning and will hopefully be able to get out some items over the weekend. Meantime:
LATE UPDATE: After successful hearings, Barbara Boxer wants to move forward on a markup in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on the climate and energy bill, but Republicans are vowing to boycott the markup. The rules of the committee stipulate that at least two members of the minority party must attend the markup, so crazy James Inhofe could potentially do this forever if he got enough of his compatriots to go along with him. Democrats did this to delay the “Clear Skies” bill in 2005, incidentally.
LATER UPDATE: Wow, Gavin Newsom dropped out of the California Governor’s race. Jerry Brown’s the only one left. That’s kind of ugly (this is not your 1975 Jerry Brown, the current model calls himself a “born-again tax-cutter.”)
LATER LATER UPDATE: I’ll probably have more on this tomorrow, but this was a train wreck of a Friday news dump: WH visitor logs and Cheney FBI tapes drop, and the Afghan runoff is off?
Some days ya just can’t keep up.
• The Blue Dogs have asked the CBO for additional detail on the health care bill, including scoring that CBO simply doesn’t do, like the overall growth of national health spending. Basically they’re looking for a reason to get off the bill, and hoping CBO can give them one.
• Meanwhile, despite the words of Rep. Grijalva, House liberals are basically accepting the House bill.
• The Senate health care bill is still in quite a bit of limbo, but Harry Reid is using all sorts of multimedia pieces to engage citizens to fight for a public option.
• Joe Lieberman certainly had a different opinion on the filibuster back at the end of 1994. The difference was, the Republicans had just come into power, so of course the filibuster should have been abolished then, I guess.
• There was some talk that Republicans could score an upset in CA-10 next Tuesday, but public polling shows John Garamendi coasting to a relatively easy victory. If he has a 10-point lead among those who have already voted, he may have already won given the prevalence of vote by mail in California.
• The bill targeting offshore tax havens falls a bit short of what Obama wanted.
• Blanche Lincoln will not yet commit on the motion to proceed to let the Senate health care bill on the floor.
• President Obama signed a bill ending the longtime travel and immigration ban for HIV-positive people. This is unquestionably good news.
• On the “bad news” front, Obama signed a bill suppressing the torture photos sought by the ACLU. It’s hard to be the “most transparent Presidency in history” with this track record.
• I’m not Steny Hoyer’s biggest fan, but this was a slick move – forcing the GOP to get a CBO score for their mystery health care bill and post language for 72 hours if they want a vote on it.
• I missed that hearing yesterday with Bonner and Associates, the “astroforgers” who sent fake letters to members of Congress on behalf of the coal industry opposing the House climate bill. Apparently it featured the coal industry lying under oath and deliberate suppression of knowledge that the letters were fake, among other things. Fun!
• Is Iran backing away from the nuclear deal they made with the West to ship uranium outside the country for enrichment?
• Dozens of Congressmen under suspicion by the ethics committee? Somehow these investigations habitually yield nothing, so I’ll believe it when I see it.
• Keith Ellison’s Same Day Voter Registration Act would ensure maximum participation in the electoral system and would be nearly impossible to credibly vote against. Let’s see if the House fast-tracks it.
• And finally, good news from Pennsylvania: that case from Michael Moore’s new movie, where thousands of juveniles where arrested and sent to court in a kickback scheme between a judge and a private for-profit prison facility, has ended with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court throwing out all the cases. If only getting rid of every horrible injustice were as easy as making a movie about it…
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Hey David; re Gavin Newsome, et al:
“I can’t believe this! Two days ago, I emailed you about how Attorney General Jerry Brown rewrote the official summary of a ballot measure sponsored by Mercury Insurance Company to omit the fact that it will raise auto insurance premiums. This morning The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Brown’s spokesman secretly taped a conversation with reporter Carla Marinucci in an effort to keep a story about Brown’s action out of the newspaper.
Taping phone conversations without consent is a crime in California, but who is going to prosecute the spokesman for the state’s top cop?
I wasn’t on that call, of course, but I do know this: Marinucci’s article was taken off the Chronicle’s website early Wednesday evening, and during that time, she called us to get our response to the AG’s claims. Today’s Chronicle story shows top Brown staff were trying to censor the story by going over the reporter’s head.
Since when does the Attorney General of California try to censor the free press in order to kill a news article about how he took the extraordinary step of rewriting a ballot title about a donor’s initiative?
Jerry Brown needs to immediately make amends by firing his spokesperson and appointing an independent counsel to rewrite the title and summary of the Mercury initiative in an impartial manner.
This is the kind of thing Mercury Insurance does when it tries to get its hands in politicians’ pockets — corrupts the democratic process. When Senate leader Don Perata took a contribution from Mercury and carried the same Mercury legislation, he was investigated by the FBI. After Gray Davis signed it, he took $175,000 in Mercury campaign money, and that helped fuel his recall.
A court invalidated the Mercury legislation for surcharging the previously uninsured in violation of Proposition 103. Brown’s decision to ignore the Court’s finding, in order to rewrite Mercury’s title and summary, got him into this mess.
When will politicians ever learn that Mercury is poison?
We are filing another public records act request today to get transcripts of the taped phone conversations. Stay tuned…
Harvey Rosenfield
Consumer Watchdog Founder “
I have heard about this. Should probably look into it further.
David, I think you’re likely to be pleasantly surprised by Jerry Brown. I don’t always agree with him. But he’s very much a pro-labor Democrat. He even took the doubly unusual step as state Attorney General of arguing in court against the anti-gay Proposition 8 and doing so on the basis of a novel legal theory. I learned a long time ago that no matter how strange what Jerry says may sometimes sound, he’s usually thought of an important angle that most political leaders haven’t understood yet.
I’m sure you saw the video of him plowing under the silly infotainment figures playing reporters on CNBC. When it comes to getting in the face of the opposition, Jerry’s definitely willing to do it. In that way, he’s no Obama.
I actually usually don’t find his way of thinking strange. He’s a Jesuit who went into politics; that’s my basic framework for understanding him. Of course, even in the 1970s when the press hadn’t yet gone off its Whitewater cliff and there were still actual news reporters on television, the press was mystified by him. That’s where all the ”Governor Moonbeam” stuff came from. I’m sure today’s Establishment reporters must think he’s a Britlingen from some alternative dimension out of a Charlaine Harris horror story.
But if there’s anyone on the scene right now who has an actual shot of reforming our ”drown the government baby in the bathwater” state constitutional mess, Jerry is it. And I don’t see any other likely candidates for that role at the moment.
yeah, um, Jerry Brown is really bad on budget issues, and has basically been a starve-the-government fiscal conservative since the day Prop.13 won, on his watch, in 1978. He’s also horrible on the drug war. I’ve written extensively about him at Calitics.
http://www.calitics.com/diary/10250/californias-past-californias-future
http://www.calitics.com/diary/10190/jerry-brown-winning-hearts-and-minds-by-playing-into-republican-fear-tactics
http://www.calitics.com/diary/10173/will-the-spotlight-ever-fall-on-jerry-browns-ideas-not-his-image
http://www.calitics.com/diary/9780/the-reaction-tough-on-crime-robots-cannot-come-to-terms-with-reality
http://www.calitics.com/diary/8526/an-apostle-for-fantasyland
But I think we can push Jerry in a Progressive direction and he knows it needs to be pushed in that direction. I have a feeling he would sign SB810 for example. I’m disappointed about Gavin though and yes, all the strong Dems are in Congress.
Maybe we can get Martin Sheen to run? That’s about as FAR left as you can get…
David, thanks for the links. You definitely make some good points there and you’re looking at the right kinds of things.
You’re certainly right that Brown has been vague on his positions so far in the Governor’s race. And now that he’s looking to more-or-less coast to the nomination (which could change, of course) he’s not likely to be very specific about things for a while yet. If the Republican nominee doesn’t show a lot of strenth, it might be quite a while. But the Democratic base should certainly be pushing him to take clear positions on important issues.
I would say that his high-profile pursuit the last few months of real-estate and investment scamsters are very pro-consumer positions that will play well for him. And are good positions.
On the Prop 13 experience, I would say that Brown played an important role in stemming the “tax revolt” tide, at least to a significant degree. I believe it was Howard Jarvis who pushed an even more draconian proposition that would have required even more drastic reductions in state spending. Brown went on TV with a prime-time address on the proposition saying talking straightforwardly about the kinds of service cuts it would impose. He set the tone for the No campaign and that one went down. As far as his actions immediately after Prop 13 passed in mid-1978, when he was up for re-election, he made a political virtue out of necessity. He had actively pushed a much less foolish alternative property-tax proposition as part of the No on 13 campaign. But once it was passed, the current system was in place, and he was faced with minimizing the damage of the cuts Prop 13 imposed.
On the prison issue, I know Brown has been giving more emphasis to the need for rehabilitation and reintegrating parolees into the community, based on this experiences as Oakland Mayor. He has explicitly rejected the idea that he himself established as Governor, that the purpose of prison was not rehabilitation but punishment. That was a strongly prevalent idea in the US and Britain at least for decades.
On his earlier political history, I think if you look at his 1982 Senate campaign against Pete Wilson, you would see that he pretty much articulated liberal Democratic themes assertively at a time when they were out of fashion. And he lost that election, of course. Wilson hadn’t made himself the pariah of Latino votes at that time.
I just discount Brown’s “bipartisan” clichees at this point. That’s a judgment call based on my reading of his record. He knows what the California Republican Party is right now. I can’t imagine he has any illusions about getting the ones in the legislature right now to go all David Broder and “reach out across the aisle” and blah, blah. Unless they are politically forced into it in some way.
Sorry, I should have specified that the more draconian Jarvis slash-and-burn-the-gubment proposition was one he pushed after Prop 13 was enacted. Blocking that amendment did stem the tide of what could have been much worse. Paul Gans did get some dumb proposition passed, too, that put percentage limits on how much the state budget could grow. But the effects of that weren’t draconian. Or, so far as I know, even that significant – though that result wasn’t Gans’ intention.
Could you explain the logic behind this? Why would a reporter be intimidated by taping of a conversation? Furthermore, why would her editors pull an already posted article because of it?
The only rationale I could think of is that the reporter misquoted either Brown, or something she posed to Brown was erroneous and the taping caught her lying.
From what I’ve seen, the spokesman called to complain to the paper about the article, and in so doing basically read the transcript of the phone call between him and the reporter to the editors. Regardless of the content of the taped call (and Marinucci is a bad reporter), secret taping of this kind is simply illegal in California.