From the Bay Citizen:

State Treasurer Bill Lockyer told lawmakers Wednesday that he continued to support a law that grants large tax breaks to alternative-energy companies — even though the bankrupt solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra was its first and largest recipient.

Solyndra was granted a $34.5 million subsidy under SB 71, a 2010 law championed by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that exempts alternative energy companies from paying taxes on purchases of new manufacturing equipment.

Lockyer’s statements marked a departure from the stance he took last month. After The Bay Citizen revealed Solyndra’s tax break, which the state granted without scrutinizing the company’s finances, Lockyer called for a moratorium on issuing additional subsidies under the law, saying, “[W]e owe it to taxpayers to see if there is more we can do to make sure we don’t give their money to companies headed for a fall.”

But on Wednesday, he told a joint hearing of two state Senate committees that SB 71 is a “wise and needed law” that incentivizes green-energy manufacturing and serves as “a model for how tax expenditure statutes ought to be written.”

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From the LA Times:

Two Democrats vying for the newly drawn 51st Assembly District seat each announced key endorsements this week. Nurses union official Jimmy Gomez of Echo Park landed the support of Los Angeles City Councilman Ed Reyes, while Luis Lopez, president of the Los Angeles East Area Planning Commission, received backing from the Victory Fund, a prominent organization of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities.

In the recently reconstituted 66th Assembly District, Torrance Unified School District Board Member Al Muratsuchi announced his endorsement by state Sen. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance). Lieu joins a slew of other Democratic officeholders and activists in backing Muratsuchi. Republican Nathan Mintz, who ran unsuccessfully for a different, strongly Democratic  South Bay-based Assembly seat last year, is making another bid for office here. 

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From Calpensions.com:

In a settlement of a wrongful firing, a suburban San Diego water district agreed six years later to put its former general counsel back on the payroll for one year at $222,000, with a leave of absence that left him free to take another job.

The rancorous firing of Thomas Harron and six others by the Otay Water District in 2001 was alleged to be a race-based purge. A lawsuit contended that a district board member said: “We got to get rid of all of the gringos.”

Harron acknowledged during a CalPERS board hearing yesterday that the one-year return to the payroll in February 2008, with a prohibition against returning to district offices, was intended to increase his pension.

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From the OC Register:

Tustin attorney Mark Bucher has been turned back twice by unions in his effort to make it harder for them to collect dues for political spending, but he has a broader target this time around.

Make it harder for both unions and corporations to contribute to campaigns, and ban contributions from government contractors to elected officials involved in hiring those contractors.

The campaign for his proposed statewide ballot measure has submitted 920,000 signatures toward qualifying for the ballot next year, he said. Of those, 504,760 must be valid registered voters. Orange County Registrar of Voters Neal Kelley recommends petitioners gather 50 percent more than the number need, a ratio Bucher has well exceeded. Kelley said Orange County received 64,738 of those petition signatures. The verification process is expected to begin next week.

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From the OC Register:

California suffered the greatest loss of jobs and businesses of all sizes during recession, according to a new analysis by the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council.

“Recessions are felt most deeply in terms of lost businesses and lost jobs,” said SBE Council Chief Economist Raymond Keating. “No one performed well in the abysmal economy prevailing in 2008 and 2009. The question is: Which states performed least poorly vs. which states did the very worst.”

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From Gallup:

Americans are more than twice as likely to blame the federal government in Washington (64%) for the economic problems facing the United States as they are the financial institutions on Wall Street (30%).

Both of these large entities have been the target of protest groups this year. The Occupy Wall Street movement has focused on large financial institutions on Wall Street, while the Tea Party movement continues to focus mainly on the federal government.

There appears to be no shortage of blame for either of these entities. The Oct. 15-16 USA Today/Gallup poll asked Americans how much they blame the federal government for the economy and, separately, how much they blame financial institutions on Wall Street. More than three-quarters of Americans, inboth cases, say these entities deserve a great deal or a fair amount of blame for the economic problems facing the U.S. Still, reflecting the results of the forced-choice question, the percentage saying the federal government deserves a great deal of blame is 11 points higher than the percentage for financial institutions on Wall Street.

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From Politico:

After the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent a recent email urging supporters to sign a petition backing the wave of Occupy Wall Street protests, phones at the party committee started ringing.

Banking executives personally called the offices of DCCC Chairman Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) and DCCC Finance Chairman Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.) last week demanding answers, three financial services lobbyists told POLITICO.

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From Fox News:

The issue of  immigration was front and center in last GOP debate, and the heated clashes over the issue between Rick Perry and Mitt Romney, coupled with renewed calls for a fence along the U.S.-Mexico border by their other opponents, made clear the issue isn’t going away. It’s a major fault line between Perry and Romney as they court a Republican primary electorate that generally takes a hardline view against people who are in the country illegally.

At every turn, Perry, the Texas governor, has been forced to defend his signing of a law that allowed some undocumented immigrants to get in-state college tuition. And now Romney is having to answer for the fact that some groundskeepers who had worked on his lawn were undocumented.

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From the LA Times:

The Republican presidential candidates clashed bitterly and personally over healthcare and immigration in a snarling Tuesday night debate that featured some of the most barbed and heated exchanges of the months-long campaign.

The event, staged in a hotel casino on the Las Vegas Strip, broke little new substantive ground as the candidates — facing one another for the sixth time in as many weeks — restated mostly familiar positions.

But there was a heightened degree of animus in the air, which pushed the usually unruffled Mitt Romney into a series of raised-voice, finger-jabbing confrontations, most dramatically with Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

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From the Sac Bee:

Bolstered by a new $400,000 donation from the California Republican Party, officials of a referendum campaign to overturn the state’s newly drawn Senate districts say 400,000 voter signatures have been collected and a full-court-press has been launched for more.

“I’m confident that we’re going to do it,” political strategist David Gilliard, who is running the campaign, said of prospects for gathering the required 504,760 valid voter signatures by Nov. 14 to place the issue before voters next year.

Gilliard said that signature-gathering had slowed temporarily because campaign coffers were draining, but the California Republican Party’s six-figure contribution last week cured the problem and “we were able to unleash our people back again.”

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