Assemblywoman Mary Hayashi, D-Castro Valley, was accused of some tit-for-tat legislative tactics this week, but her office says it’s much ado about nothing.

Hayashi chairs the Assembly Business and Professions Committee, while state Sen. Gloria Negrete McLeod, D-Chino, chairs the equivalent Senate Business, Professions and Economic Development Committee.

Hayashi’s medical peer-review bill – AB 120, sponsored by the California Medical Association – was to be considered Monday by McLeod’s committee, but Senate committee staffers thought there should be a comprehensive medical peer review bill which would be the sum of parts offered by Hayashi (in AB 120), McLeod (in her SB 700) and state Sen. Sam Aanestad, R-Grass Valley (in his SB 58). To that end, McLeod’s committee offered amendments and gave Hayashi and the CMA a week to mull them over, putting AB 120 on the schedule for the Senate committee’s July 6 hearing.

Several Legislative sources say Hayashi’s reaction was to try to pull eight bills – some of which were McLeod’s own, the rest of which came from her committee – from the Assembly B&P Committee’s Tuesday-morning hearing agenda. Then she tried to scuttle the hearing entirely, the sources claimed; apparently state Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg’s office intervened so that as of late Monday night, the hearing was back on, though some of the eight bills still weren’t heard.

“It caused a great deal of anxiety on everybody’s behalf. She … had thrown a lot of people’s lives into flux,” said one Legislative staffer, noting people had flown to Sacramento for the bills’ hearing. “We all scratched our heads.”

“She, with that bill from day one that it got into the Senate, was saying ‘This is the CMA’s biggest priority,’ and everyone else was like, ‘Well, that’s nice,’” said another staffer elsewhere in the Legislature, adding a one-week delay of her bill to insert some consumer-friendly amendments with bipartisan support shouldn’t have caused such a reaction.

The situation ranks among “tiddly-wink issues” compared to the massive budget crisis, this staffer said, and the Pro Tem’s office wasn’t happy that it had to take time during this hellacious week to deal with it. It’s unclear whether this had anything to do with Steinberg’s decision this afternoon to postpone all Senate policy committee meetings until after a budget deal is in place.

But Cory Jasperson, Hayashi’s chief of staff, says that’s not how it went down at all.

“The Business and Professions Committee hearing scheduled for Tuesday, June 30th, was never cancelled or rescheduled. Only the Speaker has the authority to cancel or reschedule committee hearings,” he said. “All of the bills scheduled for the Tuesday morning hearing were heard by the Committee with the exception of three bills authored by Senator Negrete McLeod which the author requested be put over to a later hearing.”

“There has been a lot of confusion in the Capitol over the past few days around the uncertainty of committee hearings in the Assembly and Senate due to the fluidity of on-going budget negotiations,” Jasperson added. “Some committee hearings previously scheduled for Tuesday were rescheduled for Thursday and today the Senate postponed committee hearings indefinitely. For example, some Senate hearings this morning were cancelled mid-hearing and hearings this afternoon were cancelled just minutes before the scheduled start times.”

So it seems as if either there was some honest miscommunication about hearing schedules followed by some state Senate knife-sharpening for Hayashi’s hide, or Hayashi tried to flex some committee-chair muscle and got smacked down.

It’s still a lot of he-said/she-said, but add this to Hayashi’s dust-up with state Sen. Ellen Corbett, D-San Leandro, over their bills to save the San Leandro Hospital emergency room from closure, and it surely seems Hayashi hasn’t been making any friends in the other chamber this week.

The story I wrote earlier this week about Rep. Barbara Lee’s health-care reform discussion forum Monday in Oakland brought a lot of varied responses from readers. For example, here are two e-mails I received within a few minutes of each other yesterday:

Thank you for a great article. The only solution to the Healthcare problem is a single payer plan. It cannot and should not be dismissed. The naysayer Republicans have no alternative plan to get the 47 million plus people healthcare coverage. The question should be how do we get healthcare for all rather than how do we get healthcare for all without hurting the profit of the Insurance Industry.

Now is the time for real change. They should never have been allowed to take single payer plan off the table. Many feel that we will be lucky if we get a public plan but that should not even be a question.

And…

Can you send me some of the kool aide these people must be drinking?

Everyone quotes the number of people without health care at 46million, but the report this comes from states that it is more likely in the area of 38 million, looking at the actual number of people without heath care at any one point in time. If you consider non-Americans, you can take out another 20%. And if you consider the number of people earning over $75k a year and who just don’t want to be bothered, you actally end up with a really small number of people lacking insurance.

Anyway, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius this morning released a series of state-by-state reports on the health care status quo in order to highlight the need for health reform.

“In states across the country, health care costs are going up and families are struggling to get the quality care they need and deserve,” Sebelius said in her news release. “We cannot wait to pass reform that protects what works about health care and fixes what’s broken.”

“The American people have been calling for reform, and they should not have to wait any longer. Health reform will assure quality affordable health care for all Americans, lower costs, and give more Americans the choices they deserve. The time for reform is now.”

Read the report on California, after the jump…
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A few relevant links today that have nothing to do with Michael Jackson:

The U.S. Supreme Court says school officials can’t strip search students who pose no clear threat of danger to others; seems like a gimme, but Justice Clarence Thomas dissents.

Senate Democrats keep cutting health-care reform costs, while Republicans insist any public option is a dealbreaker.

The Assembly tries to buy some time before California must start issuing IOUs, but the state Senate smacks it down.

The GOP continues to claim climate-change legislation will cost each American family up to $3,100 per year. But, no.

Heh, heh. [chortle] BwahAHAHAHA!

Your campaign finance tidbit du jour: Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison – with an estimated net worth of $22.5 billion, placing fourth on Forbes’ most recent list of the richest people in the world – gave California Attorney General Jerry Brown’s nascent 2010 gubernatorial campaign $13,000 Saturday, according to the Secretary of State’s database as updated today.

I think $13,000 is about 5.8 millionths of $22.5 billion. Or, as Larry Ellison might say, a generous tip.

After covering a federal court hearing this morning in San Francisco, I was walking through Civic Center and saw several dozen state workers — most of them wearing the distinctive purple t-shirts of the Service Employees International Union — picketing outside the state building.

“We’re taking care of California, don’t hurt our families,” “Don’t balance the budget on our backs,” their signs read. “5 percent don’t pay the rent” and “The party of ‘no’ has got to go,” they chanted.

They were delivering to Gov. Arnold Schwarzengger’s San Francisco office copies of petitions signed by 35,000 state workers, urging the governor to drop his plans to cut another 5 percent from all state workers’ salaries; they’ve already lost more than a month’s worth of wages through the governor’s mandatory furloughs.

Instead, they want the governor to make a 10 percent cut in California’s $34 billion in private vendor contracts. Just since January 2008, the state has entered into more than 15,000 new private vendor contracts worth almost $6 billion; SEIU Local 1000 boasts it has sued to stop about 120 such contracts in the past two years, winning four out of five cases by proving the contracts were more expensive and less efficient than using state employees to do the same work.

“It’s time for the governor and his corporate supporters to begin giving back to help balance the budget by cutting private contracts and closing corporate tax loopholes,” SEIU Local 1000 President Yvonne Walker said in an e-mailed statement.

SEIU workers were outside Schwarzenegger’s State Capitol office in Sacramento today, too. Senate Republican Leader Dennis Hollingsworth, R-Murrieta, seemed to misunderstand the union’s intent, issuing a statement saying the union wants all of the state’s private vendor contracts eliminated.

“SEIU and AFSCME’s proposals are out of touch with reality, and they do more harm than good. Big labor’s agenda is clear, protect the bloated bureaucracy that got us into this mess,” Hollingsworth said, noting private vendor contracts represent thousands of private-sector jobs and billions of dollars in future tax revenue that would be lost.

In the last decade, he said, public-sector employment has outpaced private sector employment by 9 percent.

“Something is wrong with our system when the market no longer drives job creation. California’s bureaucracy should never out pace private sector jobs. SEIU is protecting a broken system and putting more hard-working Californians on the street. Budget priorities should be performance based, not based on which bully can shove the hardest,” Hollingsworth said, claiming that increasing the gas tax, instituting an alcohol tax and accelerating tax collection on small businesses would protect labor’s membership while shifting the cost to the general public. “Increasing taxes and proposing new ones is insane. It’s exactly what the voters said no to. We must cut programs that don’t work, end automatic spending formulas, and pursue long-term reforms that will keep us out of this mess for good.”

And California Republican Party chairman Ron Nehring had this to say about it:

“Today we see the union campaign of threats and intimidation move from the hearing room to the capitol steps. The venue is different, but the tactics remain the same: bully government officials into making decisions that make sense for their narrow interest instead of the public good.

“Today, SEIU will continue to reject a 5 percent cut in pay for state government bureaucrats while continuing to demand billions in new taxes to be paid by California families who are already struggling to make ends meet. The Governor and lawmakers should continue to stand strong in the face of this continued bullying and intimidation by union officials.”

UPDATE @ 3:13 P.M.: Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear notes the governor issued an executive order earlier this month to eliminate funding “for contracts entered into by state agencies and departments after March 1, 2009 for all goods and services excluding those necessary for public safety and to prohibit entering into any new contracts.” The order also directed all state departments to develop and submit to the Finance Department plans to reduce their future spending on contracts and purchases by at least 15 percent no later than 30 days after the adoption of the revised 2009-10 budget.

The Oakland-based Californians for a Democratic Majority PAC on Tuesday gave $100,000 to former state Sen. Carole Migden’s Legal Defense and Compliance Fund.

That’s a big chunk of change from a PAC that had only $149,156.47 in the bank at 2008’s end. But it’s an even greater boon for Migden’s legal fund, which finished 2008 with only $1,725.95 in the bank and $127,419.40 in outstanding debts. The only other big contribution the legal fund has received in 2009 was $5,000 back in January from Feysan J. Lodde of San Francisco, the founder and owner of Fairfield-based MV Transportation Inc.

So, who are Californians for a Democratic Majority? The group’s treasurer is Michael Colbruno of Oakland, who is Clear Channel Outdoor’s vice president of public policy; an Oakland Planning Commissioner; a Democratic activist (a delegate to the 2004 Democratic National Convention and an unsuccessful candidate for the Alameda County Democratic Central Commtittee last year); and Migden’s former legislative director. Lists of the PAC’s donors for the 2008 and 2006 election cycles show it has been funded by a variety of labor unions, Democratic officials and business interests.

Colbruno tonight said he’s one of three people who decide how the PAC spends its money; he declined to name the other two without consulting them first, but said they’d agreed it was “worthy to help her (Migden) out with her legal stuff.”

“She’s had a significant and heralded career doing some great work on environmental and civil rights and foster care work,” he said, adding many elected officials run up legal bills “as your opponents make charges against you, and sometimes you need help with those.”

“I suspect she’s still going to be in the game for a while, she was a great legislator,” he said.

It’s not the first time Colbruno has helped Migden out; in 2007, he helped get Clear Channel to donate a bunch of pro-Migden billboards in San Francisco as her re-election campaign was heating up.

Migden’s legal fund certainly has seen a lot of action. California’s Fair Political Practices Commission in 2002 fined her $16,000 for eight violations of campaign-finance law; in 2006 fined her $47,500 for 21 violations; later in 2006 fined her another $47,500 for another 22 violations; and last year fined her $350,000 for 89 violations – the largest single fine in the FPPC’s history. (Thanks to Calitics for the litany.)

Despite admitting all those violations, Migden sued the FPPC last year in federal court, claiming she should be allowed to use $647,000 from her 2000 Assembly re-election campaign for her 2008 state Senate re-election campaign; the FPPC claimed that money became surplus when she left the Assembly and couldn’t legally be used for the 2008 bid. The FPPC countersued, “seeking more than $9 million in damages for her consistent and deliberate failure to follow California’s campaign laws.” A judge issued an injunction letting Migden use the old funds, and the cases finally were settled in October with Migden agreeing to pay $40,000 to resolve allegations of campaign finance regulations.

Migden – who despite accessing her old campaign funds still lost her 3rd State Senate District seat last year to then-Assemblyman and former protégé Mark Leno - now serves on the California Integrated Waste Management Board that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is so hot to eliminate as wasteful (even though its current annual budget of $235.3 million comes all from fees, not the state’s crippled General Fund). Schwarzenegger appointed Migden to the $132,000-a-year board post in December.

There’s new federal legislation afoot aimed at reducing the nation’s rising tide of drug overdose deaths – unfortunately, yet another dubious distinction in which California is a leader.

Rep. Donna Edwards, D-Md., today rolled out the Drug Overdose Reduction Act – making $27 million per year available to cities, states, tribal governments and nonprofits to implement overdose prevention plans – even as the Drug Policy Alliance issued a new report on the problem. (At the moment, despite more than 20,000 U.S. overdose deaths per year, there’s no federal money dedicated to overdose prevention.)

Accidental drug overdose — from drugs both legal and illegal — now ranks second only to auto collisions among the leading causes of accidental deaths in the United States, according to the DPA, and California has the largest number of overdose deaths in the nation: 3,646 Californians died of overdose in 2006, or 10 people per day. In fact, overdose was the leading cause of accidental death for Californians ages 25-64 in 2006, surpassing even motor vehicle accidents, and is the second leading cause for all ages.

What’s fueling the increase? It may not be what you think. Here’s what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Congress last year:

“One might assume that the increase in drug overdose deaths is due to an increased use of street drugs like heroin and cocaine, because we have in the past associated such drugs with overdoses. However, in a paper published in 2006, the CDC drilled down to another level to look at the codes given to the specific drugs recorded on the death certificates through 2004. When these more specific drugs were tabulated, we found that street drugs were not behind the increase. The increase from 1999 to 2004 was driven largely by opioid analgesics [such as OxyContin and Vicodin], with a smaller contribution from cocaine, and essentially no contribution from heroin. The number of deaths in the narcotics category that involved prescription opioid analgesics increased from 2,900 in 1999 to at least 7,500 in 2004, an increase of 160% in just 5 years. By 2004, opioid painkiller deaths numbered more than the total of deaths involving heroin and cocaine in this category.”

And although the CDC said it’s not easy to project how things have gone in the last few years, what data it has available indicates “that the mortality statistics through 2005 probably underestimate the present magnitude of the problem.”

More, including a California elected official’s unique perspective, after the jump…
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Staffers at California’s Fair Political Practices Commission have proposed a $5,400 penalty for Rosario Marin, who accepted honoraria for speaking engagements while serving as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Secretary of the State and Consumer Services Agency.

Marin — also a former U.S. Treasurer under President George W. Bush and a 2004 Republican primary candidate for the U.S. Senate — resigned her $175,000-a-year state cabinet post in March, as the Los Angeles Times reported that pharmaceutical companies paid Marin for speeches within months of her agency’s push to reduce oversight of prescription drugs, including $15,000 from Pfizer Inc. and $13,500 from Bristol-Myers Squibb. Financial disclosure forms show Marin was paid at least $50,000 for appearances between April 2004 and the end of 2007.

According to the FPPC staff’s report, Marin received lousy legal advice:

Respondent Marin’s violation of the Act and its regulations involved detrimental reliance upon the assistance and counsel of no fewer than four department and agency attorneys who reviewed her statements of economic interests but did not identify the “predominant activity” standard that separated permissible from impermissible acceptance of honoraria for bona fide business activities that involved speechmaking.

As is the FPPC’s common practice, Marin already has agreed to the fine; the matter is on the agenda for the FPPC’s approval at its meeting June 18 in Sacramento.

The Assembly this week unanimously approved a bill that would create a pilot project in Alameda, Los Angeles and Sacramento counties requiring installation of ignition interlock devices (IID) on any vehicle owned or operated by someone convicted of a drunk-driving offense.

“A restricted license still allows a person to drive drunk,” said Assemblyman Mike Feuer, D-Los Angles, the author of Assembly Bill 91. “Since we have the technology that can help prevent drivers from getting behind the wheel after drinking, we should be using it. Not only would this legislation help reduce the likelihood that innocent people will be harmed by drunk drivers, it also promotes sober driving habits.”

An IID links into a vehicle’s ignition system so that a driver must blow into the device in order to start the vehicle; it won’t start unless the driver’s alcohol level is below the limit of .08 blood-alcohol content. Courts now have the discretion to require the devices’ installation, but aren’t mandated to do so.

States where IID installation is mandatory for first-time offenders have seen significant decreases in repeat DUI offenses, Feuer said: New Mexico’s drunk-driving recidivism has declined by more than 60 percent since it enacted an IID mandate for first-time offenders, while West Virginia saw a drop of more than 70 percent.

California taxpayers won’t pay the cost; offenders would be required to pay for the IIDs. The pilot project would go from July 1, 2010 to Jan. 1, 2015, and the Department of Motor Vehicles would have to report to the Legislature by mid-2014 on the project’s effectiveness.

The state Senate now takes up the bill.

It looks as if no matter how the battle over children’s health insurance goes in the next few weeks in the Legislature, state Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, is preparing for a whole different scenario next year at the ballot box.

Days after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed to abolish the Healthy Families Program (which would entail booting more than 900,000 California kids out of health insurance), Steinberg’s Committee for a New Economy on Monday made a $75,000 contribution to Californians for Children’s Health — a sizable cash infusion for a committee that previously had only about $20,000 in its coffers.

The statement of organization for Californians for Children’s Health says the group – for which a Web site is under construction – exists to support “expansion of children’s health coverage,” and its sponsoring organizations include the Children’s Defense Fund Action Council; the Children’s Partnership, a project of the Tides Center; Children Now; and PICO California. Its CFO is PICO California director Jim Keddy; its secretary is Kelly Hardy, Children Now’s associate director for health.

Hardy earlier today told me Californians for Children’s Health aims to develop a ballot measure for November 2010, and although today’s rapidly changing budget environment makes it hard to say exactly what that measure’s specifics will be, “we’re contemplating new revenue sources that would come in, not General Fund sources, that would support children’s coverage programs.”

She wouldn’t speculate on any further details, but we all know carving out new, specific revenue streams for services Californians deem crucial is a regular practice — think of Steinberg’s own Proposition 63 of 2004, which added a percentage point to the income taxe rate for Californians earning more than $1 million a year in order to bankroll California’s long underfunded mental health system. And of course, we all also know these revenue streams don’t necessarily always remain dedicated; Steinberg himself advocated last month’s Proposition 1E, which would’ve raided the Prop. 63 mental-health funds to augment the state’s bedraggled General Fund.

At any rate, as Children Now and its partners gear up for events this Thursday in San Francisco, Sacramento, Fresno and San Diego to protest the governor’s proposed cuts in children’s health, Hardy said they appreciate Steinberg’s foresight in contributing to their committee: “We’re really glad for his support, of course, and for his prioritizing of children’s coverage programs.”