by David Dayen [courtesy of Calitics - Front Page]

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

"Hostile Business Climate" and "Job Killer" Frames Don't Match Reality of Economic Data

By Frank D. Russo

The Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) has released a blockbuster 165 page report that carefully goes through all the economic numbers and debunks the idea that businesses have been leaving the state because of a hostile business climate. This is an in depth report based on a comprehensive database of virtually every business that employed California workers at any point from 1992 to 2004.

After reading this report, and prior studies by the PPIC, Arnold Schwarzenegger should be embarrassed to have used one of the major frames he wielded in the 2003 recall election to win the Governorship and his friends at the California Chamber of Commerce should be embarrassed to trot out their "job killer" list of bills to improve the life of Californians with their wild and unsupported statements made for years. But they will not, and so this report is one that should be read carefully and remembered the next time "there they go again."

[courtesy of The California Majority Report]

Calling his GOP challengers "weasels" and attacking Charlie Brown as "more liberal" than Sen. Hillary Clinton, Congressman John Doolittle said he's definitely running again. 
 
Doolittle's Friday phone call should boost turnout for Brown's blockbuster tour this weekend. Give 'em hell, Charlie!

[courtesy of The California Majority Report]

What's the sleeper issue in next year's June blockbuster election? If you ask me, it's an initiative in the works by right-wing Republicans to steal a chunk of California's electoral votes.
 
As this excellent piece in The New Yorker tells it, the initiative would split California's 55 winner-take-all electoral college votes. It would award electoral college votes to the winner of each Congressional district. The extra two would go to the overall winner in the state.
 
Since Bush carried 22 districts in 2004, that means Republicans would have gotten the equivalent of a Pennsylvania or Illinois in the form of California's electoral votes.
 
The initiative's sponsor is an outfit called "Californians for Equal Representation." But as the article points out, the force behind it is Thomas Hiltachk, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's top election lawyer hack. Hiltachk has masterminded a variety of anti-union initiatives in the past, fought campaign finance laws, and helped with the recall that propelled Schwarzenegger to office.
 
The argument for the initiative likely will be based on "fairness" and an attack on the unpopular electoral college. After all, if the Republican candidate wins 22 districts, shouldn't they get 22 votes? And heck, isn't the electoral college an institution that needs to go?
 
Not so fast.

There's more...

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Sara S. Nichols

If the California Appropriations Committees were a summer movie, it’d be a blockbuster. After all, they’ve got all the right ingredients: suspense, mass murders, graveyards. Unfortunately for me, I’ve never liked horror films—I can’t stand the suspense.

Today the California Assembly Appropriations Committee moved AB 583, the Clean Money and Fair Elections Act by Assemblymember Loni Hancock (D-Berkeley) to the “suspense file,” leading me to wonder whether, once again, the suspense will kill me before we have public financing of elections in California. What rule, concept or decorum is actually “suspended,” I’ve long since forgotten. What I do know is that the suspense is not whether a bill will go “to suspense,” the suspense is whether it comes off.

And off it should come. As Susan Lerner, Executive Director of the California Clean Money Campaign, the sponsor of AB 583, said today, “the issue is no longer how can we afford to pay for it, but how can we afford not to pay for it?” Indeed, it is long overdue to inject clean public financing into California elections. However, this bill, coming as it does on the heels of (losing) Proposition 89 on last year’s ballot, faces a tough challenge in the legislature, even though it contains only parts of that initiative.