Sunday, June 10, 2012 – 07:30 p.m.

News of interest crossing the transom:

Obama blows it again!

President Barack Obama stepped on it big time last week. He said the private sector is doing just fine and that state and local governments needed to hire more employees.

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BY ALICIA ROBINSON
STAFF WRITER
arobinson@pe.com

Published: 09 June 2012 04:12 PM

The dust has barely settled after the election, but the two Riverside mayoral candidates who won the most votes already are gearing up for a November runoff.

Councilman William “Rusty” Bailey was in first place and former Councilman Ed Adkison in second place out of seven candidates, positioning them for a five-month battle for the mayor’s seat.

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Liset Marquez, Staff Writer
Created: 06/09/2012 08:08:25 PM PDT

ONTARIO – L.A./Ontario International Airport is not only an economic asset to the region, but its future growth can have adverse impacts – such as increased noise and safety – for the communities in its vicinity.

Historically, a governing body from San Bernardino County has overseen a process that ensures future developments are compatible with the airport’s operations.

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By Jon Ortiz
jortiz@sacbee.com
Published: Sunday, Jun. 10, 2012 – 12:00 am | Page 1A
Last Modified: Sunday, Jun. 10, 2012 – 9:03 am

Labor unions and business interests have been quietly raising millions of dollars and testing campaign messages for months, girding for a brawl over a November ballot measure that could fundamentally shift political power in Sacramento.

Now, on the heels of an election that saw unions handed a major defeat last week in Wisconsin, the opposing camps in California soon will launch a campaign battle likely to consume $50 million or more in political spending.

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Dan Morain

By Dan Morain, Senior editor
dmorain@sacbee.com
Published: Sunday, Jun. 10, 2012 – 12:00 am | Page 1E
Last Modified: Sunday, Jun. 10, 2012 – 10:30 am

In this state where Democrats control virtually all that happens in the Capitol, the pressure is on. At least, it should be.

The Democratic-controlled Legislature faces a deadline Friday for approving a budget, one that’s balanced.

Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and Democratic legislators are promising to follow that with legislation that actually curtails the cost of public pensions. If they stumble, voters will be even more disgusted come November. That wouldn’t be pretty.

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By Dale Kasler
dkasler@sacbee.com
Published: Sunday, Jun. 10, 2012 – 12:00 am | Page 1D
Last Modified: Sunday, Jun. 10, 2012 – 8:56 am

After years of wrestling with state officials about Internet taxation, Amazon.com finally agreed last fall to begin collecting sales tax from its California customers.

But some of that tax revenue, perhaps millions of dollars a year, could wind up back in Amazon’s pocket.

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By Nicholas Riccardi, Los Angeles Times
June 9, 2012, 6:24 p.m.

SACRAMENTO — In a second-floor walk-up near the Capitol, two children of one of the world’s richest men used to slump into armchairs in the evening and gripe about California education, unwittingly laying the groundwork for a potential upheaval in state politics.

That was a decade ago, and the apartment was a crash pad for Molly Munger, a Pasadena lawyer and the eldest daughter of Warren Buffett’s billionaire business partner. Having traded in a successful career as a corporate litigator to become a civil rights attorney after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, she was in the capital often to help low-income neighborhoods fight for school construction money.

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Dan Walters

By Dan Walters
Published: Sunday, Jun. 10, 2012 – 12:00 am | Page 3A

Gov. Jerry Brown wants to fast-track an initial section of a north-south bullet train system, perhaps by partially exempting it from environmental impact laws, even though there’s no financing on the horizon to complete the project, and even though a new poll shows that most Californians don’t want to build it.

While the bullet train debate rages in the Capitol and in the media, however, everyone is ignoring a far more pressing transportation issue – the deterioration of highways and roads that most Californians use every day and that were once considered to be the finest such network in the world.

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