Posts Tagged: influence
News
In just a few months, Capitol Weekly will unveil its 16th annual Top 100 list recognizing the most influential members of the Capitol community. As we began researching this year’s list, however, we realized that in all our years of the Top 100 we’ve overlooked a critical dynamic of Capitol clout: the Capitol power couple whose combined prominence and rolodex is greater than the sum of their parts. To rectify that, today we publish our first ever Capitol Weekly Top 10 Power Couples, along with three up-and-coming pairs to keep your eyes on.
Opinion
OPINION: The window of opportunity is rapidly closing for Senate Leader Toni Atkins and the California Legislature to save the Mojave Desert from Cadiz, Inc.’s reckless plan to suck the water out from under one of the Earth’s driest places and sell it to water golf courses and suburban lawns as far away as Orange County. Killed by Barack Obama and revived by Donald Trump, the water mining project would dramatically overdraw the aquifer below the desert and almost certainly stop the flow of water to the springs that preserve the Mojave’s fragile biodiversity.
News
Welcome to the 10th running of Capitol Weekly’s Top 100 list, our annual look at people who aren’t elected to office but who wield decisive influence on California politics or policy — or both. Much has changed in the nine years since we started this exercise. We shifted from a Republican to a Democratic governor, emerged from the Great Recession to become the world’s fifth-largest economy and watched GOP voter registration dip to third-party status behind decline-to-state. Hardball politics got even harder.
News
FollowTheMoney: California established a separate classification for federal Super PACs to better facilitate disclosure of activities in state elections. Once a Super PAC raises $2,000 or more to influence a race for state office, it must file reports with the state that clearly identify both the funding behind the activity as well as detailed information about the specific political activity.
Analysis
ANALYSIS: Influencing legislation is a complicated business. There is no high-tech computer model that can predict whether a bill introduced in the California Legislature will become a law and, if so, the form it will take. However, there are many, knowable influences that regularly shape state legislation in California.
Analysis
Cutting deals is part of the Capitol culture — it’s how laws are made. But does this deal-making come close to the legal line, or even cross it? Let’s continue our review of California criminal statutes that might apply to the wheeling and dealing of the Legislature.
News
It’s been almost 70 years since Michael J. Machado was born in San Joaquin County, but he still calls Linden home. Having seen the decades pass has given him a perspective on small town farming in the Central Valley. “Linden hasn’t changed much since I was born,” Machado reflected recently, “It’s tripled in size since I was a boy, now with a bursting population of 2,500.”
Recent News
If California legalizes recreational marijuana, the state should develop a single highly regulated marijuana market—for medical and recreational uses. This is among the key findings of a report released today by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC). It analyzes the regulatory approaches taken by Washington and Colorado — the first two states to legalize recreational marijuana.
News
A move is afoot in the Capitol to bring back a higher education watchdog and restore a data trove of 1.7 billion records on public colleges and universities that were placed in limbo by Gov. Jerry Brown.
News
A major Sacramento-based lobbyist and his firm have been fined a record $133,500 for throwing fundraisers for politicians and candidates – parties that violated the state’s laws governing gifts and campaign donations to public officials. The enforcement arm of the state’s Fair Political Practice Commission posted the settlement with lobbyist Kevin Sloat and the firm, Sloat Higgins Jensen and Associates, on the FPPC web site on Monday.
The Capitol's Top power couple: Ann Patterson and Nathan Barankin. 
