After promising an all-weekend budget vigil,
Don Perata's
slumber party ended around 10 a.m. Saturday, after it became clear that getting two Republican votes wasn't going to be easy.
"'
We've reached the end of our rope,' said Senate Leader Don Perata (D-Oakland). 'I do not understand what they are after…. If those 15 Republicans want to stop state government, they are on their way to doing it.'
The LAT's Evan Halper reports: "The Senate Republicans continue to ignore Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's call to sign off on the $145-billion bipartisan budget approved Friday by the Assembly. The GOP lawmakers say that budget plan spends too much. But they have been unclear about where they would make about $700 million in additional spending reductions they demand.
"Senate Republican Leader
Dick Ackerman of Irvine said his caucus will meet Perata's challenge to put it all in a GOP budget plan this week. The upper house will reconvene Wednesday.
"'
We are going to try to fashion a budget,' he said. 'We will have a proposal.'"
We can hardly wait...
George Skelton
is not a fan of the Assembly's budget. "This is how it seems: The state Assembly speaker uncorked two bottles of very expensive wine as legislative leaders sat around negotiating a budget deal.
They got a little buzz on and decided to go out and mug some blind, disabled and elderly poor.
"That's not exactly what happened, probably. But it's close enough to be cataloged as nonfiction."
The U-T's Ed Mendel
looks at what's not in the budget. Of course, as of now, nothing is in the budget, but Mendel looks at what wasn't in the budget passed by the Assembly. "After a decade of dabbling, California finally seemed ready to spend serious money to develop a computerized student-tracking system to accurately compile dropout rates, transfer student records and do basic research.
"But a sharp dip in revenue last month caused state budget-writers to cut $65 million that would have pumped up the program, leaving California further from an important education tool that is up and running in many states."
"
Juan Arambula, the Don Quixote of the state Legislature,
is tilting his lance at one of the Capitol's most powerful forces, the public education establishment," writes Dan Walters int he Bee.
"So far, Arambula, a Democratic assemblyman from Fresno, is winning approval for his legislation that would, as a pilot program, authorize county superintendents of schools in Fresno and Tulare counties to intervene with school districts that are near the bottom in academic test scores. But the opposition is also muscling up, enlisting state schools Superintendent Jack O'Connell as a point man to block the bill.
"Whether Arambula succeeds or fails, his crusade underscores the two most pervasive problems in California's 6 million-student public school system. One is the chronic educational failure among poor, non-white children, reflected not only in low test scores but in high dropout rates. The other is the convoluted structure of governance -- more accurately, non-governance -- in which many political authorities exercise degrees of control without assuming responsibility for outcomes.
"The system's deficiencies were laid out in a massive, foundation-sponsored study earlier this year that, Schwarzenegger and others have promised, will lead to a huge reform effort next year. We'll see. Meanwhile, Arambula will continue to charge, his lance pointed straight ahead."
The Bee's Aurelio Rojas
summarizes the bills aiming to crack down on voter intimidation. "The latest episode of voter intimidation in Orange County prompted [
Jose] Solorio, a Santa Ana Democrat, to introduce Assembly Bill 122. It would require election officials to give candidates a copy of provisions of the law that prohibit voter intimidation and the criminal penalties.
"Another bill, AB 288 by Assemblyman
Curren Price, D-Inglewood, would require people convicted of voter intimidation to pay a restitution fine, in addition to any existing fines, with the money to be used for voter education campaigns.
"'Current law doesn't provide for any reimbursement by the party convicted of intimidation,' said Price. 'So the state and counties end up paying for public information to dissuade such acts.'
"While both bills are moving through the Legislature, a third voter intimidation bill has stalled for the session in the Assembly Appropriations Committee.
"AB 46 by Assemblyman
Van Tran, R-Garden Grove, would have turned voter intimidation into a felony-only offense. Under existing law, prosecutors have the option of filling misdemeanor charges."
"Forty-five years after her death, a dispute over who controls Marilyn Monroe's image has a former actress enlisting colleagues in the California Legislature
to protect the blond bombshell and other dead celebrities from being improperly exploited," reports Patrick McGreevy in the Times.
"State Sen.
Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica), a television star in the 1960s, has won preliminary approval of legislation that would bolster the "postmortem right of publicity" held by the heirs of famous people to control the use of their images, voices, signatures and likenesses for commercial purposes.
"The bill would apply such rights to celebrities who died before 1985 and would retroactively allow them to be passed to nonrelatives. Opponents of the legislation say that it could retroactively nullify publicity rights that have been in the public domain or held by relatives of hundreds of dead actors and artists, and trigger a flood of lawsuits."
The
other Pete Wilson "the TV news anchor with the best exasperated sigh in the business,
died unexpectedly Friday night, a day after having a heart attack during hip replacement surgery.
"Wilson, 62, underwent the surgery at Stanford Hospital late Thursday and suffered a massive heart attack. Doctors battled to keep him alive until Friday night, when he was taken off life support. He succumbed at 9:20 p.m.
"Wilson was a Bay Area institution. He started out at KTXL-TV in Sacramento, came to ABC affiliate KGO-TV in 1983 and later went on to spend 12 years anchoring the KRON-TV evening news before returning to Channel 7 in January 2002. Although he won six local Emmys and two prestigious Peabody awards, TV viewers will probably remember him above all for his on-air demeanor."
In his final story for the Chronicle, Greg Lucas reports on
Mary Nichols' upcoming test at the ARB. "The new chairwoman of the state Air Resources Board faces her first test this week as the construction industry attempts to weaken proposed requirements to reduce diesel emissions from its equipment.
Adoption of the diesel regulations is part of the state's effort to improve air quality -- particularly the highly publicized campaign to ratchet down greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent within the next 13 years."
The Merc's Steve Harmon reports on
an effort underway to test the security of touch-screen voting machines. "The rigorous testing for vulnerabilities in touch-screen voting machines are part of an unprecedented "top-to-bottom" review ordered by Secretary of State Debra Bowen to ensure that the state's voting systems are secure - and whether they should be certified for use.
She is expected to report Aug. 3 - six months before the Feb. 5 presidential primaries, a timeline that is making election officials nervous.
Bowen is fulfilling what her supporters and voting security advocates consider to be the mandate she received from last year's election, in which she clashed with her predecessor, Bruce McPherson, over how much scrutiny the state's electronic voting and tabulations systems needed. She won in November amid a national outcry over fears of hacking, vote flipping and election rigging with suspicions squarely aimed at touch-screen voting systems.
"On Tuesday, [Nuñez senior staffer
Rick] Simpson brusquely
called Capitol staffer Lynne Jensen into the speaker's office to berate her for apparently doing something that offended Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata," reports Peter Hecht in the Bee.
"'I'm going to print out exactly what Perata said,' Simpson said, walking briskly from the room. Jensen was left shaking.
"But it was a setup.
Aaron Andres, Jensen's fiancé, entered the room.
He dropped to one knee, pulled out an engagement ring and popped the question."'Yes!' she answered.
"The couple plan to marry in September."
Congratulations Aaron and Lynne. Here's to hoping we have a budget by then.