Election Politics

Last Friday's section-front article, "Schillo Takes On Ambulance Response Time," was another unfair free political advertisement for your buddy Frank. Try to keep your advertisements where they belong. VINCE CURTIS Oak Park

SACRAMENTO - The year shouldn't slip by without giving Gov. Jerry Brown his annual report card. And that's tough. Not the grading: He obviously deserves high marks if the yardstick is effectiveness. And that's my yardstick. The only decision is whether to give him a B-plus, an A-minus or a full A. The tough part is acknowledging that Brown, who regards himself as the smartest man in the room and tends to let people know it, usually is. Certainly he was in 2012. This was the year Brown delivered what he was selling when he ran for election in 2010: political know-how, inherited from his father Pat Brown's genes and developed over decades of trial and error; the governor uniquely qualified by experience and wisdom to clean up Sacramento's fiscal mess.

How sad that The Times puts forth an article with pejorative words like stealth, captured, lead the charge, sneak attack and money trail just before the election to portray Christians, who are trying to regain the moral ground in the United States, as an army of underground bigots who are trying to take over the country. Christians feel that strong families with lots of love in them would go far in stopping the criminal behavior that's rampant in our country, and Christians also believe that a person is responsible for his or her actions.

The Supreme Court will decide in coming months whether Arizona and other states can target illegal immigrants for arrest, setting the stage for an election-year ruling that will vault the justices into the contentious political debate over efforts to crack down on immigration violators. The announcement means that the justices will rule next year on three highly partisan issues, including a challenge to President Obama's signature healthcare law and a voting rights case in Texas.

With the first free, all-German election in nearly 60 years only days away, the hoopla and sense of anticipation by rights should be almost uncontainable. Can Chancellor Helmut Kohl cap the most successful year of his political life by becoming the first freely elected German leader since Gen. Kurt von Schleicher last inherited the mantle in a November, 1932, election? Or might his Social Democrat opponent Oskar Lafontaine manage an unlikely upset and place Europe's richest nation in socialist hands?

With time and compromise slipping out of reach, the congressional "super committee" may punt its toughest deficit decisions to next year rather than strike a deal that would enrage both parties' political bases heading into the 2012 election. The Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction has until Nov. 23 to agree to a package that would reduce deficits by $1.5 trillion over the next decade. Achieving that goal would require painful compromise — both parties would have to give up political weapons they have hoped to wield over the next year.

44 days to go before Californians go to the polls. THE GOVERNOR'S RACE * What Happened Saturday: State Treasurer Kathleen Brown spoke to the California Conference of Machinists in Universal City and attended an education round table in Fresno. Gov. Pete Wilson attended a meeting of the Governor's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports and helped present the group's first lifetime achievement award to Jack LaLanne. * What's Ahead: Wilson will spend today signing legislation in Sacramento.

With time and compromise slipping out of reach, the congressional "super committee" may punt its toughest deficit decisions to next year rather than strike a deal that would enrage both parties' political bases heading into the 2012 election. The Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction has until Nov. 23 to agree to a package that would reduce deficits by $1.5 trillion over the next decade. Achieving that goal would require painful compromise — both parties would have to give up political weapons they have hoped to wield over the next year.

For the first time since the landmark Voting Rights Act became law in 1965, a Democratic administration in Washington will oversee the high-stakes, once-a-decade political redistricting based on the census. That redistricting is already underway. Under the act, the Justice Department must approve changes to election laws in the South and other areas where racial discrimination once interfered with elections. At issue will be whether the newly drawn congressional and state legislative districts — based on the 2010 census — deny blacks or Latinos their right "to elect representatives of their choice.

Hundreds of environmentalists, union members and liberal activists converged on Rancho Mirage on Sunday to rally against what they see as the influence of two of the nation's leading financial backers of conservative causes. The protestors waved signs condemning "corporate greed," chanted slogans and surged toward a line of helmeted police officers at the entrance to a resort where billionaires Charles and David Koch were holding a retreat for prominent conservative elected officials, major political donors and strategists.

Disarray and dissent are clouding the formation of Iraq's new provincial councils, which only now are taking shape more than two months after regional elections. Political bickering, as well as Iraq's laborious electoral procedures, has delayed the seating of new councils and their subsequent selection of governors. Many Iraqis had hoped the process would herald a new era of representative government and kick-start the delivery of urgently needed services and economic development.

Nine months into the worst housing crisis in a generation, Congress this week took up the most aggressive government plan so far to break spiraling home foreclosures and tumbling house prices that threaten to pull the economy down. But even as a key House committee began to mark up the bill Wednesday, there were signs that the measure could be caught up in a crippling political crossfire.

At the opening Tuesday of a federal trial of seven terrorism suspects, jurors were asked to settle a question that has dogged the case since its disclosure 16 months ago: Did the FBI foil a 2006 plot to bomb Chicago's Sears Tower, or did it finance a fictitious plot to serve as an election-year victory in the war on terrorism?

Growing anti-trade sentiment in several Central American countries has held up a trade agreement with the United States that had been slated to launch Jan. 1. Under the Central American Free Trade Agreement, the U.S. agreed to open its markets further to key Central American products, such as sugar and apparel and textiles, while those countries promised to lower barriers to U.S. farm goods, high-tech products and services.

Just weeks after allowing the federal assault weapons ban to expire, the House on Wednesday voted to repeal the District of Columbia's tough 28-year-old gun control law -- thrusting the emotional issue into the election- year spotlight once again. The Republican leadership does not expect the bill to reach the president's desk this year; instead, the vote was intended to force Democrats into making an uncomfortable choice.