Happy election day and a big shout out to the few Californians who will actually take time to cast ballots today.

Elections in odd-numbered years are generally a thin soup of city council races and school board contests, with a few local-interest ballot measures tossed in. The turnout numbers are usually dismal, with the statewide primary election that’s still seven months away usually drawing far more attention from the press and the public.

The special congressional election in and around Contra Costa County to replace Democrat Ellen Tauscher will add a little spice to the day, however. Political prognosticators across the country will be trying to tease the results there, in New York’s 23rd Congressional District and in the Virginia governor’s race to see what they can tell us about the country’s response to President Barack Obama and his policies.

"There’s
no trick to being a humorist" – Will
Rogers once said – "when you have the whole government working for you."

Even
though he observed this decades ago, Rogers’ quote sure says a lot about the
comedy club of contemporary California.  And it would be downright funny
if it wasn’t so seriously troubling.

Everyone
in Sacramento is aware of our disastrous deficits, unprecedented unemployment,
enduring government gridlock and continuing water shortages.  If the
record low approval ratings of the Governor and Legislature are any indication,
the public understands as well.

Given
the need for serious action, perhaps we can expect California’s powerful
regulatory regimes to take a break from operating their red tape factories and
reduce costs on business and consumers?

I shook my head in pity when I looked at the Port of Long Beach over the last couple of years. Poor thing, I thought. It sure is getting hurt by its bigger neighbor, the Port of Los Angeles.

But last week, I started thinking exactly the opposite. The L.A. port is helping the Long Beach port. In fact, thanks to L.A.’s missteps, Long Beach might be able to sail right past Los Angeles and become the nation’s No. 1 port.

The reason I went full astern, nautically speaking, is because of recent events.

Notably, a couple of weeks ago, the Port of Los Angeles boosted to $205,000 the payments it can give to the well-connected lobbying firm headed by former Congressman Richard Gephardt to push for a change in federal law. That change would allow the L.A. port to do what it most wants: upend the longstanding system that relies on independent and contract truck drivers (the ones who pick up and deliver cargo containers at the port) and replace it with a system in which drivers would be employees of big companies. That way, the employee drivers could be unionized by the Teamsters. The Teamsters, by the way, helped Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a former union organizer, craft the employee-driver rule.

Gavin Newsom pulled out of the governor’s race and set the punditry world abuzz about the possibilities of another Democrat jumping into the June primary. While some Democrats like the idea of a clear field for Attorney General Jerry Brown, still nominally exploring a run, others asked, as expressed by former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown in his S.F. Chronicle column in reference to the 71 year old Brown with 40 years in the political world, “Can’t we find someone with a newer paint job?”

Names flying off the page include Treasurer Bill Lockyer, former Controller Steve Westly, L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Congress members Loretta Sanchez and Jane Harman, and, of course, the old standby, U. S. Senator Dianne Feinstein.

Old not being an indication of age here, even though she is Brown’s senior by five years. Old in the sense her name has been linked to the governor’s chair for twenty years.

Well, it’s Jerry Brown versus no one in the Democratic primary, but the yellow shirt he’s wearing for the ride to November has a bull’s-eye on it.

When San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom dropped out of the governor’s race Friday, he not only cleared the field for the attorney general, but also gave everyone on the GOP side seven extra months of free shots at Brown.

Sure, Republicans Tom Campbell, Steve Poizner and Meg Whitman will spend much of their time slapping each other around in an effort to convince GOP voters they have what it takes to run the state – and that their opponents don’t.

But while a non-stop intra-party mud fight tends to annoy voters and earnest discussions of public policy may bore them, a nasty attack on the other party’s likely nominee is a sure way to fire up the faithful.

Proposition 34, the so-called campaign finance limit, is one of the worst laws ever written. That’s no surprise, it was written by politicians for their own benefit. The objective was to supplant a 1996 campaign finance initiative that set very strict contribution limits. Proposition 34, put on the ballot by the legislature and passed in 2000, loosened the contribution limits. It limits an individual contribution to a legislative candidate to $3,900. But it also created a big fat loophole for the pols to launder money to themselves. And that is just what has been happening over the past decade. Now one politician may be in trouble for it.

Last month, the San Diego Union reported that in May Assemblyman Joel Anderson (R-La Mesa) contributed $32,400 from his 2008 campaign fund to the Fresno County Republican Central Committee. In June, he sent $32,400 to the Placer GOP committee and an equal amount to the Stanislaus County committee. Also in May, three members of the Hamann family of El Cajon – longtime supporters of Anderson – contributed $30,000 to the Fresno Committee. In June, the Barona Band of Mission Indians in San Diego County gave $10,000 to the Fresno party.

When L.A. County voters assessed themselves a half-cent sales tax increase for transportation investment in November 2008, the county’s elected officials promised to deliver a final Long Range Transportation Plan (LRTP) detailing how the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) will direct $298 billion in revenue between now and 2040. After approving the 30-year blueprint last Thursday, that time is now.

The LRTP lists dozens of projects including the Subway to the Sea, extending the Green Line to LAX, expanding the successful Orange Line service in the Valley and expanding HOV lanes on the I-5, I-405 and I-10 freeways.
is now.

Transportation projects are an economic stimulus in the short term and an economic investment in the long term. They create good paying jobs from design phase to construction. And the sooner we place shovels in the ground, the more likely we will be to take advantage of the current dip in construction material costs. The Chamber looks forward to continuing to work with our partners at Metro and our elected officials to do everything possible to speed up the approval process. Just like sitting idle on the freeway, wasted time leads to wasted money.
is now.

On Thursday, columnist George Skelton of the Los Angeles Times wrote a piece analyzing Meg Whitman’s new radio ad. Skelton’s analysis gets the facts wrong. What’s even more puzzling is that the conclusions he draws are directly opposite the facts reported by his own Times colleagues.

Meg Whitman states in her new radio ad that government spending has increased 80 percent in the last ten years. The Department of Finance numbers are clear: General fund spending grew from $57.8 billion in 1998-1999 to $102.9 billion in 2007-2008. Meg used that ten-year period, from fiscal years 1998-1999 to 2007-2008, because they are real numbers. The state’s fiscal books have been closed for that period. The numbers can’t be recalculated or changed.

Logic and government accounting schedules tell us that there will be no reliable numbers for the 2008-2009 fiscal year that ended June 2009 for at least another few months, and likely much longer. Since the start of the 2008-09 budget through today, there have been three separate budgets passed, and there could be a fourth one before June 30, 2010. The books are far from closed on the current fiscal year.

For the first time since the field of potential gubernatorial candidates narrowed to five, consultants for all the candidates appeared on the same stage at the California Chamber of Commerce’s Fall Public Affairs retreat in Napa yesterday.

Steve Glazer, advisor to Jerry Brown’s exploratory committee, joined Garry South chief advisor to the Gavin Newsom campaign, Jim Bognet, Steve Poizner’s campaign manager, Jamie Fisfis with Tom Campbell and Rob Stutzman, consultant to Meg Whitman.

The spin masters dodged and weaved and spun their way through a lively hour-plus presentation.

South said his candidate, Gavin Newsom, did not have to worry about his standing in the polls well behind Jerry Brown, pointing to a number of gubernatorial races over the past two decades in which the leading candidate for governor in early polls did not win.