The Death of California Pool Culture?

Drought puts screws on California's 

swimming pools

• Say it ain't so!  The end to hot babes and poolside BBQs?
• But to the point, the swimming pool industry is an industry and creates jobs.  Pools are the tip of the economic iceberg.  At every level the California economy runs on water and we are rapidly running out.  
• Meanwhile another day goes by without the politicians demanding the building of desalinization plans up and down the coast.

(CNBC News)  -  Swimming pools have been part of California's lifestyle for decades, but as the state struggles through its fourth year of a worsening drought, communities are putting bans on filling pools or restricting new pool construction.

A handful of cities and water districts statewide have implemented restrictions on swimming pools, ranging from moratoriums on swimming pool construction to restrictions on draining and refilling pools. The California Pool and Spa Association, a trade group, has responded to restrictions with a "Let's Pool Together" campaign that gives consumers tips on being more water-efficient.

"They're trying to hammer us with the 'we're the culprits' because we do pools," said Blaine Enbody, who runs Enbody Custom Pools in Moorpark. "But if homeowners put in (landscaping), they are wasting more water than if they had a pool."

The strictest water rules are found in Montecito, a wealthy community that's home to Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres, Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Berkshire Hathaway's Charlie Munger. New pool construction is banned in Montecito, where nearby water sources, such as Lake Cachuma, are drying up.

There are bans on emptying and refilling swimming pools in at least two communities in the San Francisco Bay area. A ban on filling pools in several Orange County communities in the Santa Margarita Water District was rescinded last year after the pool industry argued that it was being singled out unfairly. The Los Angeles suburb of Glendale considered a moratorium on building new pools last summer but backed off and implemented tougher outdoor irrigation rules instead.

Last month, a moratorium on new swimming pool construction in Coalinga, a Fresno County community hard hit by the drought, was lifted in part to help attract a new Best Western Hotel that wanted a pool. Coalinga still limits the emptying of swimming pools to once every 12 months, although most swimming pools have the same water for up to seven years.

"Some people are deciding to build sooner to avoid possible moratoriums if there is one," said Greg Kearns of Fresno-based Wildwood Pools, a builder in the drought-stricken San Joaquin Valley. "People are extremely eager to get a pool in, particularly in Coalinga, because they were shut off a year or so."

That said, drought and cost worries also are keeping some homeowners from rushing into putting in a new pool. The average new pool with the latest equipment and decking can cost upwards of $50,000, according to builders.

The number of new pool construction permits in California rose 2.5 percent to 5,200 permits in 2014 from the year prior, according to figures compiled by Metrostudy, a company that tracks real estate data. Last year represented a slowed growth in percentage terms, although the actual number of permits was much higher than the industry experienced during the Great Recession when annual permit numbers sank to below 1,100 permits in 2010 and 2011.

There are approximately 1.18 million residential swimming pools in California, according to Metrostudy. The typical residential pool requires from 10,000 to 30,000 gallons of water to fill.

Read More . . . . 

San Francisco Cops accused of forcing inmates to fight each other

What About a Pay Per View?

• As long as we are all descending into Hell why not do a pay per view with the proceeds going to the victims of crime?

(CBS News San Francisco)  —  San Francisco Sheriff’s deputies have been organizing jail inmate fights and gambling on the outcomes, according to the city’s public defender.

At a hastily-arranged press conference Thursday, Public Defender Jeff Adachi said that deputies at the city’s jail at the Hall of Justice were involved in setting up gladiator-style fights and betting on who would win.

“I can only describe this an an outrageously sadistic scenario,” said Adachi.

He said four deputies were involved in staging the fights and the ringleader was Deputy Scott Neu, who was accused in 2006 of forcing inmates to perform oral sex on him. That case was settled out of court in 2009.

In the complaint, one inmate, Stanley Harris, described part of the ordeal:

“…while I’m incarcerated, Deputy Neu made me fight another individual that we’re – we’re housed in the same tank. He made us fight. We had like two fights already. It’s like, uh, he would make us go to like a – like a (inaudible) to where nobody can see, and he would make us just wrestle and fight each other to his own entertainment.”

Inmates told investigators the deputies would threaten them with beatings, handcuffing or pepper spray if they did not participate in the fights, Adachi said.

The inmate accusations were not going to be made public until the inmates were out of custody, but his Adachi said his office learned that another fight was planned for next week.

In a letter sent to Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, Adachi requested “that you take immediate action and at a minimum, remove the deputies involved from any position where they have any contact with prisoners, including the clients they have harmed.”

In the letter, Adachi said at least one inmate had been injured with a possible cracked rib.

Sheriff Mirkarimi, who spoke after Adachi’s presentation, said he will ask the U.S. Department of Justice to help in the investigation and determine whether a culture exists within his department that promotes or facilitates unlawful behavior among corrections officers.

Let the games begin

Dems - Register everyone with a drivers license

Registering Idiot Voters

• "Election Reform" to a slimy, corrupt Democrat is to put to every unmotivate mouth-breather possible on the voter rolls.
• Instead of California limiting political parties, how about opening up the process to all voters? (See below)

(Huffington Post)  -  California Secretary of State Alex Padilla has proposed automatically registering eligible residents to vote when they obtain or renew their driver's licenses, a measure that could help reverse the state's dismal voter turnout.

Padilla's proposal is modeled after the "motor voter" law recently enacted in neighboring Oregon. That legislation -- the first of its kind in the nation -- uses Department of Motor Vehicles data to automatically register eligible voters, offering them a 21-day opt-out period if they choose not to register.

“One of the biggest barriers to citizen participation is the voter registration process," Padilla said of the California initiative, according to the Los Angeles Times. "A new, enhanced California Motor Voter law would strengthen our democracy. It would be a game-changer."

He noted that if passed, an automatic voter registration law could potentially boost California's voter rolls by the millions -- the secretary of state's office estimates that there are 7 million eligible Californians currently unregistered.

Padilla, a former state senator who was elected as secretary of state last year, is teaming up with Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego) to get the legislative process rolling.

In 2014, just 42 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot in November's midterm elections.

Election Reform in California

.
One reason California voter participation is low is voters have ZERO meaningful choices on their ballots.  California has banned all smaller opposition political parties from general election ballots.  Voters are only allowed to vote for a Democrat or a Republican.  Even your write-in vote has been declared illegal and will not be counted.
.
Free multi-party elections in the states of Germany help boost voter turnout because a voter has many real choices on their ballot with five parties winning seats in their state legislature.
.
I suggest that the voters by initiate open up the California lower house with proportional representation.  If a party gets 20% of the vote they would get 20% of the seats.  If voters had real election choices turnout would increase.

party.

e • d Election results for the Landtag of Lower Saxony

Party		Ideology	Vote % (change)		Seats (change)		Seat %
	Christian Democratic Union (CDU)	christian democracy	42.5%	−5.8%	68	−23	44.7%
	Social Democratic Party (SPD)	social democracy	30.3%	−3.1%	48	−15	31.6%
	Free Democratic Party (FDP)	free market	8.2%	+0.1%	13	−2	8.6%
	Green Party (Bündnis 90/Grünen)	environmental	8.0%	+0.4%	12	−2	7.9%
	The Left (Die Linke)	democratic socialism	7.1%	+6.6%	11	+11	7.2%
	National Democratic Party (NPD)	extreme nationalist	1.5%	+1.5%	0	+0	0%
	Free Voters (FW)	various	0.5%	+0.5%	0	+0	0%
	All Others (gaining less than 0.5%)		2.0%	+0.0%	0	+0	0%
	Total		100.0%		152	-31	100.0%
Source: Parties and Elections in Europe

Piping water from a national forest during a drought

A State of Crazy People

Bottling National Park water and shipping it out 

of California during a drought

(The Desert Sun)  -  Miles from the nearest paved road in the San Bernardino National Forest, two sounds fill a rocky canyon: a babbling stream and the hissing of water flowing through a stainless steel pipe.

From wells that tap into springs high on the mountainside, water gushes down through the pipe to a roadside tank. From there, it is transferred to tanker trucks, hauled to a bottling plant and sold as Arrowhead 100% Mountain Spring Water.

Nestle Waters North America holds a longstanding right to use this water from the national forest near San Bernardino. But the U.S. Forest Service hasn't been keeping an eye on whether the taking of water is harming Strawberry Creek and the wildlife that depends on it. In fact, Nestle's permit to transport water across the national forest expired in 1988. It hasn't been reviewed since, and the Forest Service hasn't examined the ecological effects of drawing tens of millions of gallons each year from the springs.

Even with California deep in drought, the federal agency hasn't assessed the impacts of the bottled water business on springs and streams in two watersheds that sustain sensitive habitats in the national forest. The lack of oversight is symptomatic of a Forest Service limited by tight budgets and focused on other issues, and of a regulatory system in California that allows the bottled water industry to operate with little independent tracking of the potential toll on the environment.

Water flows down Strawberry Creek in the mountains north of San Bernardino.
(Photo: Jay Calderon, The Desert Sun)

In an investigation of the industry's water footprint in the San Bernardino National Forest and other parts of California, The Desert Sun found that:

• No state agency is tracking exactly how much water is used by all of the bottled water plants in California, or monitoring the effects on water supplies and ecosystems statewide. The California Department of Public Health regulates 108 bottled water plants in the state, collecting information on water quality and the sources tapped. But the agency says it does not require companies to report how much water they use.
• That information, when collected piecemeal by state or local agencies, often isn't easily accessible to the public. In some cases, the amounts of water used are considered confidential and not publicly released.
• Even as Nestle Waters has been submitting required reports on its water use, the Forest Service has not been closely tracking the amounts of water leaving the San Bernardino National Forest and has not assessed the impacts on the environment.
• While the Forest Service has allowed Nestle to keep using an expired permit for nearly three decades, the agency has cracked down on other water users in the national forest. Several years ago, for instance, dozens of cabin owners were required to stop drawing water from a creek when their permits came up for renewal. Nestle has faced no such restrictions.
• Only this year, after a group of critics raised concerns in letters and after The Desert Sun inquired about the expired permit, did Forest Service officials announce plans to take up the issue and carry out an environmental analysis.

A growing debate over Nestle's use of water from the San Bernardino National Forest parallels other arguments in places from the San Gorgonio Pass to Mount Shasta. And those debates have turned more contentious as a fourth year of drought weighs on California's depleted water supplies.

Bottled water companies in California are typically subject to environmental reviews only when a permit for a new project triggers a formal study. Otherwise, the impacts of bottling plants on creeks and aquifers often aren't scrutinized by government agencies.

Read more at the Desert Sun.com

Bottles of water move on a conveyor belt at the Nestle Waters
North America bottling plant in Ontario.
(Photo: Jay Calderon, The Desert Sun)

PANIC - California snow stands at 19% of normal

The Three Stooges could produce more water than any Democrat.

Idiots are Running California

• While water supplies dwindle insane California Democrats spend their days in endless self-masturbatory wet-dream fantasies of bullet trains, driver's licenses for illegal aliens and political correctness.
• Meanwhile I sit here waiting for Democrats (or even the brain dead GOP) to demand a string of water desalination plants up and down the coast.  

(San Francisco Chronicle)  -  Snow levels in the Sierra Nevada are at or below what they were during the driest years in California’s recorded history, surveyors said Tuesday, dashing hopes that last weekend’s storm would begin to pull the state out of its increasingly frightful drought.

The water content of the snow statewide stands at 19 percent of the average for this time of year, according to the third snow survey of the season by the California Department of Water Resources.

That means California is neck and neck with 1977 and 1991 for the most parched winter since 1950, when the state began publishing measurements of the snowpack in the Sierra. California could set a new drought benchmark this year.

Opening day of the California Legislature

“We’re looking at historical lows,” said David Rizzardo, the chief of snow surveys and water supply forecasting for the Department of Water Resources. “You go into the winter hoping that (the drought) doesn’t get worse, but I think it’s undeniable at this point that it’s going to be worse. You just can’t recover at some point from how dry it has been.”

Water consumption back up

While the state dries up, Californians have increased their water use, according to the state Water Resources Control Board. Water use was cut 22 percent in December compared with the year before, but urban residents slacked off after that, according to the water board.

California residents cut water use only 8.8 percent in January compared with the same month in 2014, water board statistics show. That’s well short of the 20 percent conservation target that Gov. Jerry Brown asked residents to meet.

"Ski" Lake Tahoe

Winter sports enthusiasts at Squaw Valley Ski Resort were seen weaving through patches of dried ground.  Many Lake Tahoe resorts have been forced to close, while others have been left with only a hint of powder.

Read more: Daily Mail. 

Inland Empire is the second fastest growing region in California

Riverside County

Growing and Growing

• Yes there is growth, but no one likes to talk about water.  You cannot keep building water guzzling business and cites in a desert.  At some point the drought will drive the entire California economy into a depression unless meaningful actions are taken.

(ONTARIO)  -   The Inland Empire has returned to its place as one of the fastest growing economies in the state, said John Husing, chief economist of the Inland Empire Economic Partnership business advocacy group, at his annual State of the Region address.

Husing told the crowd of 400 leaders and members of the business community that the region had recovered the number of jobs it had lost during the recession.

“I think when you have 400 people come together and you hear such a positive message, with people applauding when we talk about the number of jobs being created in logistics, manufacturing, and healthcare, that’s all positive,” said Paul Granillo, president and CEO of the IEEP, which sponsored the event. “A job is the best thing people can have, and in a region like ours, the more jobs we have means that our quality of life is going to get better and better.”

California's Inland Empire
San Bernardino and Riverside Counties

Husing also was happy to tell the audience that the Inland Empire, comprised of both San Bernardino and Riverside counties, added more jobs than any other area of California, except for Los Angeles, beating out the Bay area — another economic powerhouse in the state.

“It means we’re turning to the role we have historically had for the last 15 to 20 years,” Husing said. “We have often been one of the strongest economies in the state. We lost that because of the housing downturn of the great recession, but we’ve now gained it back.”

Husing forecasts the region will add about 51,200 jobs this year, with a growth rate of about 3.9 percent. That’s coming after 53,117 added last year, and 51,075 in 2013, he said.

“It will be the first time we’ve ever had three years in a row with growth over 50,000,” Husing said. “We’ve all lamented the fact that the economic recovery has been so slow. In fact, what it has done is put us on a very solid foundation where you can get continual growth of this size.”

The region’s logistics sector, or the jobs related to the warehousing and transportation of goods to and from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach throughout the Inland Empire, carried the most job growth in the past year, Husing said.

He said a strong dollar, while hurting manufacturing because of weak exports, is actually helping the Inland Empire, because increased imports benefit the region’s logistics business with more goods coming through.

Also helping the industry is the continual growth of online shopping, which has led to an increase of distribution warehouse centers, such as the large Amazon fulfillment centers in Redlands and San Bernardino. Experts say the region should expect more to come in the future.

“The one that’s really the growth engine is logistics,” Husing said. “Like I said, if anybody is going to oppose logistics, they’ve got to walk around naked and not use any electronics.”

Read more at San Bernardino County Sun.

Crime
The Inland Empire's other growth industry.

California: New mandatory water conservation

Democrat Party Insanity

• Countless billions are poured into a high speed rail rat hole while building a chain of desalination plants along the coast is ignored. 

SACRAMENTO -- Acknowledging that California's water conservation efforts are falling short as the state descends into a fourth year of punishing drought, the administration of Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday imposed new mandatory water conservation rules that will affect millions of people -- from how homeowners water their lawns to how restaurants and hotels serve their guests.

"There have been some heroic efforts that people have taken, but we are not seeing the efforts to step up and ring the alarm bells that the situation warrants," said Felicia Marcus, chairwoman of the State Water Resources Control Board, which approved the measures in Sacramento. "We're going to need to go further if it doesn't rain."

But enforcing the rules, which could carry fines of up to $500, will be left up to local cities, counties and water districts. And so far, very few have fined residents for wasting water.

Critics called the rules, which take effect April 15, a step in the right direction. But they said they are insufficient without more enforcement to avoid water shortages if the drought drags past this summer.

"At this point, we are failing. We are not meeting our goals," said Conner Everts, with the California Environmental Water Caucus, a nonprofit group. "At what point do we accept that this might be the fourth year of a 10-year drought and plan for that?"

The past three years have been the driest three years in California history dating back to the Gold Rush. On Tuesday, the Sierra snowpack was at 13 percent of its historic average, and many of the state's largest reservoirs were far below normal. Meanwhile, 2014 was the hottest year in recorded history in California and around the globe.

In January 2014, the governor declared a statewide drought emergency and asked Californians to cut water use by 20 percent voluntarily. But the state's urban and suburban residents have fallen short of that goal, cutting water use by only 9.7 percent from June to January, compared with the prior year.


Read more at the San Jose Mercury News.

Welcome to sunny California

San Diego
It took 15 years to bring just one desalination
plant online in San Diego County.
.
See Why Nothing Gets Done in California

Chinese immigrant granted posthumous law licence

Correcting an Injustice

(The Guardian)  -  A California court has overturned the decision to grant Hong Yen Chang the right to practice in the state 125 years after refusing him admission on grounds of race.

In a sweet ending to an American dream denied, a Chinese immigrant will posthumously receive a California law license 125 years after the state bar refused to admit him because of his race.

On Monday, the state’s highest court unanimously agreed to grant Hong Yen Chang admission to the state bar, overturning a 1890 court decision that denied the Columbia law school graduate the right to practice in the state.

“Even if we cannot undo history, we can acknowledge it and, in so doing, accord a full measure of recognition to Chang’s pathbreaking efforts to become the first lawyer of Chinese descent in the United States,” the unsigned ruling said.

“In granting Hong Yen Chang posthumous admission to the California Bar, we affirm his rightful place among the ranks of persons deemed qualified to serve as an attorney and counselor at law in the courts of California,” the ruling said.

In 1890, the state supreme court found that even though Chang was qualified to practice law – and was allowed to in the state of New York – he was ineligible for admission to the California bar, based on a provision of the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that denied citizenship to Chinese immigrants.

Rachelle Chong, the great-grand niece of Chang and a prominent lawyer in San Francisco, said the family has known about her great-uncle’s plight for decades but no one ever expected the case would be reversed.

“We are just so flattered and thrilled,” Chong told the Guardian.

Read More . . . .

A 19th Century California Chinese family

Handgun Sales Skyrocket, Gun-Related Homicides Plummet

Women with Guns

You can be alive or be a victim

Handgun sales in California broke a 21-year-old record in 2014, and at the same time, firearm-related murders fell to their lowest rate in over 20 years.

Moreover, accidental gun deaths decreased as well.

According to The Sacramento Bee, a record-breaking 510,000 handguns were sold in the state of California in 2014, easily breaking the previous record of 433,000 handguns sold in 1993. The rise in handgun sales reflects a national surge that was the result of “calls for more gun control in response to several mass shootings.”

The correlation between more guns and less crime was also seen nationally.

According to the FBI, violent crimes and property crimes fell in the first half of 2014 following a recording setting 21,093,273 background checks for firearm purchases in 2013.

On December 4, 2013, Breitbart News reported on a Congressional Research Service (CRS) study showing that an increasing rate of private gun ownership nationally, over a 15-year period, correlated with a sharply declining “firearm-related murder and non-negligent homicide” rate.

During the CRS study period, Americans went from owning 192 million guns in 1994 to owning 310 million guns in 2009. At the same time, the “firearm-related murder and non-negligent homicide” rate fell from 6.6 per 100,000 Americans in 1993 to 3.6 per 100,000 in 2000 and finally to 3.2 in 2011.

(Breitbart)

GOP wants constitutional amendment to prevent banning the American flag

Accompanied by fellow GOP lawmakers and veterans,
State Sen. Janet Nguyen, R-Garden Grove, announces a proposed
constitutional amendment to block publicly funded universities
from banning the American flag.

Guess how Democrats will vote

(USA Today)  -  When a California college student council banned the display of the American flag from a common area in the student government offices, the action was quickly denounced by the student body president and a higher student panel overturned it two days later.

But fearing that anti-American sentiment could reappear at University of California, Irvine or elsewhere, GOP lawmakers and veterans on Monday proposed a constitutional amendment that would block California’s publicly funded colleges and universities from banning the American flag.

“As an immigrant who came to the United States in search of freedom and democracy, I could not stand before you today as a state senator if it weren’t for the ideals of that American flag and what it represents,” said Sen. Janet Nguyen, R-Garden Grove, who called for protecting the nation’s flag.

It’s unclear how far her proposal would advance. The amendment needs a two-thirds vote of the Democratic-controlled state Legislature to appear on the November 2016 ballot and so far lacked bipartisan support.

The debate erupted on the Southern California campus with nearly 30,000 students when someone removed a U.S. flag that hung on a wall in a common area of the student government suite. An anonymous note said the flag shouldn’t be displayed in the lobby.

Six undergraduate members of a legislative council voted last Thursday to ban displaying national flags, including the American flag. In voting on the resolution, the student council noted that the American flag has been flown in times of “colonialism and imperialism.”

It went on to say that “freedom of speech, in a space that aims to be as inclusive as possible, can be interpreted as hate speech.”

The resolution was authored by student Matthew Guevara of the university’s social ecology school. Guevara did not respond to email requests for comment.

Read More . . . .

California is pumping water that fell to Earth 20,000 years ago

Pumping Water in a Desert

• As a Conservative John Muir conservationist I am staggered by the stupidity of Californians on both the Left and the Right.  Everyone appears to think it is just fine to rapidly pump out groundwater that is thousands of years older than the oldest pyramids while massive growing the size of our cities and farms.
• We spend billions on insane bullet trains to nowhere, but next to zero on desalination plants.

(Reveal)  -  By now, the impacts of California’s unchecked groundwater pumping are well-known: the dropping water levels, dried-up wells and slowly sinking farmland in parts of the Central Valley.

But another consequence gets less attention, one measured not by acre-feet or gallons-per-minute but the long march of time.

As California farms and cities drill deeper for groundwater in an era of drought and climate change, they no longer are tapping reserves that percolated into the soil over recent centuries. They are pumping water that fell to Earth during a much wetter climatic regime – the ice age.

Such water is not just old. It’s prehistoric. It is older than the earliest pyramids on the Nile, older than the world’s oldest tree, the bristlecone pine. It was swirling down rivers and streams 15,000 to 20,000 years ago when humans were crossing the Bering Strait from Asia.

What the Hell
Let's just farm and build cities in the desert.  After all, water
is "magic" and just appears at will out of pipes. California
does not have a rain problem, it has an over population problem.
But we keep importing more and more people. 

Tapping such water is more than a scientific curiosity.  It is one more sign that some parts of California are living beyond nature’s means, with implications that could ripple into the next century and beyond as climate change turns the region warmer and robs moisture from the sky.

“What I see going on is a future disaster. You are removing water that’s been there a long, long time. And it will probably take a long time to replace it. We are mining water that cannot be readily replaced,” said Vance Kennedy, a 91-year-old retired research hydrologist in the Central Valley.

Despite such concern, the antiquity of the state’s groundwater isn’t a well-known phenomenon. It has been discovered in recent years by scientists working on water quality studies and revealed quietly in technical reports.

Groundwater is crucial to California. In an average year, nearly 40 percent of the state’s water comes from underground sources. In the current extended drought, it’s more than half. Eighty percent of California residents rely to some degree on groundwater. Some towns, cities and farming operations depend entirely on it.

Groundwater is like a bank account. You want to balance the debits and credits, not draw down the principal. But California has been depleting its groundwater principal for generations, pumping more than nature can replenish. So, too, has the United States as a whole. The biggest overall user is agriculture.

Read More . . . .

Water, as it turns out, is quite ancient. If you bottled it, you could label it the provenance of the Pleistocene – a geological epoch that lasted from about 2.5 million to 12,000 years ago.

California GOP lawsuit claims unlawful use of elephant logo

Democrat Fraud?

• A campaign brochure from the Asian American Small Business PAC uses the Republican elephant logo to support GOP state Senate candidate Michaela Hertle, even though she has dropped out of the race.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article12878399.html#storylink=cpy

(Sacramento Bee)  -  The California Republican Party has filed a lawsuit against a group that appears, at first blush, to be an ally: A PAC that spent $68,000 to promote a Republican in an upcoming legislative race.

But in its suit in federal court, the party claims the Asian American Small Business PAC – which is run by a Democratic political consultant – unlawfully used the trademarked elephant logo in mailers that went out to East Bay voters promoting Republican Michaela Hertle in the race for the 7th Senate District. Though Hertle’s name will be on the ballot March 17, she announced weeks ago she will not campaign and threw her support behind Steve Glazer, one of three Democrats vying to fill the seat that represents Concord, Walnut Creek and Pleasanton.

The California Republican Party has not taken a position in the race.

California voters gather around to see 
a rare site - the nearly extinct Republican elephant.
In this case the pathetic GOP can't even manage to
run a fake, token candidates for state Senate.

“Deceptive ads like these mislead voters and misinform them about the positions and endorsements of the California Republican Party,” party Chairman Jim Brulte said in a statement. “It’s egregious on the part of a Democratic Political Action Committee to intentionally deceive Californians with its use of well-known Republican images.”

The lawsuit is the latest move in a hotly contested special election to fill the California Senate seat previously held by Rep. Mark DeSaulnier. Powerful interest groups – including unions representing teachers, firefighters and other public employees, as well as business groups for dentists, builders and the Chamber of Commerce – have poured more than $1.8 million into independent campaign efforts. The California Teachers Association is backing Assemblywoman Joan Buchanan; the California Dental Association is supporting Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla; and PACs run by the Chamber of Commerce and a charter school group are spending to benefit Glazer.

All three are Democrats. If no candidate receives a majority, the top two vote-getters in March will advance to a runoff in May – regardless of their party affiliation.

Glazer believes the Asian-American PAC’s mailer supporting Hertle is intended to keep him from landing a spot in the top two, by encouraging Republicans to vote for her instead of him. Bill Wong, the Democratic consultant and former legislative staff member who runs the PAC, says his group wants to see Hertle succeed, even if she isn’t actively campaigning.

“She is the only business person in the race,” Wong said.

He called the GOP’s lawsuit against his group frivolous, and said he purchased the elephant logo from a company that sells stock images.

“When you purchase an image from a stock image company, you purchase the rights to use it. So we’re confused why, if that is their official logo, why it would be available for someone to purchase.”

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article12878399.html#storylink=cpy

The east San Francisco Bay 7th Senate District is 43.5% Democrat, 28.5% GOP and 28% independents and smaller political parties.