Today is the last day for ballots to be counted from the November 2nd elections, which means it is official. Kamala Harris is the new Attorney General for the state of California.

San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris narrowly beat out Steve Cooley, the District Attorney for Los Angeles. The victory makes Harris, whose mother is Indian American and father is Jamaican, the first African American, Indian and woman to hold the office in California.

Harris was once labeled the “female Barack Obama”, and won the race with an uncharacteristically progressive platform. She’s openly opposed to the death penalty; in fact, she refused to pursue capital punishment during her eight year tenure as DA in San Francisco, but has vowed that as Attorney General she’ll do “what’s necessary.” [colorlines]

Harris won her seat by only 71,566 votes, according to the Secretary of State’s office. Harris will be making her “big announcement” today as well as having a victory party here in the Bay area.

As the November 2nd dust settles, there are a couple of other major South Asian American victories also to be noted. One of them is fellow Bong Hansen Clark, who is now officially the third South Asian congressman to ever hold the seat (Dalip Singh Saund and Bobby Jindal being the first two).

Voters in the Midwestern state of Michigan have elected the first Bangladeshi-American ever to serve in the U.S. Congress. The congressman-elect was born to a Bangladeshi immigrant father and an African-American mother. Clarke’s father passed away when he was 8 years old, but he says his father greatly influenced him and that he strongly identifies with his father’s culture.

Clarke, who was raised a Muslim and converted to Catholicism, says he also plans to work with local officials to end religious and racial profiling in Michigan. The city of Dearborn and other areas across Michigan are home to large Muslim populations. [voa]

Of course, how could we forget the first South Asian American woman to be elected Governor in the United States? Nikki Haley from the state of South Carolina.

South Carolina Gov.-elect Nikki Haley says former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin helped spread Haley’s message, but she’s not ready to endorse Palin for president. Haley says she’s proud to be a product of the tea party movement. She says that movement tries to fight what she called “arrogance” by Republicans and Democrats. [washingtonpost] Continue reading →

It has been 15 days since Election Day and in California, we are still waiting to hear about who the next Attorney General for California is. Will it be Democratic (Desi) contender Kamala Harris or the Republican Steve Cooley?

Harris has 4,203,346 votes to Cooley’s 4,172,616, or 46 percent versus 45.6 percent, according to figures released by the Secretary of State’s Office.

Harris, a Democrat, held a 29,738-vote lead entering Wednesday’s count of vote-by-mail, provisional and damaged ballots.[nbcla]

It’s surprising to me that for a race of this size, it is literally coming down to 50%+1 votes. The difference is only 29,738 votes right now. It must be excruciating to be either one of them right now, just waiting in limbo for the votes to be recounted and recounted.

…[T]he number of uncounted ballots [is] 671,594 — 249,002 vote-by-mail ballots, 378,854 provisional ballots and 43,738 that are either damaged, could not be machine- read and need to be remade and ballots diverted by optical scanners for further review, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.[nbcla]

It looks like discrepancies in the counting of votes in LA County are leading up to tense moments between the two campaigns. Both parties are recruiting volunteers to monitor the counting process at Registrar of Voters offices all across the state. We should know by November 30th at the latest on who the winner is. Let this be a lesson to us all – every vote really does count. As well as vote-by-mail and provisional ballots. At least, in the state of California. Continue reading →

Smoke some weed, eat some White Castle, and then get back to work. Looks like Kal Penn is quietly heading back to the White House:

Kal Penn, former actor of television series “House,” is returning to the White House after fulfilling contract obligations for the third and latest “Harold and Kumar” installment.

The White House recently issued a statement that said Penn, the only successful Indian American actor in Hollywood, has been appointed as the go-to person “for those in the Arts, Youth, and Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities.” [Link]

He will pretty much be doing the same job as before:

Penn is returning to the Office of Public Engagement to work as an associate director, White House spokesman Shin Inouye said in a statement to ABC News. He will “be the point person for those in the Arts, Youth, and Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities,” Inouye said. [link]

I wonder if at some point in the future he will quietly return to his old role on House M.D.

Continue reading →

In case you haven’t heard about the major announcement in India this morning, President Obama has called for India to join the UK, US, France, Russia, and China as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. Practically speaking of course, there would need to be a complete overhaul of the UN structure if that were to happen, but this is still a significant announcement and one that will most definitely antagonize China:

Members of Parliament reacted with sustained applause. But neither the president nor his top advisers offered a timetable for how long it would take to reform the council, or specifics about what steps the United States would take to do so. Last month, India won a two-year non-permanent seat on the council, which currently has five permanent members: Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States.

But expanding the body will be a complicated endeavor that will require the cooperation of other countries and could easily take years. “This is bound to be a very difficult process and it’s bound to take a significant amount of time,” William J. Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, said here…

“In Asia and around the world, India is not simply emerging,” Mr. Obama said in his speech, echoing a line he used earlier in the day at a joint news conference with Mr. Singh. “India has emerged.”

Many Indian officials had worried that the Obama administration was less interested in India than China, and that the bilateral relationship was lacking a “big idea,” such as the landmark civilian nuclear agreement between the two countries under former President George W. Bush. [link]