Debate with dignity

As I've reported before, everyone has gone insane. The whole world. The most recent evidence concerns assisted suicide legislation in the California Legislature that would allow critically ill patients to end their lives with a dose of doctor-supervised lethal drugs.

Adding to the tortured debate over death and dignity is Chris Weinkopf, editorial page editor of the Daily News. He says Assemblyman Lloyd Levine is a bit hypocritical for introducing legislation that would require cats and dogs to be neutered or spayed at the same time he is pushing the assisted suicide bill. The pet bill would end the daily "slaughter" in animal shelters, says Levine, pictured below with Assemblywoman Patty Berg.

But if the pet neutering bill passes, Weinkopf writes, "the warped message from Sacramento would be: Injecting a stray cat with a lethal medication is a tragedy; feeding a dispirited and vulnerable senior citizen a lethal medication is a civil right." He continues:

"Assisted-suicide supporters insinuate that dignity is not inherent in the human condition, but contingent upon one's abilities and the value society puts on them. Stick around too long - become too weak, too feeble - and you're undignified. Unlike other would-be suicides, your tragically low sense of self-worth is justified. (No wonder disability-rights groups also oppose this bill.)    

The notion that the infirm or dying are lacking in dignity points to an astonishingly narrow view of humanity. Often, the weak and the sick can teach the rest of us a good deal about courage, acceptance, strength - and dignity, above all."

Thanks for the fantastic lesson in acceptance and strength, grandma!

Conservative blogger Steve Frank posted the story, and that prompted a debate about the sanctity of life from his readers, most of whom agreed with the logic of linking pet neutering to grandma killing.

Here is a portion of the conversation from people who had just read the Weinkopf article on the definition of dignity:

15:36, by Medra: "Truly pathetic and sickening. I can’t understand how these legislators can say they are not for the culture of death because they oppose the death penalty and the euthenasia of animals but support suicide and infanticide. I guess animals and criminals are more valuable than law abiding citizens and unborn children." [Snip]

16:01: "And yet again we see another case of the right wing criticizing someones views on abortion. A right wing nutjob is defined as someone who believes life begins at conception and ends at birth."

16:09: "You are an idiot! Life does begin at conception and life ends when we either die of illness, accident or natural causes! Abortion is Murder of an innocent child!"

16:44: "N-U-T-J-O-B!!!"

16:12, by Quark: "When life is at stake pal-ee boy someones views very well should be criticized. Aren’t you lucky someone didn’t drill a hole in your head before you were born or maybe they did."

17:57: "This forum has some real wackos on it. Looks like this is THE place to see right wing extremism in action!"

07:35: "Maybe your mother should of aborted you! After all you do not value life!"

I need a new job.

(Photos: Rich Pedroncelli/AP)

New security czar for California planned

Negotiations by Gov. Schwarzenegger and lawmakers to create a new California "security czar" has drawn fire from an unexpected quarter - the American Civil Liberties Union. Capitol Weekly:

"At issue is a provision in draft legislation that civil libertarians say offers a broad definition of terrorist activity which could lead to sweeping powers for state officials. As written, the bill defines terrorist activity as any activity that 'involves an act that is dangerous to human life or potentially destructive of critical infrastructure,' violates any criminal law and 'appears intended to intimidate or coerce the civilian population.' "

A compromise is expected to be reached today on the new Department of Emergency Services and Homeland Security. The new law was prompted by articles in the L.A. Times about the Office of Homeland Security keeping tabs on anti-war protests in Santa Barbara, Walnut Creek and San Francisco.

What's good for the goose

A California law signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2004 says plainly: "A person may not force-feed a bird for the purpose of enlarging the bird’s liver beyond normal size."

Even though California's foie gras makers were given until 2012 to find a way to produce their delicious product without torture - inserting a steel tube down a duck or goose's throat - they are finding the task somewhat difficult. One producer uses a rubber tube - but that won't satisfy animal-rights activists.

The search continues for the best way to fatten the goose and follow the law. The NYT.

A morning at the Capitol

Porn star Mary Carey, who ran for California governor twice, and other adult industry workers tastefully held their press conference to the north steps of the state Capitol this morning so it wouldn't interfere with a simultaneous and far more somber event just around the corner.

The Victims March on the West Steps featured dozens of photographs of murdered Californians, and a smaller number of families who traveled to Sacramento to memorialize the deaths. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is scheduled to address the march, sponsored by the prison guard's union. View webcast here, at about 11:45 a.m.

Waiting in the front row at the event, four women held signs to commemorate the 2001 deaths of Bernice Martinez and her two daughters, Christina, 16, Ashley, 14, and school friend Desiree Guzman, 14, who were killed in Stockton when a man driving a stolen truck plowed into their car. He was sentenced to four counts of second-degree murder

Meanwhile, on the north steps, Carey and other porn stars (pictured) gathered to oppose a bill, AB 1551, by Assemblyman Charles Calderon (D-Montebello) that would authorize a point-of-sale tax on adult materials, probably the biggest industry in California after the marijuana cash crop.

The money from the tax would be directed to law enforcement, programs to combat sexually transmitted diseases and mental health treatment, and unspecified "programs to address decreased property values in the vicinity of adult entertainment venues."

This is the second time in a decade for the porn tax legislation. Then a state Senator, California sought to impose a 5% sin tax on pornographic materials. Calderon said the money would be used to help support rape crisis centers and battered women's shelters. The bill died in committee.

After Monday morning's event, the porn workers were scheduled to visit a handful of lawmakers. If the past is any clue, the elected officials won't be anywhere near the porn stars as long as a camera is present.

(Photos: Robert Salladay/LAT)

Bill sent to body shop

Here's a rare case of an industry running to the government asking to be regulated. Massage therapists in California want to create a new, statewide governing board to set standards for their work, which is often associated with sex workers. New legislation would create a nonprofit, the Massage Therapy Organization, to monitor "bodyworkers" statewide.

But not before chiropractors intervened and objected to the definition of "massage" in legislation by state Sen. Jenny Oropeza. From the Capitol Weekly, where writer Malcolm Maclachlan did a bang-up job of avoiding double entendre in his report:

"In particular, Oropeza removed references to the word "joint." The chiropractors did not want language in print that specifically put joints under the massage therapists scope of practice; massage therapists, in turn, did not want to specifically excluded from working on joints, because that would mean they would run afoul of the law every time they helped a patient stretch."

An earlier definition of "massage" was removed from the bill. It read in part:  "The application of a system of structured touch, pressure, movement, and holding to the soft tissues of the human body with the purpose of positively affecting the health and well-being of the client. The practice includes the external application of water, heat, cold, lubricants, salt scrubs, or other topical preparations, and the use of devices that mimic or enhance the actions of the hands."

(Photo: M. Spencer Green/AP)

Who's peeing now?

Last year, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was having a conversation with his chief of staff, Susan Kennedy. She advised the governor to make a sarcastic remark to Assemblyman Guy Houston, a Republican from the eastern Bay Area, as punishment for a critical quote he made in a newspaper.

A few words from Schwarzenegger, Kennedy said, would cause Houston to "pee his pants."  Houston, in an interview with The Times this year, said his bladder control is better than Kennedy suspects. "Susan Kennedy doesn't know me very well if she thinks the governor would just have to say 'boo' and I would do something like that."

This year, Houston (pictured with the governor in 2005) has introduced legislation, AB 1319, that would require random urine tests for high school athletes to check for anabolic steroids.

Kennedy's comments about Houston were made public Feb. 4 in an L.A. Times article. Houston's steroids legislation was introduced Feb. 23.

Few issues have put Schwarzenegger in a more embarrassing personal position than steroid abuse. His eponymous Arnold Classic in Ohio features bodybuilders pumped up on steroids. He has admitted using steroids himself. He had a $5 million contract with a muscle magazine publisher that profited from supplement advertisements, but ended the financial agreement after it became public. He vetoed a bill in 2004 to ban high schoolers from taking steroids and certain supplements, but signed another measure banning a smaller number of substances a year later after a barrage of criticism.

Now, thanks to Houston, Schwarzenegger is facing more questions about steroids. The governor told the Bee recently that Houston's steroid legislation would "cost a lot of money." He wants to wait for the 2005 legislation to work. If the bill is signed, however, it could be California high school students doing the peeing.

(Photo: Paul Sakuma/AP)

The end to secret ballots?

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony slipped into the state capital Wednesday to meet with about 300 farmworkers in the basement of the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament and promote legislation that could dramatically alter how farm-labor unions secure contracts in California.

More than three decades after the state's landmark Agricultural Labor Relations Act, a bill in the Legislature could curtail the use of secret ballots when farmworkers vote on union representation. The twist is that the United Farm Workers supports allowing the use of open petitions rather than regular elections, even though founder Cesar E. Chavez fought for secret ballots in the 1970s.

But with some high-profile contract losses in recent years, the new legislation would give workers the option of signing a form supporting union representation or another card that would call for a secret ballot on the issue. If approved and signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, it would be one of the most dramatic changes to California's agricultural labor law since its inception in 1975.

The UFW now has an advantage in the early stages of union organizing. It has been able to convince farmworkers to authorize elections - but then something changes in the voting booth. The UFW says that's because growers intimidate workers after an election has been called.

California's $32 billion agriculture industry says the change is undemocratic and could lead to the UFW itself intimidating workers to sign the union authorization forms and avoid a secret ballot. Barry Bedwell, president of the California Grape & Tree Fruit League, called the legislation "unconscionable and almost unbelievable."

"A secret ballot assures a fair vote and accurately reflects the true feelings the workers have," said Dave Kranz with the California Farm Bureau Federation, the largest agricultural lobbying group in the state.

The majority of California farmworkers are thought to be illegal immigrants, said Arturo S. Rodriquez, president of the UFW (pictured with Mahony above), and "there is tremendous pressure put on the workers. People are always being threatened with being reported to the INS. We have workers who migrate and they are threatened with the camps being closed. For them to lose a job or be blacklisted has a tremendous impact on them."

"There are just a lot of subtle things that can create a fear factor," Mahony said. "I think the situation has improved a lot, but a lot of growers do not want an organized workforce and there are various subtle ways they can deal with it. If they recognize someone is a leader, they can terminate them."

Stepping in it - cows vs. history

Two Los Angeles-area lawmakers are reaching into their colleague's districts to kill specific development projects - a highly unusual move that wouldn't have occurred (at least in the open) before term limits came along. But one of the projects is opening up an emotional fight about the utopian dream of a Los Angeles Civil War veteran nearly a century ago.

The first effort, by Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas, would block an aquarium being planned on the San Joaquin River bluffs near Highway 99. The Aquarius Aquarium Institute needs $5 million from Proposition 84, a parks and flood-control bond approved by voters last year. The bill, SB 931, would require the aquarium to show a "good track record of spending grant funds appropriately and the ability to attract visitors," the Fresno Bee reports.

Another bill would block the approval of two dairies within five miles of the Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park in Tulare County. Assemblywoman Wilma Amina Carter of Rialto fears that the stench and flies from 16,000 cows would ruin the park, an important site to African Americans and historians alike. In 1909, Col. Allensworth created an all-black town about 40 miles north of Los Angeles as an experiment, because "a large number of our fellow countrymen have been taught for generations that the Negro is incapable of the highest development of citizenship."

"By 1914, the settlement boasted 400 residents on 900 acres valued at $112,500. The town had a debating society, symphony orchestra, Women's Improvement League, the first branch of the Tulare County Public Library and the first all-black school district in the state. Voters elected the first black constable and justice of the peace in post-Mexican California," writes Susan Anderson, visiting professor at Pitzer College in Claremont.

Allensworth, a Civil War veteran and civic leader in Los Angeles, died in a motorcycle accident in 1914. The town thrived for a few more years, but it eventually fell into disrepair over water rights. Some believed the water was poisoned with arsenic. Nevertheless, historians want the park free from the inevitable smell from the mega-dairies. Anderson said, "Allensworth's narrative of blacks reclaiming democracy during one of their bleakest times belongs to Los Angeles too."

Tulare County supervisors, who have approved the dairy projects, are opposed to Carter's legislation, saying it would take more than 60,000 acres of agricultural land off limits. The bill, AB 576, is scheduled to be heard April 18 before the Assembly's Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee.

'Checkbook journalism' under fire

It's fairly well known that some tabloid reporters and photographers walk around with a lot of cash in their pockets, bribing bartenders, doormen, courthouse clerks and even police officers for tips about celebrities. Now, legislation in the California Legislature would make it a misdemeanor for a government employee to slip reporters inside information about high-profile cases.

"In the age of instant information and Internet sites such as Smoking Gun, YouTube, TMZ and other nontraditional media outlets, the pressure to break a story has raised concerns that some of these news websites may attempt to gain inside information on a story or breaking event by paying a peace officer," says to the office of Assemblywoman Julia Brownley, a Democrat from celebrity-rich Santa Monica. "This is a breach of the public trust."

Screeeeeccch. Stop one second. The Smoking Gun, for its part, does not pay for information. The popular website, which is owned by Court TV, often dips into the biggest warehouse of embarrassing information in the country: the criminal and civil courts. But editor William Bastone told Political Muscle: "We follow the same ethical guidelines as the L.A. Times, the New York Times, the New York Daily News or CBS News. We do not pay, nor do we ever pay. She should not be lumping us in there and raising concerns about whether we do that."

Nevertheless, some tabloids do pay bribes for information from government employees. Such "checkbook journalism" erodes the Sixth Amendment guarantee to a fair trial, Brownley argues, and creates an incentive for witnesses to lie to reporters because they are being paid for juicy information. Witnesses who have been paid for information lose credibility on the witness stand. State law already requires jurors to wait 90 days and for trial witnesses to wait a full year before they can sell their stories to tabloids or others in the media.

The bill was suggested by the L.A. County sheriff's department, after the name and photograph of one of Michael Jackson's alleged victims was released to the media.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that when putting financial restrictions on free speech, the government must show a "compelling state interest." Supporters of the legislation argue that law enforcement officers and court employees can rightly be restricted because "the benefits which the public gains by the restraints outweighs the resulting impairment of constitutional rights."

The bill, AB 920, was approved yesterday in the Assembly Public Safety Committee.

(Photos: J. Pat Carter/AP; Vince Bucci/AP)

Republican plays race card

Assemblyman Chuck DeVore - the China-hating, novel writing, constant blogging, gung-ho Republican National Guard officer from Orange County - is scheming to write legislation that would divide Democrats along racial lines. In the OC Register today, columnist Frank Mickadeit writes about attending a conference of Republican lawyers at Chapman Law School last week:

"Assemblyman Chuck DeVore told the group how even as a member of the minority party in the Legislature, he's trying to be relevant. He's working a bill that would suspend the California Environmental Quality Act for five years for low-income housing, farm-worker housing and urban infill projects.

"The strategy, he said, is to split the Democrats in the Legislature into two factions: the black and Latino caucuses, which favor the bill because it would reduce housing costs 10-20 percent for constituents, and what he called 'the white, urban limousine liberals,' who oppose lowering environmental standards.

" 'I'm purposefully eff-ing with them,' DeVore said."

Mickadeit walked up to DeVore after the meeting and asked if maybe the Orange County lawmaker was being a tad cynical. Apparently unaware a reporter was in the audience, DeVore "turned even whiter than a limousine liberal," he writes. DeVore said the legislation is valid, since he does oppose CEQA standards.