Dozens of California lawmakers are pushing to make their state the first in the nation to impose an across-the-board boycott on Arizona over its immigration law — though the state’s largest city just voted to selectively scale back its boycott after local lawmakers realized it could backfire.

The Democratic state lawmakers on Wednesday unveiled a resolution that would impose several restrictions against Arizona. The measure calls for California to issue a travel advisory on visits to its eastern neighbor, halt state investment there and urge Major League Baseball to reconsider letting the state host the 2011 All-Star Game.

Though dozens of cities and organizations have voiced their opposition to Arizona’s law by instituting bans on employee travel, canceling conventions in the state and threatening to pull contracts, California would be the first state to do so.

Read the rest.

“Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction,” said German psychologist Erich Fromm. Whatever greed does to one’s psyche, it does even worse things to public budgets. California, sinking amidst a structural $19 billion deficit and facing as much as one-half-trillion-dollars in pension debt, is paying the price for years of legislators giving away the store to public employee unions.

Yet even as unlikely sources (former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, Treasurer Bill Lockyer and California Public Employees’ Retirement System chief actuary Ron Seeling) recognize the grave threat outrageous pension deals pose to the state’s long-term fiscal health, the state’s unions and Democratic leaders continue to operate as if there is no problem. The public seems increasingly agitated by the injustice of a situation that requires private sector workers to work late into life to pay the higher taxes needed so that public sector workers can retire in their early 50s with six-figure, cost-of-living-adjusted deals. But to the politicians, the unions still rule.

In my old haunts of Orange County, Calif., a particularly nasty race for the Board of Supervisors has been unfolding in the past month. On June 8, voters in that heavily Republican and generally anti-union county will fill the slot of a supervisor who has since been elected to the state Assembly.

Back in January, party leader Scott Baugh threw down the gauntlet after watching one Republican after another sell out to the state’s unions. In what has been referred to as the Baugh Manifesto, Baugh slammed Republicans for their role in expanding debt. He promised to use the party to hold Republicans accountable. He called for the party to do more than just endorse those with an “R” after their name. He made two specific demarcations: No Republican will get party support without backing a now-dead Paycheck Protection Initiative, which limits the ability of unions to use dues for political purposes. And no Republican will get party support “who receives contributions from public employee unions.”

read the rest.