Now that Jerry Brown has made it official, everyone
can dust off those long features and hit pieces they've
been saving up for months. Steve Harmon reports, "Asserting
that California needs "someone with an insider's knowledge but an
outsider's mind" to pull the state out of its economic abyss, Attorney
General Jerry Brown strode into the governor's race
Tuesday morning
after taking months to make the inevitable official.
"In a
3½-minute video announcement taped from his campaign headquarters
in
Oakland and transmitted through his campaign Web site,
his Facebook
page and YouTube, Brown, a Democrat, sought to turn
what many consider
his greatest weakness — the fact that he is a career politician running
against fresh-faced Republicans — into a strength.
"Our state is
in serious trouble, and the next governor must have
the preparation,
the knowledge and the know-how to get California working again," said
Brown, 71, who is seeking to return to the governor's office
after
serving from 1975 to 1983."
Be on the lookout for more Brown stories this week
as the new candidate makes the rounds of the state's
newspapers. We're guessing by the end of the week Brown will have
conducted more interviews with California political
reporters than Meg Whitman has in the 6 months she's been a candidate for governor.
Matier and Ross break down the tangled web of San Francisco politics.
"Within days, two other well-known Bay Area Democrats - Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris - will likely be running for state office along with
Jerry Brown, but don't look for them to run as a team.
"The "Three Amigos" they are not - either personally or politically.
"For a decade, Brown, who announced Tuesday he is running
for governor,
Newsom, who wants to be lieutenant governor, and Harris,
seeking the
job as the state's top attorney, have been swimming
in the same Pacific
Heights social-political circles - and shared meals around the
Sunday-night kitchen table of Gordon and Ann Getty."
From our Tomorrow's Budget Headlines Today files, an
appellate court has reaffirmed the governor's ability to make cuts by line-item veto. "A California appeals court sided Tuesday with Gov.
Arnold
Schwarzenegger in a fight with state lawmakers over
his line-item veto
authority.
"Last summer, Schwarzenegger cut about $500 million from a state
spending plan passed by the Legislature, saying it
was not balanced.
Advocacy groups, supported by legislative leaders,
filed a lawsuit
arguing that the governor had overstepped his legal
rights.
"Legislative leaders told the court Schwarzenegger
did not have the
right to use his line-item veto because the legislation they passed cut
an existing budget. They said the governor can use
that veto only when
a budget is originally approved."
The Merc's Denis Theriault looks at the new proposed
ban on text messages to Assemblymembers while the house
is in session.
"Vowing
to make state government more open, Perez said Monday
that lawmakers
will no longer be allowed to trade text messages with
lobbyists while
voting, debating or otherwise "doing the people's business."
Perez
isn't ready to make lawmakers turn in their BlackBerries
before
plopping down at their desks — but he would not rule it out, either."Californians
expect us to pay full attention to the issues and to
each other," he
said. "They need not worry that special interest lobbyists
are secretly
sending messages of support or opposition to us while
we deliberate."
"The
texting ban for legislators was one of several reforms
Perez pushed as
he laid out his agenda, taking over the key leadership
post as the
Capitol is mired in dysfunction and unpopularity."
Torey Van Oot says the ban would be tough to enforce.
"Lobbyist Jackson Gualco countered that the text messaging is just
reality of living (and lawmaking) in a "world where now everyone
expects everything to be instantaneous or nearly so."
"I
respect the fact that the speaker wants to make sure
that the inner
sanctum of the Assembly floor, which is really the
sole space where the
members aren't otherwise surrounded by aides or lobbyists,
is kept
intact," said Gualco, the president of the Institute
of Governmental
Advocates, an organization that represents lobbyists.
"But things are
so fast-moving on the floor these days that there are times
when
members are going to want to know, 'Is this amendment
helpful or
hurtful? Is this going to impact the constituents?'
"
Chase Davis says furloughs could be costing te state money by replacing vacation time.
"We talked to the California Highway Patrol, CalFire,
the Department of Corrections and a few others during
the course of our reporting,
and they all said essentially the same thing: Furloughs have made it
much harder for their employees to take paid time off,
which is causing
them to accumulate leave like never before.
"The numbers seem to bear that out. Studies conducted
by the Senate Office of Oversight and Outcomes
have shown workers in several departments banking vacation
at rates
upwards of six times what they were socking away pre-furloughs. The
office was founded by Senate President Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat,
and has produced several reports critical of furloughs
enacted by
Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger."
And finally, from our When Emus Attack files, AP reports, "A mad emu gave deputies a Texas-sized hard time. El Paso authorities say the big bird
was running loose Tuesday, snarling rush-hour traffic near Interstate 10 and attacking deputies trying to restrain it. Deputies
with the El Paso County Sheriff's Office tried to prevent
the tall, flightless bird from running into traffic.
But when deputies neared the emu, it became aggressive
and slashed one deputy's pant leg.
The deputy was not seriously injured.
