Mitt Romney, raising money in Riverside on Friday, acknowledged during his plea to donors the implausibility in winning California in the general election.
“You gotta vote, and I know you’re going to vote. But I know that California is a hard state for a Republican to win,” he told about 300 supporters at a luncheon at a golf course. “If I won California, why, we’ve won in a landslide, you know that? So, I’m hoping to win California, but I’m aiming to win in those key swing states, and one of the things you can do is help people help me.”
Romney is in the midst of a four-day, multicity fundraising run through the state, which last supported a Republican for president in 1988 and has no statewide elected officeholders who are Republican. He will also raise money Friday night at a private fundraiser at the Balboa Bay Club in Newport Beach, and Saturday in Del Mar.
On Friday, Romney urged his supporters to ask their friends to contribute to his campaign and to talk to young family members in other parts of the country about his candidacy.
“Talk to them about this election and what it means about their future. In some cases, they haven’t been given a full understanding of what’s at stake in this election. They don’t realize the unfairness, the unfairness of a president who is taking from their future to pay for benefits for us today,” he said. “The idea of passing on trillions of dollars of debt and unfunded liabilities to the next generation is not just bad economics, it’s immoral and it’s unfair.”
Romney made his remarks at the Victoria Club, a golf course and country club in the Tequesquite Arroyo. Donors dined on green salad and chicken. Among those attending was longtime Los Angeles Dodgers’ manager Tommy Lasorda.
Romney said the jobs numbers that came out Friday, which showed an uptick in unemployment in May and a meager number of new jobs added to payrolls, proved the president’s policies aren’t working.
“When it was announced, there was a gasp from the floor, the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. People were shocked by how few jobs have been created this last month,” Romney said. “The president, of course, when bad news comes out, looks around for someone to blame. The president was at the White House, former president, President Bush was there. I’m sure he had to duck, because President Bush is always the one they point to, it’s all his fault. I’m afraid that’s worn a little thin.”
He said the president, in office for more than three years, is directly responsible for the halting pace of the nation’s economic recovery.
“The president's spokesman today said this recession was long in the making and it won't be overcome overnight. Forty months is not overnight," Romney said. "This president is responsible for the fact that this recession has gone on so long and so many people are hurting."
Romney said the nation was at a crossroads and the election in November would be a critical decision for its future.
“This is a campaign that has to be won. It has to be won. The country is in the balance,” Romney said. “We’re going to vote for what we believe America might be, and with your help, we’ll get the job done.”
Source: www.latimes.com
No jail for sliding butt across painting - Beeld
Denver - A woman who punched, scratched and slid her buttocks against a $30m painting by abstract expressionist Clyfford Still at a Denver museum has been sentenced to two years of probation, and will have to undergo mental health treatment, prosecutors said on Thursday.
Carmen Tisch, aged 37, pleaded guilty earlier this month to felony criminal mischief for striking at and leaning against the oil-on-canvas painting 1957-J No. 2 at the Clyfford Still Museum last year, the Denver District Attorney's Office said.
After causing an estimated $10 000 worth of damage to the painting, an intoxicated Tisch then pulled down her pants, slid her buttocks against the painting and urinated on the museum floor, prosecutors said.
A judge sentenced Tisch to two years probation and she must also undergo mental health treatment and receive help for alcohol dependency as a condition of her sentence. She may still face a restitution hearing.
The North Dakota-born Still was considered one of the most influential post-World War II American abstract expressionist artists, but he was not as famous as contemporaries such as Jackson Pollock.
Still died in 1980, and Denver officials worked for decades with his widow, Patricia, to secure a single-artist museum featuring his works. When she died in 2005, she bequeathed her husband's collection to the city.
Four of his works were auctioned by Sotheby's for $114m to endow the museum, which opened in late 2011.
Source: www.news24.com
California's minor parties facing extinction under new voting system - Contra Costa Times
They've been a colorful part of California's political landscape for decades -- Greens, Libertarians, American Independents and members of the Peace and Freedom Party.
But after Tuesday's election, most of them will be all but invisible -- and perhaps on their way to extinction.
In past years, minor parties held their own primary elections to choose nominees who would go on to compete with Democratic and Republican nominees in general elections. But that's no longer the case under California's new "top two" primary system, in which all voters choose from among all candidates of all parties -- and only the two candidates who get the most votes advance to November, regardless of party.
Since minor party candidates hardly ever finish in the top two, and it's now harder for their candidates to get on the primary ballot in the first place, the parties will have little or no presence on the general-election ballot. And in politics, invisibility means oblivion.
"It could spell the end of the Peace and Freedom Party," said party chairman C.T. Weber, 71, of Sacramento. "It's a shame that democracy is being undermined by this, but that's the reality if we're not able to overturn the law."
The law was set in place with Proposition 14 in June 2010, approved by 54 percent of voters after then-state Sen. Abel Maldonado, R-Santa Maria, forced the Legislature's Democratic majority to put it on the ballot in exchange for his budget vote. Though
minor parties complained from the get-go that they would be marginalized if not obliterated by the measure, voters liked the measure's stated purpose: increasing primary voters' choices in an effort to moderate the harsh political partisanship plaguing Sacramento and Washington, D.C.Maldonado argued recently that minor parties will get more exposure in the new top-two primary and "if they represent the views of a significant number of voters in a district, they'll be in the top two. ... I don't care what party you're from, if you have a message that resonates with the people, they're going to vote for you."
But minor-party officials contend that giving voters only two choices in November -- with no write-in votes allowed -- denies parties an opportunity to spread their messages and hobbles their ability to field candidates in the future.
"It's not a good situation," in part because it's a lot harder to recruit candidates, said Kevin Takenaga, chairman of the Libertarian Party of California.
"The final outcome is going to be the opposite of what people expect because it's going to force people to these established candidates -- the ones who have more money and more major-party support," he predicted.
"This is the United States of America, where we have more choices in what type of soft drink you want to drink or restaurant you want to go to than political parties and candidates," added Takenaga, 39, of Sunnyvale. "Why do we insist on having fewer choices?"
Minor parties have had three ways of staying qualified for the ballot. First, they can poll 2 percent of the vote for any statewide race in a nonpresidential general election. With little or no presence on general-election ballots anymore, though, this will be almost impossible.
The second way is to have at least as many registered members as 1 percent of the previous total gubernatorial vote.
About 10.3 million people voted in the November 2010 gubernatorial matchup, so a party would need about 103,000 registered voters to qualify this way. The American Independent and Green parties meet this threshold now, but the Libertarian and Peace and Freedom parties don't. And the less visible all of them become, the harder the threshold will be to reach.
The third route -- gathering petition signatures from 10 percent of the state's 17 million registered voters -- always has been impossible for the cash-strapped parties.
American Independent Party chairman Mark Seidenberg, 65, of Aliso Viejo, said his party's registration is robust enough that he's not worried about staying on the ballot, but he agreed it would be "a shame" for voters to be denied the choices afforded by other parties.
Richard Winger, who edits the Ballot Access News blog, is still optimistic courts will overturn Proposition 14's obstacles to third-party access. But California already is seeing the effects, said Winger, 68, of San Francisco: About a quarter as many minor-party candidates filed for state legislative and congressional offices this year as in 2010.
That's because the Secretary of State's Office interpreted Proposition 14 to void the old system by which minor-party candidates could gather 150 signatures in lieu of paying the primary-election filing fee. Now, he said, they must gather the same number of signatures as a major-party candidate: 1,500 for an Assembly seat, 3,000 for a state Senate or House seat.
Washington state's voters OK'd a top-two system in 2004, but it was declared unconstitutional by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2005 before being reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008.
Unlike in California, Washington voters don't declare party affiliation when they register, so maintaining party strength that way isn't an issue. But Jody Grage, chairwoman of that state's Green Party, said it has been a tough row to hoe nonetheless.
"Because the primary gets a lot less publicity and fewer voters, that makes a big difference in our visibility," she said, adding no third-party candidate has advanced to a November election if two major-party candidates already were on the primary ballot.
Election-reform advocate Steven Hill, cofounder of the nonprofit FairVote, said losing minor parties would result in an ever-narrowing political discourse.
"Minor parties tend to be the laboratories for new ideas. They bring issues and ideas into the political discussion that the major parties often ignore," he said. "That's the first thing you're going to lose, and it's a fairly big loss."
He said most Democrat-vs.-Republican races end up with candidates battling for a relatively small population in the middle. So with no minor parties to widen the debate, he said, "they're going to be talking only to that narrow group of swing voters."
Laura Wells, a 64-year-old Oakland resident who was the California Green Party's 2010 gubernatorial nominee, hopes the new primary system leads to a backlash that wrecks the two-party system once and for all.
"I think we're due,'' Wells said. "Goodness, how bad does it have to get?"
Josh Richman covers politics. Follow him at Twitter.com/josh_richman. Read the Political Blotter at IBAbuzz.com/politics.
Source: www.contracostatimes.com
California extends Tenant Act protections to 2019 - Housing Wire
The California legislature passed another set of bills Thursday extending protections to tenants facing eviction.
The two bills (AB 2610 and SB 1473) are the latest of the Homeowner Bill of Rights package spearheaded by democrat lawmakers and California Attorney General Kamala Harris.
Under the bills, new owners of a rental property, who bought the home in foreclosure, must give tenants 90 days notice before starting an eviction and must honor any fixed-term leases entered into before the sale.
The federal Tenant Act granted similar protections originally set to expire at the end of 2012. The Dodd-Frank Act extended the legislation through 2014.
The California bills passed Thursday would extend the protections statewide through the end of 2019.
According to a statement from Harris' office there were "incongruities within state law, and between state and federal law, regarding eviction proceedings following a foreclosure." The bills passed Thursday will align the protections.
Assemblymember Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, who sponsored the assembly version of the bill, said the foreclosure crisis impacted more than 200,000 California renters in 2010 alone.
The original bills at the federal and state levels forced the REO industry to look closer at who is being evicted, a homeowner or a tenant. Lawsuits against brokers and banks have grown in recent years, forcing new training to handle an occupancy status.
And enforcement may be stepping up in California. Earlier in the week, state lawmakers passed a set of bills granting more powers to AG Harris to investigate mortgage fraud and other financial crimes.
A spokesman for Gov. Jerry Brown declined to comment on whether the passed legislation will be signed.
"Tenants are unsuspecting victims in the mortgage and financial crisis," Harris said. "They pay rent on time but may suddenly find themselves forced to move. These bills will give tenants important rights and fair treatment when they live in a rental that is under threat of foreclosure."
Source: www.housingwire.com
Great Works: Bianca Saracini suspended aloft above the City of Siena, 1472-74 (20.7cm x 13.8cm), By Francesco di Giorgio Martini - The Independent
Not so here. This painting is suffering from an almost tragic degree of neglect. The paint itself has worn away; the quality of such restoration as the painting has undergone is poor in the extreme – see where that raggedy line of green ends, just above the city's tallest tower. For all that – and perhaps, in part, because of it – it is still wonderful.
This noblewoman, suspended gracefully above the easily recognisable silhouette of Renaissance Siena, looming hugely and magnificently, skirt billowing over its finicky tininess, has a lovely sense of weightlessness about her. Her legs are drawn back, as if blown into that shape by currents of air. She seems to be carried back and away from us even as we stare at her. She is entirely at her ease here, we feel, as if in someone's comfortably dependable arms.
Her graceful feet, pointily shod in the red of the city itself, seem to be pushing her along. She seems more sacred than secular, virgin-like or angelic, and yet in spite of all that, she also looks entirely human. Almost nothing suggests that she is other than human – except, perhaps, for one tiny, miraculous-looking detail, the snowball she holds out, quite loosely, in her right hand, which is a glancing reference to a sacred painting by Sassetta called Madonna delle neve ("Virgin of the snows").
The painter, in the depiction of the face and the treatment of the hair, seems to have gone out of his way to make sure that she will be recognised for the great beauty that she undoubtedly was at the time that she was painted. There is a solemnity, a real gravity, about the expression on her face, which may represent the twin burdens of being a symbol of beauty and nobility. And yet the painting is also, simultaneously – and this is surely part of its enduring appeal – utterly light and fanciful at the same time, even a little Mary Poppins-ish, snatched, if you like, from the pages of a children's book.
Not a bad guess, you might say. This very small painting, housed in a library in Florence, is indeed the frontispiece to a book, a book of poetry. The painting does have qualities of naivety. Look at how those puffed-out trees are painted below the walls of the city, for example. Their representation is simplified in a child-like way. The book itself is a secular hymn of praise addressed to Bianca herself, who was a prized contemporary embodiment of Sienese beauty.
About the artist: Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439-1501)
The extraordinarily industrious Francesco di Giorgio Martini, architect, painter, sculptor and engineer, was a man whose talents were much in demand in the second half of the Sienese Quatrocento. He decorated coffered ceilings, made secular and religious paintings for public and private patrons, and was also in charge of the city's water supply. At the end of his fourth decade he was wooed to Urbino, where he served as architect to a court that also had Piero della Francesca in its employ. His last decade saw a return to Siena, where he became engaged in works of military engineering.
Source: www.independent.co.uk
California awards tax credits to 28 pics - Variety
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Source: www.variety.com
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