What could be more fun than watching "progressive" candidates in Berkeley duke it out over how to improve the city’s business climate?

One city council candidate, George Beier, has an 11 point plan, including ideas such as such as building a "People’s Café" in Berkeley’s (in)famous People’s Park and creating a "Free Speech Trail" to point out historic free speech places on Telegraph Avenue. Now, that’ll really draw new companies and jobs to their wacky city!

Berkeley residents are still reeling from the closure of their beloved Cody’s flagship bookstore on Telegraph Avenue. While they would love to point the finger at the big retailers, they have only themselves to blame for the loss of this independent bookstore. Telegraph can be a nasty… Read More

While Cruz Bustamante can’t seem to scrape togetherenough nickels to keep from having to continueto pullads off the air, Steve Poizner today went up with another newad – a good comparison spot highlighting some great newspaper quotes on the differences between the candidates.… Read More

That’s Jerry Brown’s explanation for Jacques Barzaghi’s sexual harassment of an Oakland City Hall female employee during Brown’s tenure as mayor. Barzaghi was Brown’s longtime political aide, confidante and roommate who ended up leaving Brown’s employ and the country in 2004 after spousal abuse charges surfaced (sexual harassment charges just earned him a cut in pay).

Former Oakland City Hall employee Nereyda Lopez-Bowden, who says she was harassed by Barzaghi, held a press conference today in Sacramento with Sen. Chuck Poochigian. Lopez-Bowden contacted the campaign because she wanted to speak out after she was outraged by the Brown campaign’s claim that the Mayor handled the scandal "professionally." This was the first time… Read More

Yesterday I posted about a million dollar Independent Expenditure ad buy that the Indians had put togetherfor Tony Strickland, and about a ~$66,000 initial buy that some high-tech business folks had done for him.

Today, the other $934,000 of that buy came through.

Given his almost 1.5 : 1 advantage in slates, now $2 million in tv, Arnold’s coattails, and how close this race has been all along, Tony has to be considered the favorite coming down the stretch.… Read More

We’re down to less than two weeks left in the campaign.

We know how all but 3 down-ticket races are going to end up.

How LG, Controller, and Sec State turn out is still to be determined. Lots of decisions still are to be made and lots of money is still to be spent.

Each campaign still has some significant cash that will make a difference in the outcome. But legitimately, these three races are looking like they will be more shaped by independent expenditure efforts than by their respective campaigns.

And that isn’t a knock on the campaigns. The slates have been bought. The research has been done. It’s just that with the cash left for the last 13 days, these IE’s have far more to spend than any down ticket candidate.

On the Dem side, the Unions have pulled their money out of Angelides’ sinking ship. How much will they really end up spending on down ticket races? And where will they focus their efforts? These will be big questions in the coming 13 days.

First to see some major action on the Dem side is John Chiang, who yesterday received a $262,000 tv buy from the unions.

On the Republican side, some businesses are putting… Read More

There is some rhetoric flying around about what the Governor was and was not supporting by way of public employee pension reform last year. The Governor was supporting a change in pensions that would have shifted public sector employees from what is called a “defined benefit” program to what is called a “defined contribution” program. This change, which would have applied to only new hires (all existing public employees would be ‘grandfathered’ under the current rules), would have simply moved the methodology behind public sector retirement benifits to those used in the private sector.

In a defined benefits system, if an employee works for a set number of years, there is a specific formula of exactly how much the employer (in this case, the government) would pay a retiree, based on factors like their last salary, etc.

In a defined contributions system, the employer makes a specified contribution each pay period, or month, or year, into a retirement account for that employee (often times employees can augment this amount). Then this fund (like a 401k) grows over time resulting in an eventual retirement “nest… Read More

The wave of taxpayer groups and fiscally conservative leaders urging a sweeping NO on all five bond measures continues to grow. Lew Uhler’s influential National Tax Limitation Committee PAC has posted its ballot recommendations, and they oppose all nine spending measures, including recommending a NO on 1B, 1C, 1D, 1E and 84 — the five big bad bonds packages.… Read More

The California Voter Foundation has been around since 1994 and is most well known for its online voter guide. It’s founder, Kim Alexander, and I go way back — to before we were both bit by the political bug.

Anyways, Kim and several of her friends can be seen singing the "The Proposition Song" – a musical tribute to the wacky 13-issue long ballot. Hear the song and see it being sung by going here.

I was trying to figure out how to hijack the You Tube video so that I could have the song display the FR’s recommended ballot picks as each was referenced during the song. No such luck.

Besides, I am fairly certain the the Jon Fleischman ballot and the Kim Alexander ballot are NOT the same… OK, very sure. Check out the song – it’s great!… Read More