PROP. 90 – HAYNES AND ACKERMAN HAVE TWO DIFFERENT POSITIONS ON THIS MEASURE This November, there are a host of measures on the ballot. As you will hear from the contributors to this site over the next six or so weeks, most of them are worthy of a heave-ho, and a a "vote no" — but there are a few items on the ballot that we’ll be encouraging you to vote FOR. One of these is Proposition 90, the Save Our Homes Initiative. We’ve covered it on these pages before, and we will do so again. It is a measure that is about property rights, and about curbing the current system of abuse that is rampant — where government agencies trample the rights of private home owners. Is the measure perfect? Most aren’t? And legislating from the ballot … Read More

Republican Assemblyman John Benoit, who hails from Riverside County, is a pilot and actually commutes back and forth from his district to Sacramento in his own Cessna plane. Today the Riverside Press Enterprise has a pretty cool story about it, and how he will sometimes take other legislators to and from work, who happen to "live on the way."

Benoit is pictured here in this photo from the PE helping Assemblyman Kevin McCarthy onto his plane (I guess as the crow flies, Bakersfield is somewhere in between Sacramento and Riverside County). Anyways, you can check out the full story here, including an actual video of the Assemblyman coming in for a landing at Sacramento’s Executive Field (don’t get too excited about the video, though it is novel).… Read More

In case our Guest Editor and Los Angeles County Correspondent (along with Mike Spence) Brandon Powers needed some positive affirmation that he picked a good opinion-piece to feature as the Golden Pen Award Winner today on the main page, today’s Wall Street Journal Political Dairy selects a quote from the piece to feature in its daily e-mail:

Quote of the Day II

"Democrats are poised to take back the House. If that happens, however, conservatives will find several silver linings in the outcome…. The Congressional wing of the [GOP] lost its reformist zeal years ago and has been trying to win elections based on pork and incumbency. An election victory would reward that strategy, leaving the congressmen even less interested in restraining… Read More

SHAME ON PHIL ANGELIDES!

Dictionary.com defines ethics as:

SHAME ON PHIL ANGELIDES!

Dictionary.com defines ethics as:

The Governor has pledged to sign one of the FR ‘TWENTY WORST BILLS’ TODAY! SAY IT ISN’T SO!

The Governor has announced that today he is going to sign legislation to stiffen the regulation that the State of California imposes on businesses, large and small, mandating that they pay their employees more money.

This is a bad idea for so many reasons, but given the fact that state government finances are precariously tied to the health of the California economy, this kind of regulation is exactly what we DON’T NEED. Hiking the wage mandate on employers causes employers to have to let some employees go, and increases their costs which will lead to some businesses that are on the edge to shut down or move their operations out of the state.

Yes, it is true that if Angelides were Governor, we would be looking at the larger increase in the wage mandate, and an indexing of the wage to the rate of inflation (making it automatically increase in the future).

I will end on this sobering note:… Read More

Today Governor Schwarzenegger has an opinion piece published in the Los Angeles Times on the immigration issue, where he counsels all people who are engaged in the public debate on the illegal immigration issue to stay ‘civil’ in their discourse. I was reading through the column early this morning and would have spilled my coffee, if I had some, when I read this paragraph:

This afternoon Phil Angelides’ Campaign Manager, Cathy Calfo, fessed up on behalf of Phil Angelides that their campaign was, in fact, the source of the recorded information ‘leaked’ to the Los Angeles Times. Calfo says she neither she nor Angelides has prior knowledge that this was being done, and were not pleased. They also acknowledge that over four hours of audio recordings were downloaded from the Governor’s website, of which only six minutes has so-far been released.

You can read more detail where I found out about this, over on Dan Weintraub’s blog.

Looks like Angelides has successfully moved the media spin away from his penchant to tax everything over to his enethical behavior.

As an aside, I wonder how it feels for… Read More