February 28, 2012 | 7:01 pm

There are candidates running in California’s 30th whose names don’t end in -erman?

Posted by Jonah Lowenfeld

California’s 30th district candidates. Top, from left: Vince Gilmore, Susan Shelley, Phil Jennerjahn, Navraj Singh, Michael W. Powelson and Mark Reed.

Rep. Howard Berman, Rep. Brad Sherman and Mark Reed may have been the only candidates on the stage at the Jewish Journal-sponsored debate at Temple Judea on February 21, but there are other candidates running for the right to represent California’s 30th district in congress—including a third Jewish candidate, a restaurateur, an historian and a freelance gardener.

According to the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s website, four Republicans, three Democrats and one member of the Green Party started the process of declaring themselves candidates for congress in the West San Fernando Valley.

Of those eight, one—Phil Jennerjahn, who in the last three years has run unsuccessfully for Los Angeles City Council, United States Congress and Los Angeles City mayor—appears to have decided that the 28th District is a better fit for him. At least there he’ll only be facing one Jewish incumbent Democratic congressman, Rep. Adam Schiff—along with half a dozen (or more) other candidates.

But this blog is about the West Valley, so over the coming weeks, we’ll run down the list of the candidates whose names could appear on the ballot in June’s primary alongside the better known Berman and Sherman.

February 22, 2012 | 12:59 pm

A rundown of Tuesday night’s Berman v. Sherman v. Reed debate [VIDEO]

Posted by Jonah Lowenfeld

As advertised, foreign policy matters dominated at Tuesday night’s Jewish Journal-sponsored debate between candidates running for congress in the 30th district.

Rep. Howard Berman (D-Van Nuys), Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks), and Republican Mark Reed faced off in a 90-minute debate that covered the Iranian nuclear threat, what role the United States should play in bringing about peace between Israelis and Palestinians and whether to arm the rebels battling against government forces in Syria. The candidates also covered domestic policy issues.

It was a packed house at Temple Judea in Tarzana—800 people came, by the organizers’ count—and the two Jewish incumbent Democratic congressmen further upped the temperature in this hotly contested race.

Among the things we learned at Tuesday night’s “Tussle in the Temple” (h/t L.A. Weekly) were:

—Sherman, while still a co-sponsor of the Stop Online Piracy Act, thinks it was poorly written. Berman, who was one of the bill’s earliest co-sponsors, stood firm in his support of it, despite the outcry from internet companies and users last month that effectively killed the bill.

—Berman still won’t sign Sherman’s pledge to eliminate Super PACs from their race, calling it “a gimmick.” Berman also noted that Sherman’s first negative ad—a flyer that attempted to tie Berman to the 2009 San Bruno gas line explosion using a donation from the company involved in the disaster (PG & E) to a Super PAC backing Berman (Rebuilding America) as the link from one to the other—had backfired. On February 21, Senator Barbara Boxer cited that flyer when she jumped in to support Berman over Sherman.

Video footage from Tuesday night’s debate.  Story continues after the jump.

—Sherman would advocate moving the United States Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. (One has to guess that Berman would support such a position as well—he voted in favor a bill that would have moved the embassy to Jerusalem in 1995—but since the moving of embassies is a Presidential prerogative, it’s not clear how much a congressman’s position on the issue actually matters.)

—Berman, objecting to what he called Sherman’s distortions of his record, turned his opponent’s name into a critique of its own: “For him to invert the truth is … Brad!”

—Reed, who dismissed both Berman and Sherman as “party hacks,” and said that he would support Israel’s going after Iranian nuclear facilities only if the United States won’t do it first, hasn’t been to Israel (yet).

Many political leaders turned out Tuesday night, including Rep. Henry Waxman, who is supporting Berman in this race and told KPCC that he’s “angry that two Democrats are running against each other, spending millions of dollars, when we could have used that money to elect other Democrats.”

Susan Shelley, a Republican candidate running in the 30th district who filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service against the Jewish Journal’s parent company after not being invited to participate in Tuesday night’s debate, was also present. According to the L.A. Times, she gave out “goodie bags.”

3 Comments — Leave your comment

February 21, 2012 | 3:40 pm

Live Broadcast: Berman v. Sherman Debate (With Mark Reed) [LIVE RECORDING]

Posted by JewishJournal

[UPDATE: This is a recording of a live broadcast from Tuesday, Feb. 21.] 

On Tuesday night, Feb. 21, JewishJournal.com will live stream a congressional debate from Temple Judea in Tarzana.  The debate will feature 30th district candidates Brad Sherman, Howard Berman and Mark Reed.

5 Comments — Leave your comment

February 15, 2012 | 8:12 pm

Berman’s Israeli investor visa bill: a small (and problematic) fix

Posted by Jonah Lowenfeld

This entry takes a closer look at a bill mentioned near the end of the run-down of the race in the 30th district that appears in the newest issue of the Jewish Journal.

When Rep. Howard Berman (D-Van Nuys) introduced a bill that would allow certain Israeli entrepreneurs to apply for a type of investor visa currently unavailable to them, he cited two reasons to support the bill: Strengthening the Israeli-American relationship and adding jobs to the American economy.

“Israel is one of our closest allies in the world and a significant investor in the U.S. economy,” Berman said in a statement on Feb. 9, the day he introduced H.R. 3992. “The E-2 investor visa program will strengthen the vital U.S.-Israel relationship, boost the American middle class, and help grow the economies of both countries.”

Sounds great, right? I mean, a lot of people—powerful people—have been saying this lately, that the United States needs to work harder to attract foreign entrepreneurs as a way to improve the economy. Even President Obama made promoting immigration for high-skilled foreigners a major feature of this year’s State of the Union Address.

“It’s now a global competition for talent and America should be doing everything possible to attract immigrant entrepreneurs who want to invest in America and create new jobs,” said John Feinblatt, who runs the Partnership for a New American Economy. That organization was started by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and media mogul Rupert Murdoch to advocate for policies that promote “high-skilled immigration reform.”

And Berman’s bill does this—sort of—but only in a very limited way, and it does so by proposing to extend to Israelis a visa whose problems are already well known to both immigration attorneys and the entrepreneurs themselves.

The E-2 investor visa, which is today available to investors from more than 70 other countries—including Britain, Montenegro and Iran, JTA reported—is a nonimmigrant visa that allows investors who bring substantial amount of money from their home country to start businesses in the U.S., to live in the U.S. for a short period of time while developing those businesses.

But it’s only available to investors who bring money to the United States from their home country. (Nobody says exactly how much money one needs, but it’s at least $50,000 according to Haaretz’s report on the bill.) So Amit Aharoni, an Israeli-born entrepreneur who graduated from Stanford Business School and started a web-based business that employs nine Americans in San Francisco, wouldn’t be eligible.

Aharoni established CruiseWise, a web-based startup that helps consumers choose and buy cruise vacations. He had raised $1.65 million in startup cash—$1 million of it was from outside the United States, but not from Israel—when he was denied a different type of visa in October 2011, an H1-B visa.

Aharoni’s story was featured on ABC News, at which point his visa was quickly approved. But the experience led the 32-year-old to conclude that there are some unnecessary hurdles that stand in the way of entrepreneurs looking to start businesses in the United States.

“There’s no good visa to support entrepreneurs,” Aharoni told me. “H1B is really a ‘Specialty Occupation’ visa.”

Another problem with the E-2 visa is that it has to be renewed frequently—every two years, in the case of Berman’s bill for Israeli entrepreneurs, according to a member of the Congressman’s staff. And the visa offers no path to citizenship for those who start businesses here.

“The E-2 visa is, in the long term, not going to solve the interests of promoting foreign entrepreneurs—coming here risking everything and setting down roots,” said Deborah Notkin, an immigration lawyer in New York. “We really need a entrepreneurship visa that gives those who are successful a pathway to permanent residence, along with their families.”

Zoe Adams of Lakeland, Fla., is one such entrepreneur. She arrived, with her husband and two children, from Britain, in September 2003 on an E-2 visa. They started a pool servicing business that today employs four people.

But being on an E-2 visa, Adams can’t plan for the future in any sustained way. “You can only work in increments of five years,” Adams said, adding that her husband was about to go back to England, hoping to get his visa renewed. “We can’t really plan anything at the moment until we definitely know that we’re okay for another five years.”

That uncertainty—together with the worry that her daughter, now a college student in Florida on her own student visa, might eventually be forced to leave the United States—led Adams to start E2VisaReform.org.

Adams, together with a few other entrepreneurial foreigners living in the U.S. on E-2 visas, has been pushing for changes to the E-2 visa. And though her business is small, she says that some of those in her coalition—she’s got email addresses for about 500 people—are much larger.

“We clean 250 pools a week,” Adams said. “My husband’s a licensed state contractor. We’re the epitome of a small business.”

“For every person like me,” Adams said, “there’s somebody else who has 25, or 50 employees, or more than 100.”

Nevertheless, Berman’s bill was welcomed by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren welcomed. In a written statement, Oren appeared to say that the bill—and a companion bill introduced last year in the Senate—was the product of joint work by Israeli diplomats and American lawmakers.

“In working with the Embassy of Israel’s Office of Congressional Affairs and its Economic Mission,” Oren said in the statement, “and with the introduction of this legislation, the U.S. Congress advances shared political and economic interests that will enable the business communities in both countries to expand bilateral investments.”

If the E-2 is so fraught with problems, why are Berman and other lawmakers trying push this bill forward? And why would the Israeli embassy be so enthusiastic about it?

Perhaps because, in the political gridlock of Washington, D.C., it’s a limited, unobjectionable solution.

“It’s a tiny little fix and there’s not a lot to make one oppose it,” said Notkin, the immigration lawyer. “A bigger fix…might meet with some resistance.”

3 Comments — Leave your comment

February 15, 2012 | 6:27 pm

Berman-Sherman race picks up steam

Posted by Jonah Lowenfeld

From left: Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks), left, and Rep. Howard Berman (D-Van Nuys) testifying at a house subcommittee in 2003.

Last year, with political observers predicting the race between incumbent Democratic Congressmen Howard Berman (Van Nuys) and Brad Sherman (Sherman Oaks) could end up costing upwards of $10 million, the news that three separate Super PACs had been established to support one candidate — Berman — attracted a lot of attention.

While independent expenditure committees, as Super PACs are officially known, have had an outsized impact on Republican presidential primaries so far, it’s still unclear what impact, if any, they will have on the hotly contested race in California’s 30th Congressional District.

Indeed, over the last three months of 2011, while Berman’s campaign raked in more than $1 million in donations and Sherman raised $126,000, the pro-Berman Super PACs brought in a combined $21,000. And the Valley-Israel Alliance, the first of the Super PACs to be established, officially ended its fundraising efforts at the end of January.

“Congressman Berman made it clear that that he was not comfortable with the whole concept of Super PACs,” said Brendan Huffman, the founder of the now-terminated Super PAC. “And so, respecting his concerns, it made sense to close it and try to help in other ways.”

Huffman is a public policy consultant who has worked for several Los Angeles-area Jewish officeholders. According to filings obtained from the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the outside group did not receive any monetary contributions in the months it was up and running.

“I don’t know why you needed three Super PACs anyway,” said Parke Skelton, Sherman’s campaign manager, dismissing the disappearance of one such committee as insignificant.

Rebuilding America, a Super PAC run by State Sen. Alex Padilla, raised $20,000 in the last quarter of 2011, including a $10,000 donation from Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E). That corporation does not service any part of the San Fernando Valley, where the 30th District is located but could have business facing the California State Senate Standing Committee on Energy, Utilities and Communications, which is chaired by Padilla.

Berman has said he has not asked any of his contributors to donate to the outside groups. Nevertheless, Sherman has publicly asked Berman to sign a pledge designed to eliminate the influence of Super PACs from the race, which Berman has until now declined to do, a fact that Sherman often uses in attacks on his opponent.

“Let the grassroots speak to the voters,” Sherman said near the end of his two-minute speech to the delegates at the California Democratic Party’s endorsing caucus on Feb. 11 in San Diego, which was recorded by John Myers of KQED. “Otherwise, they’re only going to hear from the Super PACs.”

Sherman’s claims aside, with the pro-Berman Super PACs raising little money and spending less, it’s not clear what impact — if any — the outside groups will have.

“This is an unusual race in that it pits two similar candidates from the same party against one another,” said Richard Hasen, a professor at the UC Irvine School of Law, who blogs at electionlawblog.org. “It could well be that the lack of a partisan angle will mean less money will come in.  But I don’t think we know yet.”

That difficulty of drawing major distinctions between Berman’s and Sherman’s records could help explain why, at the state party convention, delegates did not award the Democratic Party’s endorsement to either one.

Even without spending by pro-Berman Super PACs, both contenders have big war chests. In year-end reports to the FEC, the Berman campaign reported $2.85 million in cash on hand. Sherman’s campaign reported having $3.7 million to spend on the race.

As many journalists watching this race have observed, the two incumbents practice very different styles of political representation, and recent news would appear to reinforce those reputations.

Sherman, who is known for holding frequent town hall meetings in his district to engage with voters, is scheduled to hold two such meetings on successive Sundays, including one focused on developments in the Middle East.

Berman, meanwhile, is the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and has a reputation as the go-to guy to get legislation passed in Congress, especially on matters of foreign policy. On Feb. 9, he introduced a bill designed to extend a form of temporary visa to work in the United States — the E-2 visa, which is currently available to citizens from more than 70 countries but not Israel — to
Israeli entrepreneurs investing in businesses in the United States.

Berman’s bill was introduced with the co-sponsorship of two Republican representatives, including Congressman Lamar Smith of Texas, who chairs the House Committee on the Judiciary, to which the bill has since been referred. With a companion bill already introduced in the Senate — with a similarly bipartisan group of sponsors — Berman’s bill is believed to have a good chance at becoming law.

2 Comments — Leave your comment

February 13, 2012 | 12:06 am

No endorsement by Calif. Dems in Berman-Sherman race

Posted by Jonah Lowenfeld

From left: Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks), left, and Rep. Howard Berman (D-Van Nuys) testifying at a house subcommittee in 2003.

The California Democratic party isn’t taking sides in the race between Reps. Howard Berman and Brad Sherman, the two incumbent Democrats facing off in the 30th Congressional District.

I wasn’t at the state party convention in San Diego this weekend, but according to KQED’s John Myers, the two congressmen “came out swinging” in their addresses to the party’s endorsement caucus.

“Sherman accused Berman of being bought by big corporations,” Myers wrote, “Berman called Sherman ‘slightly pathetic.’”

And both campaigns are calling the non-endorsement a victory.

In a press release sent out on Saturday evening, within hours of the vote, Berman called the outcome “just and appropriate.” The Sherman campaign sent out no formal press release, but in an email, campaign manager Parke Skelton reported what the Berman campaign’s email left out—the exact tally of the votes.

According to Skelton, 55 percent of the delegates who cast ballots voted for Sherman while 39 percent voted for Berman. According to Myers, a preliminary count was 69 votes for Sherman and 52 for Berman. Either way, the result kept Sherman below the 60 percent threshold that he would have needed to secure the party’s nomination.

“This race will now be decided on the merits of our candidacies,” Berman said in the statement, “and I’m confident that my record of effectiveness will earn the support of the voters of the 30th Congressional District.”

Skelton pointed to the result as evidence of Sherman’s base of support.

“We’re very happy with our strong showing which demonstrates, once again, that Brad has the overwhelming support of grassroots Democrats in the Valley,” he wrote.

0 Comments — Leave your comment

February 7, 2012 | 4:40 pm

Why we’re holding a candidates’ debate in the 30th district

Posted by JewishJournal

On February 21, at 7:30 pm, Rep. Howard Berman (D-Van Nuys), Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks) and Republican Mark Reed, who are all seeking to be the next representative in the new 30th congressional district in the San Fernando Valley, will meet at Temple Judea in Tarzana for a candidates’ debate.

Three panelists from the Jewish Journal—Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Rob Eshman, Staff Writer Jonah Lowenfeld, creator and author of the Berman v. Sherman blog, and Jewish Journal Columnist Bill Boyarsky—will be asking the candidates questions about foreign and domestic policy, as well as other issues of interest to local voters.

This is the second public debate between candidates from the 30th congressional district, whose primary election is in June. There are at least three reasons why we think it’s important to hold such a debate—and important for voters in the 30th district to attend.

1. The race doesn’t only include Jewish candidates; it also hinges on what could be called “Jewish issues.”

As readers of the Berman v. Sherman blog well know, this race has pitted two Jewish incumbent congressmen, who are seen as reliable pro-Israel voices in congress, against one another. But in trying to win over voters in the 30th district, all candidates will be addressing issues of importance to the Jewish community—which is why the panelists will ask questions about Iran, Israel and local matters.

2. Journalists ask probing questions.

It’s what we do. At the first debate, organized by a nonprofit community group, moderators asked candidates broad, open-ended questions. We’ll be doing some of that, sure, but we’ll also take advantage of the questions that have already been answered to dig a bit deeper into the records and positions of these candidates.

3. Candidate debates are now, more than ever, of tremendous importance to voters trying to decide whom to support.

In the Feb. 13 issue of The New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg made the case that in the race for President, voters need more, not fewer candidate debates. In a media landscape more dominated by partisan news outlets than ever, and with the rise of Super PACs that candidates on both sides of the political spectrum profess to dislike even as they embrace their assistance (which usually comes in the form of negative campaign ads), debates, Hertzberg writes, “are of inestimable value.”

[Debates] enable voters to see and hear the candidates in a sustained manner, outside the protective cocoons of their handlers, packagers, stage managers, consultants, PACs, and Super PACs. They oblige the candidates to speak for themselves. As [organizer of the Commission on Presidential Debates Newt] Minow has written, “The debates are the only time during presidential campaigns when the major candidates appear together side by side under conditions that they do not control.”

It’s all but certain that many millions of dollars will be spent in the race for the 30th district. That money will buy a whole lot of pre-packaged communication from the campaigns—much of which will probably end up in the mailboxes of voters. Debates allow voters to see for themselves what the candidates are like in person, in a situation that’s about a close to real-life as you can get on the campaign trail.

These are just three reasons we think that it’s important for voters in the 30th district—and engaged Jews across Los Angeles—to pay attention to debates like the one we’re holding.

If you can make it to Temple Judea on February 21, please come. Admission and parking are free.

And though we won’t be taking questions from the audience on debate night, we do see this as a chance for the community—broadly defined—to learn more about these candidates before deciding who to support. We’ve been soliciting questions from Jewish groups and other groups from across the community and across the political spectrum, and we’d also be interested in hearing what questions you want answered, too.

Email suggestions to jonahl@jewishjournal.com. Include the words “Debate Question” in the subject line.