California’s Republican congressional delegation is blaming the state’s two Democratic Senators for dooming wide-ranging legislation to address California’s water crisis. Michael Doyle, Fresno Bee:
“In a remarkably acrimonious ending to negotiations that once seemed close to bearing fruit, GOP House members acknowledged the bill’s failure while putting the blame squarely on California’s two Democratic senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer.
“’It’s dead, unfortunately,’ Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Corona, said in an interview Thursday afternoon, adding in a later statement that ‘our good-faith negotiations came to naught.’
…The Capitol Hill finger-pointing went both ways.
“’If Republicans want to know who is to blame for the stalemate on water, they only have to look in the mirror,’ Boxer said Thursday night, ‘because all they do is keeping pitting one stakeholder against another, which will only lead to the courthouse door.’”
Advocates of public pension reform got good news yesterday after the Secretary of State approved language for two ballot initiatives that, if passed, would lower the employer’s contribution to employee retirement plans. Daniel Bases, Reuters:
“Should either initiative get the necessary 585,407 signatures within the next 180 days, it would be the first time a proposal to cut pensions made it onto a statewide ballot in America's most populous state.
"’That gives us the green light to start collecting signatures. However we are going to do some polling because we are not going to move ahead with two initiatives,’ said the ballot campaign's leader, Chuck Reed….
“The measure would take aim at CalPERS, America's largest public pension fund with $300 billion in assets. It is the administrator of pensions for more than 3,000 state and local agencies, and has long argued that pensions cannot be touched or renegotiated, even in bankruptcy.”
Here’s a story you probably didn’t expect to see: California came out near the top in a new report analyzing job creation and start ups among the 50 states. Allen Young, Sacramento Business Journal:
“The California New Business Creation study uses 2013 U.S. Census Bureau data to show that the state ranks fourth in the nation for job creation and fifth for the creation of new businesses. It comes from Next10, a San Francisco-based pro-renewable energy group, and Beacon Economics, a Los Angeles economic consulting firm.
“Christopher Thornberg, co-author of the report and founding partner of Beacon Economics, has said the point of the study is not to argue that California regulatory policies couldn't be improved to help businesses grow. But rather that national economic data show a host of pluses that suggest California is an attractive place for entrepreneurs.”
California is entrepreneurial about more than just business – politicians and bureaucrats are promoting the story of the state’s business growth while implementing ambitious rules limiting greenhouse gas emissions as a lesson the world can learn from. Not so fast, some say. David Siders, Sacramento Bee:
“’To look at the fact that the (California) economy has grown while the regulations have been in place is silly,’ said Robert Stavins, an environmental economist at Harvard University. ‘Just as it would be silly to say, while California was in recession, that that was because of environmental regulations.’
“Stavins, an expert in international climate agreements, said other jurisdictions look to California not for broad pronouncements about the state’s economic or political climate, but for its experience implementing aggressive climate change programs. While politicians deliver speeches in Paris, state bureaucrats are shuttling between technical meetings with their counterparts from other countries.
“’Policymakers in California, and perhaps others, may exaggerate the importance in the world of the state,’ Stavins said. ‘When I’m out in Sacramento … I do get the sense that there may be an inflated sense of world importance.’”
Orange County congressional Democrat, and U.S. Senate candidate Loretta Sanchez suggested in a radio interview Thursday with Larry King that somewhere between 5 and 20% of Muslims want to institute a caliphate “in any way possible…” Christopher Cadelago, Sacramento Bee:
“’We know that there is a small group, and we don’t know how big that is – it can be anywhere between 5 and 20 percent, from the people that I speak to – that Islam is their religion and who have a desire for a caliphate and to institute that in any way possible, and in particular go after Western norms,’ Sanchez said on the program ‘PoliticKING with Larry King.’
“’They are not content enough to have their way of looking at the world, they want to put their way on everybody in the world,’ she added. ‘And again, I don’t know how big that is, and depending on who you talk to, but they are certainly, they are willing to go to extremes. They are willing to use and they do use terrorism.’”
Republicans don’t get to celebrate a lot of victories in bright blue California these days, but a seat change on the South Coast Air Quality Management District – the district writes the air pollution rules for a region inhabited by nearly half of all Californians – gives Republicans control of the board. Alex Matthews, Capitol Weekly:
“Last month, Orange County Republicans ousted Santa Ana Mayor Miguel Pulido, a Democrat, and replaced him with Lake Forest Councilman Dwight Robinson, a pro-business Republican. Earlier in the year, San Bernardino County Democratic supervisor Josie Gonzalez was replaced by Republican Janice Rutherford. The two changes give the district a new lineup on its governing board – seven Republicans and six Democrats.
“For the many Californians who are unfamiliar with the minutiae of regional environmental regulatory bodies, this might seem like a minor dent in a state government dominated by Democrats. But the victory has been a long time coming for Republicans like [Jim] Brulte, who has focused his time as the state GOP’s chief focusing on winning strategic local offices.”
Brulte has definitely earned congratulations regarding the SCAQMD – but we suspect his attention this week was on the current contest for a slightly higher office – you know, the oval one.
Brulte has done yeoman’s work to broaden the reach of the state Republican Party, helping pass a pro-LGBT platform for the first time and recruiting strong candidates from diverse backgrounds. He is reputed to have moved heaven and earth to keep former Assemblyman and right-wing firebrand Tim Donnelly from being the Republican nominee for governor in 2012 for fear of damaging the GOP brand in the eyes of many California voters.
Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy – basically a Donnelly campaign on steroids – has got to be a nightmare for Brulte, a centrist trying to erect a bigger tent. When your party’s frontrunner is driving so much traffic to white supremacy websites that they are having to upgrade their servers, your message of inclusiveness only goes so far.
So, this week we have to give Mr. Brulte our nod for #WorstWeekinCA politics. Sorry, pal.
