As a political reporter, I’m used to hearing a lot of spin, but the dueling news releases sent out by the “Yes on 17” and “No on 17” camps were quite amazing in their differing accounts of what happened. Read them in their entirety, after the jump…

Yes on 17: Californians for Fair Auto Insurance Rates
For Immediate Release: March 12, 2010

Court Orders Changes to No on 17 Ballot Arguments to Strike False and Misleading Statements

At the Same Time, Judge Rejects All Challenges to Yes on 17 Ballot Arguments

Sacramento, CA – Today, Sacramento Superior Court Judge Allen Sumner ordered the No on 17 campaign to substantially change language in its ballot arguments which stated Prop. 17 punishes the military.

Throughout the campaign, No on 17 has repeatedly said that Prop. 17 will unfairly penalize, discriminate against, and/or negatively impact the military. The truth is that military personnel are better off under Prop. 17, but opponents are engaging in scare tactics.

Their ballot argument said, “NO ON 17: IT PUNISHES OUR TROOPS.” “THIS INITIATIVE RAISES RATES ON CALIFORNIANS WHO SERVE IN THE MILITARY AND STOP DRIVING WHILE LIVING STATESIDE. PENALIZING THESE SOLDIERS BY FORCING THEM TO PAY MORE WHEN THEY RESTART THEIR CAR INSURANCE IS WRONG.”

The judge found this statement in the No on 17 arguments to be false and misleading and originally ordered it omitted from the ballot pamphlet altogether. No on 17 attorneys immediately appealed this decision and asked the judge to instead allow them to submit new language. Yes on 17 agreed to this decision and rewrites are taking place now.

At the same time, the courts completely rejected No on 17’s frivolous counter-suit seeking changes to Yes on 17’s ballot arguments and rebuttals. In fact, the judge rejected each and every one of No on 17’s complaints, allowing the original Yes on 17 arguments to stand without modification.

“This ruling forcing opponents to strike false and misleading statements is a major win for California voters. Opponents of Prop. 17 have taken the anti-consumer position, trying to stop the extension of a discount for drivers who follow the law and maintain auto insurance,” said Mike D’Arelli, Executive Director, Alliance of Insurance Agents and Brokers. “They know they can’t win on the facts, so No on 17 has resorted to distortions and flat out lies to try to deceive the public. Today, the Court forced them to stop misleading the public through patently false arguments.”

Proposition 17 on the June 2010 ballot, makes an already-existing persistency or “continuous coverage” auto insurance discount portable, allowing customers to take their discount with them if they change auto insurance companies. Prop. 17 will mean more competition and choice in the auto insurance marketplace and will result in lower rates for drivers.

Ballot arguments and rebuttals appear in the Official Voter Information Guide compiled by the California Secretary of State and are distributed to every voter in California. Election law (Elec. Code § 9092, Gov. Code § 88006) states that information in the voter guide must not contain “false and misleading” statements.

Today, more than 80% of drivers maintain auto insurance and qualify for the persistency or continuous coverage discount, but can only get that discount from their current insurer. If a driver wants to switch to a new insurance company, he or she loses the discount and has to pay more.

And…

Stop Prop 17 News
For Immediate Release
March 12, 2010

Judge Rejects Mercury Insurance’s Lies; Voters Will Be Told of Prop 17 Car Insurance Surcharges

Sacramento – Judge Allen Sumner has upheld Attorney General Jerry Brown’s Official Title and Summary of Proposition 17, which warns the measure will allow car insurers to raise premiums. The ruling means voters will learn in the ballot pamphlet that Prop 17 will allow insurance companies to raise rates on California drivers based on their history of buying auto insurance.

Attorneys for Mercury Insurance failed as it tried to convince the court to remove any reference to the insurance surcharges that Prop 17 will create. Consumer advocates hailed the decision as a victory for voters, who will have the opportunity to cut through Mercury’s multi-million dollar campaign of lies and read a fair assessment of the insurance company’s initiative in the Voter Guide.

“When voters face the deceptive, multi-million dollar insurance company ad campaign for Prop 17, at least they’ll be able to turn to Attorney General Brown’s summary to learn the truth,” said consumer advocate Harvey Rosenfield who co-authored one of the ballot arguments against Prop 17. “Now that the Judge has made it clear that Prop 17 lets insurance companies raise car insurance premiums, will the insurance company backers of Prop 17 stop lying about it?”

With the ruling, voters will read the following in the Official Title and Summary of Prop 17:
“Will allow insurance companies to increase cost of insurance to drivers who do not have a history of continuous insurance coverage.”

The Judge rejected Mercury’s attempt to strike out much of Prop 17 opponents’ ballot arguments. He did require two cosmetic changes to the arguments, so the main argument against 17 now includes the statement:

“It punishes our troops, among others. This initiative raises rates on Californians who stop their insurance, including military serving stateside. Penalizing these drivers by forcing them to pay more when they restart their insurance is wrong.”

The rebuttal argument was amended to read: “you will get hit with surcharges of up to $1,000/year.”

Proposition 17, which has been funded with $3.5 million from Mercury Insurance, would surcharge drivers, including soldiers and seniors, who have had a lapse in car insurance coverage for virtually any reason during the past five years. Under the measure, people who stopped driving and didn’t need insurance for a time would be required to pay up to a thousand dollars more for insurance when they sought to restart coverage. Currently, insurance companies are prohibited from imposing the surcharge in California.

The only other top PG&E officials to give money to Brown’s campaign made their contributions back in December: Senior Vice President of Regulatory Relations Thomas Bottorff gave $1,000 and Government Relations Director Lawrence Simi gave $1,500.

Though not a lot of money in the context of the millions Brown has raised for his gubernatorial bid, this week’s contributions come even as Brown’s office has been looking into PG&E’s attempts to influence public policy.

PG&E has bought itself (with $15.5 million so far) a ballot measure on this June’s primary election ballot, Proposition 16, which would require local governments to get the approval of two-thirds of their voters before providing electricity to new customers or expanding such service to new territories if any public funds or bonds are involved, or before providing electricity through a community choice program, if any public funds or bonds are involved. Critics say PG&E is playing on populist themes in order to block local governments from abandoning the utility giant in favor of power contracts with smaller, greener energy producers – a movement that’s been gaining steam in recent years.

The SF Bay Guardian last month editorialized:

When the state Legislature approved the law allowing cities to create local public power co-ops, the bill specifically barred private utilities from interfering. So it’s easy to argue that Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s ballot initiative to squash public power is, in fact, direct interference.

After all, the measure would create an almost insurmountable obstacle to creating community choice aggregation.

And the attorney general of California ought to be making that precise argument in court and trying to get this ballot initiative thrown out.

Sen. Mark Leno, a strong foe of the measure, told us he’s been in touch with Attorney General Jerry Brown’s staff, and is urging them to take action. He said he’s been assured the office is looking into the issue.

Brown spokeswoman Christine Gasparac told me today that her “office has stated that we’re looking into the issue in Marin, in which the County is in the process of implementing community choice aggregation, and local officials have made complaints against PG&E interfering in that process. Judicial review of the legality of a ballot initiative before it has been considered by the voters is highly disfavored.”

UPDATE @ 4:10 P.M.: “This campaign has raised almost $15 million from people on both sides of a variety of issues, it has no bearing on the way the professional attorneys and the Attorney General conduct the people’s business,” said Brown campaign spokesman Sterling Clifford.

In other news, Oakland A’s co-owner and Los Angeles-based real-estate developer Lew Wolff is among several Bay Area-connected notables who’ve ponied up in the past week for the campaign supporting Proposition 14, the “top-two primary” ballot measure leveraged onto this June’s ballot by state Sen. Abel Maldonado, R-Santa Maria – now Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s nominee for lieutenant governor – as part of the deal he struck for his vote on the state budget last year.

Wolff gave $5,000 on Friday. Other recent contributions include $10,000 last Wednesday from Denise Watkins, a Pleasanton education activist and wife of former Seagate CEO Bill Watkins; $5,000 last Wednesday from former state Controller and 2006 Democratic gubernatorial candidate Steve Westly; $5,000 last Wednesday from Symantec Corp. Chairman John Thompson of Woodside; and $10,000 on Monday from Aart De Geus, Chairman and CEO of Mountain View-based Synopsys Inc. Though not from the Bay Area, the $20,000 that the California Chamber of Commerce gave yesterday ain’t chicken feed, either.

Hope 2010 reported having $721,835 in the bank at 2009’s end, but as reported earlier, the committee has been spending directly to promote the measure (and, though he’d surely say it’s not the intent, to get his name into Oakland voters’ mailboxes).

And the alcohol industry is anteing up big time for the Stop Hidden Taxes ballot measure committee, formed by the California Chamber of Commerce and the California Taxpayers’ Association both to oppose a proposed ballot measure to lower the Legislative vote threshold for budget bills from two-thirds to a simple majority, and to support the chamber’s proposed measure to increase the Legislative vote threshold for state levies and charges (including alcohol levies!) from a simple majority to two-thirds.

The past week has seen contributions of $25,000 from the San Francisco-based Wine Institute (above the $25,000 it gave earlier this month); $20,000 from beer giant Crown Imports LLC of Chicago; $20,000 from the California Beer & Beverage Distributors Issues PAC; and $25,000 from MillerCoors of Milwaukee. The Wine Institute’s $25,000 had just come in as contributions of $2,500 each from Cline Cellars in Sonoma; J Vineyards & Winery in Healdsburg; Jordan Vineyard & Winery in Healdsburg; Kunde Estate Winery & Vineyards in Kenwood; Newton Vineyard in St. Helena; Pax Wine Cellars in Santa Rosa; Ridge Vineyards/Lytton Springs in Healdsburg; Rombauer Vineyards in St. Helena; Sonoma Wine Company in Graton; and ZWine Company LLC in Napa.

“Cannabis Planet,” a 30-minute weekly television program is about to start a 26-week run on the Bay Area’s KOFY-TV (Channel 20/13) at midnight this Friday.

The show – focusing on the merits of the marijuana plant in medicine, industry and agriculture “and the benefits this plant brings to Planet Earth, mankind and the United States” – is already seen in the Los Angeles and San Diego markets, and will roll out in Sacramento in March and in Colorado later this spring.

Weekly topics will include cannabis news and information, profiles of medical marijuana collectives, cannabis cooking, patient testimonials, celebrity interviews, music, entertainment and more. It’s co-hosted by Ngaio Bealum, publisher of West Coast Cannabis Magazine, and Los Angeles medical marijuana activist Sarah Diesel; Oakland’s own Ed Rosenthal, the “guru of ganja” who’s world-renowned for his horticultural expertise in marijuana, will serve as a resident expert offering cultivation tips, while Chef Michael Delao will cook up some cannabis cuisine.

“We are very excited to be bringing this show into the Bay Area, where Prop. 215 was born” Brad Lane, the show’s creator and executive producer, said in a news release. “Our goal at Cannabis Planet is to inform and educate the masses about the merits of the Cannabis Sativa plant, and to fight for safe and legal access for medical cannabis patients.”

That’s a hell of a publicity blitz even as California ramps up the debate over Ammiano’s bill and a like-minded November ballot measure put forth by Oakland marijuana activists and businessmen Richard Lee and Jeffrey Jones. But when I talked to Lane this afternoon, he insisted it’s not a political show.

“Our political agenda is to legalize cannabis” for food, fuel, fiber and medicine “but we’re not a political-based show, if that makes sense – were just trying to educate and inform the masses about the merits of cannabis sativa,” he said, noting the show won’t depict or promote recreational use of marijuana. “Hemp, hemp hooray – we just want to get the message out there.”

The show originally ran in Los Angeles for 13 weeks, then was re-run. Lane said the producers have “re-mastered” the LA episodes with minor touches to make them geographically appropriate for other areas – San Diego and Bay Area backdrops, for example – and are now producing a second run of 13 new shows which will contain more local content.

Lane said the Berkeley Patients Group is the flagship Bay Area sponsor, with other support for the show coming from San Francisco’s Ketama Collective, Richmond’s Seven Stars Holistic Healing, and Berkeley-based KZee Novelty Products, maker of the “Lollipipe” edible candy smoking pipe. “We plan on bringing in more sponsors, we’ve just started dipping our toe in the water in the Bay Area,” he said.

Statewide sponsors include the MediCann medical-marijuana-evaluation clinics, as well as Canadian hydroponics companies Advanced Nutrients and BC Northern Lights.

Ammiano’s Marijuana Control, Regulation, and Education Act (AB 2254) would create a regulatory structure similar to that used for beer, wine and liquor, permitting taxed sales to adults while barring sales to or possession by those under 21. Its former incarnation, AB 390, was approved by the Assembly Public Safety Committee – which Ammiano chairs – last month, but died when the clock ran out on the last Legislative session. Re-introduced, it’ll probably make a quick pass back through Public Safety on its way to the Assembly Health Committee.

The lawmakers’ letter urges Feinstein to cancel her plan to introduce legislation to speed more water withdrawals out of the Sacramento River and San Francisco Bay-Delta ecosystem.

“Salmon may not have high paid lobbyists like the corporate agricultural interests in the Central Valley, but they are critical to our coastal economy,” said Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, who was among the letter’s signatories. “The Feinstein plan will put thousands of families out of work from the fishing industry and local economies of the Pacific Coast.”

Salmon runs of the Sacramento River and other Northern California river systems have suffered in recent years, leading to unprecedented closures of the fishing season with significant effects on the fishing industry and related businesses across the West Coast, according to Miller’s release. Estimates of the job losses from the salmon fishery closure range as high as 23,000.

Feinstein proposes to override salmon protections, requiring the export pumps in the southern Bay-Delta to run at higher speed regardless of their effect on the salmon population.

The letter’s other signatories include Rep. John Garamendi, D-Walnut Grove; Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma; and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose.

In other water news, groups opposing the $11.1 billion water bond that the Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have put on November’s ballot are touting poll results indicating most voters oppose it, too.

Pollsters from Jan. 20 through 25 posed this question to 600 likely voters across the state:

Now I would like to ask you about a ballot measure on November’s ballot. The measure is titled, “Safe, clean, and reliable drinking water supply act of 2010” and reads as follows: To protect water quality and ensure safe, clean drinking water; meet the water supply needs of California residents, farms, businesses, expand water conservation
and recycling; restore fish and wildlife habitat; reduce polluted runoff that contaminates rivers, streams, beaches, and bays; and protect the safety of water supplies threatened by earthquakes and other natural disasters; the State of California shall issue bonds totaling eleven billion one hundred forty million dollars ($11,140,000) paid from existing state funds subject to independent, annual audits, and citizen oversight. The fiscal impact would cost the state about 22 billion dollars over 30 years to pay off the 11 billion dollars in principal and 11 billion in interest costs of the bonds with payments of 800 million dollars a year.
Would you vote “Yes” in favor of the measure or “No” against it if the election were held today?

The poll found only about a third (34 percent) of likely voters support the measure, while 55 percent oppose it – a decidedly weak start for a ballot measure. The opposition crossed party lines and extended to all regions of the state. The poll has a four-percentage-point margin of error.

Among the environmental, consumer, and environmental justice groups opposing the bond are the Sierra Club, Clean Water Action, Planning and Conservation League, Friends of the River, Food & Water Watch, the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water, the Winnemem Wintu tribe, California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, California Water Impact Network, Southern California Watershed Alliance, and Restore the Delta. They say it hands out billions to agribusiness corporations and other special interests at taxpayers’ expense.

“Voters recognize this bond as bad water policy and bad fiscal policy at a time when California is drowning in red ink,” Sierra Club Senior Advocate Jim Metropulos said in a news release. “We need clean water and we need a better water policy, but this bond is not going to get us there.”

The California Federation of Teachers’ Committee on Political Education (COPE) on Wednesday put $700,000 into the “Teachers, Firefighters and Nurses for an On-Time Budget” committee; the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) had kicked in $350,000 a day earlier, and the California Professional Firefighters gave $7,702 on Friday.

The committee is backing the “On-Time Budget Act of 2010,” which reduces the voting threshold to pass a budget while also providing that that if the Legislature fails to pass a budget bill by June 15, all lawmakers will permanently forfeit any pay and expenses for every day until the day the budget is passed. The proponents have until May 10 to gather valid signatures from at least 694,354 registered voters in order to put the proposed constitutional amendment on November’s ballot.

Meanwhile, the California Teachers Association put $580,850 this past week into its “Taxpayers for Jobs and Against Corporate Handouts” committee, which is pushing a ballot measure to repeal several corporate tax loopholes enacted in recent years.

Specifically, it would repeal laws that let businesses shift operating losses to prior tax years and extend the period permitted to shift operating losses to future tax years; that let corporations share tax credits with affiliated corporations; that let multistate businesses used a sales-based income calculation instead of a calculation based on a combination of property, payroll and sales. The Legislative Analyst’s Office says this would raise about $1.7 billion in revenue for the state when fully phased in, starting in 2011-12. The proponents have until May 13 to gather valid signatures from at least 433,971 registered voters in order to put this proposed statute on November’s ballot.

I’d noticed it too: a mailer went out recently urging support for the ballot measure, which would raise tobacco taxes to fund cancer research. It went addressed to “Dear Fellow Oakland Voter.” And it went out with Perata’s photo and name all over it.

Gammon, the duke of Perata-watchers from waaay back, notes:

Perata’s use of the cancer-measure committee’s funds in this manner makes little sense unless his true aim is to boost his mayoral campaign, experts say. Indeed, the cancer-research initiative, which would raise taxes on cigarettes, hasn’t even qualified for the ballot yet. Doug Heller, executive director of the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Consumer Watchdog, which keeps close tabs on the state’s initiative process, noted that the proposition will probably face potent opposition from Big Tobacco because it proposes to raise California cigarette taxes by $1 a pack. In other words, it’s foolhardy, Heller said, to spend money now on a local mailer when the tobacco industry will spend millions in the summer and fall attempting to kill the initiative. “Every dollar will be precious in this campaign,” Heller said.

Campaign finance reports also indicate that Perata is muddying the waters between the cancer-research measure and his mayoral campaign in ways that raise legal and ethical questions. Under California law, it is illegal for a candidate to use funds from a statewide ballot-measure committee with no contribution limits to support a campaign for an office that does have donation limits. Nonetheless, Perata has hired at least three consultants to work on both campaigns, raising questions as to whether they are being paid by the cancer-research committee to work on his mayoral campaign, in violation of state law.

I talked this evening with Perata spokesman Jason Kinney.

“I don’t know about the number (of mailers), but I know it went to all voters in the November 2008 election in Oakland,” he told me, saying they’re “the people he (Perata) knows best” after representing them for so long in the Legislature and, before that, on the Alameda County Board of Supervisors.

Perata has done the same – targeting Oakland first with mailings urging support for certain statewide ballot measures – in the past, Kinney noted. He said the Bay Area tends to be both a rich hunting ground for the petition signatures needed to put a measure on the ballot, and also a place packed with liberal voters more likely to support tax increases for what they see as just causes.

Of course, he wasn’t running a concurrent campaign for Oakland mayor when he was stumping for those other measures. And he hadn’t paid his longtime political lieutenant, Oakland City Councilman Ignacio de la Fuente, a hefty consulting fee on those earlier measures, either.

Kinney said Gammon’s story was “fairly insulting to Don personally” because funding cancer research long has been a cause “near and dear to his heart” – both his parents died of cancer, and he and several staffers are survivors.

So when it came time to raise awareness for this measure, “he started in Oakland, where his base is,” Kinney said. Future mailers will go elsewhere around the Bay Area, he added, and will be handed out at farmers’ markets, churches and other public gathering places across the region.

Perata always has been a grandmaster both at raising a lot of money and at shuffling it among his many committees and causes, yet a years-long FBI probe turned up no criminal activity and Fair Political Practice Commission investigations have brought nothing more than the occasional slap on the wrist or outright dismissal. He knows how to use the system to his advantage.

How Oakland voters feel about that remains to be seen.

The proposed constitutional amendment would remove authority for setting California’s 53 Congressional district boundaries from the state Legislature, and would give that authority instead to the same Citizens Redistricting Commission that will soon be setting state Legislative boundaries (as required by 2008’s successful Proposition 11).

He’s the only major donor to the campaign; he has until March 22 to gather and submit 694,354 registered voters’ valid signatures in order to qualify the measure for November’s ballot.

The rather euphemistically named “Taxpayers Right to Vote Act” would require local governments to get the approval of two-thirds of their voters before providing electricity to new customers or expanding such service to new territories if any public funds or bonds are involved, or before providing electricity through a community choice program, if any public funds or bonds are involved. Critics say PG&E is playing on populist themes in order to block local governments from abandoning the utility giant in favor of power contracts with smaller, greener energy producers – a movement that’s been gaining steam in recent years.

The power giant’s latest ante – almost doubling the $3.5 million it had put into the committee from July through October to qualify the measure for the ballot – comes at the end of a week in which several California newspapers published editorials (the Sacramento Bee and Fresno Bee ran slightly differing versions of the same piece, and the Redding Record Searchlight had its own) taking aim at the measure, saying it’s anything but what its title implies.

Secretary of State Debra Bowen announced Jan. 12 that the measure had qualified for the ballot – here’s a tally of the signatures gathered – and so clearly the company is now making ready to spend whatever it’ll take to protect its profits.