CA-32: Cedillo Masses An Army In El Monte

The San Gabriel Valley is a unique area. Within 5 minutes of Gil Cedillo's campaign kickoff for Congress yesterday in El Monte, I visited a 200 year-old Spanish mission, and a Pho shop in Alhambra where I was the only guy in there who didn't speak Cantonese. This is a series of highly homogeneous communities, which doesn't have the same media, doesn't have the same leadership, and doesn't even speak the same language.

However, it's a demographic reality that the district is over 60% Latino while being about 18% Asian. This is an urban, middle-class Hispanic district. And while Gil Cedillo doesn't represent it in the State Senate, he drew a lot of support to his initial campaign event yesterday. Close to 400 people packed a storefront in El Monte to get started on the campaign. Before there's even a date set for the primary election (though everyone assumes it will be folded into the May 19 special election), yesterday Cedillo supporters were out canvassing the district.

But first, there were a series of speeches and endorsements. Cedillo will have the backing of the Latino political establishment in the area. The big news yesterday was that Rep. Xavier Becerra, of the neighboring district of CA-31, was out to endorse. He joins the local county supervisor Gloria Molina, the local city councilman Ed Reyes (a small part of the district includes LA City), former Rep. Esteban Torres, and several other councilmembers and local politicos in giving their endorsement to Cedillo. Molina even intimated that Congressional Hispanic Caucus support would be coming. There was some not-all-that-subtle rhetoric about "our community" and "our people." It's clear that this is a replay of the CA-37 special election, where Laura Richardson pushed an African-American/Hispanic divide. With Cedillo's main competition being Judy Chu, there's definitely going to be some of that Hispanic/Asian divide in this race, though I imagine it will be more respectful that Richardson's toxicity.

What complicates this is that Chu received the Cal Labor Fed endorsement and actually has support from a few Latino lawmakers of her own. Cedillo was sure to tout his 100% labor scorecard in his short address. In the rest, he talked about a campaign of faith and hope, strength and leadership. He called the San Gabriel Valley "a slice of America," where families come to buy a home, raise children, and get an education. And he talked about the need to make the economy work for those families, with a particular emphasis on health care (he mentioned how great it would be to build a hospital with the stimulus money - even though I'm pretty sure that won't be something the stimulus can do). Cedillo is at his best when talking about immigration. His tireless support for the California version of the DREAM Act, to allow undocumented students to attend college and be eligible for financial aid, has earned him a sterling reputation among young people, many of whom were there volunteering yesterday.

I don't know how many of those young people are eligible to vote, however, and in particular, eligible in that district. Cedillo will have no shortage of volunteers, but he doesn't completely have a voting base inside the district, having never represented it. Outside of Molina, the endorsees are not by and large from the population centers of the district, either. The other factor in this race is Emanuel Pleitez, who liveblogged at FDL yesterday. He is a local, with a small but strong group of former Obama organizers working with him. If you look at this strictly on the level of identity politics, having Pleitez in the race probably helps Judy Chu a bit. The big question, of course, is who is going to turn out their voters.

State Legislative Update

Technically, the session is over in Sacramento, but of course, with no budget, the work will go on. More on that in a moment, but let's take a look at the bills that have passed thus far.

Hundreds of bills passed through their respective houses and made their way to the Governor's desk. Among those passing:

• AB 1945, which cracks down on insurance company rescission policies
• SB 1301, the California DREAM Act, allowing children of illegal immigrants to access financial aid for college
• SB 375, a major land use bill that would improve transportation planning and reduce urban sprawl (this is a real coup)
• AB 583, the Clean Money pilot project bill that would make the 2014 Secretary of State election a Clean Money race.

Among the bills that failed:

• SB 1522, a health care reform bill which would have standardized the individual health care market and made it easier to comparison shop, as well as set a floor for basic minimum care. That those who most strongly pushed for comprehensive health reform would fail to pass this common-sense fix makes no sense to me.

• SB 110, which would have created an independent sentencing commission to review and revised sentencing guidelines and parole standards. Another failure of leadership in our prison crisis, as lawmakers refuse to loosen their grip on the rules which they've abused and led to this disaster.

As for the budget, now the legislature, out of session by constitutional mandate, must work on nothing else. Sen. Perata has called the bluff on the Republicans, asking them to formally submit their unspeakably cruel budget plan so that the whole state can see their priorities for what they are.

There was a strange colloquy near the end of yesterday’s Senate session (Republican Senator Jim Battin is pictured at right), where the Republicans were clearly caught flatfooted, flustered in their responses like school kids admonished for not doing their homework, and having a hard time coming to grips with what Perata told them. This is a reprise of what Perata did last year when Senate Republicans held the budget up and when he asked them to come up with their own proposal.

Perata: Right now, the bill that I brought up yesterday is kind of an orphan. You have your opportunity to present a bill that you outlined today in your press conference. I appreciate the fact that there is a substantial amount of work to be done on that bill. We know, because we started ours 8 months ago. So you’ve got a lot of work to do. But we’re very confident you can do it. Every day we will be here to see how we’re doing [...]

Republican Senator Jim Battin: I just want to make sure I understand what your expectations are. So what you want from our caucus is a full budget document, is that correct?

Perata: Yeah. A budget.

Battin: And every day we are preparing that, you want to meet.

Perata: Yeah. You know what I don’t’ want to do is to be caught in that position where people are getting confused whey we don’t have a budget. Now every day we meet, we can say, “you’re working on it.”

Battin: And you also want to have the trailer bills as well?

Perata: Yeah. A budget.

Battin: You would actually allow us to bring it up for a vote on the floor?

Perata: You betcha.

Battin: So my expectation is that it will fail…And then what?

Perata: Let’s not prejudge. You may come up with a piece of work that will knock our socks off. So let’s see what you will do.

It's a neat trick, and good for political purposes. I don't know how it gets us closer to a budget. Schwarzenegger still wants the sales tax hike, Yacht Party Republicans are still dead-set against it, and Democrats are trying to compromise and on the edge of cracking. But they seem to believe, this time around, that the budget can be blamed on Republicans in November and there's a benefit in campaigning on the issue (I think that's why Perata wants a real plan).

So nobody knows how this ends. And the victims are the public employees, the long-term care workers, the schools, the health clinics, the everyday Californians that did nothing wrong and don't deserve this anxiety.

McCain Running The Zachary Taylor Campaign

I mentioned this yesterday, but it's important to ponder how John McCain either doesn't believe in recording equipment or has so much faith in the people doing the recording, i.e. the BBQ-stained media, that he has no problem saying 100% different things to different audiences. Conservatives hear "I don't support the DREAM Act," Hispanics hear the opposite.

When I was in high school, I remembering learning about Zachary Taylor, our 12th President, put up by the Whig Party almost entirely because of his military background. He would visit different areas of the country and give completely different speeches, citing his support of slavery in the South and his opposition to it in the North, among other things. It worked in 1848 because there wasn't a lot of regional spillover in how information was disseminated. But now we have things like the television, and videotape, and YouTube, and archives, and there's no way for the new "Old Rough and Ready" to be as successful with this tactic as the old one.

Or maybe there is. There's been such a balkanization of the media landscape, with so many people only referring to friendly sources, and there's been such a devaluation of facts in the age of Bush and his spinners who create their own reality, that McCain's campaign might figure they can lie with impunity, deny it when challenged, and never give it a second thought.

That's kind of chilling to think about.

Numbers Don't Add, Statements Don't Match, Nobody's Making Sense

Welcome to the McCain campaign.

After delivering an economic policy document with no numbers attached to it, the WaPo editorial board, in an unexpected burst of journalism, asked for some corroborating information, and found it wanting.

SEN. JOHN McCain says that President McCain would balance the federal budget by 2013. The plan is not credible.

The Congressional Budget Office projects a deficit of $443 billion in 2013 if President Bush's tax cuts are extended, as Mr. McCain wants, and the alternative minimum tax is merely patched to make certain it does not hit growing numbers of taxpayers. But Mr. McCain is proposing far more tax cuts.

The McCain campaign says it will fill the hole with spending cuts. It would "reclaim billions" by rooting out existing earmarks and prohibiting new ones; impose a one-year freeze on discretionary spending other than for defense and veterans; and "reserve all savings from victory in the Iraq and Afghanistan operations" to use toward deficit reduction. These claimed savings are illusory. The campaign assumes $150 billion in savings by cutting in half deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. But the Congressional Budget Office says that even reducing troops to 30,000, far beyond Mr. McCain's estimate, would save just $55 billion in 2013 beyond the costs that the CBO projects as part of its deficit calculation. The campaign assumes an additional $160 billion in cuts to the Pentagon procurement budget and other discretionary spending. But eliminating every procurement program that the CBO has identified as a potential budget target would save perhaps $30 billion in 2013.

Republican primary voters don't ask for numbers to add up, they ask for all the tax cuts they want and a balanced budget and a pony. And McCain is their white knight on this front. He just makes up numbers and provides everything conservatives hope and dream for.

Speaking of dreams, McCain faced a far different audience yesterday than he previously faced in the primary, at the National Council of La Raza conference, and he up and lied about his support for the DREAM Act.

In the Q&A session following his prepared remarks, a young woman from the group One Dream 2009, asked John McCain, if he were president, to support the DREAM Act next year. McCain answered he would.

But that is not what John McCain told right-wing bloggers on an October 25, 2007 conference call. McCain emphasized that he has "said it a thousand times" that he "got the message" on immigration. However, don't take my word for it, ask conservative blogger Paul Mirengoff:

As for the Dream Act, McCain told us that he would have voted against cloture (i.e., in favor of preventing a vote) because he "got the message" this summer that Americans want the border secured before we "go on to the rest." McCain would deem parts of the border secure when the governor of the relevant state so certifies.

Since McCain is clearly on record as to how he would have voted on the Dream Act cloutre motion, and since his vote was not needed to prevent cloture, there seems to be no basis for criticizing his departure for Iowa prior to the vote.

These are just total panders. He wants to be all things to all people, and he keeps tripping himself up on the details.

And that's also true on Social Security, where McCain doesn't know the details of the program and is throwing around words like "privatization" to pacify the economic royalists in his party. Here, he is in for the fight of his life.

It was a spectacular flop: a president making dozens of fruitless trips around the country to build support for a plan his own party's leadership refused to accept.

But President Bush's failed push to privatize Social Security has not deterred John McCain from putting forward the same idea - and from risking a similar political disaster [...]

Democrats are gearing up to turn McCain's stand on Social Security, and his willingness to consider a privatization plan, into a key campaign issue. They say changing the program in that way would undermine retirees' benefits, and they hope to use the issue to harm the Arizona senator's support among a set of voters who tilt toward him -- seniors.

On Tuesday, a coalition of Democratic strategists, labor unions and liberal activist groups that helped defeat Bush's efforts in 2005 plans to launch a similar campaign. They intend to target McCain and dozens of GOP congressional candidates who have supported proposals to allow workers to divert some of their payroll taxes out of the Social Security system and into private investment accounts.

This feels like we're putting the band back together. There is no chance for McCain to survive if he is defined on Social Security - that's why I picked up on his remarks immediately. If Obama can cut into his numbers among seniors just a little bit on this issue, there's no credible path to victory. The signs that Obama is increasing his leads in Midwestern and Great Plains states, which are traditionally a little older, suggests that McCain is already meeting resistance among his core group. Time to wonk out on Social Security and pummel this guy.

Winning The Immigration Debate, Losing The Immigration Reality

I know that Markos is convinced that immigration as a wedge issue was a big loser for Republicans, and I agree. Clearly they have gotten little or no traction from it electorally, and their dash headlong into the arms of xenophobes increasingly cements their status as a permanent minority party, particularly as the Hispanic population grows and becomes a political force.

However, that's a reality of politics that's going to play out over the next decade or so. Right now, the anti-immigrant forces have shown sufficient perceived power to send Republicans (and more than a few Democrats) cowering. And the policies that have been implemented since the last attempt at comprehensive immigration reform are incredibly damaging and catastrophic. The consequences of waiting for the politics to become more favorable are grave.

Everybody chided Hillary Clinton for her not-entirely-coherent views on the policy of the then-governor from New York, Eliot Spitzer, to grant driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. There was a lot of demagoguery in the press and the plan fizzled in New York and on the national stage. There were consequences to that failure.

Luz Gonzalez used to take spur-of-the-moment trips to the beach. Now, she's afraid to drive to the doctor for checkups on her new pregnancy. She and her husband, Ismael, can no longer have a savings account or a car registered in their names. Every time they drive to church, they watch for the flash of blue lights in the mirror.

The Gonzalezes, who identified themselves by only one of their two surnames, are among many illegal immigrants in North Carolina who are beginning a new life — one without driver's licenses. A 2006 state law made it impossible for illegal immigrants to renew their licenses. The change was talked about mostly as a tool to combat terrorism — several of the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks had licenses.

But it's also created a crisis in the Hispanic community and a potential hazard on the roads. As licenses issued under the old rules expire, advocates and law enforcement authorities say many illegal immigrants, who number an estimated 300,000 in North Carolina, are now driving without licenses or insurance.

This is a public safety nightmare waiting to happen. Tens of thousands of unlicensed drivers on the roads, who may not know the traffic laws, who are sure to leave the scene of any accident lest they risk deportation - that has a deleterious effect on the nation's roadways.

Then we have the dramatic increase in immigration prosecutions with the effective end of the "catch-and-release" program. Border enforcement officials are using the broadest possible definitions of "crime" to arrest virtually everyone found crossing the border, which is unsustainable and a distraction from actual border crimes like drug smuggling and human trafficking. This is especially true because border resources are finite - the money being put into failed initiatives like the virtual fence isn't going into a law enforcement apparatus that is straining against having to arrest, house and prosecute all of these individuals. There's border security and there's "border security" which threatens actual security by tying up the tools of law enforcement. There's also the fact that it's a completely misplaced policy:

Others note that, historically, immigration violations have been processed by U.S. administrative courts. Criminalizing illegal immigration while turning a blind eye to employers who provide the jobs that lure migrants makes for good election-year politics but poor policy, said T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council.

"This strategy pretty much has it backwards," he said. "It's going after desperate people who are crossing the border in search of a better way of life, instead of going after employers who are hiring people who have no right to work in this country."

And this hardline crackdown, thoroughly supported by a Democratic establishment that thinks a tough stance on enforcement is their way out of the immigration issue, means that things like this happen for no reason whatsoever:

In May 2007, Victoria Arellano, a 23-year-old transgender immigrant from Mexico, was sent to a detention center in San Pedro after being arrested on a traffic charge.

Arellano, who was born a male and had come to the United States illegally as a child, had AIDS at the time of her arrest but exhibited no symptoms of the disease because of the medication she took daily. But once detained, her health began to deteriorate.She lost weight and became sick. She repeatedly pleaded with staff members at the detention center to see a doctor to get the antibiotics she needed to stay alive, according to immigrant detainees with whom Arellano shared a dormitory-style cell. But her requests were routinely ignored.

The task of caring for Arellano fell to her fellow detainees. They dampened their own towels and used them to cool her fever; they turned cardboard boxes into makeshift trash cans to collect her vomit. As her condition worsened, the detainees, outraged that Arellano was not being treated, staged a strike: They refused to get in line for the nightly head count until she was taken to the detention center's infirmary.

Officials relented, and Arellano was sent to the infirmary, then to a hospital nearby. But after two days there -- and after having spent two months at the federally operated facility -- she died of an AIDS-related infection. Her family has taken steps to file a wrongful-death claim against the federal government.

These immigration detention centers are growing as the "prosecute everyone" philosophy pervades all levels of government. They have no minimum standards to provide healthcare and are mainly managed by private contractors. The immigrants inside these detention centers are not even under criminal charges, but civil violations as they await deportation. The next detainee may be this valedictorian who has lived in America since he was 2 years old:

Arthur Mkoyan's 4.0 grade-point average has made him a valedictorian at Bullard High School in Fresno and qualified him to enter one of the state's top universities.

But while his classmates look forward to dorm food and college courses this fall, Arthur Mkoyan may not make it.

He is being deported.

Arthur, 17, and his mother have been ordered out of the country. By late June, they may be headed to Armenia [...]

Mark Silverman, director of immigration policy at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in San Francisco, said Arthur Mkoyan's case illustrates why Congress should have passed the Dream Act. The act would have allowed students who excelled in school and stayed out of trouble to become permanent residents and attend college or enlist in the military

"There's something very wrong with the immigration laws when our government is deporting our best students," Silverman said.

Absolutely right, but Democrats were confident that they would win this debate in the long run if they didn't rock the boat and offer a sensible alternative to a xenophobic hardline set of policies. As a result, bright students are being sent away, hundreds of thousands are driving without licenses, law enforcement can't focus on actual security measures, and immigrants are dying - needlessly.

It's not enough to just "win" politically on this issue. There has to be some actual conviction to stand up to pernicious policies that warehouse humans, deny them basic medical care, and hold children responsible for the actions of their parents. Republicans didn't care that their position has been discredited at the ballot box - they kept forging ahead. The Rahm Emanuel position is to encourage Democrats to take a right-wing stance to defuse the issue until such a time as it's politically convenient. Arthur Mkoyan and Victoria Arellano won't have the luxury of waiting around.

On DREAMs, Intimidation, and Nativist Jerks

The federal version of the DREAM Act comes up for vote today in the US Senate. The bill would set on a path to legal status those children of immigrants who enlist in the military or enroll in college. Yesterday, college students who would benefit from this program were on Capitol Hill, lobbying Congress for passage. Tom Tancredo, noted jerk, called for the arrest of the students.

Democrats were planning to hold a press conference today featuring three college students whose parents came to the United States illegally in order to promote the DREAM Act. But the event was postponed after anti-immigrant Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) called on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency to arrest the three students:

“I call on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency to detain any illegal aliens at this press conference,” said Tancredo, who claims to have alerted federal authorities about the well publicized press confrence. “Just because these illegal aliens are being used for political gain doesn’t mean they get immunity from the law. If we can’t enforce our laws inside the building where American laws are made, where can we enforce them?”

They eventually held the press conference anyway and nobody was arrested. Tancredo is not only being callous here, he's being ignorant. One of the students has permanent residency status, and another cannot be deported because she exists in a kind of legal limbo. Her name is Tam Tran.

Tam Tran, whose Vietnamese parents came illegally to the US from Germany, has lived in the US since she was ten, is a UCLA graduate who wants to pursue a PhD at USC, but can't because she can't afford further schooling without federal student loans. The government can't deport her family back to Vietnam because her father was persecuted by the communist government there, but the German government won't take them back either. Tran said today she is in "permanent legal limbo."

The last time Tran spoke out in support of the DREAM Act, in an article in USA Today on October 8, her family was detained by the ICE.

Just three days after the article appeared, federal officers entered her home in the middle of the night and forcibly arrested her family. Tran’s family was detained on a “years-old deportation order,” even though they have been in regular communication with immigration officials for almost 20 years since arriving in the United States.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), chair of the immigration subcommitee, equated the family’s arrest to “witness intimidation” and accused Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials of targeting the Tran family because Tam “testified before Lofgren’s panel earlier this spring.” Earlier this week, USA Today spoke with Lofgren about the Tran family’s arrest:

“Would she and her family have been arrested if she hadn’t spoken out?” Lofgren said of Tran, who was not at home for the raid but has been asked to report to Immigration and Customs officials next week. “I don’t think so.“

This is shocking behavior for the ICE to undertake, and not only does it show the price for dissent in Bush's America, but it shows how convoluted our immigration system is in the absence of a comprehensive solution. You can punish immigrants, who have no political power, or you can punish companies who hire the undocumented, who have loads of political power. In this case, the solution is clear; allow students who have known no other home to contribute to the country in which they were raised. Brian has the numbers; light 'em up.

...And You Will Know Him By The Trail Of Dead (Bills)

I saw Bill Maher on Friday in an interview with former Mexican President Vicente Fox, lamenting that Bill Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger wouldn't be able to face off as Presidential candidates due to Constitutional violations. "Isn't that sad," he said. For all his conceits as a free thinker, Maher represents a kind of baseline Hollywood groupthink when it comes to Arnold, reading the headlines and the magazine covers but never bothering to uncover the whole story. That story can be easily divined from this weekend's veto massacre. In addition to stopping the California DREAM Act, he vetoed needed legislation for the state's migrant farm workers, allowing them to organize through a "card check" system. He even disabled a bill that would have added a sunset clause to the card check system, making it ever harder for them to organize and support themselves and their families. Here's another bill that went down the drain:

On Saturday, another bill was vetoed, AB 377, by Assemblymember Juan Arambula (D-Fresno). It would have required an employer who is a farm labor contractor to disclose in the itemized statement furnished to employees up to five names and addresses of the legal entities that secured the employer's services.

According to the sponsor of the bill, the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation more than 40,000 California farms grow fruits and vegetables on almost four million acres in this state, so it is not surprising that a 2006 survey of Central Valley farm workers found that 70% could not identify the name of the farm they were working on.

The same survey found that 56% had not been paid the minimum wage when working on a piece rate; 31% had not been paid all the overtime they were owed; and that 42% had unexplained deductions made from their pay. Between 60% and 80% of harvest work is done by labor contractors. Without being able to readily identify the farm who hired the contractor, enforcement actions against the contractor are unlikely to either make the worker whole for wages owed or to have any deterrent effect at all against a grower who shares legal responsibility for the contractor's labor law violations.

So while Governor Schwarzenegger told the hundreds of farm workers who were at the Capitol in September that he was supportive of their goals, in the end, he vetoed these bills and sided with agribusiness.

Indeed, this is part of a persistent pattern by the Governor to make life harder for working families while protecting the corporate interests that helped get him elected. Far from a governor of the people, he is simply a corporatist who has the backs of the elite. Because we don't have a functioning political press, this contempt for the average Californian will probably not make it too far off the blogs and insider political circles. But they have real-world consequences that people will only discover when they are put in the situation that legislation could have covered, and they aren't likely to connect the dots. A sampling of the pro-worker legislation that was vetoed:

• SB 549 (Corbett)-this bill would have protected the job of a worker taking time off to attend to the funeral of a family member.

• SB 727 (Kuehl)-this bill provided that employees covered by family temporary disability insurance (FTDI) could take the leave to care for a grandparent, siblings, grandchildren and parent-in-law.

• AB 537 (Swanson)-this bill expanded the definition of family under the California Family Rights Act (CFRA) to allow eligible workers to take job-protected leave to care for a seriously ill adult child, sibling, grandchild, or parent in law.

• AB 435 (Brownley)-this bill would have addressed harsh limitation periods on bringing certain wage discrimination claims. These claims are frequently brought by working women who have been underpaid relative to their male counterparts, and many of these women are struggling to raise kids in single parent situations.

• AB 1636 (Mendoza)-this bill would have expedited a job retraining voucher to disabled workers unable to return to their former jobs; workers such as these are struggling to adapt to replace the income needed for the family to survive.

• SB 936 (Perata)-this bill would have increased the benefits paid to permanently disabled workers over a 3 year period. Since 2004 these workers have seen their benefits slashed by 50% or more according to studies by University of California researchers. At the same time, insurer profits have exceeded all benefits paid to or on behalf of disabled workers; it’s a concept that is clearly not family-friendly. The families and kids of disabled workers suffer as they struggle to keep pace with the financial devastation of injuries.

AB 435 is the state version of the Lily Ledbetter Pay Act, attempting to remedy a horrible Supreme Court decision from earlier in the year. So Arnold is putting himself squarely in the position of Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Smuel Alito. This is our post-partisan "leader."

Furthermore, he vetoed meaningful health care reform in AB 8, and put forth flawed legislation of his own that has no chance of coming out of the legislature, partially financed by the stupid, shortsighted practice of leasing the lottery to private interests.

I'd like to say that there's an "on the other hand," a couple bills Arnold allowed through that provide aid or comfort to the working class. But on these issues, he comes down squarely on the side of his corporate buddies. It feels like spitting into the wind to keep noting this. Maybe someday Bill Maher won't have a big-time TV show, he'll be working for his own retirement, and he'll realize that he's been screwed by this Administration. But I wouldn't bet on it.

Dream Stealer

The Governor of California vetoed SB1, legislation which would have allowed students who are children of undocumented immigrants to apply for financial aid and have the same opportunity at contributing to the American dream as their counterparts. These are young men and women who did not make the decision to come to this country, yet represent out best hope to continue as a strong nation by contributing to our economy and our historic diversity. They consider themselves Americans and Californians and wish to use their talents and skills to benefit this country and this state. The Governor said no.

And get this, he blamed it on the high cost of college (yeah, who's responsible for THAT?).

At a time when segments of California public higher education, the Universirt of California and the California State University, are raising fees on all students attending college in order to maintain the quality of education provided, it would not be prudent to place additional strain on the General Fund to accord the new benefit of providing state subsidized financial aid to students without lawful immigration status.

That expense will pay itself back 10 times over in the future. But now the dream of a college education for these students becomes ever more remote. This used to be a different kind of country.