President Obama has given several very important policy speeches during this month of September 2009. In general transcripts of President Obama’s speeches are easily found on the White House Speeches and Remarks site. A few of the September 2009 speeches are highlighted here:
The Census Bureau has released social, demographic, housing, and someeconomic data from the 2008 ACS for areas with populations of 65,000 or more.
On September 29, 2009, the remaining 2008 ACS economic data will be released. The delayed release of these data is due to the discovery of a coding error that affected the estimates of poverty, family income, and food stamp receipt. The Census Bureau released all tables that weren’t affected by the coding error. For a list of the impacted tables, please see the revised release schedule: http://www.census.gov/acs/www/Products/2008/schedule.html.
Below is a sample of the topics included in the current release:
The Library’s exhibit “125 Years of Discovery: The FDLP at Cal” celebrating UCB’s 125th anniversary of being a Federal Depository Library (see original blog posting for more details) is scheduled to close in late September. If you have not yet visited this exhibit, we encourage you to do so before it closes. The exhibit is located in the Bernice Layne Brown Gallery, just inside the North entrance of the Doe Library. The exhibit website will remain active:http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/doemoff/govinfo/federal/fdlpexhibit/
Vermont began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples today, becoming one of five states to allow same-sex couples to marry. Massachusetts, Iowa, Connecticut, and Maine are the others. New Hampshire will begin allowing same-sex couples to marry beginning January 1, 2010. California briefly allowed same-sex marriages, but stopped after the passage of Proposition 8 in November 2008.
Representative Barbara Lee, U.S. Congressional Representative from the 9th District of California (where UCB is located), has a YouTube channel : http://www.youtube.com/user/RepLee. You can watch her speaking from the House Floor, or questioning witnesses in Congressional Committees.
If you would like to watch other congressional floor debate, try Metavid: http://metavid.org/wiki/ Metavid is free to the public and contains video from the floor of the U.S. House and Senate, archived back to 2006. It is also searchable.
The California Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) has issued the report: July 2009 Budget Package that summarizes the budget actions of the state Legislature and the Governor. The Legislature passed amendments to the 2009-10 Budget Bill on July 24, 2009. The Governor signed the budget package on July 28, 2009 and in doing so vetoed $489 million in General Fund appropriations. The new budget authorizes total General Fund spending of $84.6 billion and leaves an estimated reserve of $500 million at the end of FY 2009-10. Tables in the report of interest:
Expenditure-Related Budget Reductions in areas: K-14 education, higher education, local government, social services, transportation, health, employee compensation, criminal justice, and other; also includes increases in revenues/transfers to general fund, and increases in borrowing
2008-09 and 2009-10 Proposition 98 Funding comparisons
Another report, this one from the California Budget Project, Governor Signs Budget Revisions, also offers an analysis of the new budget. It notes that the majority of the Governor’s vetoes cut ($394 million) from health and human services programs, including the Child Welfare Services Program, the Health Family Programs, and the Regional Center services for developmentally disabled children. This publication provides a summary of the key provisions of the budget and the Governor’s line-item vetoes.
The recent report, State Budget Update: July 2009, by the National Conference of State Legislatures provides an excellent overview of the challenges faced by states trying to balance their budgets. In FY 2009 state lawmakers were required to close budget shortfalls that reached $113.2 billion. FY 2010 budgets face a gap of more than $142.6 billion. Budget negotiations required extension of regular sessions or convening of special sessions. Eight states did not meet their July 1 budget deadlines. As of mid-July when this report was written, six states still had not passed a budget for FY 2010. Credit is also due to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 funds (ARRA) that helped some states balance their budgets. The report used information from legislative fiscal directors in June and July 2009 and includes information on budget gaps for all 50 states and Puerto Rico for FY 2009 and 2010. Tables provide information on budget gap number by year; FY 2009 budget gaps by state; and budget gap projections by state for FY 2011 and FY 2012. The report does also state that some of the information provided is preliminary and might change and that ARRA funds distorted many of the numbers.
Want to know what a Registered Warrant or IOU is? Who gets paid in IOUs beginning July 2nd? California Controller John Chiang has created a Frequently Asked Questions about Registered Warrants (IOUs) website that will be updated regularly.
Here is a piece of news I missed this weekend. The United States Census Bureau announced on Friday that it will count married same-sex couples in the 2010 Census. According to an article in the Washington Post, this is a reversal of a decision made by the Bush Administration not to count same-sex married couples because of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The Obama Administration does not interpret DOMA as prohibiting this count. According to the article, the Census Bureau is now working to identify the technical changes needed to ensure the reliability of the information on such couples.
The New York Times is reporting that California’s budget battles have gotten rather interesting in Sacramento between the state senate president pro tem and the governor. According to the article:
“Darrell Steinberg, the Senate president pro tem, sent Mr. Schwarzenegger a package of mushrooms in response to the governor’s saying the Legislature was “hallucinating” with its budget plan; the governor sent Mr. Steinberg a sculpture of a bull testicle, suggesting something like backbone, only not quite, would be needed to make tough cuts.”
