It’s June, the primary elections are over, there was a change in term limits, so the current crop of Legislators have relatively secure jobs for the next 12 years. The top two primary has come and gone, and it changed some things, but not very much. Now the Legislature has to get back to work. It now has a week to enact a budget. The challenge, there is a deficit.

This is not news. By all accounts, this year’s deficit is small in comparison to say, 2001-02, where there was a $48 billion deficit in the general fund on a $74 billion general fund budget. Or even 2003-04, where there was a $25 billion on a $78 billion general fund budget. The state got through both of those budgets without a tax increase. Heck, a $15 billion deficit on a $110 billion general fund is child’s play. Quite frankly, that kind of budget deficit is almost what we call “budget dust.” It certainly is just leftovers on the lavish table of our current ruling class.

But do not expect them to say that. Expect much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Expect legislative leadership to cry and moan about the difficulties of balancing the budget, and demand that the… Read More

Question: What do California Republican Congressmen Brian Bilbray, Jeff Denham and Dan Lungren all have in common?

If you answer this question saying that they are all in tough re-elections this year in districts that are very competitive, you would be correct. But unfortunately, they all have something else in common. All three of them (along with California Republican David Dreier who is retiring after being “drawn out” of a district) were the only Republicans from California to vote last night against a floor amendment to the Energy and Water Appropriations Bill to cut spending in the bill by 0.27% across the board. Yes, you read that correctly, while California GOPers Wally Herger, Tom McClintock, Devin Nunes, Kevin McCarthy, Elton Gallegly, Howard McKeon, Ed Royce, Jerry Lewis, Gary Miller, Ken Calvert, Mary Bono Mack, Dana Rohrabacher, John Campbell, Darrell Issa and Duncan Hunter all voted with a significant majority of House Republicans (140 Republicans voted for the amendment), Bilbray, Denham and Lungren voted with every Democrat from California to oppose the cuts (in total 95 House Republicans voted no). [See the roll call vote … Read More

This morning Governor Jerry Brown and his allies of inconvenience the, state’s massive public employee unions, must be looking at the results of the June election with much dismay. Governor Brown will be wincing at the looking-most-probable defeat of Proposition 29, the major tax increase on tobacco products. The union bosses will be keenly dismayed that voters in two of the state’s largest cities, San Jose and San Diego, passed ballot measures that curtail many of the lavish retirement benefits of the employees in those cities.

If Governor Brown is now keeping a tally, the magic number is eight. The last eight times that California voters have had to decide at the ballot box whether to raise taxes (of any sort), they have decided against it. For liberals like Brown who see that the path to balancing the state’s budget should come by reaching further into the pockets of the very wealth creators on whom we need to depend for private-sector wealth creation in this state, the defeat of Prop. 29 comes as a heavy blow. After all, despite Brown’s prior stated concerns about California’s over-dependence on personal income taxes from a… Read More

Too Big to Fail: There is a lot of talk these days about the $3 billion loss at JP Morgan Chase. There is a lot of hand-wringing, concern, and investigation into what happened. We are asked about it on Capitol Hill, we have an opinion, and we all care about it. And, that is the problem. We shouldn’t have to care.

The only reason we are all in a tizzy over this is because JP Morgan is too big to fail. If Apple announced it lost $3 billion tomorrow, the shareholders, Wall Street and some trial lawyers would care, but it wouldn’t be any of Washington’s concern. That’s the way it should work with private companies. They take risks to make money. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.

Dodd-Frank did not fix this problem for the banks. Arguably, a provision in Dodd-Frank was part of the cause of the JP Morgan loss. Dodd-Frank requires disclosure of trading that was previously private. Hedge funds saw JP Morgan taking big positions (which just a few years ago would not have been made public) and decided to play the other side of the trade. The hedge funds won and JP Morgan lost. However, in this case, we all lost. That’s why… Read More

Fun new ad — showing how critically important the Democrats claimed the Wisconsin recall election was — right up until they realized that they were going to lose.

Suddenly the recall election outcome became no big deal.

Michael Moore is one of the stars – inadvertently demonstrating that occasionally he CAN be funny.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/flashback-scathing-new-ad-uses-maddow-and-michael-moore-to-remind-how-important-recall-election-was/… Read More

From today’s Wall Street Journal Political Diary E-Mail…

California’s Labor Pains Public unions in California have got to be more than a little worried after last night’s election results—and not just because of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s resounding victory.

More than two-thirds of voters in San Jose and San Diego supported ballot measures scaling back pensions for government workers. The San Diego initiative, which shifted new workers to defined contribution plans, won with 66% support. But the bigger news was in more liberal San Jose, where 70% of voters okayed benefit cuts for current workers. San Jose unions promise to sue, which would set the stage for a protracted legal battle over the extent to which pension benefits are protected under state law.

But the overwhelming support for the ballot measures reveals why Democratic legislators have refused to put California Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed pension reforms up to voters. Any pension reform initiative would almost certainly succeed. The measures also signal a decisive shift in public opinion… Read More

Unclear if/when we will post up election results on this page. I recommend that you check this page for up to date results. I will be “live tweeting” all night long here. After 8pm I will also be “live blogging” here.

… Read More

The prediction is that the turnout for today’s Presidential Primary (otherwise known as the “top-two” election for every other partisan office) will be low — very low — perhaps the lowest in history. If you need a reason, look no further than the fact that the Obama-Romney matchup for the Fall has already been decided, and that only two measures are on the statewide ballot, neither of which are on issues that drive turnout. In prior years, a hyper-low turnout would be great news for the ideological extremes in that the base vote of each party tends to be the party stalwarts on the left and on the right. Add to the mix that DTS voters, at least when looking at VBM ballot returned, have been under-performing (which is typical in a June election), and the table would be set for a banner election for partisans. Except, and a big except, we have this new top-two system courtesy of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Abel Maldonado. There is simply no way to know what kind of a wrench it will throw into works, besides the obvious results of sending two R’s or two… Read More