California Report

• Turning locally, while Arnold missed the festivities in St. Paul to look very serious about the budget, Pete Wilson made it out there in his stead - and he slammed Schwarzenegger's call for a tax increase, clearly temporarily forgetting the increase of his own. And when he was reminded, he said, "The situation was very different."

• Among the bills about to land on the Governor's desk is an equal pay bill. This has become a big issue in the Presidential race, and I'm glad to see the legislature on the right side of it.

• This is a good Chris Hayes piece from The Nation about union members at the RNC, but the California-specific part about the SEIU-UHW fight I found just right:

The more I talked to the UHW members and heard their grievances, the more I thought about the fact that organized labor has two goals that can often come into tension: power and dignity. We tend to focus on the power aspect in politics: the power to collectively bargain, to make sure labor captures a fair share of profits, to demand higher wages--all of which have been in sharp decline. That's the objective nature of unionization. The subjective nature of unionization, though, is dignity. It is the process by which working people come to believe that their views and their ideas and their demands are important. That they should be listened to. These two values can be in tension, as I suspect might be the case in California. Sometimes maximizing power might (I stress might, because the UHW-SEIU situation is very, very complicated) require people to fall in line, but the prerogative of dignity is to speak out and stand up.

• I'm interested in hearing more about Prop. 5. Anything that rolls back our stupid and shortsighted drug war is positive, in addition to addressing the prison crisis. Martin Sheen, of all people, has joined up with the No on 5 crowd, being run by the people who brought you the pro-Denham team during the aborted recall.

• Just noting the prison guard payoff to Don Perata because nobody else has.