It’s only June, but it sure seems like Christmas morning with the state’s Citizens Redistricting Commission dropping new maps into stockings all over California today.

While the full impact on the GOP won’t be known for a few days (or a few months, if you believe the Commission that this is only a “first draft”), interesting races are emerging. Aside from a lump of coal or two delivered to coastal GOP State Senate districts, there are two new interesting districts in Southern California yielding fresh GOP blood that will prove to be particularly exciting.

South Bay – Los Angeles

The first is the newly-drawn district across the South Bay communities of Los Angeles. You may remember Nathan Mintz, the South Bay Tea Party founder and dynamic twenty-something aerospace engineer who ran a respectable campaign against the far-left’s trial attorney lobbyist Betsy Butler last fall. While Nathan fell short of victory in that matchup, he came closer to winning than any candidate in recent history – by a long shot. (In case you were wondering, the last Republican to run in that district won approximately zero precincts.) And today, it’s a whole new ballgame.

Summer is now upon us, and Californians
have yet another reason to be excited: everyday citizens have a chance this
season to help decide the future of the Golden State. Today, California’s
Citizens Redistricting Commission will release draft maps for California’s
state Senate, state Assembly and congressional districts. Over the next two
months, Californians can  tell commissioners who we are and how we’d like
to be represented.

For the first time in the state’s
history, the lines are being drawn by a citizen’s commission, based on
extensive public input. This public-driven process is an important reflection
of a long-held desire by Californians to determine our collective fate –
whether at the ballot box or at the community level. Public input has played
and will continue to play a crucial role in making the redistricting process
transparent and representative of all of California’s diverse constituencies.

Figures released by the national Bureau of Economic Analysis showed the state’s gross domestic product recovering by 1.8 percent, after adjusting for inflation. This compares to national real economic growth in 2010 of 2.6 percent.

California’s GDP, at just over $1.9 trillion, is still below its 2008 peak. And our anemic recovery shows: 33 states are growing more robustly than California, including most of our key competitors. Construction, finance and nondurable manufacturing continue to be the major private sector economic laggards.

Anyone interested in storytelling might want to pull up a
chair in the state senate gallery and listen to a battle of stories — about
taxes. Dueling emails are circulating requesting stories of woe from those who
either see the end of the temporary taxes as the road to local budget
devastation or the continuation of those same taxes as hardship for taxpayers.

The storytelling fest started with a request from the office
of senate president pro tem Darrell Steinberg. He wants stories from school and
local law enforcement officials on how they will be devastated if the tax
extensions do not occur. The email read in part: The pro Tem is asking all
Senators to call their Sheriffs and the Superintendents of the school districts
in their Senate districts and get short letters from each of them, describing
the cuts they will have to make, worst case scenario (if the Senate must pass a
budget without continuing existing revenues).

The Secret Knowledge is a book by playwright David
Mamet that was published last week and that is highly relevant to our job
training system and employment world in California.

The
book has nothing in it about WIA funding in California, or individual training
accounts, or management information systems. Its relevancy is how it addresses
the broader meanings of economic  growth
and individual freedom in our evolving global economy.

Several
of Mamet’s plays,  particularly American Buffalo  and Glengarry
Glen Ross depict the harshness of capitalism in America, and particularly
the harshness for individuals at the margins of the market economy.  In Glengarry
Glen Ross, Shelley Lavene and George Aaronow  are aging men who have no place in the
economy, whose skills have become obsolete, who are portrayed as being
discarded by capitalism.

Cross-posted at CityJournal.

California’s landmark parent-empowerment law, passed last year, is one of the state’s few bright spots in education. But the law is under assault on multiple fronts. The greatest danger comes from state bureaucrats and untrustworthy lawmakers, abetted by teachers’ union lobbyists, who would lock the law’s “parent trigger” by attaching burdensome requirements and obtuse rules. The upshot? Parents may find they’re once again left to fend for themselves against an education establishment heavily invested in preserving its prerogatives.

Under the current law, if at least half of eligible parents at a chronically failing school sign a petition, the local school district must adopt one of a handful of reforms: close the school and let the students enroll in a higher-performing campus nearby; convert the school to an independent charter; fire half the teaching staff and replace the administration; extend school hours and revise the curriculum under a federally recommended turnaround plan; or adopt an “alternative governance” model, which could include anything from establishing a school-site council to handing over the school to the local district superintendent.

While the law’s language may be brief and fairly straightforward, its execution thus far has been anything but.

A major hang-up on the budget deal is whether taxes should be extended until the people can vote. However, unanticipated revenues revealed last month should make the tax bridge unnecessary if the vote occurs in a few months.

An election probably would not happen until the beginning of autumn at the earliest and the governor wants to build a tax bridge until the election occurs. Republicans have balked at the idea of continuing taxes beyond their expiration date at the end of the month.

As things are shaping up, the voters would be presented with a package of proposals that include continuing or re-establishing the expired taxes – depending if the tax bridge is built – a short term spending reform and some public sector pension changes.

I hope that arguing over redistricting commission maps burns calories. Because if this doesn’t help you lose weight, there’s really nothing useful about this mapping debate.

There’s an easier, smarter, more effective way to divide California into legislative districts, of course. And it happens to be my way. It wouldn’t require a redistricting commission or a legislature. It’s a two-step process:

1. Take any map of California that shows the regions of the state.
2. Make those regions our legislative districts.
You’re done.

Ideas matter, particularly when colored by religious fanaticism, wreaking havoc even in the most favored of places. Take, for instance, Iran, a country blessed with a rich heritage and enormous physical and human resources, but which, thanks to its theocratic regime, is largely an economic basket case and rogue state.

Then there’s California, rich in everything from oil and food to international trade and technology, but still skimming along the bottom of the national economy. The state’s unemployment rate https:> is now worse than Michigan’s and ahead only of neighboring Nevada.  Among the nation’s 20 largest metropolitan regions, four of the six with the highest unemployment numbers are located in the Golden State: Riverside, Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco. In a recent Forbes surveyhttps:>, California was home to six of the ten regions where the economy is poised to get worse.

One would think, given these gory details, California officials would be focused on reversing the state’s performance. But here, as in Iran, officialdom focuses more on theology than on actuality.   Of course, California’s religion rests not on conventional divinity but on a secular environmental faith that nevertheless exhibits the intrusive and unbending character of radical religion.