In One Ear: A state cryptid?
'Assemblyman Chris Rogers (D-Santa Rosa) authored AB 666, to designate Bigfoot as the 'official state cryptid.' A cryptid is a creature whose reported existence is unproved,' the article said. And no, seriously, it's not a joke.
There really is a California AB 666 at tinyurl.com/CAcryptid, and here's the text: 'Existing law establishes the state flag and the state's emblems, including, among other things, the golden poppy as the official state flower and the California redwood as the official state tree. This bill would state the intent of the Legislature to enact legislation that would designate Bigfoot as the official state cryptid.'
The state of Washington better get with it quickly if they want Bigfoot to be their state cryptid first, because that's the state with the highest number of sightings, at 724, according to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. California is only No. 2 at 463 sightings. Sadly, in comparison, Oregon has a paltry 260.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Axios
26 minutes ago
- Axios
Newsom signs California redistricting measures in response to Texas bill
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed two redistricting bills into law on Thursday evening after a Democratic-controlled Legislature passed them earlier in the day. Why it matters: The legislation is in direct response to Texas' Republican-controlled House passing a new congressional map at the urging of President Trump, and the consequences of both could prove pivotal in the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
As Michigan schools lay off staff due to ongoing budget standoff, Hall tells them to hold the line
Michigan House Speaker Matt Hall (R-Richland Township) speaks to members of the news media to discuss the ongoing battle over the state's budget and new notices from schools that they are laying off staff due to funding uncertainty. Aug. 21, 2025 | Photo by Ben Solis/Michigan Advance Michigan schools facing uncertainty over the state budget are beginning to issue layoff notices to staff, adding another layer of disarray over the Legislature's strained and stagnant funding plans for the coming fiscal year. On Thursday, Michigan House Speaker Matt Hall (R-Richland Township) eschewed schools' claims that new layoffs were related to the current budget fight. Hall also doubled down on his assertion that his chamber's budget would provide them with more money than in years past. In a regularly hosted news conference, the speaker told schools to hold the line and wait it out, promising that the House's full budget would be presented soon, and that negotiations on a consensus plan with the Senate would emerge swiftly. Those who represent and advocate for Michigan's K-12 schools, however, said Thursday that districts can't wait for the Legislature's fight to continue, and the longer they do, tough decisions would need to be made. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX At present, the Legislature is now many weeks past its statutory July 1 deadline to complete and present to the governor an appropriations bill to fund state departments, public schools and higher education. Although the deadline has been missed before, this year's budget fight is novel in the fact that partisan gridlock has stalled movement on negotiations. A full budget has been passed by the Michigan Senate, but the chamber lacks a clear roads funding plan, which the Republican-controlled House has blamed for the current impasse. The House has yet to present its full budget funding state operations, but it has crafted a roads plan and passed K-12 and higher education budgets. The Democrats who control the Senate say it's the House that's holding up the process. Either way, the two competing school funding plans are diametrically different in their approaches to funding. That's given K-12 districts no insight into how to best plan for the year to come. To give themselves some cushion, some districts are already either talking about laying off staff or have already done so. In his press conference to address the ongoing stalemate held Thursday, Hall was asked if he had comment on those schools who are directly tying the budget crisis to their decisions on layoffs. The question from a reporter focused mainly on school safety and mental health staff that were allegedly getting the ax. To that, Hall said that the previous Democratic trifecta, which held power for the last two years, slashed funding for mental health and school safety, and that his chamber's schools budget this year was a restoration of those areas. Some have criticized the House budget because it rolled up all the categorical spending line items for funding areas into the total per-pupil allowance, which gave schools no clear direction on how to spend that money. Critics have also said that schools would remove free meals and other key programs if the House budget was adopted into law because the Legislature no longer mandated that they fund them. Hall said boilerplate language in the House education budget mandates money to be used for mental health and schools. 'Right before the [2024] election, they tried to fix that and put a little bit in, but it's still way down,' Hall said. 'One of the main things we're trying to achieve in our budget, we … put a rule in place that you must fund school safety and mental health with this money.' In response to the talk of layoffs in the face of potentially more school funding from the House this year, Hall said he believed those layoffs were more performance based than anything else. Another reporter noted that despite whatever the House put in its version of the education budget, the lower chamber and its big brother in the Senate still needed to work out a consensus conference budget. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer would also have considerable influence in those negotiations. That could take time even after the House presents its full plan and the Senate finally moves forward on road funding. Schools would be left in the lurch despite promises of increased funding because they don't have that money now. Again, Hall asked schools to hold the line and not make any rash personnel decisions because the money was coming. 'If I was a school superintendent, and I was watching this and I saw that all parties want to increase my funding, I wouldn't be making all of these crazy decisions, because I see that all parties are trying to fund me more,' Hall said. 'I would assume they'll work it out. … All three budgets [the House, the Senate and the governor's recommendations] increase funding for schools, it's just the House Republicans who are increasing it the most.' Hall chalked up the disconnect to the new House budgeting process, adding that the chamber was doing it 'in a way that is a little different than the establishment is used to.' Robert McCann, executive director of the K-12 Alliance of Michigan, said schools have a reason to be worried as the budget battle rages on. 'The reason for these layoffs is directly tied to the fact that they haven't passed a budget,' McCann told Michigan Advance. 'The budget is more than the per pupil [amount]. The budget is more than the total amount you're getting. It's pieces that create an entire budget for a school year, and those individual pieces fund specific programs and specific personnel.' McCann said schools typically build their budgets in June, even though, as in years past, a final consensus budget might not be completed. 'But we were pretty far along in the process [in previous years] where they can take some reasonable guesses as to where their final budget is and what it's going to look like,' McCann said. 'They might have had to come back and tweak it a little bit at the end of the summer, but it's close, and they could make enough informed decisions to keep personnel or to bring on new ones.' In the current saga, McCann said schools have nothing to go on. 'With all due respect to the speaker, I couldn't disagree more. Yes, they had two budgets that have been passed, but they were radically different from one another,' he added. 'That's where I say, it's not just the fact that there were two budgets passed that would give them some amount of money, it's that there were two budgets that contained very different funding and ways of distributing that funding.' Aside from the dilemma facing schools, the roads issue continues to take precedence in the budget talks for Hall, as does the new Republican ethos to target funding areas that they consider 'waste, fraud and abuse.' The speaker has said that the full budget hasn't come out yet, despite an optimistic view from his appropriations chair, state Rep. Ann Bollin (R-Brighton) that it could be delivered as soon as next week, because his team keeps finding wasteful spending areas that it says it can cut safely and responsibly. Although that concept has been a national GOP talking point, Hall has only given a few examples of where waste was located in previous spending plans and where cuts might come from. On Thursday, he shared more, targeting the Department of Attorney General, the Department of Technology, Management and Budget, the Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, the Department of Civil Rights and the Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy. Hall showed slides comparing the budgets of former Republican Gov. Rick Snyder to the last two budget cycles when Democrats held all levers of power in state government. By his caucus' math, the attorney general's office budget grew by 22%; management and budget by 36%; civil rights by 80%; labor by 92%; and EGLE by 107%. For Hall, that was evidence enough for Republicans to take the ax to those ballooning departments and label that all as waste. The numerous press conferences and tough talk in Lansing, on both sides of the aisle, have brought the budget no closer to completion. Hall previously said it was his estimation that the full budget proposal would land by Sept. 30, the constitutional drop deadline for the fiscal year before the government lands in a shutdown. The last government shutdown in Michigan lasted only a few hours, with a consensus reached soon afterward. The Advance asked Hall what that might look like if both budgets are delivered and passed by each chamber on Sept. 30 or Oct. 1, and how swiftly he believed the two sides could come to agreement to stave off a potential shut down. Hall has said his team was putting together 'the perfect budget,' and therefore, any shut down might only last a few hours in this round, if it happens at all. 'In that scenario, we would only need a couple of hours at that point,' Hall said. 'But I think we'll try to give them a little more time, a few more days than that, to work through this.' In the face of sneering political mistrust between Democrats and Republicans, Hall's assumption appears highly optimistic. The speaker, however, blamed any infighting on two opposing factions within the Democratic Party, and not on House Republicans. 'If the Democrats can unify and empower their leader, Governor Whitmer, we'll get a deal done in about two weeks, probably less,' Hall said. 'I think when I show this to her, she will see a lot of this waste, fraud and abuse, and will help us eliminate it. And then I think we share a common goal of getting the roads fixed.' Play Farm Merge Valley
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Fight over rulemaking power escalates after Evers bypasses Legislature
A state Supreme Court ruling hasn't ended the friction between Republican lawmakers and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers over administrative rulemaking. (Wisconsin Examiner photo) Republican leaders of the Legislature moved Thursday to block the Evers administration from bypassing legislative committees in implementing administrative rules. Republican leaders of the Joint Committee on Legislative Organization (JCLO), with members from both the Assembly and the Senate, sent committee members a motion Thursday instructing the Legislative Reference Bureau not to finalize or publish any rules unless they have gone through a review by the Legislature in accordance with Wisconsin law. The motion came two days after a published report that Gov. Tony Evers instructed cabinet heads to skip the Legislature in the final steps of the rulemaking process. It is the latest development in an ongoing feud between the Democratic governor and Republican leaders in the Legislature over the power of the executive branch to write rules in order to carry out state laws. In a memo Aug. 12, Evers told department secretaries, 'There no longer remains any statutory requirement to wait for legislative committee review before promulgating a rule once I have approved it.' The governor's memo cited the July 8 Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling in the case Evers v. Marklein that curtailed the power of the Joint Committee for the Review of Administrative Rules (JCRAR) to block executive branch rulemaking. In the 4-3 decision, which has become known as Evers v. Marklein II, the Court majority ruled that state laws giving JCRAR broad powers to block administrative rules indefinitely were unconstitutional. 'This is good and important news as it means we can — and must — continue the people's work in earnest,' Evers wrote in the memo, first reported by 'Accordingly, I am directing agencies to submit rules that have made it through that relevant part of the process to the Legislative Reference Bureau for finalization and publication.' The motion distributed to JCLO members Thursday takes direct aim at the assertion in Evers' memo. The motion states that 'the Legislative Reference Bureau (LRB) shall neither finalize nor publish any rules or proposed rules that failed to comply with the standing committee statutory requirements of s. 227.19 (2) to (4), Stats., including rules or proposed rules that have already been submitted to the LRB.' Those statutes require that when administrative rules are in final draft form, the Legislature must be notified, a detailed report on the rule must be submitted, and the rule must be reviewed by a standing committee of the Legislature. There are 27 administrative rules submitted to the Legislative Reference Bureau currently awaiting publication in the Administrative Register. The bureau director, Rick Champagne, told the Wisconsin Examiner on Thursday that 13 of those rules have not yet completed standing committee review. Those have been classified as not to be published. 'Evers v. Marklein II did not address the constitutionality of standing committee review of proposed administrative rules,' Champagne wrote in an email message. Among the rules held up pending review are one addressing the state's policy on gray wolf management and one on surface water degradation. The remaining 14 rules have completed the standing committee review and are before the Joint Committee for the Review of Administrative Rules or have completed that process, according to Champagne. 'I believe these are ready for publication under Evers v. Marklein II,' Champagne told the Examiner. 'JCLO has the authority to direct the manner in which the LRB will carry out its statutory duties,' Champagne added. 'The Wisconsin Supreme Court, in Evers v. Marklein II, did not eliminate standing committee review of proposed administrative rules. If JCLO so directs, the LRB will not finalize or publish any proposed administrative rules that have not completed standing committee review.' The paper ballot votes on the motion are due Friday and results are expected to be posted by the end of the day. The motion is expected to pass given the committee's GOP majority. The committee's Republican co-chairs, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Senate President Mary Felzkowski, issued a press release Thursday calling Evers' action to sidestep submitting rules to the Legislature for committee review a 'direct contradiction' of the Court's ruling. 'In Evers v. Marklein, the Wisconsin Supreme Court clearly stated that the Legislature 'alone maintains the ability to amend, expand, or limit the breadth of administrative rulemaking in other branches' of government, the press release said. 'Governor Tony Evers is attempting to circumvent statutory requirements that are part of the rule-making process and that no court has held to be invalid in any respect.' 'We are following the law and maintaining the fundamental checks and balances of lawmaking,' Vos and Felzkowski said in a joint statement. 'The governor is flagrantly disregarding the rule of law and egregiously abusing the power of his office.' Evers' communications director, Britt Cudaback, countered with a charge that the Republican lawmakers were defying the law. 'Republicans are reaching new levels of lawlessness, whether it's President Trump trying to take over Washington DC, Republicans in Texas trying to rig maps and elections in their favor, or Republicans in Wisconsin who appear poised to disobey decisions made by our state's highest court,' Cudaback wrote in an email message. 'Republicans are not above the law — they should follow the law like everyone else is expected to.' SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX Play Farm Merge Valley
