We admit that most of the time that we draw attention to an L.A. Times story, it is to point out something we didn’t like about what a reporter or columnist wrote… But I have to give an FR "shout out" to Times reporter Evan Halper, whose state budget update story "GOP members maintain their opposition but agree to offer a plan of their own" which ran yesterday contained a generous amount of "ink" on the FlashReport!
It’s at the end of the story, and excerpted below. You can read Halper’s full Sunday story here.
"You 15 are officially martyrs for all California taxpayers," Jon Fleischman, a member of the state party’s board, wrote to the caucus on his blog Flash Report, http://www.flashreport.org, senators have been using the blog to sound off on Perata, the governor and Assembly Republican Leader Michael Villines of Clovis. They also offered updates on the lockdown.
Just before 7 a.m. Saturday, Sen. Jim Battin (R-La Quinta) sent in a posting. "We’ve been locked in, and there are sergeants at every exit making sure we can’t leave," he wrote. "I slept in a chair for about an hour (and btw — Dennis Hollingsworth [(R-Murrieta)] snores :/). Ah-Democracy at work…. It’s all rather quite embarrassing."
Also posted on the blog was an attack on the governor by Sen. Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks): "He sided with liberal Democrats in refusing to balance the state budget."
Sen. George Runner (R-Lancaster) blogged that if Assembly Republicans "had chosen to learn more from their colleagues in the Senate who have gone through more than one or two budgets, we might have a true ‘fiscally responsible’ budget to vote on."
He also took a swipe at their decision to leave town: "Now is the time to put our vacation plans aside, get back to Sacramento and craft a better budget."
To be honest, it is the tendency of most MSM newspapers to ignore that there is a blogosphere influencing the debate, from the left or the right. So, hats off to Halper. Not mentioned in this story, by the way, is that last Friday morning, we prominently featured a column from Assembly Republican Leader Mike Villines on the budget deal in the Assembly, so that readers aren’t left with a wrong impressed. We are a "pro-Mike" internet publication ;-)