Arnold's Crusade Against Legislators For Committing The Crime Of Legislating

The Sacramento Bee committed an act of journalism today, taking a look at the consequences of the legislature failing to act on various bills in favor of solving the budget.

Merced County beekeeper Gene Brandi says he had enough problems before getting ensnared in the nasty war of words between Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature over California's failure to cure its staggering budget deficit.

His Gene Brandi Apiaries in Los Banos, which once produced 400 drums of honey a year, has turned out just 20 drums so far this year as a searing drought has deprived wildland plants of the nectar that bees turn into honey.

And Brandi says he is facing competition from food processing companies that market sugar-added honey products as the real thing. "We've got people who take advantage of the good name of honey to try to sell their product," he says.

Now some agricultural producers and Democratic lawmakers say Schwarzenegger and his aides are unfairly exploiting the good names of honey, blueberries, pomegranate juice – and cow tails – to bash legislators for fiddling while California burns.

The dust-up stirs debate over whether the budget mess should freeze out all other matters – or whether lawmakers still have a responsibility to continue the business of legislating, no matter how mundane it can appear.

Did this guy really ask to be turned into a punchline by the Governor? I would argue that the crap that large multinational food producers package and sell as food is a serious problem on a variety of levels, not the least of which is public health. And given 120 legislators with different committees and responsibilities, we are perfectly able, even with a budget crisis, to deal with additional legislation, particularly that which can make a difference to small businesses and the health and safety of the entire state. In the past several years, with budget woes in every single one of them, somehow we passed a prescription drug benefit for seniors, an increase to the minimum wage, a landmark smart growth bill, and the Global Warmings Solutions Act, just to name a few.

Ol' Stogie And Jacuzzi is guilty of the exact same crime of turning every program that sounds funny, that includes animals or food, into an object of derision, as John McCain when he discussed so-called "pork" in the stimulus package:

McCain's method of indentifying waste, gleefully repeated by Dowd, is a disgrace. His technique is to focus on programs that mention animals or food, or anythign that sounds silly. He's clearly not interested in learning whether any of the programs he targets have merit. Here is Dowd recording McCain's twitter postings:

$1 million for Mormon cricket control in Utah. “Is that the species of cricket or a game played by the brits?” McCain tweeted. ...

$2 million “for the promotion of astronomy” in Hawaii, as McCain twittered, “because nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy.” ...

$200,000 for a tattoo removal violence outreach program to help gang members or others shed visible signs of their past. “REALLY?” McCain twittered.

I don't know whether or not cricket control is a necessary program. Maybe crickets are doing many times that amount in crop damage every year. Maybe it's a boondoggle. I don't know about the astronomy program, either, though I do think there's a role for federal support of the sciences, even in silly-sounding places like Hawaii.

I do know that the tattoo-removal program is an effective anti-crime initiative -- it allows rehabilitated former to reenter society shorn of visible markings that cut them off from middle-class culture. McCain and Dowd don't know this, and they don't care. What's on display is the worst elements of political demagoguery meeting the worst elements of the instant-reaction internet culture. They think the very idea of trying to learn about something before you take a position on it is a joke.

Who could have expected that going with a chief executive this simple-minded could lead us to such a place of ruin?

Celebricabinet

There is good news and bad in the proposed selection of Dr. Sanjay Gupta as Surgeon General in an Obama Administration. The good news is that a high-profile choice like Gupta, much bigger and more well-known than any Surgeon General in decades, could begin a new conversation on public health in America, with a great deal of authority. One of the biggest problems with our health care system is that it's a disease care system and not a health care one. Our lifestyles are too sedentary, our diets are too high in fat, our attention is not paid to what goes into and through our bodies. Gupta can have an impact on that. Here's Ezra Klein.

But Gupta is not leaving CNN and Time to give out medals. The surgeon general has an informal role as the country's leading medical and lifestyle educator, and it's that role the Gupta is uniquely positioned to fill. There's not a doctor in this country with half his media training and experience, nor one with a rolodex of editors and reporters a tenth as large.

Expect Gupta to be doing more than health education, though. According to Howard Kurtz, Gupta has negotiated "an expanded role in providing health policy advice." And if he's advising the project, he'll almost certainly be advocating for it, too. Which means Sanjay Gupta, arguably the nation's most trusted health care authority, will back on TV screens arguing for Obama's universal health care plan, lending it his credibility as a doctor, a trusted media presence, and the nation's surgeon general. It's a far cry from the days when Ira Magaziner and Hillary Clinton were reform's best known advocates.

The bad news is that Gupta is at the least an adjunct Villager, and his most controversial moment in recent years consisted of shouting down Michael Moore, mainly because he was Michael Moore. It was unpersuasive and abrasive, and does not portend well.

You don’t have to like Moore or his film; but Gupta specifically claimed that Moore “fudged his facts”, when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong.

What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he’s uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right. It’s sort of a minor-league version of the way people who pointed out in real time that Bush was misleading us into war are to this day considered less “serious” than people who waited until it was fashionable to reach that conclusion.

Gupta's role on Obama's health care bill will probably be just to publicly elucidate the policy. But if he treats it with the same disrespect for the facts, that would not help the cause. Stick to lifestyle reports, Sanjay.

Several Unrelated Items About Food

I like the blogosphere around this time of year because you can easily figure out who the Jewish bloggers are (the ones posting). Anyway, since all Jewish holidays are devoted to food (and pretty much only food), here are a few musings about that which we eat.

• There's some kind of mini-uproar about Barack Obama ordering spam musubi on the golf course in Hawaii this week. Not only is there a very good Hawaiian restaurant on the Westside of LA that serves spam musubi, but they sell T-shirts which read "What the hell is spam musubi?" that will hopefully start flying off the shelves now that the delicacy has a Presidential imprimatur. For the unenlightened, it's basically sushi with Spam instead of fish.

• I am breaking with all known Jewish traditions this Christmas and not going to a Chinese restaurant, but instead a potluck for wayward members of the tribe. My contribution will be butternut squash soup, perfect on this unusually cold California day.

• It's not too late to give to your local food bank. Demand is up significantly over the past several months as the recession deepens. Second Harvest is a good place to connect with the food bank that needs the most help in your area. I did a little work at the Westside Food Bank in Santa Monica over the weekend, and it was a good feelings.

• Speaking of food assistance, and turning to a food-related story that has actual policy implications, the Obama transition is considering using food assistance programs to encourage better nutrition.

For decades, the government has treated hunger and obesity as unrelated phenomena. But at a news conference last week in Chicago, Tom Vilsack, President-elect Barack Obama's choice for agriculture secretary, said he would put "nutrition at the center of all food assistance programs," a signal that he will get involved next year when Congress moves to reauthorize nutrition programs that support school breakfasts and lunches as well as summer food for children.

"For a long time, we've looked at hunger and obesity separately," said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the committee that will draft the legislation. "It's not a zero-sum game."

This is a great idea. The tragedy of being poor is that your food options are typically cheap, high-fat products that end up leading to obesity. By offering major discounts to the purchase of produce with food stamps, for example, we help to solve both a hunger problem and a public health problem. There is a reasonable concern that the government becomes too paternalistic over this, but the very real concern about obesity among the poor outweighs it. I would also encourage farmer's markets in low-income communities that accept food stamps; much of this is a problem of access, as only fast food restaurants and convenience stores seem to proliferate in depressed communities instead of full-service groceries.

The California Report - News Of The Good

We spend an inordinate amount of time on the bad of California politics here on the site. And with a system this dysfunctional, there's a lot of bad to go around. But as the budget hostage crisis continues, and state workers don't know if they'll be able to afford their bills come Monday, I wanted to at least recognize some of the positive developments around the city and state:

• The Governor signed a bill today banning trans fats in all state restaurants and bakeries by 2011. Combined with the law signed earlier this week to crack down on the sale of downer cattle in US groceries, and the LA City Council moving forward on a one-year moratorium on new fast-food restaurants in South Los Angeles, this is a good week for food safety, nutrition and public health.

• As mentioned by Shayera, the Los Angeles City Council voted to ban plastic bags by 2010, if the state does not mandate a $0.25 charge for every bag by then. Additionally on the environmental front, there's also the statewide green building code adopted by the California Building Standards Commission, and another passage for the third year in a row, of a port container fee which would be invested in fighting pollution (Hopefully this time the Governor will sign it). This too is good.

• Leland Wong was convicted yesterday on 14 counts of public corruption and bribery while he was LA City Commissioner. Accountability is good.

• In Orange County, the Laguna Beach City Council, which is majority Republican, became one of the first to publicly oppose Prop. 8, the hate amendment. Saying no to hate is good.

• Unfortunately, not everything is good. Foreclosure rates are skyrocketing nationwide, more than doubling in the second quarter. In one incredible example, almost 1 in 20 homes in Merced have been lost to foreclosure, the highest rate in America. Wow. Not good.