"The state Senate on Thursday
confirmed the appointment of
Rachelle Chong to the Public Utilities Commission after a battle highlighting consumer advocates' concerns that the commission is more interested in advocating for the telecommunications industry than consumers," reports Janis Mara in the Oakland Tribune.
"The 33-0 confirmation vote came over protests from consumer groups and after the Senate Rules Committee on Wednesday refused to endorse Chong, 47, a Republican telecommunications attorney appointed to the board last January by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
'In the spirit of 'post-partisanship' I'm going to vote for Ms. Chong, but I have some serious concerns,' said Senate President Pro Tem
Don Perata, D-Oakland, referring to the governor's call in his inaugural speech last Friday for a more centrist Legislature."
Ahhh, a brand new day. How long will it last?
Let's
ask Joe Nuñez, the CTA mucky-muck whose
appointment to the state Board of Education was defeated yesterday by the same Senate.
The Bee's Judy Lin writes: "Signaling that the "post-partisanship" called for by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger may be difficult to achieve, the governor's fellow Republicans in the state Senate on Thursday
rejected one of his appointees to the State Board of Education.
The Senate voted 25-11 on the confirmation of teachers' union activist
Joe Nunez, but with most Republicans opposed, fell two votes short of the required two-thirds majority.
"'This isn't about Joe,' said
Barbara Kerr, president of the California Teachers Association. 'This is about Republicans doing something to the governor, and I think they picked a very sad time to do it.'
Just before the vote, Senate Republican leader
Dick Ackerman of Irvine said Nunez could not separate his duties on the board from his work on behalf of the teachers union.
'This is a conflict you cannot get around,' Ackerman said. '
I think he is disqualified for the mere fact he is working for an organization that has business before this board every day.'
After the vote, Ackerman said the decision was based on the merits of the nominee and denied there was any political conflict between GOP lawmakers and the governor."
The Merc News's Mike Zapler writes "Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to cover illegal immigrants as part of his universal health care plan, but a
new poll shows that a majority of Californians oppose that idea.
Only 37 percent of adults, and 32 percent of voters, say illegal immigrants should be included, according to the poll taken Jan. 2-6 by the Survey and Policy Research Institute at San Jose State University. However, 52 percent of adults, and 50 percent of voters, say the government should guarantee health insurance for everyone, as opposed to relying on employers or individuals to provide coverage.
'This is a very sensitive issue,' Schwarzenegger said this week. 'So what I'm trying to figure out is, how do we do it cheaper than what we are doing right now?'"
Dan Walters writes that the fate of the governor's health plan
may rest on the definition of a tax. "When Schwarzenegger dramatically unveiled the plan this week, he rekindled what had been a decades-long, circular debate over who should pay for health care, especially for the working poor, and energized dozens of stakeholder interests.
Ultimately, however, the fate of Schwarzenegger's crusade may depend not on lofty principles but on a very fine legal point -- whether the proposed $4.5 billion in levies on business and health care providers are taxes. Under the plan, employers not providing health insurance to workers would be required to pay 4 percent of their payrolls into a state health insurance purchasing pool, hospitals would be assessed 4 percent of their revenues and doctors another 2 percent.
It's much more than a semantic conflict, because if they are taxes, they would require two-thirds votes in the Legislature to enact, thereby giving minority Republicans the decisive leverage."
Meanwhile, the Oakland Tribune's Erik Nelson writes that public transportation advocates
are miffed at the governor's proposal to use gas tax money for debt service and school transportation. "Recent gas price spikes have pumped hundreds of millions ofdollars into that fund, resulting in a windfall for public transit of $624 million in the current 2006-2007 fiscal year budget.
The projected spillover for the 2007-2008 budget is $1.1 billion.
The governor's new budget would spend $340 million of that on debt service for seismic work on bridges. The budget, which must be approved by two-thirds of the state Legislature, also allocates $144 million to providing transportation to centers for the developmentally disabled.
The rest of the spillover money — $627 million — would pay for home-to-school transportation. That would only be the beginning of a more permanent funding shift, explained H.D. Palmer, deputy director of the state Department of Finance.
But the spillover money is one of the biggest funding sources public transportation has, transit advocates say. The governor's proposal is simply trying to play one major area of need — education — against that of transit-dependent Californians.
'
If the Legislature doesn't strongly act against this proposal, there are going to be devastating impacts against working families, youth, the elderly and low-income people from further reductions in service,' said
Carli Paine, transportation program director for the Oakland-based Transportation and Land Use Coalition."
From our
Yeah, That'll Happen Files the Pacific Legal Foundation issued a press release "challenging" Jerry Brown to drop the global warming lawsuit against automakers filed by Bill Lockyer on his way out of office.
PLF filed a "brief urging the courts to dismiss the suit."
