– On Tuesday, Republican State Senator Tony Strickland formally announced his candidacy for the newly minted, very competitive 26th Congressional District. Yesterday Strickland announced that he has already raised $317,915 (with none of that being transfers of any funds from his existing State Senate campaign committee). Strickland’s strong showing reinforces what I said when Congressman Elton Gallegly announced his retirement — Strickland is a stronger candidate for the GOP to win that seat than Gallegly would have been.

– No doubt the winner of the “most enjoyable response to the Governor’s State of the State Address award” goes to longtime FR friend State Senator Joel Anderson, with his press release entitled, “I want to work with the Governor but sometimes it’s hard to take him seriously.“

– Vice President Biden came into San Francisco to perform a series of “cashectomies” on the liberal donor class in the area. Apparently he managed to mix up the San Francisco Forty Niners and the San Francisco Giants. At least Biden isn’t prone to frequent gaffes. Oh wait, yes he is.

– Something really does need to be done to curb the egregious power of the State Attorney General to assign the Title and Summary for state ballot initiatives. Two recent, blatant examples of Attorney General Harris using her bias to impact this process:  she gave a terrible Title and Summary to an initiative that, if passed, would provide much needed reforms to our state’s public employee pension system — and yesterday she handed a sweetheart Title and Summary to Governor Brown’s initiative to hike state income and sales taxes. Perhaps we need an initiative to take this power away from the Attorney General and vest it somewhere else — but then again, I guess the Attorney General would most certainly give that initiative an extraordinarily crappy Title and Summary…

– The choice for the GOP nomination seems to be winnowing — so that we have the serial adulterer with serially flawed judgement, the guy with racist newsletters and sympathy for terrorists, and the plutocrat who changes substantive policy positions based on the office he seeks. Do I sound encouraged? It really does say something about my visceral dislike of Barack Obama that I will support any of these folks rather than see the President re-elected.

– Read this column from Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution.  Then go eat some souvlaki.

– There are a lot of things where you would covet a “#1” rating, right? Well California has taken the top honors for something that we do not want — in the newly release Sunshine Review’s first State Government Salary Report, California has more public employees making over $150,000 a year than any other state in the union. Congratulations to us! (not)

– My wish for the new year is that legislators from my own political party, a small handful aside, would wake up and realize the horror that local Redevelopment Agencies had become. There is nothing conservative about using taxpayer funds to pick winners and losers, playing “Sim City” — and manipulating the marketplace. There is nothing conservative about using the power of government to take someone’s private property from them — their home, their business, their place of worship — without their consent — because politicians would like to see a “higher economic use” for that property. Conservatives should not be afraid to praise Governor Brown for his resolve in seeing redevelopment agencies expire. Governor – you are doing the right thing where RDA’s are concerned!

– Happy Birthday to Assemblywoman Kristin Olsen. When I was your age, I launched this website. Seems like a long time ago. Thanks to all of our readers for what has been a great run so far — over six years!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 19th, 2012 at 2:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.