Washington Post writer Michael Leahy has an excellent report on the war within California’s G.O.P. The latest episode was an unsuccessful Republican attempt to recall a fellow Southern California Republican legislator, Anthony Adams, who had the gall to vote for Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s state budget, which, in the face of a projected $42 billion deficit and unpaid state worker salaries, included modest tax increases.
Harold Pollack is a professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and Special Correspondent for The Treatment.
The Washington Post includes a nice little article by Aaron Davis on House provisions to extend stimulus-package Medicaid subsidies to states by six months. Davis starts out in familiar jaded fashion:
Over at SolveClimate, Renee Cho reports that Massachusetts is embarking on a simple yet ingenious way to get people to conserve energy: just send them reports showing how much power they're using compared with their neighbors. This has been tried elsewhere. Last summer, Sacramento's municipal utility tried out a similar program, and energy use in the area has dropped about 2.8 percent this year.
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Sacramento, California
On a hot spring evening in early May--the kind that elicits nervous global-warming jokes--a crowd of powerful and wealthy people are gathered at a cocktail party in the banquet hall in the Hart Senate Office building on Capitol Hill, sipping wine and talking carbon.
Sacramento, California
On the dais, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger--his jaw jutting, his chest thrust forward, his unlined bronze face frozen in a smile--is flanked by four small black schoolchildren, one of whom gazes up at him in rapt wonderment. Behind him stands Latina Democratic State Senator Martha Escutia, and in front of him are crates and baskets of oranges, avocados, and grapes. Schwarzenegger has called a press conference to announce his support for Escutia's Healthy Schools Now Act, which would encourage schoolchildren to forgo junk food. But the event, held here on July 25, was about more than just cute kids and healthy snacks. Over the past eight months, Schwarzenegger has had rancorous conflicts with nurses, firefighters, police, and teachers, while voters were treated to revelations of his personal excesses and ethical lapses--most recently, The Sacramento Bee's report that the California governor was under contract to body- building magazines that make money from advertising notoriously unhealthy dietary supplements. This, then, was the first of many summer events intended to revive Schwarzenegger's standing among the state's disillusioned electorate.
