[Updated at 2:30 pm, at bottom…]

Exactly one week ago today, literally out of the blue, moderate Republican State Senator Bill Emmerson announced that he had tendered his resignation from office, effective December 1st of this year.

In his short public statement, Emmerson declared, “I have always felt that one had to be passionate about their work. In these past few months, my passion has waned and my constituents deserve a Senator with the level of commitment that I once had.”

The Senator made it clear he was in good health.

Politics being what it is, all eyes have now focused on the 23rd State Senate District, with everyone wondering who will succeed Emmerson.

While a special election will not formally be called until Emmerson is actually out of office, peeking at the calendar one can assume that it is likely that a special election will be held in April of next year, and that a probable runoff election would then be consolidated with the June statewide… Read More

I received my notice of cancellation from Anthem Blue Cross October 14, stating my company’s health insurance plan will no longer be available Jan. 1, 2014. But as a 20-year former Human Resource professional, panic did not set in.

Instead, I was angry.

I have a really good PPO plan. My annual out-of-pocket is high, but my coverage is good. It makes doctors smile when they see I have a PPO. Cha-ching $$.

I like my insurance plan. I like my family doctor — we have a 23 year relationship. Skin cancer and San Joaquin Valley allergies have plagued me for years, so my two favorite docs are my dermatologist of 25 years, and my ear, nose, throat doctor of nearly 28 years.

The cancellation of my plan means Anthem Blue Cross agreed to what Covered California forced on them, to cancel all employer plans by December 31, 2013.

Tuesday, Anthem Blue Cross of California announced it has agreed to a two-month extension of more than 100,000 individual policies. This was supposedly after they failed to give the required 90-day cancellation notice, state Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones announced this week.

The policies had been set to expire on Dec.… Read More

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[Editor’s Note: We are pleased to share this original commentary from Doug Lasken on the Tea Party.]

Unlike the journey in the Jules Verne fantasy, where explorers find specific forms at the center of the earth (e.g. a twelve foot tall prehistoric human shepherding mastodons), my experience traveling into the Tea Party center has been more like that of a particle physicist, where the clear forms of the larger world become increasingly blurred and elusive the closer one looks.

In the first foray of my quest to get a close look at the Tea Party, I discovered, at a rally of the Tea Party California Caucus (TPCC) at the state GOP convention on Oct. 4, that there is no clear identification among Tea Party members with the Republican Party. In fact, keynote speakers told the story of TPCC attendance at the convention as if it were the tale of a clandestine invasion of the Party, and a number of speakers proudly told that they had quit the GOP when it “lost its way.”

I had been invited to attend the TPCC rally because of my… Read More

Everyone knows that our nation’s tax laws are a mess, and the specific rules in the tax code that apply to political activities are no exception. While they are very complicated, they aren’t to blame for secret money in the funding of ballot measures. John Myers’ article “Ballot measure money not political under IRS loophole” confuses two separate and distinct legal issues, and credits the wrong one for the supposed problem.

The 501(c)(4) status under the federal tax code is not a loophole and has very little to do with campaign (candidate or ballot measure related) disclosure laws in California. The fact that ballot measure advocacy isn’t defined as “political intervention” in the tax code (it’s actually part of the definition of “lobbying”) doesn’t mean that state campaign finance rules don’t apply to such activity when engaged in by 501(c)(4)s. Just the opposite is true.

Since ballot measures are creatures of state law, state campaign finance laws, not the federal tax code, define the parameters for disclosable ballot… Read More

During the most recent year for which there is publicly available data, the fiscal-year-ended 6-30-2012, the California State Teachers Retirement System contributed a $1.1 billion paymenttowards paying off an unfunded liability of $71.0 billion. This fact, and much more, came out in a California Public Policy Center study released last week “Are Annual Contributions Into CalSTRS Adequate?”

Now let’s suppose you have borrowed $71,000, and you are paying a 7.5% interest rate on this borrowed money. Do you think you would ever have this debt paid off, if you only paid $1,100 per year? How would that work? Isn’t 7.5% interest on $71,000 equal to $5,300? Wouldn’t a mere $1,100 payment put you further in the hole by $4,200? Wouldn’t you owe $75,200 by the end of the year, more than the $71,000 debt you started with?

Multiply by a billion and you’ve got CalSTRS.

And this same disastrous, wishful thinking is playing out in nearly every “professionally managed” public sector pension fund in California. Every year, the combined unfunded liability… Read More

Riddle me this: Why do government projects never seem to be completed efficiently, on budget and on time?

Currently, national attention is focused on the failure of the ObamaCare website. Not since the launch of the Titanic has so much gone so wrong. After three and a half years and a $1 billion investment, most of those visiting the site found it non-functional – reports are that on the first day, only six individuals were able to sign up on a website intended to serve millions. However, this is only the latest IT project to be bungled by government officials.

A September $62 million systems “upgrade” by the California Employment Development Department triggered a backlog of 100,000 jobless claims and thousands of unemployed were still waiting for their benefits more than a month later.

An isolated occurrence? Hardly. In February, state officials jettisoned a flawed overhaul of the state’s payroll system that was $250 million over budget and four years behind schedule.

Earlier this year, the Sacramento Business Journal reviewed some of California’s biggest technological boondoggles and concluded that canceled projects, cost overruns and… Read More

UPDATE (November 13, 2013):At its November 12, 2013 meeting, the board of trustees for Rancho Santiago Community College District voted unanimously to continue a practice adopted in August 2013 not to discuss its Measure Q Project Labor Agreement negotiations in closed session until the college chancellor gets legal clarification from California Attorney General Kamala Harris. An opinion from the Attorney General is not likely to be produced for several months.

Speaking in support of having the discussions in open session was Dave Everett, Government Affairs Director for the Southern California Chapter of Associated Builders and Contractors, and Craig Alexander of the Pacific Justice Institute. On behalf of trustee Phil Yarbrough, Alexander wrote aNovember 5, 2013 memo to the boardexplaining why discussing Project Labor Agreement negotiations in closed session was not legal.

The head of the Los Angeles/Orange County Building and Construction Trades Council was at the meeting… Read More

[Publisher’s Note: We are pleased to offer this original column submitted to the FlashReport by Greg Rath, a candidate for Congress in California’s 45th District – Flash]

Of all things that can be said about President Obama, you have to give him credit. After punting the cover-up of the Benghazi attacks, humiliating our international credibility with illusionary ‘red lines’ over Syria, tolerating an IRS that behaved as a partisan attack dog, and plunging America’s international credibility to new lows, it takes supreme skill and effort to top those disastrous precedents. But never underestimate the Obama administration’s bumbling incompetence.

Unfortunately, the recent Obamacare website rollout has only added another notch to President Obama’s disastrous domestic record. Out of the millions of Americans who are forced to purchase health insurance on the so-called exchanges, only a tiny fraction managed to successfully apply. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have been dropped from their corporate insurance plans, and millions of self-insured have… Read More