Eight of Youngkin's college board appointees can no longer serve, judge rules
The ruling stems from a vote last month by a Democratic-controlled Senate committee to reject some appointees to the boards of the University of Virginia, George Mason University and Virginia Military Institute.
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Los Angeles Times
an hour ago
- Los Angeles Times
Wealthy first-time candidate Cloobeck drops $1.4 million on TV ads in the California governor's race
Wealthy first-time political candidate Stephen J. Cloobeck is spending $1.4 million on television ads starting Tuesday — the first barrage of cable and broadcast messaging that Californians will likely be bombarded with in next year's governor's election. Cloobeck's campaign declined to preview the 30-second ad on Monday, but the candidate confirmed the size of the ad buy. Public records of advertising purchases show that Cloobeck bought space in every California market on cable, as well as broadcast television time in Sacramento. He also bought time in New York City and Washington, D.C. — as well as West Palm Beach, the location of President Trump's Mar-A-Lago. Cloobeck confirmed the size of the buy; a campaign advisor confirmed that they would run through Monday and that he was also launching a social-media effort. 'I will always Fight for California. All Californians deserve the contract to be fulfilled for an affordable livable workable state,' Cloobeck said in a text message. 'Watch [the ad] and you will see how a conservative Democrat fights for All Californians.' The move comes after former Vice President Kamala Harris opted last week against running for governor, leaving a race without a clear front-runner with a large field that is widely unknown to most California voters. The candidates need to raise their name recognition among California's 22.9 million registered voters, which makes Cloobeck's early advertising understandable, according to Democratic strategists. 'It's unprecedented for regular business. Not for this race,' said Democratic media buyer Sheri Sadler, who is not currently affiliated with a candidate in the contest. It's also not unprecedented for Cloobeck, a Beverly Hills philanthropist and businessman. He announced his gubernatorial run in November with a fusillade of television and digital ads. While the 63-year-old's exact net worth is unclear, he made his fortune in real estate and hospitality. He founded Diamond Resorts International, a time-share and vacation property company, which he sold in 2016. Earlier, he appeared on several episodes of the reality-television show 'Undercover Boss,' which sends executives in disguise into low-level jobs at their businesses. While Cloobeck has not run for office before, he has long been a prodigious Democratic donor and fundraiser. He also played a critical role in renaming the airport in Las Vegas after the late Sen. Harry Reid, who he describes as a father figure. The book shelves of his sprawling Beverly Hills mansion are lined with pictures of Cloobeck with Democratic presidents and many other prominent members of the party. Cloobeck announced last week that he was contributing $10 million to his campaign, on top of the $3 million he initially seeded it with. His wealth was on vivid display at the California Democratic Party's spring convention, where canvassers who said they were paid $25 per hour wore royal blue shirts emblazoned with his name chanted his name. Cloobeck said at the time that his campaign had spent 'probably a couple hundred thousand dollars' on the effort.
Associated Press
an hour ago
- Associated Press
Alaska Sen. Murkowski toys with bid for governor, defends vote supporting Trump's tax breaks package
JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — Republican U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, speaking with Alaska reporters Monday, toyed with the idea of running for governor and defended her recent high-profile decision to vote in support of President Donald Trump's tax breaks and spending cuts bill. Murkowski, speaking from Anchorage, said 'sure' when asked if she has considered or is considering a run for governor. She later said her response was 'a little bit flippant' because she gets asked that question so often. 'Would I love to come home? I have to tell you, of course I would love to come home,' she said. 'I am not making any decisions about anything, because my responsibility to Alaskans is my job in the Senate right now.' Several Republicans already have announced plans to run in next year's governor's race, including Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom. Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy is not eligible to seek a third consecutive term. Alaska has an open primary system and ranked choice voting in general elections. Murkowski is not up for reelection until 2028. A centrist, Murkowski has become a closely watched figure in a sharply divided Congress. She has at times been at odds with her party in her criticism of Trump and blasted by some GOP voters as a 'Republican in name only.' But her decision to support Trump's signature bill last month also frustrated others in a state where independents comprise the largest number of registered voters. She previously described her decision-making process around the bill as 'agonizing.' On Monday, she said it was clear to her the bill was not only a priority of Trump's but also that it was going to pass, so it became important to her to help make it as advantageous to the state as she could. 'So I did everything within my power — as one lawmaker from Alaska — to try to make sure that the most vulnerable in our state would not be negatively impacted,' she said. 'And I had a hard choice to make, and I think I made the right choice for Alaskans.'
Politico
an hour ago
- Politico
Newsom's big pivot on Big Oil
With help from Camille von Kaenel and Noah Baustin OIL ABOUT-FACE: Gov. Gavin Newsom spent the last four years provoking the Big Oil boogeyman. Now, it's haunting him. Newsom's casting of oil companies as the villain behind the state's perpetually high fuel prices seemingly signaled the industry's waning influence in Sacramento as recently as last year's special session. But then two of the state's nine refineries announced closure plans, leaving the governor and Democratic lawmakers scrambling to boost in-state oil supply and find potential buyers to keep the facilities pumping out gasoline and avert shortages that some experts estimate could drive gas prices up by as much as $1.21 per gallon by next August — just as midterm elections will be heating up. The pivot is emblematic of a national Democratic party course correction on cost-of-living issues in the wake of the presidential election — and provides a real-time demonstration of the political risks of pursuing an aggressive transition away from fossil fuels. 'The reality is, if those refineries close and we have increased gas prices, it's going to be a problem for everybody,' said Andrew Acosta, a veteran California Democratic campaign consultant. 'Not just Gavin Newsom, but every Democrat running for office.' The shift has left groups that thought they had Newsom on the anti-Big Oil train with whiplash. Newsom announced a fracking ban in 2021, spearheaded a lawsuit to hold major oil companies liable for climate change damages and pushed legislation to consider a cap on oil industry profits — all while castigating the industry as a corrupt force fleecing Californians. 'They have been raking in unprecedented profits because they can,' Newsom said in October while signing a bill requiring refiners to store more gas to prevent shortages, a concept the industry warned would backfire. 'They've been screwing you for years and years and years.' Fast forward to June, when Newsom's administration unveiled a suite of proposals to keep refineries solvent, including streamlined permitting for more in-state drilling in Kern County. Newsom's office has since circulated a draft bill mirroring those recommendations. 'Refineries all across the globe are struggling,' Newsom said after the proposals were released. 'We've got some challenges, and so just require some new considerations.' And even some environmentalists are having second thoughts after Phillips 66 announced in October that it would close its Southern California refinery by the end of 2025, followed in April when Valero announced the planned closure of its Northern California facility in 2026. 'I think Democrats sort of failed to read the room, perhaps in a way that, unfortunately, Trump did,' said Katelyn Roedner Sutter, California director for the Environmental Defense Fund. 'If we're not acknowledging people's day-to-day reality and the challenges they face, it's really hard for them to care about the existential threat that is climate change.' Newsom spokespeople pointed to the governor's comments during a press conference last week where he called the approach 'completely consistent' with the state's climate agenda, which has 'always been about finding a just transition.' While recent polling shows California voters still want their leaders to fight climate change, the state faces a unique set of circumstances that make the transition particularly complicated. California has long operated as a fuel island, meaning it doesn't have the infrastructure necessary to pipe in refined gasoline from its neighbor and quickly respond to gas shortages when refineries go offline. That leads to price spikes like in 2022 and 2023, when average prices soared past $5 per gallon. Colin Murphy, deputy director of the University of California, Davis' Policy Institute for Energy, Environment and the Economy, said that isolation has given the handful of oil companies that operate refineries in the state outsize power to control the market, and that California lawmakers underestimated the industry's willingness to wield that power. The oil industry intends to continue pressing its advantage. Andy Walz, Chevron's president of downstream, midstream and chemicals, said California officials have made the state 'uninvestable' for companies like his and is pushing to unwind key pieces of the state's climate agenda, like its cap-and-trade program and rules aimed at reducing emissions from oil tankers and other ships that dock in the state's ports. 'I don't think they believed the industry was in trouble,' Walz said of California officials. 'I think they misread what was really going on, and it took some real action by some competitors to get them woken up.' Newsom's draft bill does include olive branches to environmental justice groups that have been left feeling burned — including a well stimulation ban and a requirement for drillers to plug two wells for every new well they make — but that hasn't dampened their frustration. EJ advocates are preparing to go to the mat in what's setting up to be an end-of-session brawl. 'It seems like a lot of our elected officials are driven above all by a fear that they'll be blamed for high gas prices,' said Bill Magavern, policy director at Coalition for Clean Air. — AN Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here! REFINING THE LANGUAGE: Environmental justice groups have their counter-offer to Newsom's proposal to bolster in-state oil supply to stop refineries from closing and keep gas prices in check. Fifty environmental and community groups signed onto a Friday letter to Newsom, Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire and Speaker Robert Rivas asking to significantly amend Newsom's draft oil legislation. The groups include the Los Angeles chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Asian Pacific Environmental Network and the VISIÓN Coalition (notably, they do not include major environmental organizations like the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council.) Among their chief asks: if state officials are going to streamline more crude extraction in Kern County, they should cap the number of new wells at 500 (compared to the nearly 3,000 in the local ordinance Kern County adopted earlier this year) and include a 2035 sunset date. They also want to require refiners to disclose more of their business when they tell the state they are considering closing. Faraz Rizvi, APEN's campaign and policy manager, said the goal was to offer a counter-solution to the oil and gas industry's wish list. 'We are trying to hold the line as best as we can to ensure we're protecting communities while also understanding the way the winds are turning,' he said. — CvK CHARGED UP: California's network of batteries installed at peoples' homes is now capable of moving the needle on the state's entire grid, according to a new industry report commissioned by Sunrun and Tesla. A group of virtual power plant aggregators delivered an average of 535 megawatts to the California grid last Tuesday from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., according to a report from research firm Brattle. The energy came from over 100,000 residential batteries, mostly Tesla-manufactured. It was the most energy Sunrun, the largest aggregator of the group, has dispatched from a single distributed power plant in a night. The deliveries were part of a pre-planned test to assess the performance of virtual power plants ahead of the state's hottest months, when their services are most needed. And to Sunrun execs, it was a success — and a major step toward the dream of having batteries on everyday people's property provide utility-scale value to the grid. 'This is no longer a future thing, this is a now thing,' said Chris Rauscher, Sunrun's VP of grid services and electrification. The state was rocked by blackouts in 2020. That led to a push for increased storage to help keep the lights on during extreme heat. At the time, California had about 245 megawatts of residential battery storage capacity. That figure has climbed seven-fold to 1,829 MW as of this April, according to California Energy Commission data. — NB GRID GAMES: Environmental groups are opening their pocketbooks in a fight over how much control California should have over a proposed regional energy market. EDF Action and NRDC Action Fund — political arms of the Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council — announced a six-figure ad campaign Monday pushing state lawmakers to amend Sen. Josh Becker's SB 540, which would establish a West-wide energy market. The ad calls on lawmakers to 'fix' the bill by removing language they argue would dissuade other states from joining an expanded regional market, including a proposed regional council that could remove California energy providers from the market. EDF and NRDC, original co-sponsors, pulled their support last month after Becker amended the bill to include the council after pushback from some unions and ratepayer advocates who argue a regional market could allow the Trump administration to hamper the state's climate goals and expose residents to rate hikes. Backers of the original language say giving California officials too much control of the market would 'make it unappealing or even impossible' for regional energy suppliers to join. Newsom and Assembly Speaker Rivas have committed to getting regionalization over the finish line this session, though the governor has made clear that the policy could come through a different vehicle than SB 540. — AN SETTING THE AGENDA: On Wednesday, Aug. 27, POLITICO is hosting its inaugural California policy summit: The California Agenda. Come see the Golden State's most prominent political figures — including Sen. Alex Padilla and gubernatorial candidates Katie Porter and Xavier Becerra — share the stage with influential voices in tech, energy, housing and other areas at the forefront of the state's most critical policy debates. The live and streamed event is free, but advance registration is required. Stay tuned for more on speakers and discussion topics, and request an invite here. — NASA will announce plans to build a nuclear reactor on the moon, according to documents obtained by POLITICO. — State water regulators told Los Angeles decades ago to take less water from Mono Lake, but the city still hasn't met its requirements. — Are you wondering how tariffs could impact clean energy? Just look at past U.S. solar panel policy.
