CalBuzz has a lead item in today’s website entitled “Lies, Damn Lies: Howard Jarvis and Small Biz ‘Poll”. However, the picture of Jarvis that they use to punctuate their accusations includes an illegal and unauthorized use of the famous picture of Howard Jarvis that appeared in Time magazine, which is copyrighted material and privately owned by the HJTA and another organization. We were told the picture was sourced from the Google Images Library. The Google images Library clearly instructs any potential user that the picture “may be subject to copyright” and reports the picture back to a website that firmly, very clearly asserts a copyright on the picture and states “All material on this website is copyrighted.” One would think the experienced journalists at CalBuzz would understand copyrights for journalistic materials, including those clearly marked as such. CalBuzz says they will remove the offending material “by noon,” but all the damage will be done by then, when the website has received the majority of it’s page views. Beware a message of “lies, damn lies” that comes from a source… Read More

Yesterday at 5pm, KFI radio talk show hosts John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou hosted Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist, Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association’s Jon Coupal, and yours truly for a fun segment — united a group of anti-tax leader that were dubbed by Governor Jerry Brown as the “Legion of Acceptability” — Joe Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote about that here.

The premise of Brown’s assertion is that our group of taxpayer advocates is responsible for stopping his play to put taxes increases on a special election ballot this year. The reality is that the vast majority of GOP legislators opposed these tax increases because they are bad public policy, not because of anything printed here on the FlashReport or spoken on the John and Ken Show. Those few GOP legislators who were willing to put taxes on the ballot were thwarted by the public employee unions,… Read More

Solyndra is the kind of company certain politicians love because it provides a concrete example that can be used to justify a particular philosophy. It turns an abstract idea real.

In this case, the philosophy is one which liberals have developed to rationalize all types of regulations and subsidies of the kind America has otherwise spent fifty years moving away from. “Green jobs,” the story line goes, will be our future.

It sounds great. And politically, it’s even better: it’s suddenly acceptable to crush all kinds of businesses with regulations and taxes because the jobs that are destroyed will be replaced will all kinds of new “green jobs.” Everything will be fine. In his 2010 campaign for Governor, Democrat Jerry Brown citied such idealistic, clean, high-tech jobs almost daily.

Yet, “green jobs” is an abstract concept, and one which has proven to be largely a failure in the real economy. At best they occupy a niche, and no credible economic analysis can demonstrate a roadmap by which such jobs become anything more than a tiny sector of our giant economy.

The “green jobs” concept is an important one to keep the… Read More

We all are familiar with the rest of the variations on this phrase describing the dedication of the US Postal Service (USPS) in delivering the mail. Well, snow and rain may not be keeping the Post Office from delivering the mail, but financial problems within the USPS may soon halt delivery.

This has not gotten much publicity, but the USPS is in real trouble. The USPS is an independent, but wholly-owned entity of the federal government. It is designed to be self-supporting such that the rates it charges will cover the costs of delivering the mail. This worked for a long time. Obviously, for over 200 years. But, not so now. After earning modest profits from 2004-2006, the agency started hemorrhaging money in 2007. Between 2007 and 2010, it has lost over $20 billion. These losses are now accelerating in 2011 with a loss, in the first 3 quarters of this year, amounting to $5.7 billion. The USPS has already borrowed the maximum $15 billion it is allowed to borrow under the law and has already deferred another $4 billion in payments to its employee retirement fund to cover these losses. The Continuing Resolution adopted by the House last week… Read More

Barack Obama continues to ring-up his California Automated Teller Machine. despite record 12.1% unemployment here punctuated by almost 50% employment among high school age black men, with fundraisers planned in the higher employment environs of San Diego County and Hollywood.

Today the President of Hope, whose current Misery Index economic number here is higher than the number that inspired Jimmy Carter to use the data to defeat Gerald Ford for President in 1976, lunches at noon at the mansion residence of Elizabeth and Mason Phelps in the 1400 block of La Jolla Rancho Road in La Jolla. (Maureen Guffanti of the Tea Party informs us that a public protest is planned… Read More

Let’s start with this 2 minute video which offers fascinating insight into the woefully ignorant political appointments that Obama is making. In a taped interview, the U.S. Secretary of Labor is STUNNED to discover that Texas is creating jobs like crazy — she literally had no idea about this.

You gotta see her laugh incredulously at the assertion, saying “Come again??” From there you get to watch a political deer caught in headlights — wishing she were elsewhere. I suspect that many Democrats watching this video feel the same way about her.

Texas for Dummies: U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis Doesn’t Know Texas Has Largest Job Growth in U.S.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/texas-for-dummies-u-s-labor-secretary-hilda-solis-doesnt-know-texas-has-largest-job-growth-in-u-s-but-she-is-sure-texas-has-low-pay-dangerous-work-conditions-and-a-lousy-education-system/

Apparently… Read More

Back in the year 2000, Texas Governor George W. Bush was elected as the 43rd President of the United States on a platform of opposing higher taxes. I remember that election season well as I was Executive Director of the California Republican Party at the time. That same election cycle, popular Modesto City Councilman Dave Cogdill was running for the State Assembly in the Central Valley. Cogdill campaigned as a conservative, proudly, publicly signing a pledge to oppose higher taxes in Sacramento. He won his primary by a healthy margin, in a safe GOP seat.

Six years later Cogdill ran in an uncontested race for a safe GOP State Senate seat, going on to easily win the general election against a token Democrat opponent. Cogdill was able to advance into the State Senate without a primary fight because of the trust he had built up with his Republican constituents. Cogdill had pledged to oppose tax increases in the Assembly, and had kept that promise. Very early in that State Senate campaign, on February 25, 2005 to be precise, Cogdill again signed a pledge to oppose higher taxes — and why should Republican voters have doubted him? It was a matter of… Read More

I’m glad the Governor signed compromise legislation today to help get some California affiliates back to work and bring thousands of Amazon.com distribution jobs to California. That’s very good news.

Unfortunately, this legislation is by no means a cure-all. It does nothing to solve the long-term problems created by the Legislature’s botched efforts to compel out-of-state retailers to serve as California’s tax collectors.

Absent a federal solution, which is highly unlikely in such a short time frame given all of the competing interests, we’ll be right back in the same mess in a year. The State of California will again be killing California jobs, driving away investment and inviting costly litigation.

Let me be clear: this compromise legislation, while welcome, provides only a short-term delay to a bad law that will never produce the revenues, nor the level-playing field, its proponents imagine.… Read More