The Sacramento Bee reports that Schwarzenegger (or at least his spokesman) is displeased with the cameo role Poizner’s people gave him in a new ad trashing rival, and front-runner, Meg Whitman.

Since this is a primary, the Republicans are involved in the usual roller-derby effort to get the conservative vote (conservatives tend to bear extra clout in GOP primaries). The new Poizner ad links Whitman to President Barack Obama’s stance on immigration reform; says that Whitman, “like Schwarzenegger,” supports continuing state benefits to people without legal documents; and ties Whitman to U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer — the Democrat most likely to get conservatives to foam at the mouth — and government funding for abortions.

The zing at the end: “After Arnold, don’t we deserve a Republican?” Schwarzenegger press secretary Aaron McLear responded: ”I totally forgot [Poizner] was running until I saw that ad. We get that he’s desperate to be relevant, but extending his anti-immigrant campaign to Austrians? That’s just mean.”

Oh, and the SacBee calls the ad “misleading.”

Related posts:

Broidy, who lives in the exclusive Brentwood area of Los Angeles, entered a guilty plea in a New York courtroom today, admitting paying nearly $1 million in bribes in order to win $250 million in investments.

Here is what Attorney General Cuomo said about the case. For a review of the day’s developments, please see this article in the Los Angeles Times. And on Saturday, the Sacramento Bee connected more dots in the growing scandal.

Broidy was chairman of a venture capital fund, Markstone Capital Group, which carved a niche by investing in heavy industries in Isreal. Public employee pension funds from California to New York invested retirement savings of state and local workers in Broidy’s fund.

Cuomo accused Broidy of using bribes to win business. But he and his wife, Robin Rosenzweig, also gave large sums of presumably legal political donations, spreading more than $1.4 million in campaign donations to candidates and their causes in California, Los Angeles and at the federal level in recent years.

Broidy was an especially kind to Republicans, including President George W. Bush, as this invitation at the top shows.

Broidy was a major Republican fund-raiser during the 2008 campaign. Sen. John McCain brought his presidential campaign last year to Broidy’s Brentwood home for a $5 million shindig that was to be attended by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, as the Los Angeles Times wrote at the time in this article.

The venture capitalist was part of Schwarzenegger’s stable of donors, giving $161,000 to initiative campaign committees control by the governor, and another $97,900 to the California Republican Party, California Secretary of State records show.

UPDATE: Here is a link to a spread sheet of Broidy and his wife’s donations to California candidates and causes in this decade. It is drawn from the California Secretary of State’s web site.

FURTHER UPDATE: Broidy was the Republican National Committee’s finance chairman during the 2008 campaign, for good reason. He and his wife were major donors to federal campaigns up through at least September 2009, as you can see from this spreadsheet.

Broidy gave to Democratic politicians, such as former California Controller Steve Westly, who held sway over where to place pension fund money.

Perhaps Broidy’s oddest public campaign donation came in the form of two $3,000 checks in 2004 to a political action committee of the United Food & Commercial Workers.

At the time, the committee was controlled by Sean Harrigan, a former head of the board that oversees that California Public Employee Pension System, who later became a member of the Los Angeles Fire and Police Pensions board. Harrigan also has been subpoenaed in the ongoing case.

–Dan Morain

Related posts:

Matthew Pordum of the Daily Journal reports CDCR has agreed to send an additional 2,336 inmates to prisons operated by Corrections Corp. of America, in an extension of a contract with the company that is worth more than $54 million a year.  Six months before the CDCR decision, Corrections Corp. of America contributed $100,000 to Budget Reform Now, the committee organized to campaign for six state budget-related measures supported by Schwarzenegger on a special election ballot in May.

A Schwarzenegger spokeswoman told Pordum there was no connection between the donation and the contract extension, saying the governor had nothing to do with the extension.

The Journal story has more details about CCA’s political spending:

“We are politically active and make contributions to Democrats and Republicans alike all over the country, as do all companies of our size and reach,” said Louise Grant, vice president of communications at Corrections Corp.

Corrections Corp. donated $234,500 in 2007-08, and $38,900 so far this year, to several members of the California Legislature and the state Democratic and Republican parties, according to its filings with the Secretary of State.

The firm has also reported spending about $45,000 for each of the last three quarters on lobbyists in California.

The state began sending some inmates to CCA prisons in 2006 in response to Schwarzenegger’s emergency proclamation on prison overcrowding.  If the legislature approves the spending for the extension, California’s contract with CCA would be valued at more than $224 million a year, with state inmates housed at facilities in Arizona, Mississippi and Oklahoma.

The Schwarzenegger administration is not wholly responsible for the decision to send inmates to private prisons. The Legislature approved AB 900 in 2007 giving the state greater authority to transfer felons to private prisons outside the state.

The Florida-based prison prison firm, the Geo Group, also is seeking more California inmates. Geo is a significant campaign spender, giving $50,000 in October 2008 to the Schwarzenegger-backed Proposition 11 redistricting initiative.

Related posts:

Unlike many pols, however, Schwarzenegger has no plans to return money given by Scott Rothstein, the latest Ferrari-driving high-flier to crash amid allegations that he bilked friends and investors in a Ponzi scheme.

Rothstein was a Fort Lauderdale lawyer and head of a Florida law and lobbying firm, Rothstein Rosenfeldt & Adler. He is accused of having stolen more than $1 billion by convincing investors including hedge funds to invest in apparently nonexistent legal settlements. The Sun-Sentinel of Florida offers this report about the emerging scandal.

Like many wealthy people who later become law enforcement targets, Rothstein was generous, giving large sums of other people’s money to charities, as detailed in this report back when he was viewed as a “prince.” And like many others in his situation, Rothstein would dole out large campaign donations.

Politicians swarmed to his side.

When Schwarzenegger traveled to Rothstein’s home turf of Florida in search of campaign contributions, Rothstein could not have been more accommodating.

Rothstein’s law firm gave $250,000 to a Schwarzenegger-backed redistricting initiative, Proposition 11, which voters approved in November. Rothstein himself spent another $6,484 to co-host the Florida fund-raiser, California Secretary of State records show.

Schwarzenegger and Rothstein both are cigar aficionados. The governor is well known for his smoking tent in the courtyard outside the governor’s office. Rothstein once shared a stogie with an ink stained wretch. The campaign finance statement detailing Rothstein’s donation notes a nonmonetary contribution worth $315, presumably cigars, by Brazil Cigars & Tobacco of Miami to the Yes-on-11 campaign.

Counting the Proposition 11 money, Rothstein’s firm and its partners spread $441,784 to state campaign and politicians nationally, data compiled by the nonpartisan National Institute for Money in State Politics in Helena, Mont. Other than the $256,484 to Proposition 11 money, the firm’s next largest state donation was $177,000 to the Florida Republican Party, according to the institute’s findings.

The firm and its partners gave another $602,000 to federal candidates and parties between 2006 and 2009, including at least $142,500 to the Republican National Committee, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Rothstein could not have cared much about a California initiative. But he did care what Florida Gov. Charlie Crist thought of him and his law-lobbying firm. Crist, a Republican running for U.S. Senate, was the conduit  between Rothstein and Schwarzenegger, as well as other Republican heavyweights. Many of those benefactors now are distancing themselves from Rothstein.

A Miami hospital is giving back $1 million that Rothstein sent its way, as the Miami Herald reports. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal took $10,000 in October 2008 and is giving it back, according to Talking Points Memo. TPM also reports that there are calls for the Republican Governors Association to return $200,000 in Rothstein money. The New York Times detailed several others who are giving back the money or placing it in trust funds for victims of the purported fraud.

Not California Gov. Schwarzenegger.

Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear said by email that the money was given to the Proposition 11 committee, not the governor. So the governor has nothing to return, he reasoned.

The governor did, however, return Crist’s favor. Schwarzenegger hosted a fundraiser for Crist at his home a few weeks back.

–Dan Morain

Related posts:

Civil Justice Research & Education Project

Senate Majority Leader Dean Florez started the year with high hopes that he could transform California’s system of ensuring food safety .

The issue had drawn national attention. “Omnivore’s Dilemma” was atop the best seller lists, while authorities announced they had detected salmonella in hundreds of tainted peanut butter, paste and other products produced by Peanut Corporation of America, prompting a massive recall and a bankruptcy.

Setton Pistachio of Terra Bella, Calif., voluntarily pulled from the shelves scores of its products after federal authorities discovered they too were fouled by salmonella. Beef producers had recalled hundreds of thousands of pounds of hamburger containing e-coli.

“The days of voluntary recalls must come to an end,” Florez, a Democrat from the Central Valley town of Shafter, declared in an opinion article that appeared in the Los Angeles Times in April. “To live with the status quo leaves our nation with an unacceptable paradox: the pistachio nut, lauded in marketing campaigns as a healthy snack for the heart, becoming a killer in the gut.”

Despite all that, Florez had the look of resignation as he presented what was to have been his signature food safety bill at a mid-summer hearing of the Assembly Health Committee.

The measure had been “very tamed down,” Florez acknowledged, appearing to have little enthusiasm for the bill’s remains after a round of severe slashing on the Senate floor.

In its original state, Florez’s SB 173 would have required food processors and growers to notify the state of a potentially tainted product. It would have given the state the power to force a recall, and set severe penalties for processors and growers who fail to do their own testing and are then subject to a mandatory recall.

In its amended form, the bill preserved none of those goals. Instead, the legislation merely sought to authorize the state Public Health Officer to adopt regulations for voluntary recalls, which are initiated by individual companies.

Even in its weakened state, the measure went too far, at least for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. He vetoed it, declaring:

The Department of Public Health already has broad statutory and administrative authority to ensure contaminated food product is removed from commerce. This bill does not provide any additional improvements to that authority.

In the nation’s biggest farm state, food safety bills stall

In any given year, the Centers for Disease Control estimates, food-borne illness sickens 76 million Americans, sends 300,000 people to hospitals and kills 5,000 individuals. Still, most food safety bills introduced in Sacramento have been swiftly killed or gutted, victims of a powerful agricultural lobby and legislators who generally have looked to Washington to decide how best to protect food.

“We thought this was a federal government function,” said Florez. “Food safety was a hole in the legislative policy agenda.”

Efforts of Florez and several other legislators to make food safety a key issue in California this year were eclipsed by action at the federal level. After years of foot-dragging, Washington was poised to make policy changes in the food safety arena, including increased inspections of food facilities and mandatory recall powers for the government.

Now, California – widely seen as a pioneer in environmental and public health policy – could present more problems than solutions in terms of food safety.

The state is the nation’s largest producer of fresh fruits and vegetables, and also the source of vast numbers of recent outbreaks of food-borne illness. Deadly bacteria have been found in spinach, peppers, almonds, pistachios, and beef, products that are among the state’s top agricultural income-earners.

Advocates of a food safety regulatory overhaul say farms and processing facilities are inspected too infrequently and the state has no power to force growers and processors to reveal the results of microbial tests, or to demand that they recall potentially tainted food.

“It has been left up to industry for far too long,” said Elanor Starmer, a legislative advocate with the non-profit Food and Water Watch.

Safety standards for growing and handling leafy greens were developed after e.coli-tainted, packaged spinach sickened more than 200 people and killed three in 2006.

Critics point out that signing onto the standards – called the Leafy Green Products Handlers Marketing Agreement – is voluntary, although nearly all California salad producers have done so. Also, the standards only apply to the salad market while contamination seems to pop up in an ever-wider circle of food products.

The fact that the salad industry set safety standards after the spinach outbreak, not before, is precisely the problem, Florez said.

“It takes, unfortunately, a crisis or a lot of bad press,” he said.

The farm lobby prevails, despite recalls

A second Florez food safety bill, SB 550, sought to require grocery stores to stop the sale of a product subject to a recall when the product is scanned at the checkout counter.  The bill failed, falling 10 votes short of a majority on the Assembly floor as the session drew to a close.

Assemblymember Mike Feuer (D-Los Angeles) also authored an ambitious food safety bill this year. The bill, AB 1372, would have required food processors to implement hazard analysis and control plans similar to those required of participants in the leafy green marketing agreement. (Such plans are already mandatory for meat processors.)

The bill sought to authorize the state to order testing of food products it suspects of being tainted, and, like Florez’s bill, require that food processors report test results showing contamination.

“I think most Californians would be astonished to find that their food is not tested on a regular basis,” Feuer said.

The bill was bottled up in the Assembly Appropriations Committee and did not reemerge this year. Though a proposed increase in public spending to fund the program surely abetted the measure’s hold-up, Feuer said the lobbying factor played an even greater role.

“There was serious opposition from many in the food industry,” Feuer said. “I thought that opposition was extremely short sighted.”

Food safety advocates say the big players in California’s $34 billion agricultural industry have had much to do with keeping food safety reform out of Sacramento.

“The issue is simply an agricultural industry that has a lot of sway,” Florez said.

Since the start of the decade, the agricultural lobby has spent at least $33.75 million on lobbying in Sacramento, according to records compiled by the California Secretary of State.

Two of the largest farm groups– the California Farm Bureau Federation and Western Growers Association–have spent a combined $3.3 million on lobby in Sacramento since 2007.

Farm groups long have been major campaign donors. The Farm Bureau and Western Growers have spent more than $4 million since the start of the decade, Secretary of State records show.

Political money from agricultural interests is difficult to count to because so much of it comes from individual farmers. But a review of campaign finance reports by ProtectConsumerJustice.org shows that major agricultural concerns (not counting major wineries and their trade groups) have doled out at least $17 million since the start of the decade to political campaigns.

Lobby groups support food safety but not state laws

Wendy Fink-Weber, communications director for Western Growers, said the group is not against food safety, but the legislative process might be too slow to keep up with the evolving science.

“In these days of improving technology, improving science, when you have to rely on government regulation, it is a cumbersome process to update that regulation,” Fink-Weber said. The industry came together to develop safety standards after the spinach outbreak “because government was so slow,” she added

Action at the federal level has also been offered as a reason to stall food safety efforts in California. A representative of the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association, itself a significant lobby force, told the Assembly Health Committee this summer that “the state may just want to fill in the gaps for whatever reforms [federal legislators] do.”

California has made several advances in food safety admired by advocates. A 2006 measure, SB 611 authored by Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Hillsborough) when she was in the state legislature, requires meat or poultry suppliers and processors to notify the Department of Health Services when products they sell are subject to a federal recall due to risk of illness. They also must provide a list of their retail customers. The state can then notify consumers of where tainted products are sold.

The federal government passed a similar rule in 2008.

Some say California may still pave the way in new areas of food safety concern, such as curbing the sale of meat and poultry raised on growth-promoting antibiotics, and labeling meat from cloned animals. However, attempts to pass such legislation have thus far failed.

Florez, who’s running for Lieutenant Governor next year, has little hope for his food safety plans under the current Sacramento administration.

“We’re excited but we have to wait for a new [state] government,” Florez said. “We’re going to hopefully strengthen and build upon the Obama changes in California.”

(Jill Replogle is attending UC Berkeley School of Communications, where she is seeking her masters degree in journalism. She was an intern at Civil Justice Research & Education Project. For Jill’s other stories, please see this one and this one. jillrep@gmail.com)

Related posts:

“Her hard work, dedication and outlook on life is an inspiration to us all and proves that opportunity lies in every obstacle,” the governor said in a statement issued Saturday.

Granda is paralyzed from the neck down. A graduate of UC Davis’ School of Law, she received the word on Saturday that she had passed the California Bar Exam.

That’s only part of the story. As the Sacramento Bee reported in July, the Bar Association did not process Granda’s application to take the exam. The reason: the state Department of Rehabilitation, which covered the costs, paid the fee with a check rather than with Granda’s credit card. The California Supreme Court intervened and ordered that she be allowed to take the test.

People who took the bar exam were able to check results today. The public will be permitted to check the results on Sunday.

Related posts:

Billionaire Ed Roski Jr. is spending millions in his quest to bring a National Football League team to the City of Industry.

But so far, 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.

According to his real estate company’s lobbying disclosure, Roski’s Majestic Realty Co. spent about a fifth of the estimated $290,000 cost of a luxury box suite at the stadium he envisions. For a mere $53,740, his team of three lobby firms managed to get a bill introduced and through the Assembly in September, Majestic’s third quarter lobbying report shows.

The bill, SB 81XXX, exempts the developer from having to comply with the California Environmental Quality Act. It passed the Senate on a bare majority, over objections of several Democrats and environmentalists, as described in this story by Patrick McGreevy of the Los Angeles.

Majestic’s third quarter report does not cover any lobby expenses incurred in October, when the legislation stalled and then won final passage in the Senate, and when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger visited the City of Industry to sign the bill.

Nor does the third quarter lobbying disclosure make clear how Roski spent the bulk of the $53,740, other than to state that Majestic paid $25,000 for a lobbying firm that represents organized labor. Counting on jobs for their members, several unions are supporting a National Football League stadium in the City of Industry. Majestic didn’t disclose the amounts he paid to his two other lobbying firms.

The City of Industry, a lightly populated and long controversial burgh in the San Gabriel Valley, supported the bill, though the city’s lobby disclosure does not list the bill as one that it worked on during the session.

City of Industry is a perennial lobbying force in the world of local government. The $427,000 it has spent on lobbying since 2007 far exceeds the sums spent by such cities as Beverly Hills, Irvine and Oakland. Other cities are less than thrilled by the prospect of a stadium in City of Industry, as as the Voice of San Diego wrote the other day.

The National Football League maintains a lobby presence in Sacramento. The  NFL stated in its lobby reports that it has worked on no legislation in the first nine months of the year.

Related posts: