PROTECT CONSUMER JUSTICE.ORG

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo nabs Elliott Broidy, a California heavyweight in the world of Republican politics.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is sending more inmates to out-of-state prisons run by a private company that recently made a $100,000 donation to a ballot campaign committee controlled by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Gov. Schwarzenegger has no plans to return $256,484. He raised the money one of his initiatives from Scott Rothstein, the latest high-flier to crash amid allegations that he bilked his friends and investors in a Ponzi scheme.

Food-borne illness sickens 76 million Americans, sends 300,000 people to hospitals and kills 5,000 individuals annually. Still, in the nation’s biggest farm state, most food safety bills are killed or gutted, victims of a powerful agricultural lobby and legislators who have relied on Washington to decide how best to protect food. Here’s a hard look at how the issue fared in Sacramento in 2009.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who often goes out of his to criticize attorneys, doesn’t welcome many new lawyers to the trade. But then Sara Granda is not like other new lawyers.

Billionaire Ed Roski Jr. is spending millions in his quest to bring a National Football League team to the City of Industry. One of the more modest costs appears to be the price of getting a new law through the California Legislature that will permit him to build the 75,000-seat stadium without having to go through a full environmental review.

Financial institutions, including several banks that received taxpayer bailouts, spent almost $4.01 million on lobbying in Sacramento in the first three quarters of the year as they sought to blunt legislation to rein them in. The industry successfully blunted and blocked several bills intended to provide consumer protections and halt abuses that led to the worst recession since the Great Depression.