Political consultant Joe Cerrell dead at 75

Longtime Democratic political consultant Joe Cerrell, a former adviser to President Kennedy and fixture in California politics, has died. He was 75.

Here's the press release from Hal Dash, CEO of Cerrell Associates:

“We are deeply saddened to announce that our company co-founder, mentor, political legend and friend Joe Cerrell passed away this morning in Camarillo following a brief bout with pneumonia.  His family was at his side to say goodbye.

Joe was a larger-than-life figure in California politics and public affairs for the past half century, beginning as a USC college Democrat and building a career in which he was an advisor to presidents, governors and political figures at all levels.  His legacy as a counselor, confidant, and close friend to thousands of people in politics, the business community, as well as in the public relations and non-profit arenas, especially the Italian-American community in Los Angeles, will not be forgotten.

Along with his beloved wife Lee, Joe built Cerrell Associates into one of the most respected and successful public affairs and political consulting firms in the nation.

Today, we celebrate this great icon of California and national politics, his life and many accomplishments, even as we mourn his passing.

 Rick Orlov at the LA Daily News has an obit here.

Four today

1. eMeg Whitman, Republican candidate for California governor, is the 332nd richest person in the world and only one of 34 women to make the Forbes 400. Gawker

2. Getting a handle on the SEO slave-drivers in the newsroom. Nieman Journalism Lab

3. National Journal continues to beef up, hiring Patricia Wilson from Reuters as the deputy editor-in-chief. The news magazine was criticized for being too male dominated in its new hires. Poynter

4. Spot.us, the fund-raising news site, has a 10-month gig for a reporter/editor to cover "overlooked, quality-of-life issues across Los Angeles." Journalism Jobs (via LA Observed)

Setting the bar low, then jumping it

Slate blogger Mickey Kaus has set an exceptionally low bar for himself in his windmill-tipping battle to embarrass Sen. Barbara Boxer in today's Democratic primary. He's declared that if he wins more than 5 percent of the vote it will be, as LA Weekly reporter Gene Maddaus put it, "a historic repudiation" of the three-term incumbent.

Except that even the most obscure challengers often exceed the 5-percent mark in primary elections. Meaning Kaus will almost certainly succeed in his effort of a historic repudiation, and probably with two or three percentage points to spare. But will anyone notice?

Poizner, the anti-pornographer*

Insurance Commissioner and Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner has launched an attack ad accusing his opponent, Meg Whitman, of profiting from pornography.



*UPDATE: Whitman gets the Dick Cheney endorsement. Cheney rips Poizner for having given money to the Gore-Lieberman campaign in 2000.

California country

Joe Mathews of the New America Foundation will host a Zócalo panel on Thursday, April 22 at the Autry National Center to discuss whether California would be better off as a country. The speakers are political consultant Darry Sragow, PoliPoint Press editor Peter Richardson and "Global California" author Abraham Lowenthal.

Hear Jerry run

California Attorney General Jerry Brown talks about his race for governor on "Which Way, LA?" with Warren Olney. The interview starts at the 27 minute mark.

Texas oil looks to influence California law

California environmental laws are some of the toughest in the nation, and are often copied by other states, much to the consternation of energy and automobile companies.

Former LA Times reporter Robert Salladay reports that two Texas oil firms appear to be funneling money into California for an initiative that would undo the state's landmark greenhouse gas legislation, known as AB 32.

From California Watch:

Two Texas oil companies have been evasive about whether they are backing a California ballot initiative that would suspend the state's landmark global warming law, signed with fanfare by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006.

But it wouldn't be surprising if Tesoro Corp. and Valero Energy Corp. were behind the initiative to delay AB 32.

The Texas companies – which operate refineries in Benicia and Wilmington, Martinez and Los Angeles, and hundreds of gas stations throughout California – have been well-known players in the fight to weaken global warming legislation at the federal level, and they are major donors to state politicians working for the same goals.

Read the rest of the story here.

Carson City Council's muted meetings

California's open-meeting laws ensure the public has a right to speak at city meetings. But the mayor of Carson has taken to hitting the mute button, and that's prompted the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office to open an investigation, the Daily Breeze reports.

Carson City Attorney Bill Wynder is supposed to advise the council on the law, but chose to punt on the question of whether the mute button is a violation:

"I do not believe the mute button has been used in a way that violates the Brown Act but that's not my decision to make," Wynder said. "That's up to the District Attorney's Office. We'll give them the information they request."

(found via LA Observed)

It's not illegal when the government does it

The Alameda District Attorney's office has concluded that the secret taping of reporters by a spokesman for Attorney General Jerry Brown were not illegal, as the reporters were conducting interviews and therefore knew the contents of the conversation "could be published to the public."

California laws makes it illegal to surreptitiously tape record a phone conversation.

Capitol Weekly, LA Times team up

Sacramento political coverage is increasingly dependent on blogs to push stories, everything from the Sacramento Bee's Capitol Alert to Rough & Tumble. With that in mind, the Los Angeles Times has joined forces with the Sacramento-based Capitol Weekly to produce a blog about California politics in the run-up to the November elections.

The blog is called, coincidentally enough, "California Politics," and the contents can be found here or here. The primary writer for the blog is Capitol Weekly editor Anthony York, but other reporters are contributing, including Shane Goldmacher, who was a driving force behind the success of the Sacramento Bee's Capitol Alert before he got hired away by the Times.

Another nonprofit watching California

In September, the Center for Investigative Journalism unveiled California Watch, a nonprofit investigative journalism unit, with the stated mission of exposing "injustice, waste, mismanagement, wrongdoing, questionable practices, and corruption" in California.

The Pacific Policy Institute today launched it's own version of the nonprofit investigative team called CalWatchdog. The Pacific Research Institute is a think tank with strong libertarian-leanings. The group promotes smaller government and free-market ideology and is associated with such think tanks the Cato Institute. But the nonprofit, investigative arm promises to follow traditional media standards:

CalWatchdog’s mission is to uncover governmental waste and shine the light on the misuse of taxpayer dollars. As part of a new wave of nonprofit, Web-based journalism, CalWatchdog adheres to traditional journalistic standards and focuses on improving government transparency.

The featured investigation on the site concerns the state water policy and was written by Wayne Lusvardi, a vocal libertarian and former MWD employee from Pasadena who's made his opinions known about state water policy known.

CalWatchdog's board of advisers includes former LA CityBeat publisher Will Swaim, former Republican analyst and now head of USC's Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics Dan Schnur, Chapman University professor Tibor Machan, conservative columnist Deroy Murdock, and Cathy Taylor, editorial director for the Orange County Register.

The more eyes on government, the better. But the genesis of this investigative unit does point up the increasingly blurry line between traditional newsrooms and ones born of ideological agendas. As we saw in the row over the Washington Post's partnership with The Fiscal Times, the blurred line can expose traditional media sources to charges of partisan favor. Nonprofit does not necessarily mean non-ideological.

A California pick me up

For the last year, California has been portrayed as a broken state. Fast-growing debt, high unemployment, irreconcilable demands for more services and lower taxes, an intractable budget, and an impotent state government. Waterless, traffic jammed and on fire. Time magazine's Michael Grunwald suggests that only those who have it so good could whine so loudly:

Ignore the California whinery. It's still a dream state. In fact, the pioneering megastate that gave us microchips, freeways, blue jeans, tax revolts, extreme sports, energy efficiency, health clubs, Google searches, Craigslist, iPhones and the Hollywood vision of success is still the cutting edge of the American future — economically, environmentally, demographically, culturally and maybe politically. It's the greenest and most diverse state, the most globalized in general and most Asia-oriented in particular at a time when the world is heading in all those directions. It's also an unparalleled engine of innovation, the mecca of high tech, biotech and now clean tech. In 2008, California's wipeout economy attracted more venture capital than the rest of the nation combined. Somehow its supposedly hostile business climate has nurtured Google, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Facebook, Twitter, Disney, Cisco, Intel, eBay, YouTube, MySpace, the Gap and countless other companies that drive the way we live. ...

"In the depths of the breakdown, you can see the next narrative," says Mark Muro of the Brookings Institution's metropolitan-policy program. "It's California. The next economy is already in place there, and it's amazing."

The complete article is here.

Death of a newspaper

The Lemoore Advance in Lemoore, California (west of Visalia) closed its doors last week after 121 years in business. (via Newspaper Death Watch)

UC Press goes Boom

The University of California Press plans to launch a scholarly magazine about California issues called Boom: A Journal of California.

From the release:

Headed by Editors Carolyn de la Peña, Associate Professor of American Studies at UC Davis and Director of the Davis Humanities Institute, and Louis Warren, UC Davis’ W. Turrentine Jackson Professor of Western U.S. History, the journal will include a wide range of works ...

... according to de la Peña, “To truly grapple with the crisis facing California, we have to gather new knowledge about who we are, how we got here, and what common ground can be built for the future. By featuring the work of researchers in multiple fields and combining that with community voices, we believe Boom will uncover fresh perspectives on the state we're in.”

Nonprofits have lots of room to bloom given the gaps left by the cuts to statewide coverage at California's largest newspapers.

Eleventh

California ranks 11th in an annual survey of average Internet speeds for the 50 states and three U.S. territories. Delaware, home of the credit card company headquarters, is first. Puerto Rico is last. Montana ranks as the state with the slowest speeds, falling behind Alaska, which had the distinction last year.

The survey was done by the Communication Workers of America, which would like to see the government spend more money on upgrades. From the summary:

The results of this third annual Speed Matters survey of Internet speeds show that the U.S. has not made significant improvement in the speeds at which residents connect to the Internet. The average download speed for the nation was 5.1 megabits per second (mbps) and the average upload speed was 1.1 mbps. This was only a nine-tenths of a megabit per second increase (from 4.2 mbps to 5.1 mbps) since last year. At this rate, it will take the United States 15 years to catch up with current Internet speeds in South Korea. And when compared to the rest of the world, the United States ranks 28th in average Internet connection speeds.

Oh, and Jessica Biel is the celebrity most likely to give you a virus.

(via Chicago Tribune)

California budget squabble continues

The California budget battle isn't over yet.

Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg said today he will sue Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to restore about $489 million in cuts made after a budget agreement was reached. Schwarzenegger used his line-item veto authority to slash funding from health and welfare programs.

Steinberg's office sent out the following statement:

“We elected a governor, not an emperor. In making these line item vetoes the Governor forced punishing cuts on children, the disabled and patients that he couldn’t win fairly at the bargaining table. And in doing so, he overstepped his constitutional authority.”

The Sacramento Bee got this response from the governor's office:

"Because the legislature failed to send him a balanced budget after months of debate the Governor was forced to make these difficult cuts. While Democrats are focused on a protracted legal battle to dig the state back into deficit the Governor will continue to focus on moving our state forward and getting Californians back to work."

Democrats have been working themselves up to file a lawsuit for about a week.

Cooper's California wake-up call

Reporter and USC prof Marc Cooper pens a cover story for The Nation about the undreaming of the golden dream. An exerpt:

California has always been as much a state of mind as a physical reality. The state's natural resources, along with its inhabitants' capacity to exploit them, made The Dream more likely than not. But now it's time to stop dreaming, says D.J. Waldie, who has the unique experience of living through this crisis as both an official of an LA suburb and a prizewinning author who plumbs the Golden State zeitgeist. "The middle class and the near middle class have been missing in action in paying for the sort of life they think California owes them," he said. "Instead, they believe that someone else should pay for the California Dream. Smokers. Drinkers. Gamblers. Millionaires. But not me.

"We have sold ourselves a vision of California, but we are not psychologically or emotionally prepared to make the hard choices. We prefer to point our finger at 'waste, fraud, immigrants.' Those are all straw men. It conveniently avoids the question of what we want and what we want to give up."

California has never been able to live up to its promise, but now seems ready to embrace its dysfunction.

Eureka!

A data mine gold mine for anyone wanting to keep tabs on California's shifting demographics, business trends, legal landscape, and most every statistic collected by the state. The state has created an online searchable data base full of info from births and deaths to water, maps and exports.

Here's some of what's included, according to Government Technology magazine:

• vital statistics such as population, birth, death, and marriage data;
• more than 50 million data records on education;
• imports and exports coming through California ports,
• traffic counts on state highways;
• driving statistics, fatalities, accidents and injuries;
• travel and tourism;
• water data; and the
• Cal-Atlas Web site, which provides geospatial data and allows others to contribute their geospatial data.

Happy mining.

Tracking failure (and success)

Database reporting is a somewhat new trend in Internet journalism. Publishers can track data changes over a period of time and provide readers with periodic updates, whether it be the latest homicide or broken promise.

In its relatively short lifespan, the nonprofit ProPublica has become a master of the database, compiling all of "midnight regulations" in the last days of the Bush presidency, for example. Yesterday, the news site launched the "DNA backlog tracker" that will monitor the progress five law enforcement agencies make, or don't make, in eliminating their backlogs of untested DNA evidence. The list includes two California agencies, the Los Angeles Police Department and California Department of Justice, as well as the FBI, Illinois State Police and Virginia Department of Forensic Science. ProPublica is taking suggestions for other agencies to add to the list.

Four in the evening

1. The nonprofit news outlet ProPublica has joined forces with Marketplace to do a comparison of the patchwork unemployment insurance programs across the United States - don't get fired in Mississippi if you can help it. ProPublica

2. The California State Parks Foundation has launched a campaign to stop Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger from making real his threat to close up to 200 state parks as way to shave a little from the state's massive budget deficit. CSPF

3. The San Jose Mercury News has promoted Bert Robinson, 47, to be managing editor of the newspaper. He replaces David Satterfield, who left in November. SJMN

4. Another blow to the California ego: Census figures found the state ranks as the 16th lowest when it comes to Internet access for individuals. Capitol Alert