The latest
Field Poll has
a little something for everyone. The good news for the governor -- most of his "reform" proposals still have a slight lead with California voters. Voters are about evenly split over the plans for a special election, and similarly split on most of the proposals. The one exception is a plan to base pay for teachers on performance, an idea which polls support from about 60 percent of those who responded.
"I'd say these are vulnerable proposals, especially with well-funded campaigns to oppose him, which I expect those will be," Field's
Mark DiCamillo tells the Bee. But I don't want to dismiss the strength of Arnold Schwarzenegger. He has surprised pollsters in the past, so we'll have to wait and see."
Download the poll here.While the governor was talking about budget reform at a press conference complete with props that
Dan Weintraub called
"a new zenith in hokey," Democrats were talking
traffic, sprawl and housing prices the new core of their poll-tested message for the upcoming legislative year.
Later today, Legislative leaders and the governor will appear at the New America Foundation's California policy forum to discuss this year's legislative proposals. The guv is slated to talk about his redistricting plan over lunch.
No incarceration separation: The U.S. Supreme Court warned California yesterday that an
unwritten policy to temporarily separate prisoners by race needs to be more carefully scrutinized.
In other incarceration news, the governor's plan to restructure California's prisons and youth authority received a
thumbs-up from the Little Hoover Commission.
The Knight-Ridder crew reports "Though the plan mostly involves rearranging lines of authority, administration officials have called it a crucial step that will make it easier to solve other problems."
When is $2.5 billion a bad thing?
Weintraub explains.Schools chief
Jack O'Connell yesterday
banned the Scientology-backed Narconon program from California's schools after some "teachers reported that Narconon instructors told students that the body can sweat out drug residues in saunas, and that as drugs exit the body, they produce colored ooze" among other--shall we say--scare tactics,
The big nada "Nobody cares." That's one
Latino voter's assessment of the Los Angeles Mayor's race. The Times takes a look at Latinos and the election, and discusses whether
Antonio Villaraigosa has lost his mojo from 2001.
Our winner for Intriguing Mystery of the Day comes from the residential hamlet of Moorpark: What was that
tiger hanging out around the Reagan Library? Resident
Ken Tucker "awoke to see the tiger slowly pacing along his backyard fence on Coffeetree Lane in Moorpark and then crouching next to his neighbor's wrought-iron fence." Apparently, they don't care much for Democrats or tigers in the area. The big cat was shot and killed by animal trackers yesterday.
Tom Arnold tells all about the governor's wild hallucinations from
chewing too much nicotine gum.From our
Big, Fat Grain of Salt files: What is it about disgraced reporters cashing in with confessional tell-alls? "Off the Record," a political tell-all tome by former Dow Jones reporter
Jason Leopold, opens with a less-than-flattering portrayal of a certain gubernatorial press secretary during his time with
Gray Davis. (Full disclosure, one of us was the Washington correspondent for
Salon.com when we were forced to retract a story by Leopold that led to the reporter's downfall.
On January 27, lawyers for
Steve Maviglio sent a letter to Leopold’s publisher, objecting to “defamatory statements” in advance materials promoting the book, a move that now appears to be delaying the book’s launch. Unfortunately, that's only serving to give this latest in the cannon of fibbing journalist confessionals
more publicity. If we officially didn't care about
Stephen Glass and
Jayson Blair, are we really supposed to care about Leopold? Why can't some people just get some therapy and go away?
Speaking of journalistic fabrications, yesterday we linked to a story about
Bill Lockyer doing his best
Elliot Spitzer imitation. The story was actually about
John Garamendi, not Lockyer. Lockyer's emergence was instead
documented in this story. Now do we get a book deal?
