* If you have a badge issued to you by a member of the California Legislature, you may want to frame it for posterity. Speaker Fabian Nunez has announced that there will no longer be badges produced for non-legislators. Which really begs the question — why were badges created for non-legislators in the first place? I wonder if the current badge-holders will have to turn theirs back in. Undoubtedly for all of their hard work, Jason Kinney, Roger Salazer, Andrew Acosta and Steve Maviglio must have badges, no? I guess they will have to make their favorite drive from Sacramento to San Francisco while observing the speed limit. Sorry guys.
* I can’t say how disappointing it is that the Governor has proposed what are, so obviously on the face of them, new taxes to finance this ill-fated government incursion into healthcare in California. When he and his senior officials are trying to thread some sort of needle over technical yet important distinction between a tax or a fee, then the Governor just doesn’t get it. For example, what kind of an person doesn’t think a hike in the payroll tax — is a payroll tax? After the weekend, the Governor should announce that after careful consideration of his PROMISE to Californians not to raise taxes, he is pulling the new proposal payroll tax as well as the tax on doctors and hospitals off of the table.
* Republican Senators Abel Maldonado and Jeff Denham clearly didn’t ‘get it’ when they cast votes in favor of confirming CTA hack Joe Nunez to the State Board of Education. You see, Nunez was the Chairman of the Alliance for a Better California during the 2005 special election. This was the public-employee-union led effort which raised and spend tens of millions of dollars to defeat common sense reforms to teacher tenure, how public employee dues are collected (paycheck protection), revamping our budget and spending processes to return some sanity to them, and fair redistricting. For all of us who toiled hard on these important measures, it is an eye-opener that neither Maldonado or Denham felt the compunction to show this union-goon the highway…
* FR friend Congressman John Doolittle won re-election to his ‘safe GOP’ House seat in Northern California with less than 50% of the vote. One of the issues used against him in his campaign was that his wife, Julie, did his fundraising and so the Doolittle family was making a hefty income from commissions off of checks that supporters wrote to the Congressman’s campaign. Doolittle has announced that he has learned a lesson, and Julie will no longer be doing his fundraising. That’s a good move. But what Republican primary voters are really looking for is an acknowledgment that the hideous practice of redistributing wealth from federal taxpayers into earmarked "pork" into districts contributed to the GOP loss of Congress. Here is a good example. Our Republicans lost because they forgot that they were supposed to shrink government, not ship home pork.
* At the upcoming California Republican Party Convention, that is less than a month away, you have to wonder what an honest liberal Republican is going to do in the race for Vice Chairman of the Party. You see, all three candidates — Jalene Forbis, Tom Bordonaro, and Tom Del Becarro — are very conservative Republicans. With just a few weeks until the confab, there really isn’t a lot of time for a fourth, more moderate candidate to get into the race. Which means that this race will be less about ideology, and more about personalities and specific ideas that are put forth. Last week we ran columns from all three candidates and you should check them out if you haven’t. As I am running for Vice-Chairman, South, I am not endorsing any of the candidates for Statewide Vice-Chairman. But I do know who I am voting for… Do you?
Have a great Saturday!
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