Former state Senate President Pro Tem and 2010 Oakland mayoral candidate Don Perata, who helped conceive, introduce and raise money for the tobacco-tax ballot measure on this June’s ballot, has a lot of friends who are making money from the campaign, new reports show.

Perata’s “Hope 2012” ballot-measure committee began raising money for what’s now known as Proposition 29 way back in 2009, and has transferred $488,500 to Californians for a Cure – the primary committee backing the measure, sponsored by the American Cancer Society, American Lung Association, American Heart Association and a group of cancer research doctors. Prop. 29 would impose a $1-per-pack tax on cigarettes, and equivalent tax hikes on other tobacco products, to fund cancer research; Perata is a cancer survivor.

Now Perata himself has received $5,792.17 since July from Californians for a Cure, including $2,607.19 for “meetings and appearances” and $2,508.36 for travel expenses.

One of Perata’s current employees also has been paid by Californians for a Cure. Anne Willcoxon, 58, of Moraga, has been paid $27,760 since last May, with the lion’s share of that – $15,000 – paid in the first two months of this year under the designation “campaign consultants.”

Anne Willcoxon’s LinkedIn profile lists her position since January 2011 as “charges d’affaires” at Perata Consulting LLC – that’s a French term for a subordinate diplomat who substitutes for an absent ambassador or minister. She ranked high among Perata’s 2010 Oakland mayoral campaign staffers. And her husband, Michael Willcoxon, is general counsel for Dublin-based DeSilva Gates Construction; founder Ed DeSilva for years has been among Perata’s most generous political contributors.

The rest of Californians for a Cure’s expenditure list reads like a who’s-who of former Perata aides and consultants:

The Sacramento consulting business of former Perata staffer Sandi Polka has been paid $53,887.03 since the beginning of 2011.

Chris Lehman, a former Perata staffer, has been paid $47,196.04 in the past year, mostly for campaign consulting, including more than $19,000 so far in 2012.

Maurice Williams, another of Perata’s state Senate aides, has been paid $32,000 by Californians for a Cure since last June, including $7,000 in this year’s first two months, for campaign consulting and fundraising.

Rhys Williams, who was Perata’s mayoral campaign press secretary, is now the ballot measure’s online campaign director; he has been paid $60,250 since last June, including $18,250 so far in 2012.

Stephenie DeHerrera, who worked on Perata’s mayoral campaign while a fellow at The Organizing and Leadership Academy in Oakland, has been paid $13,073.34 since November for campaign consulting and fundraising.

TOLA is run by veteran political consultant Larry Tramutola, who helped run Perata’s 2010 mayoral campaign. Californians for a Cure has paid Tramutola $86,546.00 since last June, mostly for campaign consulting.

Polka, Lehman, Williams and other former Perata aides also were paid generously by Perata’s Hope 2012 committee as he got the initiative off the ground in 2009 and 2010.

Questions and eyebrows arose in 2010 when Perata’s Hope 2012 committee gave money to two nonprofits – neither of which had anything to do with cancer – led by his former campaign treasurer, a close confidante whom some said had been romantically involved with Perata. Earlier, Hope 2012 in 2009 had paid $25,000 for campaign consulting by Oakland Councilman Ignacio de la Fuente, a longtime Perata ally and political lieutenant.

And there were also questions in 2010 of whether Perata was thought to be leveraging the nascent tobacco-tax campaign to widen his name recognition as he also campaigned for mayor.

Perata and some of his political associates were the subjects of a five-year-long FBI corruption probe, which ended in 2009 without anyone ever charges ever filed.

The state Assembly voted 48-22 today to urge Congress to amend the U.S. Constitution as a means of overturning a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that unleashed a deluge of unlimited political spending by corporations and unions.

If the state Senate passes it as well, Assembly Joint Resolution 22, co-authored by Assemblyman Bob Wieckowski, D-Fremont, and Assemblyman Michael Allen, D-Santa Rosa, will put California amid a national grassroots movement. Hawaii and New Mexico have passed similar resolutions, as have more than 100 cities across the nation including Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond and Fairfax.

Today’s vote was along straight party lines, with all the ayes from Democrats and all the nays from Republicans; 10 members were absent or not voting.

“The Citizens United decision is judicial activism run amuck,” Wieckowski said in a news release. “For more than a century, Congress and the Supreme Court have recognized the need to differentiate between people and the vast amount of wealth at the disposal of large corporations. The floodgates were opened by this ruling and now a small number of very wealthy interests are having a greater influence on our national politics than ever before.”

The Supreme Court’s holding that the First Amendment bars the government from restricting political spending by corporations and unions led to the creation of the “Super PACs” – often funded by a just few wealthy donors – that now essentially serve as shadow campaigns for the presidential candidates, but without any fundraising limits.

Groups including Public Citizen, Common Cause, the California Public Interest Research Project (CalPIRG), California Church Impact, California Labor Federation, California Nurses Association, California Professional Firefighters and the California League of Conservation Voters support AJR 22.

Jonah Minkoff-Zern, senior organizer with Public Citizen’s Democracy Is For People campaign, said this movement has percolated up from the streets. “It is because of the work of dedicated activists throughout the state that California’s elected officials are joining them in taking a stand to say that democracy is for people, not for corporations.”

Public Citizen helped lead the introduction of similar resolutions in Massachusetts, Vermont and Maryland, and has supported activists’ and lawmakers’ efforts to introduce similar resolutions in Alaska, Iowa, Kansas and New York.

Former Contra Costa sex crimes prosecutor Michael Gressett has turned the tables on the agencies and people who pursued him for the alleged rape of a junior colleague nearly four years ago.  Read my full story here.  Watch video of the press conference here.

The state recently dropped the criminal charges, clearing the way for Gressett to file today damage claims — the precursor to a lawsuit — against Contra Costa County and Martinez, where he says he was the target of politically motivated malicious prosecution.

Speaking publicly for the first time about the graphic case that has wracked the District Attorney’s Office, the gregarious 55-year-old Gressett displayed his legendary spunk to journalists gathered at his attorney’s Oakland office.

“What would satisfy me would be a trial where all the people listening to the cross-examination would see what I have been seeing for years,” said Gressett, impeccably dressed in a dark suit and red-checkered tie.

But in other moments, a visibly distressed Gressett choked back tears as he spoke about the devastating impact on him and his family in the years since accusations surfaced that he raped a deputy district attorney with an ice pick, ice cubes and a gun during their lunch hour.

“It has destroyed my life in every way possible,” Gressett said. “If you Google my name, you see pages and pages of me being a rapist. You can never rectify that.”

He said the ordeal was especially hard on his college-age son.

Gressett even contemplated killing himself, anticipating the sexual assaults he would suffer in prison at the hands of other inmates as a former prosecutor convicted of a sex crime.

“It would have been a death sentence for me,” he said.

Read the rest of the story here.

Gov. Jerry Brown today named Juan Felipe Herrera as California Poet Laureate, the first Latino ever to hold the title.

Herrera, 63, of Redlands, is the author of twenty-eight books and now serves as the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair in the Creative Writing Department at the University of California, Riverside. He was a professor and chair of Chicano and Latin American Studies at California State University, Fresno, from 1990 to 2004 and a teaching assistant fellow at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa from 1988 to 1990.

In a 2008 review of his work, the New York Times’ Stephen Burt wrote, “All life, all art, involves boundaries, if only those of birth and death. Some poets keep us conscious of those boundaries; others, like Herrera, discover their powers by defying them. Many poets since the 1960s have dreamed of a new hybrid art, part oral, part written, part English, part something else: an art grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly individual too. Many poets have tried to create such an art: Herrera is one of the first to succeed.”

Upon his receipt of the PEN Beyond Margins Award in 2009, the University of Arizona Press wrote, “For nearly four decades Juan Felipe Herrera has documented his experience as a Chicano in the United States and Latin America through stunning, memorable poetry that is both personal and universal in its impact, themes, and approach. Often political, never fainthearted, his career has been marked by tremendous virtuosity and a unique sensibility for uncovering the unknown and the unexpected.”

The son of migrant workers from Mexico, Herrera earned a Bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, a Master of Arts in social anthropology from Stanford University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa. He was elected to the Board of Chancellors for the Academy of American Poets in 2011, was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry in 2010 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry in 2009.

This position requires confirmation by the state Senate, and the California Arts Council provides an annual stipend. Herrera is a Democrat.

Herrera is the eighth person to hold the title of California Poet Laureate since 1915. From 1915 through 2001, the title was unofficial and held for the rest of the recipient’s life, bestowed by the California Arts Council. The Legislature and Gov. Gray Davis in 2001 made it an official post with a two-year term; the governor chooses a nominee from a list of three candidates provided by the council.

Follow us after the jump for a sample of Herrera’s work…
Read the rest of this entry »

The public is increasingly uneasy with the mixing of religion and politics, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life.

In fact, the number of people who say there has been too much religious talk by political leaders stands at an all-time high since the Pew Research Center began asking the question more than a decade ago.

Nearly four in ten Americans (38 percent) now say there has been too much expression of religious faith and prayer from political leaders, while 30 percent say there has been too little. That’s a significant flip from just two years ago, when 37 percent said there was too little religious expression and 29 percent said too much. The percentage saying there’s too much expression of religious faith by politicians has increased across party lines, but this view remains far more widespread among Democrats than Republicans.

Also, slightly more than half of the public (54 percent) says churches and other houses of worship should keep out of politics, compared with 40 percent who say religious institutions should express their views on social and political matters. This is the third consecutive Pew poll conducted in the past four years in which more people wanted churches out of politics than wanted them in, although the balance consistently tilted in the opposite direction from 1996 to 2006.

And the poll found a sharp divide among voters backing the two leading GOP presidential candidates. Almost six in ten (57 percent) Republican and Republican-leaning voters who favor Mitt Romney say churches should keep out of political matters; meanwhile, 60 percent of GOP voters who support Rick Santorum say that churches and other houses of worship should express their views on social and political questions.

For my own part, I’ve got to wonder how much of this GOP split is attributable to Rick Santorum’s supporters being more comfortable with his Catholic faith than most Mitt Romney supporters are with his Mormon faith.

The survey, conducted March 7-11 among 1,503 adults, has an overall margin of error of three percentage points; among the GOP voter subsample, it’s a six-point margin.

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum will visit the East Bay for a fundraising event next Thursday evening.

Tickets for the March 29 event at the Alamo home of Ubokia.com CEO Mark Pine and his wife, Becky, start at $125 per person for a general dessert reception; $500 buys access to a VIP photo meeting with the candidate, and $2,500 buys access to the host committee’s private reception with the candidate. The hosts include former Rep. Bill Baker and his wife, Joanne; Realtors Richard and Mary Jo Bedayn; Tea Party activist Bridget Melson and her husband, Mike; Bob and Joan Stover; and the Frederick Douglass Foundation. (For the foundation’s California branch, click here.)

The Associated Press says Santorum, a former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, now has 263 delegates, while frontrunner Mitt Romney has 563; a candidate needs 1,144 delegates in order to clinch the nomination. Santorum is expected to have a strong showing in Louisiana this Saturday, where 46 delegates are up for grabs.

With BART Director Bob Franklin giving up that post to run for Oakland City Council this year, candidates are emerging to vie this November for the open seat he’ll leave on the transit agency’s board.

Environmental activist and local blogger Rebecca Saltzman, 30, of Oakland, announced her candidacy in a fundraising e-mail to friends and potential supporters Tuesday morning. She wrote that her years “of public transit and policy advocacy, coalition building, grassroots organizing, and management experience with local, state, and national issue-based organizations and campaigns has prepared me well for this job.”

Saltzman said that as government affairs manager for the California League of Conservation Voters, she coordinates Green California, a network of more than 80 environmental and social justice groups working to pass and protect environmentally friendly laws in the Legislature.

Earlier she worked for four years as chief of staff of Americans for Safe Access, an Oakland-based medical marijuana advocacy nonprofit. She graduated last year from Emerge California, a candidate training program for Democratic women.

She also is vice chairwoman of Oakland’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee; has been active in several local and state political campaigns; and is the longtime proprietor of the “Living in the O” local news blog. Until recently she was an avid tweeter as @OaklandBecks; now she’s @RebeccaForBART.

“As a BART Director, I will work hard every day to make BART fiscally and environmentally sustainable, to increase transit-oriented development around BART stations, and to coordinate more closely with other transit agencies – especially AC Transit,” she said in the e-mail. “I will also work to make a dream I’ve had since my college days at UC Berkeley come true – making BART run later on Friday and Saturday nights.”

BART’s District 3 includes all or parts of Albany, Berkeley, El Cerrito, Lafayette, Moraga, Oakland, Orinda, Piedmont, San Leandro, and unincorporated areas of Alameda and Contra Costa counties; it includes the Bay Fair, San Leandro, Rockridge, Orinda, Downtown Berkeley, North Berkeley, El Cerrito Plaza and El Cerrito Del Norte stations.

Filings at the Secretary of State’s office show Nashua Kalil, 53, of Berkeley, a former BART planner, also intends to run for the seat, but apparently has not yet made the candidacy public.

Newt Gingrich was thought to have doomed his then-nascent presidential campaign last May when he stiff-armed his own party’s budget plan on “Meet the Press.”

“I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering. I don’t think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to operate. I think we need a national conversation to get to a better Medicare system with more choices for seniors,” Gingrich had said.

“I think that that is too big a jump,” he had said of the House GOP budget proposal to move Medicare from a system of direct government payment to doctors to one in which private insurance companies would manage a voucher-like system for seniors.

But Gingrich seems 100 percent OK with the new plan being rolled out by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wisc. That plan includes a proposal – made jointly with Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. – for an optional premium support plan, which according to them would “strengthen traditional Medicare by permanently maintaining it as a guaranteed and viable option for all of our nation’s retirees. At the same time, our plan would expand choice for seniors by allowing the private sector to compete with Medicare in an effort to offer seniors better quality and more-affordable health care choices.”

Here’s what Gingrich said today:

“The House GOP budget is a courageous plan that correctly understands the key to returning to a balanced budget is robust economic growth, spending control and bold entitlement reform, including the Ryan-Wyden optional premium support plan in Medicare. Chairman Ryan and the House Republican’s leadership stands in stark contrast with that of the Democratic Senate, which has once again, failed to produce a budget.”

“My plan to grow the economy and balance the budget differs in details but shares the same core principles as Ryan’s impressive effort. As president I would work very closely with Chairman Ryan to reform government and balance the budget.”

Yet Bay Area Democrats see little if any difference between what Ryan proposed last year and what he’s proposing this week. Rep. Pete Stark, D-Fremont, the ranking member on the Ways and Means Health Subcommittee that oversees Medicare, said:

“This year’s Republican Budget, once again, is a plan to dismantle the Medicare guarantee that Americans overwhelmingly support and that seniors and people with disabilities rely on.

“The Republican claim that their budget would preserve Medicare is both irresponsible and disingenuous. Beneficiaries would be given a voucher — crafted to decrease in value over time — to buy private insurance or try to stay in traditional Medicare.

“This Republican scheme would not only shift health care costs to seniors as their vouchers diminish, but will end Medicare as we know it. Private plans will cherry pick healthier folks, leaving the more sickly and elderly in what amounts to a faint memory of traditional Medicare as costs rise beyond their reach.

“Importantly, the Republican budget would not require plans to provide defined benefits as Medicare does today, thus ending the Medicare guarantee that has defined the program for decades.

“What’s more, the Republican budget would undo the consumer protections provided by Medicare and put private health insurers back in charge.
“Enacting the Republican plan would be devastating to the health and financial security of America’s senior citizens and people with disabilities. I will fight this plan to take America backward.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, said Ryan’s plan lets Medicare “wither on the vine … The American people have already rejected this plan before – and this year will be no different. Americans’ priorities are clear: Republicans must work with Democrats to preserve and strengthen Medicare, not dismantle it.”

Online daters, take heart – California Attorney General Kamala Harris has your backs.

Harris announced Tuesday that three of the nation’s leading online dating providers agreed to issue a joint statement of business principles to help protect people seeking their soul mates from instead falling victim to identity theft, financial scams and sexual predators.

Her agreement with Santa Monica-based eHarmony, Dallas-based Match.com and Beverly Hills-based Spark Networks – which operates websites such as JDate and ChristianMingle – states that the companies will protect their members by using online safety tools, including checking subscribers against national sex offender registries and by providing a rapid abuse-reporting system for members. They’ll also keep proactively educating their members about safe online practices, providing tips such as fraud-prevention guidance and how to safely meet people offline.

“I commend these companies for committing to these important consumer protections,” Harris said in a news release. “Consumers should be able to use websites without the fear of being scammed or targeted. It is a priority for this office to ensure consumers are protected online, and companies who are creating in the Internet space have a continued opportunity to innovate and thrive.”

She said providers will continue their efforts to screen members for financial or physical safety threats, including looking for fake profiles and checking sex offender registries to prevent registered sex offenders from using their fee-based services. Anyone identified as a registered sex offender won’t be allowed to use these services.

“In the interest of protecting and educating users, I strongly encourage all online dating companies to adopt the same principles as these industry leaders,” she said.

Harris last year created an eCrime Unit to prosecute identity theft, data intrusions and other tech-involved crimes. She’ll assign a liaison from that unit to deal with reports of suspected criminal activity provided by the three online dating providers and other providers who adopt these principles.

About 40 million Americans used an online dating service and spent more than $1 billion on online dating website memberships in 2011, Harris said; of couples married in the last three years, one in six met through an online dating service and one in five people have dated someone they met through an online dating site.

The CEOs of all three companies reiterated their commitments to member safety in Harris’ news release, and said they’re proud to work with her to set an example for the industry.

The endorsement battle between Contra Costa County supervisor candidates Candace Andersen and Tomi Van de Brooke is getting interesting although I still maintain that endorsements don’t matter much to typical voters.

Still, the endorsement list does offer insight into where each of the candidates is finding financial and volunteer support, and signals where each might stand on policy decisions.

Andersen secured the nod from retiring Supervisor Gayle Uilkema of Lafayette. This isn’t a big surprise. Uilkema and Andersen, who is Danville’s mayor, have worked together for years on various boards and while the supervisor post is nonpartisan, both women are Republicans.

Andersen also secured recommendations from the county’s top law enforcement leaders along with the unions for the county’s prosecutors and deputy sheriffs.

Van de Brooke, a trustee on the Contra Costa Community College board, has locked down the endorsements of every major Democratic political leader in the county including state Superintendent of Public Schools Tom Torlakson; Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez; state Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord; and assemblywomen Susan Bonilla, D-Concord, and Joan Buchanan, D-Alamo.

Will party registration matter in this race? It certainly matters to the two major parties, who view these seats as part of their farm teams. County supervisors do run for higher — and partisan — offices. Torlakson, DeSaulnier and Bonilla were all Contra Costa County supervisors. But for the average voter, whether or not partisanship plays a role will likely depend on how much of a campaign issue the candidates or their supporters make out of it.

There is no significant party registration incentive for either candidate. Of the five supervisor districts, District 2 has the most competitive party registration split: 39.8 percent of registered voters are  Democrats vs. 35.4 percent for Republicans. The other four heavily favor Democrats.

Candace Andersen

A sample of Andersen endorsements (click here for full list on her web site)

• Gayle Uilkema, Contra Costa County supervisor
• David Livingston, Contra Costa County Sheriff
• Mark Peterson, Contra Costa District Attorney
• Ken Westermann, Contra Costa Deputy Sheriffs Association president
• Barry Grove, Contra Costa Deputy District Attorney Association president
• Warren Rupf, retired Contra Costa County Sheriff
• Charlie Abrams, former Mayor of Walnut Creek
• Mike Anderson, Lafayette vice mayor
• Newell Arnerich, Danville vice mayor
• Bill Clarkson, San Ramon mayor
• Mike Doyle, Danville councilman
• Erlene DeMarcus, former BART director
• Carol Federighi, Lafayette mayor
• Paul Gardner, San Ramon Valley Unified School District Board of Education
• Howard Harpham, Moraga vice mayor
• David Harmer, former candidate for Congress
• Guy Houston, former assemblyman and former Dublin mayor
• David Hudson, San Ramon councilman
• Denise Jennison, San Ramon Valley Unified School District Board of Education
• Lynne Leach, former assemblywoman
• Jim Livingstone, San Ramon councilman
• Roxanne Lindsay, San Ramon Valley Fire Protection District
• Judy Lloyd, former presidential appointee, U.S. Dept of Labor & U.S. Dept. of Agriculture
• Mike Metcalf, Moraga mayor
• Sue McNulty Rainey, former mayor of Walnut Creek and Moraga
• Richard Rainey, former state senator, assemblyman and Contra Costa County Sheriff
• Pat Rudebusch, Orinda Union School Board President
• Christopher Severson, Orinda School Board Member
• Sue Severson, Orinda councilwoman
• David “Shoe” Shuey, Clayton councilman
• Karen Stepper, Danville councilwoman
• Robert Storer, Danville councilman
• Hank Stratford, Clayton councilman
• Dave Trotter, Moraga councilman
• Jack Weir, Pleasant Hill councilman

Tomi Van de Brooke

A sampling of Van de Brooke endorsements (click here for full list on her web site)

• Rep.  George Miller, D-Martinez
• State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson
• State Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord
• Assemblywoman Susan A. Bonilla, D-Concord
• Assemblywoman Joan Buchanan, D-Alamo
• Jim Kellogg, California Fish & Game Commissioner
• Joseph A. Ovick, Contra Costa County Superintendent of Schools
• John Coleman, East Bay MUD Board of Directors president
• Robert J. Calone, Contra Costa Community College trustee
• John E. Marquez, Contra Costa Community College trustee
• Susanna Schlendorf, former Danville mayor
• Tim Sbranti, Dublin mayor
• Robert Schroder, Martinez mayor
• Karen Mendonca, Moraga mayor
• Brandt Andersson, Lafayette councilman
• Anne Grodin, former Lafayette mayor of Lafayette
• Victoria Smith, Orinda mayor
• Amy Worth, Orinda councilwoman
• Dean Orr, Orinda councilman
• Laura Abrams, former Orinda mayor
• Bob Simmons, Walnut Creek mayor
• Kish Rajan, Walnut Creek vice mayor
• Cindy Silva, Walnut Creek councilwoman
• Kristina Lawson, Walnut Creek City councilwoman
• Gwen Regalia, Former Walnut Creek mayor
• David Bowlby, Alamo MAC Chair
• Nancy Dommes, Alamo MAC Member
• Ed Best, Alamo MAC Member
• Steve Roberti, Fmr Secretary’s Representative, US Dept. of Labor
•  Contra Costa County Firefighters