CDP Delegates: Download “Paul Song for Insurance Commissioner” Petition!

By
Greg Diamond
– January 16, 2018Posted in: Fresh Juice, Health Care Reform, Insurance, single payer

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[Note: the urgent nomination petition you can download appears down at the end of this post (not including comments!)]

If you’re a CDP delegate, you’ll need to hurry to download, print, sign, scan, and send the petition!  That’s Song on the left, Lara on the right.

There’s a new entry in the race to replace the wonderful and widely respected Attorney General candidate Dave Jones as California’s new Insurance Commissioner. Until recently, decent-but-not-Dave-Jones-level State Senator Ricardo Lara — whom we can safely call “the establishment candidate” and who (accordingly) has hired the SCREAMING ALL CAPS EMAIL HEADER SERVICE [not its real name] to send out his email blasts — has been the sole contender. Now comes a physician and single payer health insurance advocate, Dr. Paul Song, to challenge Lara for the position.

No one has to endorse Song (or Lara) for the position quite yet. The issue of this week is simply whether Dr. Song will be eligible for next month’s California Democratic Party endorsement. If he is, and if he keeps Lara from getting the supermajority needed for an endorsement, then activists favoring either candidate can work for whomever they choose without running afoul of the State Party.

In other words, this is more about fairness and an equal playing field than about policy. This blog may come to favor Song over Lara, but it’s safe to predict that even if Lara wins, Song’s presence in the race will have pushed Lara to the left in the meantime — meaning that Lara would be more likely to come out for the sorts of strong (and powerful-special-interest-frustrating) consumer protections that have been produced by Dave Jones.

As such, OJB considers the decision to sign and send in the petition to be both obvious and urgent: the petitions are due at the CDP headquarters by 5:00 p.m. Friday! I’ll be happy to send out the email address to which to send them — which I won’t publish here because of the anonymous miscreants in this fair county — to interested CDP members upon their request. (You can write me at mail2greg4-bernie at yahoo dot com.)

Here’s the 1-page PDF for your downloading pleasure!  Thanks for reading!

Paul Song Petition blank

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About Greg Diamond

Somewhat verbose attorney, semi-disabled and semi-retired, residing in northwest Brea. Occasionally ran for office against jerks who otherwise would have gonr unopposed. Got 45% of the vote against Bob Huff for State Senate in 2012; Josh Newman then won the seat in 2016. In 2014 became the first attorney to challenge OCDA Tony Rackauckas since 2002; Todd Spitzer then won that seat in 2018. Every time he's run against some rotten incumbent, the *next* person to challenge them wins! He's OK with that. Corrupt party hacks hate him. He's OK with that too. He does advise some local campaigns informally and (so far) without compensation. (If that last bit changes, he will declare the interest.) His daughter is a professional campaign treasurer. He doesn't usually know whom she and her firm represent. Whether they do so never influences his endorsements or coverage. (He does have his own strong opinions.) But when he does check campaign finance forms, he is often happily surprised to learn that good candidates he respects often DO hire her firm. (Maybe bad ones are scared off by his relationship with her, but they needn't be.)