"Gov.
Arnold Schwarzenegger handed Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa a much-anticipated prize Monday, signing a law that will give the mayor substantial control over the Los Angeles public schools," report Duke Helfand and Howard Blume in the Times.
"Appearing together for a bill-signing ceremony at the Los Angeles Central Library, the officials said the change would bring new accountability to a system that fails students, teachers and parents."
Why didn't they have the ceremony at a public school? Oh, that's right. Never mind.
"'With this bill, the community will gain more control over its schools,' Schwarzenegger told the audience packed into the children's reading room. 'We will move graduation numbers up. We will move test scores up. And we will move our dropout rate down.'"
"'I'm asking for people to hold me personally accountable for leading improvement in the schools,' the mayor said. He urged school board members to drop their challenge. 'Accept the will of the people,' he said."
Um, which people? The 60 or so Legislators who voted for the bill?
Rick Orlov writes in the Daily News that the governor
is open to giving other mayors similar authority. "With Los Angeles schools undergoing a major reorganization, a confident Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Monday that he is open to giving similar power to mayors of other cities in the future."
While the guv may be willing, the Legislature probably isn't. Ask Fresno's
Alan Autry.
"'What we had was a system that is failing,' Schwarzenegger said in an interview with Daily News editors and reporters. 'If this was a private business, it wouldn't be allowed to continue. They would have been out of business.'"
"'I have worked at the schools with my after-school program. We have excellent teachers. We have excellent principals. The problem is with the system. It is the system that is failing.'"
In other bill signing news, "[a]ll commercial ships coming into San Francisco Bay and other California waters will be required to kill exotic plants and animals stowing away in their holds -- even those as tiny as a grain of salt -- under a new law signed Monday by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger," reports Paul Rogers in the Merc News.
"The measure,
SB 497 by Sen.
Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, gives California the most far-reaching rules in the nation aimed at removing non-native clams, crabs, plankton, bacteria such as E. coli, and other species from the ballast water of cargo ships, cruise liners and other vessels."
"The law will take effect in 2009, applying first to new ships. After that, it will be phased in until all discharges of invasive species, no matter how tiny, are banned from all ships by 2020."
Shane Goldmacher compares
the governor's bill-signing ratio to last year. "
So far this year, Schwarzenegger has taken action on 338 bills, signing 327 and vetoing 11. That's only a 3.25 percent veto ratio.
As of early October last year, Schwarzenegger had signed 729 bills and vetoed 232, for a 24.14 percent veto rate--almost eight times this year's pace."
Dan Walters looks at the
dimming prospects for Phil Angelides. "The new Datamar poll puts Schwarzenegger at 53.6 percent among California voters who voted in the primary and general elections of 2002 and 2004, while Angelides is at 31.4 percent. That's a wider margin than slightly older polls by the Field Institute and the Public Policy Institute of California found, but it's in line with what private polling has been showing recently -- roughly a 20 percentage-point advantage for the governor."
"The propensity of voters surveyed in polls is important because this may be another extraordinarily low-turnout election, which could largely erase the roughly eight-point advantage that Democrats hold in voter registration. Datamar said that by confining its survey to high-propensity voters, the sample was 45.2 percent Democratic and 42.6 percent Republican. Even so, Democrats still outnumbered Republicans, and
Angelides ran 14 points behind his party's share in the poll -- the same kind of Democratic softness that the Field and PPIC polls also found."
"Then-Gov.
Pete Wilson was 23 points behind when he started his re-election campaign in 1994 but wound up winning by 15 points. Schwarzenegger, whose popularity plunged to under 40 percent after last year's debacle, could surpass Wilson's comeback.
A landslide could be in the works -- perhaps one big enough to help Republicans in close down-ballot races if Democrats, depressed about their prospects, stay home Nov. 7."
Why governor, are those coattails we see?
"Responding to negative television ads portraying him as an attorney general candidate opposed to gun control and abortion rights, Republican state Sen.
Chuck Poochigian on Monday
said it was his opponent, Democratic Oakland Mayor
Jerry Brown, who is 'extreme,'" reports the Bee's Judy Lin.
"Poochigian cited Brown's 'unbelievable effort to undermine the death penalty' when, as governor in the late 1970s, Brown vetoed a bill reinstating the death penalty. The Legislature overrode his veto."
"'I'm absolutely convinced that the more people know Jerry Brown -- the truth -- and the more they know about me, the higher my standing,' Poochigian said in a breakfast meeting with The Bee Capitol Bureau. '
He is going to avoid (discussing) bizarre and extreme positions he's taken in public life.'"
Meanwhile,
Poochigian has hit the airwaves, attacking his better-known Democratic opponent, reports the Times' Eric Bailey.
"Poochigian's 30-second advertisement, which the campaign said is running on broadcast and cable TV stations in Southern California, the Central Valley and the Bay Area, drubs Brown for pardoning seven first-degree murderers as governor and
describes Oakland as 'one big murder scene.'
'This is our opening salvo,' said Kevin Spillane, a spokesman for the Fresno lawmaker. 'It reminds those who remember Jerry Brown about his horrible record on public safety. For those who don't know him, it defines Jerry Brown for his lifetime failure on criminal-justice issues.'"
Meanwhile, "[a] California Nurses Association publication indicates the group
is pushing the Proposition 89 campaign-finance measure as a Trojan horse to get what it covets most: universal health care, opponents said Monday," writes Jim Sanders in the Bee.
"
Allan Zaremberg, president of the California Chamber of Commerce, said the strategy basically was spelled out in a document that appeared on the nurses association Web site."
"'They have a two-step process here,' he said. 'One is to eliminate the ability of business to communicate with the voters. The second step is to have government-run health care on the next ballot ... and deny voters the ability to hear the other side.'"
"
Chuck Idelson, spokesman for both the CNA and the Yes on Proposition 89 campaign, said the nurses group has supported universal health care for many years but that the campaign-finance initiative is not specifically linked to that goal."
