10th CD Race Means a Lifetime Job
There’s a couple reasons California’s lieutenant governor, the local state senator and a newly minted assemblywoman all are scuffling to win today’s primary for the Bay Area’s 10th Congressional District.
First, it’s a special election in the district, which includes most of Contra Costa County, along with smaller chunks of Alameda, Solano and Sacramento counties. Since Democratic Rep. Ellen Tauscher resigned in June to take a State Department job, that means this is a free ride for elected officials, who can run for a new job and still keep their old one. That’s a gift from heaven for politicians.
But it’s also a seat in Congress that’s up for grabs. In these days of term limits – and gerrymandered districts – a House seat is as close as it comes to a guaranteed lifetime job.
In 2008, for example, 94 percent of the country’s 435 members of Congress were re-elected. Since 1976, the only time that rate has fallen below 90 percent was in 1992, when it skidded all the way down to 88 percent.
BOE Votes to Support AB 1506, Common Sense Legislation for a Cash-Strapped State
Today I am proud to announce that the BOE agreed to sponsor Assembly Bill 1506 (Anderson) yesterday at our Board Hearing in Sacramento. The bill, which was luckily revived from the suspense file on Friday, will allow taxpayers that receive IOUs from the state, to return those IOUs as payment for any obligations owed to the state.
When we agreed to accept IOUs from taxpayers at our July 21st hearing, we requested for Board staff to return on August 31st, with a legislative proposal to standardize the policy of the Board regarding registered warrants.
The Board is not currently required by law to accept state-issued IOUs, but has done so this year as well as in 1992, the last time IOUs were issued by the state. The BOE staff proposal, approved yesterday, as an amendment for AB 1506, will clarify the law for the BOE to accept IOUs automatically when they are issued in the future.
Why Should I Have to Pay For Your Primaries?
News item: Some in the California Republican Party don’t want to let California voters registered as Decline to State (full disclosure: I’m proudly one of them) vote in the GOP primary.
Fine. But why then should I, as a taxpayer, have to pay for your primary?
The same is true of other partisan primaries. Registered voters that are not members of a party are the fastest-growing segment of the electorate – 20 percent and rising fast. In an era of super-tight budgets, our taxes, by paying for primaries, are subsidizing the parties.
What do we get out of it? Hyper-partisan legislators that dominate the legislature. Budget gridlock. The total failure to deal with urgent issues such as prisons and water. And who do the 20 percent of Californians who are DTSers have to represent them in Sacramento? Not a single legislator, unless you count Fresno Assemblyman Juan Arambula, who was elected as a Democrat.
Will Garamendi Hold On in CD-10?
Today
is "Game On" for the Primary in Congressional District 10 where 14 candidates
vie to be our next Member of Congress.
This is the "old" Bill Baker seat – once Republican – where Democrats
now hold a startling 18-point registration advantage.
All
candidates run off against one another today. The top vote getters of each party run
off on November 3rd if no candidate gets 50% +1.
On
the Democrat side, it could be a "toss up" if primary turnout is below the
predicted 35% to 38%. If turnout
is high, Gov. Schwarzenegger will have the opportunity to appoint a new
Lieutenant Governor.
September Anniversaries
As Labor Day approaches and we slip out of Summer and into another September, many think of 9/11 and that this September is yet another anniversary of that horrific, unimaginable tragedy. But, September will be another milestone anniversary this year – the anniversary of what some are calling the Great Panic.
In one of the first books to comprehensively examine the extraordinary financial collapse of September 2008, “In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic” by David Wessel, and surely far from the last such book, we are reminded of just what was going on the last time we tore the month of August from our calendars and turned to the September page. This one focuses on Ben Bernanke and the unprecedented situation that swallowed up Lehman Brothers. All the heroic efforts to bail out Bear Stearns earlier that Spring had provoked so much controversy about the correct role of government, if any, in rescuing financial markets who were about to set off an H-Bomb in their own universe. Lehman’s bankruptcy, the biggest in history at that time, nearly lit the fuse on a global financial meltdown.