Referencing the recent District 4 primary between Kate Anderson and Steve Zimmer, StudentsFirst head Michelle Rhee last week boasted that  the Coalition for School Reform effort she helped fund “came within three percentage points of unseating an incumbent, union-backed Board member – something that would have been unthinkable just a couple of election cycles ago.” But...

SB 10, a bill aimed at streamlining the dismissal process for teachers accused of sexual misconducted, was introduced earlier this week and is now out in a full-text version. A carbon copy of SB 1530 (the previous bill seeking to address this issue) SB 10 is among a handful of proposals sure to garner attention...

Santa Monica Mayor Richard Bloom seems like he’s on the verge of having won his race against Assembly member Betsy Butler. (See: KPCC, LA Observed, LA Weekly). If this happens, Bloom will have won despite being outspent by a wide margin, lacking key Democratic endorsements, and even having the state Democratic party circulate flyers against him.  And his victory...

There were 28 state legislative contests pitting two Democrats against each other this year, according to this October 17 LA Times article. But the still-unresolved contest between incumbent Betsy Butler and challenger Richard Bloom for California State Assembly District 50 may be one of the only situations in which the state Democratic Party not only endorsed the incumbent Democrat but also...

In a race that is still considered too close to call, Assemblywoman Betsy Butler is trailing her upstart opponent, Santa Monica Mayor Richard Bloom, by just over 200 votes in Assembly District 50, which covers one of the wealthiest areas of the city from Beverly Hills to the ocean. In the end, the narrow margin...

You might enjoy (or be appalled by) this Thursday night segment from the CNN Show Anderson Cooper 360 including footage of reporter Kyung Lah chasing the four SB1530 abstainers around the statehouse. It’s a little heavy-handed, but three of the four legislators play right into CNN’s hands by ducking interviews and issuing terse “no comments”...

Santa Monica Mayor Richard Bloom, a Democrat running for the 50th State Assembly seat against Democratic incumbent Betsy Butler, isn’t refraining from criticizing his opponent for her abstention during the committee vote on SB 1530. “I’ve never done that in 13 years of being a public official,” he told me earlier this week. “I think...