TONY STRICKLAND ISSUES THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT ON SACRAMENTO COUNTY SUPERIOR COURT JUDGE PATRICK MARLETTE’S RULING Friday’s ruling likely galvanizes John Chiang’s political operation but it unfortunately continues to highlight the fact that we wouldn’t be in this situation had John Chiang used the millions taxpayers gave him to upgrade his payroll system over four years ago. According to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, as of last year Chiang had spent over $70 million dollars “with few tangible deliverables to show.” Instead of legal challenges to mask over his failure to get the job done, Chiang owes the … Read More

Los Angeles Times: Some experts say California’s payroll system ‘puzzle’ doesn’t compute They say it should not be as hard as the controller says it is to reprogram the computer system to cut state employees’ pay to the minimum wage as Schwarzenegger has demanded while there is no budget. Read the entire story here: http://bit.ly/df7QAP … Read More

When he took over the Fair Political Practices chairmanship from Ross Johnson, Dan Schnur promised he would focus the efforts of the Commission to root out corruption in the Capitol and enforce legislative ethics. These are noble goals for any government agency, goals which would take the time and effort of the enforcement personnel in the agency, and would also make them work very hard at rooting out corruption, and discovering unethical behavior. Government employees, however, tend to be lazy, and are not always interested in working hard, so they pick easy targets.

I expect this week to be hit with an accusation from the FPPC. My crime – I forgot to terminate one of my five election committees, and didn’t file campaign reports for that committee. Of course, the committee didn’t collect for the periods when I thought it was terminated (and hasn’t collected any money from anyone other than me for four years), but the FPPC thought I was such a criminal that I should pay a $4000 fine for these "serious" violations of the law. Oh yeah, and I gave a $2000 contribution to Guy Houston (which I disclosed) from the wrong bank… Read More

When former Fresno County Lincoln Club Board Member and current City Council member Lee Brand was elected to office in 2008, he didn’t wait long to make an impact on how the city does its business. First, Mr. Brand wrote the Better Business Act, adopted by the Council in 2009, it effectively ended city financed boondoggles by revising and revamping the process by which Fresno can enter into a partnership with a private developer.

But Brand wasn’t done there. This week, the Council will vote on the Labor Management Act, a groundbreaking outline that will govern the rules for how the city negotiates all future agreements with the public employee unions. You can read the Fresno Bee’s endorsement of the Act hereand I’ve uploaded an Executive Summary as part of this post.

A significant impetus behind Brand’s effort is the presence of "no layoff" clauses in most of the labor agreements. The Labor Management Act bans these in the future. Of course, all the unions hate that there will be sunshine on future negotiations. And… Read More

Given that incumbent State Treasurer (and former Attorney General and Senate President Pro-Tem) Bill Lockyer has been a "high profile" public official for decades… It will come as sobering news to him that nearly half of all California voters have no idea who he is…

This will be especially troubling news to Lockyer because of two very important additional factors — the first is that 2010 is shaping up, nationally, to be a good year for Republicans, the second is that thanks to a VERY competitive race for Governor and a GOP nominee in Meg Whitman who is bringing record resources to bear, the GOP ticket this year in California specifically will be strong.

Enter into the equation State Senator Mimi Walters. Walters is known for being a smart, tenacious candidate who will be campaigning all around the state as the GOP’s nominee for Treasurer.

The Walters campaign recently tagged some questions into a statewide survey from respected public opinion polling firm Public Opinion Strategies. Here are some interesting data points that Walters’ consultant, Dave Gilliard, culled from the survey (taken July 11-14, 800 likely… Read More

Today was the second of my weekly appearances on Sacramento conservative talk radio station KTKZ, spending a segment with popular radio talk show host and FR friend Eric Hogue (his columns on his Hogue News website are linked often on our site’s main page — very insightful).

You can listen to the audio of my interview with Eric below — our topics? The State Budget crisis – specifically Schwarzenegger vs. Chiang, remembering Senator Dave Cox, and how the tax increase issue will dominate the GOP race to succeed him…… Read More

From today’s Wall Street Journal Political Diary E-mail…… Read More

The front page of the Wall Street Journal today featured a great article exposing the hypocrisy of unions. The title says it all: “To Protest Hiring of Nonunion Help, Union Hires Nonunion Pickets.”

According to the story, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters is hiring people (who are neither carpenters or in unions) to protest against nonunion companies. The union’s excuse? They claim “it’s really difficult to have [union members] come out, either because of parking or something else.” Really? If finding parking is the biggest deterrent to protesting against companies using nonunion workers, then maybe it isn’t a big priority for union members—just their power-greedy leadership.

Even better, the union asserts it’s helping the unemployed by paying nonunion picketers. I’m sure President Obama would approve of this job growth calculation.

California unions and interest groups are also participating in the rent-a-mob hypocrisy. “In California, one group is offering to pay $10 and up per hour to… Read More