[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Jesse Douglas Allen-Taylor

Advocates of single payer health insurance in California are saying that the collapse of the Nuñez-Perata-Schwarzenegger health care bill is a good thing and are moving forward with reviving their own single-payer legislation.

“We were opposed to the Nuñez bill,” Vote Health representative Kay Eisenhower said by telephone this week. “We considered it a step backwards.”

Vote Health is an Alameda County-based health care activist organization.

Eisenhower said statewide single-payer health care advocates will be holding a two-day conference in Los Angeles later this month to talk about ways to put State Senator Sheila Kuehl’s (D-Santa Monica-Los Angeles) SB 840 single-payer health care bill back on track. “SB 840’s not dead,” she said. “It’s only on ice.”

Two years ago, it seemed dead. After SB 840 passed the state legislature in 2006, Gov. Schwarzenegger vetoed it.

Kuehl revived her single payer bill a year later, and the bill passed the Senate on a 23-15 vote and the Assembly Health Committee on a 12-5 vote last summer, but it stalled in the Assembly Appropriations Committee as attention in the Assembly turned to a compromise bill being put together by Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez.

[courtesy of The California Majority Report]

"The problem with the 58-year-old Yee is his troubling tendency to do the wrong thing, for the wrong reasons, when he thinks no one is paying attention," wrote the San Francisco Chronicle last year when it endorsed Yee's opponent for the State Senate in 2006.

And now it appears Yee has once again done the wrong thing for the reasons.

But this time, everybody noticed. Including State Senate President pro Tem Don Perata.

Yee surprisingly announced his opposition to the Democratic health care bill co-authored by  Don Perata on Tuesday in a press conference sponsored by the California Nurses Association, one of his major campaign contributors. That was enough get Perata to tweek Yee in his opening statement to the Senate Health Committee for making his decision before the hearing and before reviewing the Legislative Analyst's opinion of the bill. As Capitol Weekly's "Roundup" put it on Tuesday: "... Leland Yee might want to make sure those keys to his office are still working this morning... ," a reference to Perata's changing the locks on the doors of other moderate State Senators who crossed the Democratic Caucus position on a key issue last year.

There's more...

[courtesy of The California Majority Report]

Berkeley Assemblywoman Loni Hancock will endorse Sen. Hillary Clinton for President this week, joining other East Bay legislators supporting the New York Senator.

Hancock, the former Mayor of Berkeley, is well respected in the legislature for her work on campaign finance reform, health care, and other progressive issues.

She joins other East Bay Assemblymembers Sandre Swanson and Mary Hayashi, as well as State Senators Tom Torlakson and State Senate President pro Tem Don Perata in backing Clinton.

by Julia Rosen [courtesy of Working Californians blogs]

This year was supposed to be the year of health care reform. Next year was supposed to be the year of education, or so pronounced he of the grandiose titles and ambitions: Arnold Schwarzenegger. And you know what, we really need to have our state government make some headway on those issues. Unfortunately, we have a big pressing problem, the huge budget deficit. Health care negotiations have bogged down as the budget gap has risen.

Now Arnold is calling a fiscal emergency. Even prior to that came this LAT article:

Legislative leaders said Thursday that more taxes would be needed to fill a projected $14-billion budget gap next year, and the state Senate president said a healthcare overhaul -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's priority this year -- will have to wait.

Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez (D-Los Angeles) said lawmakers would have to consider raising a host of taxes, including those on Internet purchases and on foreign companies that do business in California.

"We've got to close those tax loopholes," Nuñez told reporters at a news conference. "We can generate billions by doing that."

read more »

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Frank D. Russo

Backed by a phalanx of representatives of organizations who have worked for decades to prod state and local governments to clean up the San Francisco-Oakland Bay and those who fish and take crab in the bay, California State Senate President pro Tem Don Perata criticized Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today for under funding and failing to staff regional water control boards and California’s oil spill prevention program.

Perata stated that the state has the money but just has not spent it--and that this has led the agency responsible for conducting unannounced drills to only conduct 3% of those that it is supposed to according its own plans under state law.

He also said that many of these boards do not have a quorum and therefore cannot operate. He noted 34 vacancies in the office, and said: "If you go on their website, it says, 'December meeting pending a quorum.' Now that's a hell of a thing to tell people, that if we can get people together… There are nine spots. There are five vacancies. There's no excuse for that."

He then noted: "Absent having the board in place, it's difficult for the agency to operate, and if they're severely understaffed, they can't operate anyway."

by Julia Rosen [courtesy of Calitics - Front Page]

by David Dayen [courtesy of Calitics - Front Page]

Columnist Jim Boren boldly calls for anarchy.

The only thing the 52-day budget stalemate proved is how irrelevant the California Legislature has become. Change a few laws and we wouldn't need them at all.

State Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata wants to reform the state budget process. I say reform the whole bunch out of business. Nothing the legislators have done over the past two months -- maybe the past several decades -- has made life better for Californians.

This guy's the editor of the editorial page, and a crank, so he doesn't appear to examine the reasons WHY the legislative process is stalled.  This is classic "a pox on both your houses" editorializing, the likes of which you'd typically find in the back of a bar.  And I would guess this pretty much molds political opinion for many in the Central Valley, where independence is no doubt prized.

more...