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

[courtesy of The California Majority Report]

Cutting out the gas tax may actually backfire on consumers, warns the San Diego Union-Tribune.The article also has a brief Q&A explanation of the current highgas prices.

The large number of recalled consumer products last year has prompted Bay Area legislators to push for better regulation. Sen. Carole Migden (D-SF) has introduced the "Toxin-free Toddlers andBabies Act," which would ban bisphenol A from toys and child-careproducts. Sen. Ellen Corbett (D-San Leandro) wants to ban agrease-resistant compound found in pizza boxes that can be carcinogenicwhen ingested.

At least someone's happy about the drawn-out Democratic race: Rush Limbaugh, whose calls to Republicans to side with underdog Clinton may have beensuccessful. "Nobody really knows, of course, how influential Limbaughhas actually been, although the promotional publicity for him and hisprogram has been absolutely priceless. Anecdotal evidence suggests manythousands of Republicans did, in fact, cross over to vote for Clinton,which, frankly, is fine with her. She'll take anybody's vote thesedays."

There's more... 

Image courtesy LATimes.com  

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Peter Schrag

The departure of Mitt Romney from the presidential campaign ought to lower the decibel level on what loomed as the nastiest wedge issue of 2008: illegal immigration. Although John McCain supported comprehensive reform, then flipped and pleaded mea culpa before the conservatives he's now courting, he obviously understands its complexity. Ditto Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

That hardly means immigration will vanish as an issue: It will be played to a fare-thee-well in a lot of congressional and legislative races, even in city and county races, especially in districts where new immigrants are increasingly visible on the streets and in the malls, but not yet on the voter rolls.

Opponents of illegal immigration have also seized on it in a lot of bills, including the federal State Children's Health Insurance Program, where there could be a claim that some benefit might go to somebody who wasn't supposed to be here.

And there are still the frothers – Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter and countless other drive-time talkers who, without questioning or (often) checking the data, retail the stuff of anti-immigration outfits.

The GOP, said Frank Sharry, the head of the National Immigration Forum, which supports comprehensive reform, "is a party that's in the grip of nativism."

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Peter Schrag

Who said this? "Immigration to this country is increasing and is making its greatest relative increase from races most alien to the body of the American people and from the lowest and most illiterate classes among those races … half of whom have no occupation and most of whom represent the rudest form of labor.

"The immigrants who come to the United States reduce the rate of wages by ruinous competition, and then take their savings out of the country. Home as a foreign country. … They have no interest or stake in country and never become American citizens." Many, he went on, are genetically prone to crime, insanity and disease.

Five points credit if you guessed it isn't Rep. (and late presidential candidate) Tom "throw all illegals out" Tancredo of Colorado, or Mitt Romney, or Rush Limbaugh or Lou Dobbs of CNN. Two more points if you recognized it as not coming from anyone in this century. A perfect 10 if you traced it back to the last decades of the 19th century.

The author, in a pair of articles on "The Restriction of Immigration" for The Atlantic magazine in 1891, was Rep. (later Sen.) Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. His undesirables were Jews, Italians, Poles and Hungarians, people like Tancredo's Sicilian great-grandparents. In those days, of course, everybody was undocumented.

by Bob Brigham [courtesy of Calitics - Front Page]

[courtesy of The California Majority Report]

This week, Congress is expected to take up a vote to override President Bush’s veto of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program -- SCHIP -- a veto that places 1.4 million children here in California at risk of losing affordable, quality health insurance.

Even with 49 governors and bipartisan majority of both the House and Senate (45 Republicans in the House and 18 GOPers in the Senate) having voted for the SCHIP bill, California Republicans remarkably continue to think denying millions of kids health care is a pro-family, politically advantageous move. Good luck explaining that one!

Rep. Jerry Lewis of Redlands is defending his vote against the kids by recycling the same tired GOP talking points about "socialized medicine" and using Rush Limbaugh-isms like "Hillarycare."

On the House floor debate, Lewis said: "The real plan here is to set the stage for a movement of the next gigantic step in the direction of what should be called Hillarycare."

Image courtesy ChipCentral.

by babaloo [courtesy of Calitics - Front Page]