Three of the six Democrats vying for California Attorney General had news to report today.

Assemblyman Pedro Nava, D-Santa Barbara, led a news conference with other Assembly Democrats this morning in Sacramento asking their colleagues to vote against confirming state Sen. Abel Maldonado, R-Santa Maria, for lieutenant governor. Nava said a look at Maldonado’s record shows that “99.9 percent of the time he has not stood with the everyday working men and women of this state who are struggling to raise their families.” (Meanwhile, the California Republican Assembly – the GOP’s conservative grassroots – sent out a release this morning also urging that Maldonado be rejected, claiming he “has not exhibited the honor, integrity or principles that merit support for this position. A confirmation would provide a stark contrast of the disconnect between the elitists and the Tea Party movement.”)

Assemblyman Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, was promoted today to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve. Lieu, who has served for 15 years, is a military prosecutor in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps.

And former Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly announced today that veteran campaign strategist Robin Swanson is joining his campaign as communications director. Swanson’s resume includes several Legislative races as well as state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell’s 2002 win.

Here are a few upcoming political events in the East Bay:

Orinda

Common Cause chief Derek Cressman will discuss at the Feb. 11 meeting of the Lamorinda Democratic Club the impacts of the recent Supreme Court case decision that relaxed restrictions on federal campaign contributions.

Cressman is the organization’s western states regional director and founded TheRestOfUs.org, a nonprofit watchdog over the role of money in politics.

The event begins at 7:30 p.m. at the Orinda Community Church, 10 Irwin Way in Orinda. The cost is $5 per person.

For information, call 925-210-7337 or visit www.lamorindemoclub.org.

Danville

Author Eric Golub will speak at the Feb. 11 meeting of the Blackhawk Republican Women on combating ideological bigotry.

Golub is the winner of the 2007 Bloggers Choice Awards, wrote “Ideological Bigotry” and blogs on the Tygrrrr Express.

The event begins at 5:30 p.m. with hors d’oeuvres and no-host cocktails at Blackhawk Country Club, 599 Blackhawk Club Drive in Danville. The cost is $25 per person.

For reservations, call 925-820-6452 or e-mail rlyons1009@sbcglobal.net.

Clayton

Retired Air Force pilot and Republican 7th Congressional District candidate Rick Tubbs is the featured speaker at the Feb. 17 luncheon meeting of the Ygnacio Valley Republican Women Federated.

The event begins at 10:15 a.m. at the Oakhurst Country Club, 1001 Peacock Creek Road in Clayton. The cost is $22 a person.

For reservations, call 925-672-5061 or e-mail jngcabot@pacbell.net.

The deadline to apply for a position on the new state panel that will draw political boundaries has been extended to Feb. 16 at 5 p.m.

State Auditor Elaine Howle said this morning the surge of applications in the past week, spurred by a statewide media campaign, prompted the extension. More than 20,000 people have applied so far.

The auditor’s office will select 60 people — 20 Democrats, 20 Republicans and 20 nonpartisan voters — from which the 14 members of the Citizens Redistricting Commission will be selected. The panel will craft new voting boundaries for the Board of Equalization, state Senate and Assembly after the 2010 Census.

For applications and more details about the process, visit http://www.wedrawthelines.ca.gov/

Republican U.S. Senate candidates Carly Fiorina and Chuck DeVore will be on Fox News personality Glenn Beck’s show at 2 p.m. today, for a segment live from Los Angeles in which “Glenn explains how he’d fix California’s budget,” according to his Web site. As DeVore campaign spokesman Joshua Trevino suggests: “Just imagine the green room conversation.”

Also, if you’ve not already seen it, Jon Stewart was the guest on Fox’s “The O’Reilly Factor” last week, and the uncut interview is available online. (Sorry, Fox doesn’t allow video embeds.)

Contra Costa Republican Central Committee Chairman Greg Poulos resigned today from the panel, saying the job has become too time consuming.

“Going into the 2010 elections, Contra Costa will need a chair able to devote even more time than usual to advancing the agenda of the Central Committee and doing our part to secure local and statewide victory at the ballot box,” Poulos wrote in a letter to GOP Secretary Becky Kolberg.

That’s the public version.

Behind the scenes, I strongly suspect Poulos has grown weary of the constant infighting. This group has along history of political clashes but more recently, a minority faction of the board accused Poulos and his allies of financial mismanagement and has been trying for months to wrest control.

Tom Del Beccaro, the state GOP vice chairman from Lafayette, has also resigned from the committee; he has been unable to attend Contra Costa’s meetings due to his work for the state party.

Decline-to-state and Democratic voter registration have grown while Republican voter registration has fallen since an equivalent pre-gubernatorial primary report in 2006, Secretary of State Debra Bowen’s office reported today.

From Jan. 3, 2006 to Jan. 5, 2010, voters declining to affiliate with a political party have grown from 18.18 percent of the state’s total voters to 20.18 percent, an all-time high for California and more than twice what it was 20 years ago; similarly. Meanwhile, Democratic registration rose from 42.7 percent to 44.6 percent while GOP registration fell from 34.7 percent to 30.8 percent.

It looks to me as if, unsurprisingly, most of the Democratic gains happened in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election; I see Democratic registration stood at 44.4 percent and Republican registration stood at 31.37 percent in the last report before that November’s election.

Today’s report also shows more than 16.9 million Californians are registered voters, up from 15.8 million at this same time four years ago.

“Whether or not you choose to register with a particular political party, the most important choice is to register to vote and then to make your voice heard on Election Day,” Bowen said in her news release. “While there is still plenty of time – until May 24 – to register to vote in the June 8 primary, why wait?”

The report includes data gathered 154 days before the June 8 Statewide Direct Primary Election and reflects updates to voter registration rolls, including the removal of registrants who have passed away, moved out of state, or have been determined to be ineligible to vote, as well as the addition of new registrants.

California has a “modified closed primary” system that lets each party decide whether to let decline-to-state voters take part in its primary election. The Democratic and Republican parties will let decline-to-state voters request their ballots in the June 8 primary; the other four qualified parties (American Independent, Green, Libertarian and Peace & Freedom) won’t.

Our print deadlines required me to do a quick, short take yesterday on the Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley’s finding that state Attorney General Jerry Brown’s office broke no laws when a now-former employee secretly taped telephone conversations between officials and reporters.

Today – amid covering other stories – I figured I’d seek some Republican reactions, given Brown’s status as the only Democrat apparently running for governor and all the hullabaloo various GOPers raised as the incident came to light last fall. But the reactions were few today.

California Republican Lawyers Association Chairman Steven Baric, an Irvine attorney who also serves on the state GOP’s executive committee, had sent letters to Brown and O’Malley last November demanding such an investigation. A CRLA spokesman didn’t respond to an e-mail I sent last night, and Baric didn’t return my call this afternoon.

State Sen. George Runner, R-Antelope Valley, and Assemblyman Ted Gaines, R-Roseville, had sent a similar letter to Brown in November. Runner spokeswoman Jana Saastad told me this morning that she’d discuss the matter with her boss this afternoon and get back to me, but then about two hours later told me Runner would be unavailable all day. Gaines’ office didn’t return my e-mail at all.

Although the state GOP had sent the lawmakers’ letter out to reporters Nov. 3, it’s not archived among the news releases on the state GOP’s Web site, Runner’s, or Gaines’. (The state GOP’s site does, however, still have a link to the “Brown’s Tapegate” video it posted Nov. 12.)

California Republican Party Chairman Ron Nehring, speaking this morning from Nashville where he was teaching seminars at the National Tea Party Convention, called O’Malley’s conclusions “fishy.”

“The Alameda County District Attorney seems to have invented an exemption from the state wiretap law that denies reporters the same level of protection from the rest of us,” he said. “That doesn’t seem to make much sense. … If the Legislature had intended to create that carve-out, they could’ve done so – legislative bodies create carve-outs all the time.”

Nehring said he’d need to review O’Malley’s findings in more detail before commenting on whether the state GOP intends to continue making an issue of the matter.

The campaign of Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner, who’d stayed mum on the issue when it was breaking back in October and November, didn’t respond to my e-mail. Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman’s campaign did respond, only to say they’d take a pass on commenting.

Assembly Majority Leader Alberto Torrico – locked in a six-way battle for the Democratic nomination for state Attorney General – will roll out legislation next week to put a uniformed police officer at each of 100 California high schools in areas with the highest crime rates.

Torrico, D-Newark, will unveil his “Cops on Campus Grant Program” in a press conference next Tuesday at Independence High School in San Jose; he’ll be joined by his brothers Fabian Torrico, a veteran San Jose Police Department officer, and Cesar Torrico, principal at the city’s Franklin Elementary School.

“Every student, teacher, and school employee in California deserves a safe and secure learning environment,” Torrico said in his news release. “A uniformed police officer dedicated to school safety, like my brother Fabian who has dedicated his career in law enforcement to protect South Bay residents, will help make our high schools a better place to learn.”

His bill would establish a grant program, overseen by the California Department of Education, to which school districts can apply for funding to pay for the officer. It’s to be funded by what Torrico calls “a minor restoration” in the Vehicle License Fee for vehicles valued at $50,000 or more, which would raise about $10 million per year.

Torrico is also pushing his AB 656, the Fair Share for Fair Tuition bill, which discusses a 12.5 percent oil-severance tax toraise more than $2 billion to help control the state’s skyrocketing higher-education tuition fees. “It is our responsibility to ensure our high schools remain safe and the opportunity to a higher education is in reach,” he said.

Actually, I checked and saw that AB 656 in its current iteration merely asks the Board of Equalization to report back to the Legislature on how much such a tax would raise; Torrico spokesman Jeff Barbosa said this morning that Torrico will continue exploring the possibility of actually trying to implement such a tax.

Also in the Democratic primary race for Attorney General are San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris; former Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly; Assemblyman Ted Lieu, D-Torrance; Assemblyman Pedro Nava, D-Santa Barbara; and former Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo.

I spent a couple of hours yesterday with Bob White, the volunteer Northern California director of the Independence Caucus, talking about grassroots efforts to recruit and support “fiscally responsible” candidates to challenge incumbent state and national lawmakers.

I put “fiscally responsible” in quotation marks because White bristled a bit when I used the phrase “fiscally conservative.” He defined fiscal responsibility very simply as not spending more than you have.

The Independence Caucus was founded by a pair of Utah men, Frank Anderson and Monte Bateman, whose model was their successful support of Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, who beat a six-term Republican incumbent in 2008’s primary despite being vastly outspent. The idea is that most, if not all, long-time incumbents on either side of the aisle are beholden to special interests, and that no incumbent is safe if citizens put enough time and effort behind a candidate they believe in. The caucus’ informational Web site is here, and its activist site here.

White – who retired three years ago from a 30-year career in Silicon Valley as an executive recruiter who also helped launch a few high-tech startups – is responsible for California congressional districts 1 through 27. He’s been putting a lot of mileage on his car, crisscrossing the state’s northern half to hit every conservative gathering he can find, trying to identify potential “citizen candidates.”

The only criteria, he said, are a commitment to fiscal responsibility and “adherence to the Constitution” – the candidate could be Democrat or Republican, he said, so long as they stick to those two tenets.

Lots more on this, after the jump…
Read the rest of this entry »

Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman launched the 2010 race’s first television ad today, a 60-second spot called “Confidence” to run statewide on broadcast and cable channels:

What, no sheep?

“This is just the beginning. We will be introducing Meg, her leadership experience and her vision to Californians all over the state,” Whitman campaign manager Jillian Hasner said in a news release. “We’re not waiting until our opponents and their special-interest allies attempt to distort Meg’s message; this campaign is under way.”

The ad, you’ll notice, doesn’t mention GOP gubernatorial primary rival Steve Poizner at all – no “tearing up” happenin’ here, at least not yet.

Whitman’s campaign wouldn’t say today how much this ad buy cost: “It’s significant, but we’re not providing specifics,” spokeswoman Sarah Pompei said. The former eBay CEO has committed $39 million of her personal fortune to her campaign so far, while Poizner has anted up $19.2 million of his own for his campaign.

UPDATE @ 12:46 P.M.: This just in from Poizner spokesman Jarrod Agen:

“If Meg Whitman was confident, she would take questions from reporters and debate Steve Poizner in front of the Republican Party at next month’s convention. There is an anti-Republican trend in Meg Whitman’s campaign as she refuses to use the word ‘conservative’ in the ad and she’s been attacking the basic conservative principle of cutting taxes across-the-board. Steve Poizner is the confident candidate in this race and the only candidate calling for tax cuts for every business and individual in California.”