November 2012 Targets – Part Three: The State Senate
Last week, I made my early picks a to where the action may
be for Congress and the state Assembly in November 2012. Now, lets look at the
state Senate.
First, only the 20 odd-numbered districts are up for
election in 2012, and, barring a successful court challenge or referendum, the
candidates will run in one of the newly drawn districts that the Citizens
Redistricting Commission, in their final vote, are expected to approve today, August
15.
Senators elected in 2010 in one of the 20 even-numbered
districts were elected to a four-year term and will represent those districts
as drawn until the end of their current term in 2014. Should any of these
senators resign his/her seat, a special election would be held to fill the
unexpired term, but the election would be held under the old lines. The newly
drawn even-numbered districts do not become legal until the 2014 election
cycle.
Here are the odd-numbered senate districts that I pick as
possibly being competitive, with the more likely targets being listed first.
Hooray for BART! (for standing up for California’s workers against the ACLU)
(F&H “California Employment” poster Michael Bernick, former state EDD director, was a member of BART Board of
Directors 1988-1996, and today is a regular BART rider).
Hooray for BART! For BART Board President Bob Franklin, Vice
President John McPartland and the Board of Directors; for acting General
Manager Sherwood Wakeman; for BART spokesperson Linton Johnson (shown below);
and for the new BART police chief Kenton Rainey.
Last Thursday, August 11, BART officials learned via
Facebook that a group, No Justice No BART, was threatening to shut down the San
Francisco Civic Center station, and disrupt the evening commute. The group
previously had shut down the Civic Center station at the evening commute on
July 11, in protest of the shooting by BART police of Mr. Charles Hill.
The Mask is starting to slip
Public
employee unions portray themselves as representatives of public servants, whose
only goal is to insure their members are treated like all other Americans. Teachers’ unions especially portray
themselves as having the best interests of students and parents at heart.
The mask is starting to slip.
Last
week a 19 page power point presentation prepared by the American Federation of
Teachers showed how the AFT derailed a Connecticut grass roots movement of mostly
working class moms fighting for a better education future for their
children. As the Wall Street Journal reported, the goal was to insure
parents thought the union was on their side while all the while:
- Making
sure the parents were shut out of any and all negotiations - Trick
parents into signing onto proposals that pretended to give parents power
but in reality did not
Amend AB 1215 and put California consumers and safety first
California has the seventh largest economy in the world. And what drives this economy is the willingness of consumers to take risks and buy products. To guard against risk, consumers often rely on commercial data to tell them the history of a product. So, for example, when someone is buying a house, he or she can see the history of the house: its property tax values, its renovations and what it sold for in the past. Shouldn’t the same process apply when buying a car? It should but it doesn’t.
A new piece of legislation, AB 1215, aims to protect consumers in the market for a used car by giving them information on the car’s history. The bill asks the right question: how can we protect consumers? Unfortunately, it provides the wrong answer: it relies on the National Motor Vehicle Titling Information System. Essentially, the NMVTIS is a program developed by the Justice Department to help keep track of car titles. But if you are looking for information on how many wrecks a car has had or how much work has been done to it over the years, the NMVTIS isn’t much use.