Yes, you read that headline correctly. Federal minimum wage of $6.55 an hour, not California minimum of $8 hour. The SacBee has this gut shot of a story.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger plans to sign an executive order next week that will reduce pay for more than 200,000 state workers to the federal minimum wage of $6.55 per hour to preserve cash in the midst of a month-long budget standoff, according to a draft copy of the order obtained by The Bee.
Administration officials said the governor expects to take the action Monday.
How are these employees going to be able to pay for their groceries on $6.55 an hour, or fill up their car with gas, let alone pay their rent? The short answer is they aren't.
This is going to result in a lot of employees needing governmental assistance for basic needs, not that the state has the money to help with that anyways at this point. This is a crisis and this damn well better get some folks up in arms.
I dunno about you, but I am super excited for Netroots Nation tomorrow.
I would like to cordially invite you to attend a panel I will be speaking on along with David Sirota, Andrea Batista Schlesinger, the Executive Director of the Drum Major Institute and David Goldstein, of Horse's Ass. The panel will be moderated by Elana Levin, the Assistant Director of Communications for UNITE HERE.
The full panel title is Middle class isn't middle of the road: Take politicians’ populist shpeil and make it real. It is in Ballroom F at 10:30 AM on Friday. The bios are all located here.
This weekend the Courage Campaign discovered a serious ballot design flaw in Los Angeles that could disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters in LA County.
To cast a ballot in the Democratic presidential primary a Decline-to-State (DTS) voter must request a Democratic Party ballot. However, in Los Angeles County, they must also fill in an oval indicating their desire to vote for a Democrat and then mark their preferred choice for President -- two ovals must be filled, not one. If the voter fails to fill in the Democratic Party oval, their vote will not be counted and they will not be alerted to the error. (see the ballot on the flip)
There are 776,774 registered DTS voters in Los Angeles.
(Full disclosure: I work for the Courage Campaign)
A tiny town called Potrero just north of the border in California, an area ravaged by the recent wildfires, just stood up and resoundingly said no to another impending disaster: Blackwater moving to town. I am so unbelievably happy to have such a huge victory to celebrate!
It was the nation's first ever electoral vote on Blackwater and it was a massive people-powered grassroots victory over the mercenaries. Every "stop Blackwater" candidate won by at least 63% (results here). It was an an enormous statement to Blackwater: stay out, you are not the kind of neighbors we want in our community. It is also a blistering statement by a very conservative town to reject the Bush world view. Our nation is not better served by having a privatized Army. There is nothing pro-troop about supporting Blackwater.
(also up at Calitics. full disclosure: I work for Courage)
Bradley Whitford, better known to many of you as Josh Lyman on The West Wing, took time out of filming a movie in Calgary to shoot this video for the Courage Campaign on the importance of opposing retroactive immunity for telecom companies. Go watch the video and then do as he says, call your Senators.
(full-disclosure: I work for the Courage Campaign)
The movement to censure Senator Feinstein brought together 35,000 people and over 40 grassroots groups, organizations and clubs. It all started when Mal Burnstein read aloud a censure resolution at an East Bay for Democracy Meeting and while the resolution failed to pass, it changed the conversation.
It changed the conversation online. It changed the conversation the California Democratic Party Executive Board Meeting and within the party staff. And finally it leept into the media's spotlight, from the NYT editorial board to Fox News. Conversation changers are great, but where the rubber meets the road is on the Senate floor.
And there is a real whopper up next week, when FISA comes up.
The call for the California Democratic Party to censure Senator Dianne Feinstein has grown exponentially over the past few days and a huge log was just thrown on the fire. MoveOn.org just sent an email to all of their California members urging them to sign on to the call for censure over at Courage Campaign.
They are now one of 19 grassroots organizations in California who have signed on to the call since Monday. That is absolutely amazing considering how long it takes many Democratic Clubs to pass resolutions given their high barriers for endorsement.
The response by the party structure and the Senator have been well documented here by dday and hekebolos. Needless to say, we stirred up one heck of a hornet's nest and it really could not have been done without you.
Serious question here. Dianne Feinstein seems unreachable. No matter how many calls, emails, petitions, letters, smoke signals (well honestly we have not tried that yet) we have sent to her there is no response. She seems unaccountable.
Earlier this week it was Mukasey. Tomorrow will be FISA.
It's enough to make you throw your hands in the air and give up. But you know what. We have a moral obligation not to.
What I want to know is do you have an idea on how we can get through to her? How do we hold her accountable for her actions?
This Sunday I was all set to have a call with the local activists on the ground in the tiny town of Potrero where Blackwater is planning on setting up a training facility on 824 acres in a fire-prone box canyon with one way in and out. We were going to talk about ways that the Courage Campaign could support them during the upcoming recall election to boot the Planning Board members who voted to support Blackwater's proposal. But the locals had to evacuate due to a fire bearing down on the town and we canceled the call.
Since then the only word we have had from them was via the San Diego Union Tribune where Jan Hedlun, one of the organizers was quoted talking about her former colleague who was killed in the fire. His son is in the hospital with four firefighters after a heroic rescue.
BarbMD, KagroX and others have had extra coverage on Blackwater's repeated atrocities in Iraq. But what if I told you that Blackwater still hoping to expand their operations here in the U.S.? They are moving forward with their plans to open up a base in an environmentally sensitve area in San Diego. Blackwater has their eyes set on border security contracts and disaster response.
Can you imagine it? Mercenaries operating in California. Shoot first, ask questions later. They will put our security at risk.
Blackwater has proven that they do not deserve to have any role in Iraq. There is no way that we should allow them to acquire 824 acres of land in a sleepy rural corner of San Diego County to build a mercenary training facility, consisting of 15 firing ranges, a helipad, and a heavy vehicle operator's course covering the equivalent of 10 football fields. Oh hell no! It is time for our Democratic Senators to speak up and shut this down.
You killed it. All of the noise you made. The blog posts. The donations. The email forwards to friends. The petitions. The copies of the intiative you sent to Arnold. Everything. The netroots mobilized, and the right-wing backed down. This is a lone bright victory, in what has been a tough couple of weeks.
Absent some big rich right-winger stepping up with $2 million in the next few days, the attempt to put an initiative on the ballot to steal 20 of California's electoral votes is kaput. The main Republican lawyer for the California Republican Party, and the mastermind behind this has quit. They can't find anyone who is not a front group established in MO to donate. In short, the campaign is in disarray.
In what can only be described as yet another dirty trick, the campaign pushing the initiative to steal California's electoral votes disclosed its main donor in a campaign finance report earlier this week. The lone $175,000 donor was attributed to a Missouri based company called Take Initiative America (T.I.A). The only name we have is Charles A. Hurth III, an attorney in the small town Union, MO and big donor to Rudy Giuliani's campaign. He is the guy who registered the company, way back on September 10th. The donation came in on the 11th. The proponents of the ballot measure swear they have no idea who actually gave the money. (See also Shane Goldmacher's story. He broke it)
(full disclosure: CTA has hired me to do blog outreach on NCLB)
Teachers, lawmakers and San Francisco labor leaders came together today to present House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with a garage door-sized CTA postcard about their objection to the current NCLB re-authorization draft. The 8-foot by 12-foot postcard was signed by nearly 1,000 teachers. Since the big one would not fit through the door, they dropped off a off a poster-sized picture of the big postcard to her 14th floor office. Unfortunately, Speaker Pelosi was not in her office to receive her visitors and their gift.
This morning I opened my email and found a tirade by a friend currently serving in Iraq about Blackwater killing all of those civilians and the U.S. Army having to go in and stop them. First of all, I was relieved to see that he was alive, as I am any time I get an email from him. Then I was incensed by what he wrote. I asked if he would be willing to share what he has seen of Blackwater on the ground in Baghdad. Here is his statement, as a Army Captain, West Point graduate and a Combat Patrol Leader in Baghdad.
My impression of Blackwater after having served 10 months of my tour in Baghdad is that they are trigger happy, unrestrained by our army's rules of engagement, a danger to Iraqi civilians and coalition forces alike, behave as if they are above the law, are viewed as indescriminate killers by the population, and have no business operating in a combat theater. The consensus among my peers is they are a liability, not an asset. Our government's money would be better spent on increasing the size of our regular army than on hiring thrill-seeking cowboys loyal only to a paycheck.
(full disclosure CTA has hired me do to online outreach on NCLB. originally posted on Calitics)
It is well known that the current focus of NCLB on testing forces teachers to teach to the test. In fact, according to a recent national study by the Center on Education Policy, a majority of the nation's school districts report that while increasing time for test preparation they have decreased class time for science, social studies, art, music, and physical education. In some elementary schools time for student lunches has also been cut to spend more time to prepare for the standardized tests mandated by the feds. How depressing is that, kids forced to eat quickly and lose out on valuable social time to cram for a test.
(full disclosure CTA has hired me to do blog outreach on NCLB)
One of the many problems with the current Miller/Pelosi draft of the re-authorization of NCLB is how it assesses schools. The feds require schools get assessed with an Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) report. It sets benchmarks. If you do not meet them, you fail. It is a very rigid system. They mandated this program, yet never provided the money for states to actually track schools and students. Thus states have had to cough up the money on their own for data programs.
Here in California we already have a great assessment program called the Academic Performance Index (API). (Get that AYP (feds) API (Cali)). The API sets goals based on progress over time. So if a school is way behind, but they show significant percentage improvement (say 20% or so gains), they don't get on the failing list and get punished. Many schools who were really far behind under NCLB were classified as failing and punished, even though they were showing dramatic gains under API. It was a vicious and disheartening cycle.
(full disclosure: California Teacher's Association has hired me to do online outreach on NCLB)
There are a lot of things wrong with NCLB, so why are George Miller and Nancy Pelosi insisting on adding new problems. More specifically, adding a federal merit pay program for teachers. First of all, studies have shown that merit pay just does not work. It leads to divisiveness in the teaching ranks, makes hiring more difficult and tends to go to teachers in affluent school districts, despite promises to the contrary. Just about every school that implements merit pay repeals it down the road.
(full disclosure: CTA has hired me to do blog outreach on NCLB)
Well, CTA sure got George Miller's attention yesterday with the blog ads (see dkos side bar). He actually responded with a statement to Education Weekly:
