RICHARD POMBO: A REAL HERO
You never know what you are going to find as you sift through almost 50 websites early each morning – that’s a big part of the fun of putting together the main page of the FlashReport each morning. Will it be a crisis? A scandal? A major piece of breaking news? Well, today I was extremely pleased to see a major profile in the San Diego Union Tribune of one of California’s greatest assets, Congressman Richard Pombo, who hails from the Stockton area.
I’ve known Richard Pombo since he was ‘just’ a rancher, with his modest 500 acre spread in Tracy. Pombo is just the kind of politician that you would expect a conservative like me to really like. With the strongest foundations possible — his faith and his great family — Pombo went off to Washington to try and make a difference. His commitment to voters was straight from his conscience and heart-felt beliefs — to restore American’s federal government to the institution envisioned by its founders – a limited federal government that would fulfill its appropriate functions, but then leave the process of making this country great exactly where it belongs, with the people. Since his election, Pombo has had a razor-sharp focus on just this goal.
We all hear about politicians who go off to the Beltway and ‘go native’ on us — eventually ‘morphing’ into Washington’s representative to their district, instead of the other way around. Richard Pombo is the Congressman we all hope for, one that has never forgotten the reason why he ran for public office in the first place. Take the time to read the profile today, and join me in being glad that we have real American heroes like Pombo serving in the House of Representatives.
GOP CONVENTION APPROACHES
I will be writing a lot more about California Republican Party’s winter convention in the coming days – the event will be held next weekend in San Jose.
There has been a lot of noise in the press about the Governor taking a lot of heat because of his leftward-shift on some major public policy/hiring issues since the beginning of the year. I think that much of the noise about ‘open rebellion’ is being planted by our friends in the main stream media. I imagine that the convention will be a pretty upbeat affair.
But that said, the Governor does have a serious problem on his hands. The same Republican volunteers who pushed for the recall, and who helped rally voters to elect Arnold Schwarzenegger were very comfortable with the idea that this Governor was not going to be a right-winger on social issues, and that we would not see eye-to-eye on some environmental issues. But our unified coalition has been centered around the Governor’s conservative views on economic issues. Embracing a huge spending package WITHOUT the needed fiscal reforms that the Governor championed last year is tantamount to walking away from the message of fiscal conservatism on which he was swept into office. You can’t spend, spend, spend in concert with the Democrats who control the legislature and not expect this to turn into a big spending-spree that would make any fiscal conservative cringe. The Governor doesn’t need fiscal conservatives depressed, he needs us motivated and working towards his re-election. This can best be done by "re-embracing" the fiscally prudent message that put him into the Governor’s mansion.
LOTS OF NEWS TODAY
The papers have a lot of great and interesting news stories and columns today — and, as usual, I have brought you the ones I thought relevant as you keep on on California politics.
Enjoy!
Jon
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