As the Wisconsin protests have continued and spread to Indiana and Ohio, with solidarity rallies held in Sacramento and elsewhere, the strategy of Republican Governors becomes clear: cripple public unions. If there was ever any doubt about this goal, it was dispelled by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s conversation with a newspaper editor (impersonating billionaire conservative campaign contributor David Koch) in which Walker discusses their anti-union strategy.  This conservative effort has important implications for the Sacramento area.  Not coincidentally, the effort follows a long decline of unions. In 1945, according to the Department of Labor, unions represented 34% of private empl

In case you’ve neglected your political calendar lately, we’re nearly to the 4th of July, beyond the June 8th primary, and the November 2010 general election race for the 3rd Congressional District seat between challenger Ami Bera and incumbent Dan Lungren is in full swing. Nowhere has this race been more evident recently than it was in the mid-June dust-up in which Bera accused Lungren of being silent about the gulf oil spill, calling him “a pawn of BP and big oil” who tacitly defends BP (the firm that caused the Deepwater Horizon spill, easily the nation’s worst environmental disaster ever), because he (Lungren) relies heavily on the oil and gas industry to finance his political campaig