Blog Post
September 7, 2010
Even as gubernatorial campaign spending has skyrocketed in recent years, fewer and fewer voters have been turning out to the polls in state primary elections, according to a study released late last week by the California Fair Political Practices Commission.
The study [PDF] concludes that the increase in independently wealthy, self-funded candidates have driven up the cost of elections (even though those candidates are often unsuccessful), which in turn has forced less wealthy candidates to spend more time raising money.
Not that Jerry Brown knows how that feels.
The study looks at gubernatorial primaries from 1978 to 2010. During that time, it was actually former Northwest Airlines executive Al Checchi – not Meg Whitman – who spent the most per primary vote. Checchi spent $70.21 per vote in his ultimately failed Democratic bid in 1998, whereas Whitman spent $65.29 this year.
Bucking the trend, Brown actually spent less per vote during primary season this year than he did in 1978, even when adjusted for inflation. In 1978, when he also ran unopposed, Brown spent $1.77 (in 2010 dollars) per vote. This year, he spent just 38 cents per vote after running San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom out of the race last fall without even firing a shot.
All that despite more people voting in the 1978 primaries – about 6.8 million – than this year's, when 5.6 million cast ballots.
Article
August 21, 2010
The office of Attorney General Jerry Brown has dismissed an increasing number of criminal cases against defendants suspected of elder abuse, while cutting back on surprise inspections to investigate violence and neglect in nursing homes.
Blog Post
August 20, 2010
Who are Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown? Depends who you ask.
Jerryfails.com would have you believe Brown’s life amounts to nothing but “a career politician with a legacy of broken promises and failure.” Meg-a-Myths.com barely stops short of calling Whitman a pathological liar, with Brown spokesman Sterling Clifford explaining the site exists because “Whitman is either incapable or unwilling to tell the truth about Jerry Brown, California or herself. If she won’t, we will.”
Unveiling his Myths website last week marked Brown’s first foray into specialized campaign websites outside of his main jerrybrown.org page, and the most recent in a long string of campaign websites rolled out by the candidates – the vast majority from Whitman’s camp.
Article
August 20, 2010
Gubernatorial candidates Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman have unrolled a string of campaign websites targeted at specific audiences since spring 2010. This timeline should help sort out when candidates first launched their specialized websites.
Blog Post
August 12, 2010
If visions of broken legs and whiplash isn’t enough for anxious parents watching kids romp in a giant, vinyl air-filled castle, California’s Attorney General has another nightmare scenario to add to the list: lead exposure.
Jerry Brown’s office filed suit Wednesday against nine manufacturers, distributors and renters of children’s bounce houses, claiming the vinyl structures contain unsafe levels of lead.
“Every single bounce house we rented, except for one, had high levels of lead,” said Charles Margulis, spokesman for the Center for Environmental Health.
Margulis said the levels ranged from 10 to more than 70 times the federal limit for lead in children’s products under the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act.
The Oakland-based environmental organization, which also filed suit, performed the testing.
There is no safe limit for lead. And although the tested levels are not high enough to cause acute lead poisoning, they do add to a child’s lead burden. Lead is associated with lowered IQ and learning disabilities in exposed children.
“Kids at birthday parties can spend hours playing in bounce houses,” said the attorney general in a press statement. “The goal of our lawsuit is to eliminate any chance they will be exposed to lead while they’re jumping around having a good time.”
Blog Post
July 23, 2010
Gubernatorial candidates Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman have both repudiated partisan politics and attacks made against their campaigns.
But despite their concern about partisan attacks, Politics Verbatim has documented hundreds of attacks the two candidates have made since the beginning of the campaign.
In a recent interview with Time magazine, Brown concluded that personal attacks may be the determining factor in deciding the next California governor.
He said:
But you know what decides it? Who f_____ up. Who says the wrong thing. Who insults someone. That will be the deciding factor … I'm not one to stay on message. Maybe not. But if I say something, you know I mean it. You know who it's coming from. That much hasn't changed.
After dissecting comments from more than 400 documents and multimedia articles since the two began their campaigns, Politics Verbatim has found a total of 353 “candidate attacks.” Candidate attacks include any statement in which either the Brown or Whitman campaign takes a shot at each other or another political target. Politics Verbatim is a new site created by California Watch that tracks the statements of Brown and Whitman.
Blog Post
July 16, 2010
Meg Whitman has out-raised Jerry Brown four to one in large contributions during the month-plus since the June 8 primary, further adding to her already massive cash advantage heading into election season, state campaign records show.
Not counting the $20 million check she wrote to her campaign two days after the primary – almost as much as Brown had in the bank at the time – Whitman has reported raising just more than $2 million since June 9, compared to about $516,000 for Brown. Late-contribution reporting rules require only donations of at least $5,000 to be disclosed in the weeks since the primary.
Whitman has also narrowed the gap or pulled ahead in several recent polls, which her campaign has hyped as indicators that she is gaining on Brown, who led going into the general election season.
The money disparity has been a popular narrative for Brown, who has portrayed himself as an insurgent underdog, running a low-cost campaign against Whitman's seemingly bottomless bank account. But that narrative has largely assailed Whitman's personal fortune, which continues to constitute the overwhelming bulk of her campaign cash, and not the money she has raised.
Blog Post
July 12, 2010
Like most big companies, eBay has for years rained campaign cash on politicians who supported their interests and tithed to others they could call on for help in a pinch. But little did they know, several of those politicians would turn out years later to be its CEO's biggest rivals.
While she was running the company Meg Whitman's, political committees tied to the online auctionhouse once gave thousands of dollars to Whitman's future Democratic rival for governor, Jerry Brown, and even a few hundred to her GOP primary opponent, Steve Poizner. Democratic U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, whom Whitman has taken heat for supporting, also took in a few grand from eBay's federal political action committee, as did her counterpart, Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
Blog Post
July 9, 2010
Where did the candidates for California's most high-profile elected offices – Jerry Brown, Meg Whitman, Barbara Boxer and Carly Fiorina – get their education?
None graduated from a public high school in California. San Francisco-born Attorney General Jerry Brown came the closest, attending St. Ignatius College Prep, the prestigious parochial school in his home town, and graduating from there in 1955. (The school, affectionately referred to as "SI," was founded exactly a hundred years earlier).
In fact, Brown has the purest California education pedigree of all four candidates. After graduating from St. Ignatius, he went to the University of Santa Clara, and then the Sacred Heart Novitiate Jesuit Seminary in Los Gatos in 1956. Four years later, he enrolled in UC Berkeley, where got a bachelor's degree in classics.
His opponent in the gubernatorial race was educated further afield. GOP candidate Meg Whitman graduated from Cold Spring Harbor High in Long Island, N.Y. in 1973. (Other notable former students include Lindsay Lohan, whose recent travails have not brought luster to her alma mater). Whitman went on to Princeton, where she got a degree in economics.
Blog Post
July 1, 2010
UPDATE: Upon further research it was discovered that the 16 pieces of jewelry with lead in them were from Richmond except two from Oakland and one from Emeryville, rather than all of the stores being from Richmond except two from Oakland and one from Emeryville.
Pieces of jewelry purchased from Rainbow and 5-7-9 stores in May yielded "highly toxic" lead content, including one piece that was 97 percent lead, the attorney general's office said in a statement released yesterday.
Of 16 pieces of costume jewelry from China, 15 contained more than 50 percent lead and one piece with the words "kids" and "lead free" on it had a clasp of 81 percent lead.
The attorney general's office said all the stores were in Richmond, except one in Emeryville and two in Oakland. The stores are not allowed to sell "plated metal components with more than 6 percent lead," according to a letter from Attorney General Jerry Brown to the retailer.
Rainbow Apparel's attorney Jeffrey Margulies said Wednesday that the jewelry identified in the attorney general's notice has been pulled from store shelves, adding that the attorney general's notification was the first indication that something was wrong with the jewelry.
The store does not test its products but rather presumes that its purchases from domestic vendors are safe and legal, he said. "We are moving quickly to try to figure out how this happened," he said, adding that actions taken in the future will depend on what Rainbow Apparel learns as it looks into the issue. The retailer's statement offered insight into how the pieces made it to their shelves:
