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California child care providers demand raises from Gov. Newsom as budget deadline looms

BY JEANNE KUANG, CALMATTERS

Gabriela Guerrero’s children are all grown and have moved out, but the former stay-at-home mom never stopped raising kids.

The children who attend her home daycare in El Centro, in Imperial County near the Mexico border, are as young as 3 months old. Some are the children of farmworkers who drop them off at Guerrero’s house before their shifts in the pre-dawn hours. Nearly all are from families poor enough to qualify for state subsidies. 



Across the aisle: Can bipartisan caucuses change the California Legislature?

BY SAMEEA KAMAL, CALMATTERS

Every other week, the 21 members of the Problem Solvers Caucus gather for lunch to hear presentations on different policies. This session, they’re focusing on clean energy and homelessness — issues they say impact every legislative district in California. 



Democrats keep pushing to bolster California’s role as an abortion sanctuary

BY VANESSA ARREDONDO, GRACE TOOHEY, Los Angeles Times

Democratic lawmakers introduced a package of bills this week to further bolster California’s role as an abortion haven after last year’s repeal of the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Roe vs. Wade.



California Legislative Women's Caucus calls for removal of Dana White as UFC president

BY BRETT OKAMOTO, ESPN Staff Writer

The California Legislative Women's Caucus on Monday called for the removal of Dana White as UFC president in a public letter addressed to the head of the promotion's parent company.

The letter, sent to Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel, comes after video surfaced last week of White slapping his wife, Anne, at a nightclub in Mexico on New Year's Eve.



Sacramento Bee Op-ed: California makes progress on child care, but more to do

By Hannah-Beth Jackson and Cristina Garcia
Special to the Bee

Over the past two years, the women’s caucus has helped restore more than $500 million into these programs, reinstating child care and preschool for more than 45,000 children.

Even as we are making progress, it is remarkable how far we still have to go. When policymakers mention states doing groundbreaking early childhood education work, Oklahoma and Georgia are often lauded. California may be the world’s seventh-largest economy, but we are serving less than a quarter of all eligible children through state-supported child care.



Sacramento Bee: Family Leave Expansion Bill Sparks Clashes

By Dan Walters

Two efforts to expand paid and unpaid “family leave” for California workers – a major cause for the Legislature’s Women’s Caucus – generated sharp clashes Wednesday among powerful interest groups, but both survived committee votes.

One of the clashes was a surprise to members of the Senate Labor and Industrial Relations Committee – a late-blooming and rare division among labor unions.



Sacramento Bee Op-ed: Child Care Looms As Big Spending Issue in California

By Dan Walters

The state Democratic Party’s weekend convention in Anaheim began just a day after Gov. Jerry Brown released his revised 2015-16 state budget.

One might expect a Democratic governor to use the occasion to trumpet an expanding economy, a multibillion-dollar cornucopia of new revenues and his plan to spend them. But Brown made only a token appearance, then vamoosed.

Brown’s reluctance to take the spotlight may have reflected what happened after he left.

The convention was full of explicit demands from Democratic legislators and constituent groups for additional spending and implicit criticism of Brown for being too stingy.



KCRA: Gov. Brown to Propose $380 Million Tax Credit for Working Poor

Gov. Jerry Brown will propose offering a $380 million tax credit for the working poor as part of his revised budget Thursday.

Information provided by the Brown administration says the tax credit would help as many as 2 million people who earn up to $13,870 a year for a family of four.

Brown has been under pressure from fellow Democrats and social welfare groups to spend some of the surplus revenue pouring into state coffers this year as California rebounds from the recession.

Education will get most of the $3 billion in unexpected extra income, but there's fierce competition for the rest of it.



KQED: Gender Equality Debate Gives New Life to Old Ideas in Sacramento

By Marisa Lagos

Are you a liberal Democrat who supports increased welfare payments or expanded access to subsidized child care or paid family leave?

Your best bet may just be to frame it as gender issue — not a way to fight poverty.

That’s the tactic many Democrats in the California Legislature are taking this year as they push bills that, in many cases, have failed in years past.

Ange-Marie Hancock, a professor of political science and gender studies at the University of Southern California, said it’s a pretty smart approach.



Sacramento Bee: Isn't It Time for Movement on Women's Inequality?

To talk about income inequality in 2015 is largely to talk about women. In California – as in all but four other states – women account for the majority of workers making minimum wage.