The Golden State

(Cross-posted at Hullabaloo)

Have you heard the one about the liberal plot to use the issue of Global Warming to seize power?

Isn't it amazing? As soon as the Democrats go from the minority to the majority, the Republicans stop calling them the "party of no ideas" to the "party of the craziest, most sinister ideas, ever." Who could have predicted that?

Well, I'll show you an example of how the issue of Global Warming is being brazenly used for political purposes at the expense of the least fortunate. What a shock to learn it's the GOP putting their own interests ahead of the truly needy.

California's state budget is over a month late because the GOP refuses to pass it. Why? They don't like what Jerry Brown is doing to clean up California's environmental policies.

The two-thirds majority required to pass a state spending plan gives the Republican minority leverage during budget negotiations that it lacks the rest of the year.

It is using that leverage to try win concessions on several other issues. In addition to eliminating the deficit, Republicans are seeking changes on other issues that are not directly related to the budget process.

For example, they want assurances that billions of dollars in transportation bond money approved last year by voters will be spent as intended in the ballot measure. They also are trying to rein in efforts by Attorney General Jerry Brown, who has been pressuring local governments to address the negative effects on global warming of their various development projects.

Republicans fear Brown's actions hold the potential to delay or stop housing and road projects.

Schwarzenegger said he was willing to address that issue later but told reporters, "It shouldn't be part of the budget."

Without a signed budget, the state controller's office said it could not pay $326.6 million to community colleges; $170 million to school districts for programs such as special education and summer school; $140 million to companies that sell products to the state; and $300 million to preschool and day care programs.

Controller John Chiang said he will be unable to pay $2.1 billion due in August unless there is a budget agreement by the end of the month.

On Wednesday, one of the GOP senators, Abel Maldonado, voted with the Democrats to try to pass the budget, but it still came up one vote short. To fully appreciate how hard the GOP is playing here, understand that Gov. Schwarzenegger has line-item veto power and offered to remove parts of the budget that the GOP senators found objectionable. They turned him down.

This isn't about fiscal responsibility, but then, it never is. The Republicans love spending taxpayer money, just not on services for the less fortunate. They are playing with people's lives, fragile lives, and they don't seem to care at all. How else can you describe this kind of avarice?

At nursing homes, the cash crunch threatens not only their ability to pay staff but to buy essential supplies, such as food for elderly residents.

Eduardo Gonzalez, who with his wife owns the Fillmore Convalescent Center in Fillmore, said their food supplier may soon stop delivery. Of the home's 88 patients, 64 are on state-funded Medi-Cal.

[...]

Small homes for developmentally disabled adults are another immediate casualty of the state budget fight. They rely completely on state funding.

Bob Horrigan runs 19 homes, each with six beds, in La Verne and throughout San Bernardino County. He said he had suspended all repairs on vans, houses and wheelchairs, and soon would be unable to pay his employees. He and his wife, who together own the homes, are exploring ways to borrow money. But Horrigan said that his bank is balking and that other potential sources of money carry steep interest rates.

"Times like this you get money wherever you can," he said. "You alienate your family. You go behind on your mortgages."

[...]

The inability of the state to cover its bills is equally hard on the thousands of in-home child-care providers whose clients pay them with state subsidies. The caregivers, many already living on the margins themselves, rely on the state checks to pay their own rent and utility bills. This week the checks stopped coming.

"They will eventually get the money, but they need it right now to pay the rent," said Cliff Marcussen, the executive director of Options, a West Covina nonprofit that facilitates state payments to 1,000 child-care providers.

The state has suspended the subsidies for more than 250,000 children.

"Without payment from the state very soon, our programs — full of children of low-income parents — will have to close, leaving them with no child care," Kathy Lafferty, North President for the Child Development Administrators Assn., said in a written statement. "How does this serve the people of California or its businesses?"

Even if some of the larger institutions that provide state services are able to weather the budget impasse, many of the small businesses that are a backbone of their operations may not.

"I'm already living on borrowed time, as far as my bills, insurance and payroll," said Daniel Rojas, general manager of Midway Care Medical Transportation, an Artesia company that shuttles about 300 dialysis patients from their homes or nursing facilities to treatment centers. Rojas, who employs 25 people, said 95% of his funding comes from the state. He is frantically trying to secure a bridge loan, but his prospects are uncertain.

"If this doesn't get settled by the 10th, I would have to shut the doors down," Rojas said. "It's going to put us out of business."

There you have it: The Grover Norquist Republican Party. Dialysis patients and low-income children, used as pawns because the GOP doesn't approve of Jerry Brown and his environmental agenda.

Update on LAPD video

DB was on the verge of being appalled yesterday at the sight of LAPD officers using considerable force during an immigration rally. But I reserved judgment because I didn't have all the facts.

Well, it's not looking pretty today. This video does indicate that the police were provoked, but it is hard to watch it without wondering what the heck the police were doing, other than attacking anybody in front of them, even if there was obviously no threat posed by a given individual.

Not good.

UPDATE: DB eagerly awaited Lou Dobbs' program today to see how he would cover the story.

DOBBS: In Los Angeles, the chief of police and other officials promised a full investigation into the violence that broke out at the end of yesterday's otherwise peaceful pro-amnesty rally. Police fired rubber bullets and swung their batons in efforts to disperse elements of the crowd from a city park. Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, in fact, told a local radio station some actions, he said, taken by his officers seemed inappropriate.

Fifteen police officers among those injured in the melee. None of the injuries were believed to be serious and activist organizers of those demonstrations said they believe the people confronting the police were anarchists.

There you go, just a bunch of anarchists. Anarchists with press credentials. Anarchists in elementary school.

UPDATE II: Here's an interesting video from the mess. It indicates that the people were instructed to leave. But it also seems to show that the police were firing indiscriminately into crowds of people.

UPDATE III: Here's Wolf Blizter at the end of the "Situation Room" today:

BLITZER: Jamie McIntyre at the Pentagon.

The Los Angeles Police Commission now investigating the melee at yesterday's immigration rally in Los Angeles. Police fired rubber bullets at demonstrators, struck some with batons. Officers say they were targeted with rocks and bottles.

The police chief says some of the officers' tactics were, in his words, inappropriate.

Lou Dobbs is following that story.

He's getting ready for his own prime time "Broken Borders" special that begins right at the top of the hour.

Number of times Dobbs mentioned the story: 0.

Way to go, L.A.

As we look back at the Rodney King riots, which peaked with King's "Can't we all just get along" comments 15 years ago today, it's just amazing to see that the LAPD is still on the news swinging clubs at people and giving them welts with rubber bullets.

Unbelievable.

UPDATE: I just wanted to say that, in general, I am very supportive of the LAPD. I know people on the force and I have the utmost respect for them. Their work is significantly more dangerous than mine, not to mention the disparity in contributions to the general welfare between our jobs.

This graphic and disturbing YouTube video of Peter Jennings with the LAPD pretty much says it all.

I just get extremely disappointed when things like this happen, especially with the riots on my mind.

Also, I am still waiting to read (and I've been looking for) some sort of conclusive statement from the people investigating the tasing of that student at UCLA last year. (That was the UCPD, operating under the authority of LAPD)

Can't we all just get along?

It was 15 years ago today that Rodney King asked that question. DB was at a friend's house.

The first night of the riots, the local news was showing maps of Los Angeles with little fire icons slowly moving towards my location. I called my future roommate to ask what was happening at the apartment in Koreatown where I would soon be living. Buildings were blazing out the window. I ended up staying with a friend in Highland Park for a few nights. Between the carnage and the curfew, where you were was where you ended up.

Eventually, we had to get used to seeing tanks parked at the 7/11 instead of cops. Store owners walking on their roofs with rifles. Strange days.

I went down to Florence and Normandie a couple years ago and it looked alright. I don't have much occasion to go there, but I had a work assignment that brought me nearby. It was hard to picture so much violence in that neighborhood at that point. I guess Los Angeles has come a ways, if not a long way.

I hadn't been in Los Angeles for very long when the riots happened. I had been living someplace where you knew just about everybody. The riots were an eye-opener for me in a lot of ways. The complete breakdown of order, now all too familiar, had previously been beyond my imagination.

Looking back, other than the heroes who saved Reginald Denny and whatever other acts of bravery took place over those insane days, nobody at all came out looking good.

President George H.W. Bush looked clueless, especially when he insensitively stated flatly that the system worked.

Mayor Tom Bradley was outraged at the verdict. But when the choke hold was banned, the police ended up with those steel batons and Bradley saw the injury rates steadily increasing during his tenure. He didn't act when he could have (and he was asked to).

Chief Gates presided over a department that allowed the officer seen flailing over King to remain on duty even though he failed a baton test only two hours earlier. And his department's relationship to its community was obviously beyond substandard.

Unless that community was someplace like Simi Valley, which brings us to the justice system. As bad as it was for the jury to let the cops off completely, it was the mindboggling decision of a couple judges to move the trial to an extremely cop-friendly town with an all-White jury. They almost couldn't have put the trial in a place more likely to return an acquittal.

The way the media edited the footage of the beating also set up false expectations in the minds of the jury.

And then there were the people of Los Angeles. As I wrote above, some were heroes. But many were not. Fifty-four were killed. Hundreds of buildings burned to the ground.

A decade later a friend called me from another state. He had been my next door neighbor and we were actually together when we saw the verdict handed down. I hadn't spoken to him in years. What he told me was shocking to me.

He said that he moved out of California because during the riots, while I was asleep in Highland Park, he was out breaking curfew. He was walking around looking to contribute to the carnage. He was a college graduate, out of steady work (the first Bush presidency was not friendly to the L.A. economy) and ready to explode. The riots pushed him to act out.

He didn't tell me what, if anything, he did while roaming. But when the fever finally broke, it left him wondering what kind of person he was and what living in Los Angeles had done to him. I can tell you what kind of person he was; he was good. It was all just too much for him and soon he was back in his home state, living at his parents' house.

The riots changed my world views as well. They certainly changed my life. The career path I had laid out for myself was shattered by the lack of faith I suddenly had in all these institutions.

Sometimes you look back and say "I can't believe it's been 15 years..." but this time, it seems like a lifetime ago for me. I remember thinking that the Bush presidency was a disaster. I had no idea that his offspring would eventually reach new depths.

UPDATE: Just found this excellent look at key figures in the riots and where they are today at TIME Magazine.

In the drink

Anybody's who's ever spent any amount of time in Silverlake (Los Angeles) knows just how completely out-of-control this security guard must have been.

Big scare in Los Angeles

"We now know that in October 2001 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11 attacks who was captured in 2003, had already set in motion a plan to have terrorist operatives hijack an airplane using shoe bombs to breach the cockpit door and fly the plane into the tallest building on the West Coast." -- George W. Bush, Feb. 9, 2006

We now know? Yeah right, just came out.

DB has said that the fear card won't work anymore, but this time, this blogger is panic-stricken!

DB scanned the television and Neternit™, every picture of the "Liberty Tower," but there's no sight of Laura and the Twins!! Aren't they supposed to show up at the target whenever three-year-old information about a plot is released? Aren't they supposed to be there smiling for the cameras and making us all feel safer? For the love of God, WHERE ARE THEY?? ARE THEY OK??

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said he was "blindsided" by Bush's announcement. What's he all worked up about? If there ever were some sort of major catastrophe, Bush would take care of it. And besides, I'm sure he would never dream of blaming any failures on the local officials. Especially Democrats.