Everyone is expecting a big initiative election year—and it still could happen. But where are the petition signature gatherers?

There were none in front of a Sacramento Wal-Mart yesterday. There were none in front of a Los Angeles Wal-Mart on Saturday. In fact, I have not run into one person carrying a petition seeking signatures for a ballot measure.

By rights the signature gatherers should be everywhere pulling a cart full of different petitions. They could not carry all the measures that have passed through the Attorney General’s office for title and summary.

All who follow such things know that about 90 or so initiatives have been filed as citizens try to compete with legislators to see who can write the most laws. With so many initiatives on record you would expect signature gatherers to be hard at work. Many of the major initiatives that have big money backers are ready to go but so far no major push.

"And I compromised–yes! So that all these years I could
stay in that Senate–and serve the people in a thousand honest ways! You’ve got
to face facts, Jeff. I’ve served our State well, haven’t I? We have the lowest unemployment and the
highest Federal grants. But, well, I’ve had to compromise, had to play
ball. You can’t count on people voting, half the time they don’t vote, anyway.
That’s how states and empires have been built since time began."           

-Sen. Joseph Paine, the corrupt but successful logroller
played by Claude Rains, explaining the facts of Senate life to the idealistic
new Sen. Jefferson C. Smith (Jimmy Stewart) in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

California has one of the highest unemployment rates and
among the lowest rates of federal grants.

So it’s time, way past time for Senators Feinstein and Boxer
to play ball.

Hardball.

Northrop Grumman Corp.’s decision to move its headquarters out of Los Angeles, in and of itself, is no biggee.

We’re only talking about the loss of 300 jobs. That’s less than one-hundredth of 1 percent of all payroll jobs in Los Angeles County.

What’s more, Northrop’s departure doesn’t necessarily say anything derogatory about L.A.’s relative business climate. Northrop’s explanation that it wants to move to the Washington, D.C., suburbs to be close to its prime customer, the Defense Department, is perfectly plausible. It needs to be there; it didn’t say it’s itching to flee from here.

But rather than focus on the decision of one company to move, it’s far more instructive – not to mention important – for the community to look at the decisions of a bunch of companies. In other words, the Big Picture. Are more companies moving out or moving in? Are companies that are born here staying here and growing here? One the whole, are we thriving economically or slowly dying?

Alas, the big picture may make you squirm.

Attorney General Jerry Brown’s nomination for governor is now certain, and given the rapid Republican decline in California, he has to be the odds on favorite for November. So it is time to concentrate on Brown’s next campaign for president.

President you ask? Well, each time he has been elected governor (1974 and 1978), he has immediately begun running for president (1976 and 1980). He even ran when he was not governor, in 1992. So a fourth campaign for president should not be totally dismissed, even if, as is likely, Brown denies it.

Additionally, there is a logic for another quixotic run in 2012. Brown always runs for president from the left, and the left wing of the Democratic Party is increasingly disenchanted with President Obama. He has betrayed them on public option health care, on withdrawing from Afghanistan, on closing Guantanamo. This is the fodder Brown has used in his past campaigns; there is no reason he cannot reprise this strategy again.

I had been planning to spend part of the week in a federal courthouse in Pasadena, where a special broadcast had been arranged so Southern Californians could watch the trial in the legal challenge to Prop 8 without having to go to the courtroom in San Francisco.

But the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling that seemed based on a sort of “Wizard of Oz” logic (even the most important trials shouldn’t be hidden behind the curtain), barred the federal district judge’s plan to broadcast the trial to Pasadena, other federal courts, and over the Internet. The court’s decision, which makes me wonder if the five conservative justices have some sort of deal with Southwest Airlines, forced me to fly to San Francisco to see what I was missing.

Here are a few notes from the civil trial, in which two couples are challenging Prop 8’s ban on same-sex marriage as a violation of the equal protection clause of the U.S. constitution:

A state Assembly committee on Tuesday approved legislation to legalize the possession, sale or cultivation of marijuana by adults. (The bill later died when a separate committee refused to hear the bill.) A ballot measure is circulating to accomplish the same goal.

But just last June, the state’s official risk assessment agency, the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, officially added marijuana smoke to the “Proposition 65 list,” determining that “marijuana smoke was clearly shown, through scientifically valid testing according to generally accepted principles, to cause cancer.”

Therefore, marijuana smoke has been placed in the same category as second-hand tobacco smoke.

So which is it, people? Legalize and tax it? Or label it and banish the stuff from polite society?

Last spring, I wrote about the municipal atomic bomb that threatens to decimate L.A.’s treasury and potentially lead to bankruptcy. The City of L.A.’s public pension crisis continues to grow, but fortunately our leaders are now prepared to act. Difficult decisions must be made to pull us back from the brink.

By 2015, Los Angeles will need $2 billion every year to fund its public employee pension plan, five times as much as the $400 million budget deficit the City faced this year. Unless action is taken soon, these pension contributions will consume the money the City needs to hire more police officers, respond to fires, repair our streets, pick up our trash, mow the grass in our parks and maintain our other municipal services. The good news is that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the City Council are now focused on this crisis.

Last week, I violated one important rule of good reporting: never assume. I had assumed that California’s breakout media stars of January, Gov. Schwarzenegger’s miniature pony Whiskey and potbellied pig Bacon, would be unavailable to offer their own comments on his state of the state speech.

I thought wrong. I got a call over the weekend from a previously unheard-of public relations firm, Orwell-George Communications, saying that the animals would like to talk.

I met the pig and the pony — along with their CHP detail, publicist and agent — in the private room behind a fashionable café in Brentwood. Here is an edited transcript.

Q: Were you surprised to have so much of the State of the State address devoted to you?

WHISKEY: Floored, and I don’t use that word lightly, since I’m only three feet tall. First off, it struck me as a big risk for a politician to talk about pigs – no offense, Bacon. And that goes double when the politician in question is named Arnold. People put that name and pig together, and they’re thinking less about your political agenda and more about that pig on “Green Acres.”

Bad as California’s budget numbers are, they’re likely to get worse.

Along with the continuing commotion over whether California will get the $6.9 billion it needs from the federal government to help close the budget deficit (Note to gamblers: take the under, the way under), state Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor warned Tuesday that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger might have been a teensy bit optimistic when his budget folk estimated next year’s revenues. About $3.1 billion optimistic, that is.

In Taylor’s words, the governor’s budget is realistic, but “there’s a downside risk on revenues.” Taylor’s main concern is that the governor’s financial team is counting on a faster, more robust economic recovery than he sees as likely.

It’s important to remember that both Taylor and the governor are dealing with best guess estimates of what the upcoming year will bring and there’s a lot of “potato/po-tah-to” arguing that goes on among the green-eyeshade crowd.