by David Dayen [courtesy of Calitics - Front Page]

Lieutenant Governor John Garamendi:

"Our state and its people cannot prosper in the 21st century if we force our schools to live on a fiscal starvation diet," Garamendi said Thursday at Sacramento City College.

Assemblymember Dave Jones:

However, in doing so my Republican colleagues in the State Assembly decided that while they were prepared to cut education funding and health care for the poor, they just couldn't stomach closing the yacht tax loophole. Too painful, apparently, to the Thurston Howell IIIs of the world. So they refused to provide the 2/3 vote necessary to close the yacht tax loophole. In doing so they robbed the poor to help subsidize tax avoidance by rich yacht owners. Are those the values we want reflected in our state budget? Those aren't my values, that's for sure.

Jack O'Connell, who is nominally in charge of education for the state, should find something else to emphasize.

by David Dayen [courtesy of Calitics - Front Page]

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Frank D. Russo

Governor Schwarzenegger announced at a press conference today his desire that legislators pass a budget by March so that cuts can take effect immediately at the beginning of the new fiscal year for the state in July. He also announced a hiring freeze, issued an Executive Order for an additional $100 million of cuts, and repeated his rhetoric that the state has a spending problem and not a revenue problem.

But as he was speaking, events occurring elsewhere in Sacramento showed a sharp disconnect between his bluster and reality. A Senate Committee hearing looking to see what had been done with the multi-billion bond for prisons passed last year, designed to avert a Federal Court ordered release of prisoners because of overcrowding and lack of medical care, was told in the middle of their hearing about the hiring freeze, after having heard from Administration witnesses about the gains that were being made and were planned to catch up on staffing the prisons. Committee Chair Senator Gloria Romero, said she was handed a note about the freeze, and wanted to know how it stacked up with the notoriously understaffed prisons and pledges to beef them up.