by WarmingLaw [courtesy of Calitics - Front Page]

(Cross-posted from Warming Law, which focuses on covering and analyzing the fight against global warming from a legal perspective. My name is Sean Siperstein, and I run Warming Law as part of my work for Community Rights Counsel, a non-profit, public interest law firm that assists communities in protecting their health and welfare. Given the blog's focus, a lot of what I write about ends up having to do with efforts by the administration and the auto industry to hold up California's pioneering efforts in fighting global warming (here's our full archive of posts about the EPA waiver application), and as such I'm (belatedly) taking up a suggestion to post select items here. Thanks for the opportunity to join the discussion; I really look forward to it!)

Reacting to last week's lawsuit challenging the EPA's failure to produce a timely decision on California's waiver application to enforce its own auto emissions standards, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson cited-- as he had many times before-- the need to painstakingly evaluate thousands upon thousands of in-depth public comments on the waiver.

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Vivian Kahn

The folks who brought us Prop. 13 are at it again. Having made a mess of California's fiscal structure, they're now out to undermine the ability of California's communities to make decisions about how they're going to grow, preserve natural resources, and maintain and provide affordable housing.

Prop. 90 was defeated last year in part because voters weren't fooled by the sponsors' attempt to deceive them by hiding damaging provisions under the eminent domain reform banner. They are doing it again. The so-called "California Property Owners and Farmland Protection Act" (CPOFPA) initiative, which some observers have dubbed the "Hidden Agendas" measure, would effectively abolish local zoning in California.

The Howard Jarvis Taxpayer Association and its supporters, including the California Republican Party, are now circulating the initiative for signatures and misleading voters about its potentially dire effects. As of October 16, they had reportedly collected well over 700,000 signatures needed to qualify their measure for the June 2008 ballot. A minimum of 694,354 valid signatures must be collected by November 26, 2007 to qualify a measure for the June ballot.

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla
Campaign Director
Restore the Delta

A trial is unfolding this week in federal court in Fresno to determine how to protect the tiny delta smelt from the giant pumps that send water down south from the California Delta. This fish lives only in the Delta, and you’ll probably never see one, even if it doesn’t go extinct.

You may ask yourself, why should I care about this seemingly insignificant fish? That’s a fair question.

The answer is this is about much more than a tiny fish. It’s about whether we’re going to suck so much water out of the Delta that it becomes a contaminated, stagnant pond – harming Delta farmers, fishermen and communities.

The California Delta is the biggest estuary on the Pacific Coast from the tip of South America all the way up to Alaska. It’s also a source of drinking water for some 22 million Californians and a source of irrigation water for California farms. If you drink water or eat lettuce, tomatoes, oranges, almonds or any number of crops irrigated using Delta water, then you have a stake in the Delta’s health.

by Robert in Monterey [courtesy of Calitics - Front Page]

One of the hardest things about being a California historian is watching the same tragedies repeating themselves, nearly every generation. Ever since the Anglo conquest in 1846, non-whites have faced the brunt of scapegoating during hard economic times. And in almost every case, this immigrant-bashing has turned violent.

California's ugly history of racial terror spans all 150+ years of US ownership. It includes the attacks on Mexican miners (here legally under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo) in the Sierra goldfields in 1850, the state-sanctioned genocide of Native peoples in central and Northern California later in the 1850s, the forced disposession of Latinos' land in the 1870s, the violent assaults on Chinese laborers and communities in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and the forcible deportation of 1 million Mexican residents of CA, including many US citizens in the early 1930s.

Now, in 2007, it is returning, with an ugly vengeance. Last Friday, day laborer Artemio Santiago Garcia was savagely beaten in Seaside, a majority-Latino city next to Monterey. Prosecutors are calling it a hate crime. We can call it the leading edge of outright terrorism, a predictable evolution in the already ugly immigration paranoia. And it's spreading.

by Larry Dudley [courtesy of Blog for America]

There were Deaniacs, Keehniacs and Democrats galore in Saratoga Springs last night, Tuesday August 14th, when DFA Chair Jim Dean came to town for a fundraiser to reelect Saratoga Springs Mayor Valerie Keehn.  

Smaller communities like Saratoga Springs don’t often see political heavyweights like Jim Dean coming in to promote local candidates.  It was a double treat for local activists to come out and show their support for Keehn, one of Upstate New York’s leading progressive politicians.

Over two years ago, Keehn, a citizen activist, became concerned about that way overdevelopment, cronyism and rising housings costs and taxes were changing the character of a classic small town that is  an historic American icon-- the county’s summer thoroughbred racing capital and architectural gem.  She turned candidate and attended a DFA Training Academy weekend in Cazenovia, NY in July 2005.   The result was a historic upset.