One week ago, Republican Leader Mike Villines and the California Chamber of Commerce hosted a luncheon featuring a presentation outlining the Republican game plan in the 80th and how they would offset Manuel Perez’s double-digit lead.
 
A key part of the Republican strategy hinged on filing a politically driven, frivolous lawsuit to challenge Manuel Perez’s ballot designation as an "Educator."

But today the Sacramento Superior Court dealt Republicans a loss, blowing up their key strategy.  It would seem Rove's maxim: 'Attack the Democratic candidate's strength,' just won't work on Perez.  In fact, it boomeranged.

My baby sister is going to marry. My daughter is due to be born just one week later. Though I can not attend the wedding, a circumstance that brings great sorrow and great joy, I can contribute a few words that mean a lot to me and will hopefully mean something to her and her husband.

Santa Barbara, California, is often called "ground-zero of the environmental movement" because of the 1969 Oil Spill. Nonetheless, two Republicans on the County Board of Supervisors persuaded a third Super to vote for a resolution to withdraw the State's ban on offshore drilling.

The republicans in our state legislature won't sign on to a budget that includes a tax increase of one percent on people with paychecks of more than $320,000 a year; they seem to have no problem approving an additional one cent on California's already horrendous sales taxes that add up to over 9 percent here in Torrance.

The rich protect their own; the regular folks get to pay the bills.

Time for a change!

It's Democratic Convention time in Denver, and this week we're seeing some of the most promising '08 House and Senate candidates on display. Many have been struggling for a turn in the spotlight all year, as the presidential race continues to monopolize attention, volunteer energy and fundraising dollars.

Orange County, California's 46th Congressional District has been represented since 1988 by delusionally far-right Republican Dana Rohrabacher. But this year he faces a stiff challenge from Huntington Beach mayor and former city council member Debbie Cook.

Barack Obama and Debbie Cook in Newport Beach, CA

Rohrabacher is one of the worst Republican clowns in Congress, and Cook is a champion on all the issues that matter. The 46th district is ready to vote for a credible alternative to Rohrabacher. This race is winnable and Debbie Cook deserves to be on every progressive's list for donations and support.

More below the fold...

Its always hard to send a husband to war, but to send your child is much harder.

With 71 days to this historic election, I wanted to send you a special video message about why this campaign is so personal, and why we aren't waiting until January of 2009 to make a difference in California's District Four.

Growing up in the redwoods of Northern California was one of the luckiest things in my life. My early childhood was nature-soaked, set within the steep, narrow redwood canyons of Santa Cruz County, California, along a tributary of the San Lorenzo River.  Moss grew on the roof and the deck and me, too, if I stood still long enough.  

At 14, we moved 350 miles up the coast to Humboldt County, California. The redwoods here were bigger, grander, towering on hills to receive the high fog off the north Pacific.  The country was wilder.  The bears were more numerous and cougars chased deer through my backyard.  Empty beaches glowed with diatoms at midnight. The towns, Victorian postcards all, were more isolated.  To my eyes it was a place of extraordinary natural beauty.  I'd started school before I knew I had just moved into a war zone.  

The redwood wars preceded me and the redwood wars outlasted my time in Humboldt, but this month I can finally say that the biggest of them - the war with Pacific Lumber, once controlled by Charles Hurwitz, the junk bond king, the man who would have cut them all down at once if he could have - that war is over. And the trees, and the people of Humboldt, won.

Some clowns in California who call themselves the American Independent Party are trying to get motormouth Alan Keyes on the ballot and part of their strategy is to submit a petition to the court to have John McCain disqualified on the grounds he was born in the Panama Canal zone and not on U.S. soil.  

"The harm sustained by being forced to compete against-and potentially be defeated by-an illegal and illegitimate campaign cannot be monetarily remedied nor can it be remedied after the November general election in any manner," the petition said.  

Personally I think the whack jobs have a better chance of knocking McCain off the ballot than Alan Keyes has of defeating Obama one-on-one in California.

No matter where you live in the country, this affects you.

A bill in California would remove our voter-chosen preference for embryonic stem cell research.

If this is allowed, not only will it be imposed on California, but throught it, the nation.

Last week, the California Legislature passed Senate Joint Resolution 19 (SJR 19), a resolution aimed at preventing California health professionals from engaging in coercive interrogations of detainees at Guantánamo and other U.S. military prisons.  This resolution makes California the first state in the nation to condemn the use of torture in the 'War on Terror', and helps protect California health care professionals by informing them of their legal and ethical obligations to 'do no harm'.  SJR19 also gives health professionals a legal reference to remove themselves from abusive situations should they have to contravene the orders of a military superior.

In light of the police shooting deaths of four tribal members on the Soboba Indian Reservation since December 2007 (after the Soboba canceled a lucrative policing contract), the Soboba recently hosted a forum with other Indian tribes and groups. Their recommendation: repeal Public Law 280.

The repeal of PL 280 is, of course, of particular concern to those who deal with its consequences every day; however, though the costs may not be readily apparent, PL 280 ultimately creates social and financial costs for all Americans. What happens to the least of us affects us all,

As the Soboba and other groups challenge and work to repeal PL 280, the support and participation of progressives and the Democratic Party will materially and substantially affect the success of those efforts.

California Dems should work to ensure the GOP / Schwarzenegger measures don’t make it on the ballot. Timing is everything and could be the significant budget strategy for progressives and democrats IF they take it as their approach.

Well, I missed my v.p. diary taking a long nap in the hot afternoon after work today. I taught English to tenth graders, so I thought I'd share an anecdote about what I learned in school today.

We started out with silent reading and some writing practice, then I gave the students some notes on figurative language. After I had defined various terms and given examples, they had a bunch of worksheets to do, so I went over the directions with them and set them to work on that, telling them to ask me or the teacher's aide if they had any questions.

I got up again to point out that many (if not most) common literary figures of speech they would encounter in speaking or reading could be traced back in some form either to the Bible, Shakespeare or Cervantes.

(continued below the fold)

I'm still going to school and I live at home with my parents. I always thought I lived in a pretty nice neighborhood. I mean nice not as in well off, but one where the neighbors generally get along and you see lots of little kids playing outside. But after tonight I'm really wondering what happened to it. More after the flip.

There are some items up on News Unfiltered that may interest the community.

DNC calls on the FEC for a new investigation into McCain's campaign finance violations:

With the Federal Election Commission scheduled to address John McCain's decision to unilaterally withdraw from the federal matching funds program on Thursday, the Democratic National Committee today called on the Commission to remove that item from its agenda and instead proceed with a full investigation of the charges made against McCain in the administrative complaint filed by the DNC in February. In a conference call with reporters this morning, DNC General Counsel Joe Sandler discussed a letter he sent to the FEC last night that argued that the Commission should not consider McCain's decision to withdraw from the matching funds program because there is no request for permission pending and the Commission hasn't yet conducted an investigation as required by the law.

Read more.

Hey! While many of you are driveling on ad naseam about who Barack's running-mate will be, I just wanted to take the opportunity to remind you that Election 2008 will be the most important election ever for achieving marriage equality in the United States. California has become ground zero in the debate over gay rights, with rabidly antigay conservatives threatening to nullify the California Supreme Court's courageous decision legalizing marriage equality.

So far, polls about voter attitudes toward Proposition 8 have been favorable for supporters of marriage quality. But now is not the time to get complacent. There have been two major developments in the last twenty-four hours that will be of interest to all progressives and advocates of GLBT rights. More after the jump.

They sure have to do a lot of clarifying in the McCain campaign, don't they?

McCain set off a firestorm last week when he suggested that the 86 year old agreement that allocates the scarce resource of the Colorado River among the seven states of the Colorado Basin "obviously needs to be renegotiated" because of "new realities of high growth, of greater demands on a scarcer resource," he didn't mean it should, you know, be renegotiated, really, to make sure that the high growth states of California, Nevada, and Arizona got more of that scarce resource. But that's sure how it sounded to the people of Colorado.

So here comes the McCain campaign with what he "really" meant:

Tom Kise, the McCain campaign's Colorado spokesman, said McCain was not proposing that the 2007 agreement be reopened or any immediate talks on the compact.

"He's talking about ongoing conversations, conversations that happen this year, next year, 10, 20, 30 years down the road," Kise said.

Kise said McCain knows global warming is changing water conditions in the West, and that means the states need to talk. "As long as water is going to be an issue in the West, there should be an open conversation among all parties," Kise said.

Ah, so the states need to talk, that's all he was saying. Only problem is: they have been.

Considering he's a Senator from one of those seven states in the compact, you think he'd have somewhat of a better grasp of the actual policy making on the issue in his state. See, the seven states' governors came together last year to address current changing water conditions. In fact, they came up with an agreement:

The agreement was signed April 23 in Las Vegas by representatives of the Colorado River basin states of Colorado, Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. The agreement proposes reducing deliveries of Colorado River water to Arizona and Nevada when storage in Lake Mead drops below certain set levels, thus reducing the risk of shortages in Colorado. The agreement would reduce the risk of shortages in the lower Colorado River by coordinating Hoover and Glen Canyon dam operations. The agreement also proposes a system for storing in Lake Mead water saved through conservation efforts or the development of new water sources.

In addition to resolving current Colorado River disputes, the agreement reduces the likelihood of future litigation among the seven Colorado River basin states by encouraging cooperation and consultation between the states. "Litigation pitting state against state over the Colorado River would cost taxpayers millions, and the likely result would not please anyone," said Colorado Attorney General John Suthers. "Thanks to the hard work of the parties involved, we can now work with - not against - other states to resolve our water disputes."

Into the middle of all this stumbles McCain, ignoring--or completely ignorant of--the fact that the seven governors (including California's, Nevada's, and Arizona's) decided that those states needed to work on how to find some of their own water, ignoring the fact that this was a complex and difficult set of negotiations.

Between this and his long support of using Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste dump, McCain's shown that he's pretty much completely out of touch with what is going on in the West. He's just not much of a westerner anymore.

Great news out of California, Pacific Gas and Electric recently agreed to purchase power from new 800 MW PV soalr installation..

Sound great, but there is a twist in the tale that is not just an issue for this project, but for practically every large scale wind and solar renewable project out there.  A almost throwaway at the end of the article reveals all:

PG&E has said the deals are contingent on Congress reauthorizing several tax credits for renewable energy that are due to expire at the end of this year. Although there is broad bipartisan support for the credits, their renewal has been caught up in the debate over other controversial issues like offshore oil drilling and how to pay for the tax credits.

"This is contingent on the (renewable-energy tax credits) being reinstated," Borenstein said. "If Congress screws up and lets that lapse, this could be put on a shelf."