Barack Hussein Obama’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, upper west side New Yorker Elena Kagan, in 1996, wrote an article for the University of Chicago Law Review entitled, “Private Speech, Public Purpose: The Role of Governmental Motive in First Amendment Doctrine.” Kagan argued that government has the right, even considering the First Amendment, to restrict free speech, when the government believes the speech is "harmful", as long as the restriction is done with good intentions.

The problem with these laws that restrict the First Amendment, such as campaign finance rules, are the words "good intentions." Whose good intentions is the question to be asked, and usually those are the intentions of government power and its liberal bureaucrats, who seek to expand government authority and restrict freedom of speech, and not the intent of the Founding Fathers of our constitution, who sought to eliminate rules against fundamental freedoms.

Kagan failed as a nominee to the Federal appeals… Read More

The lightly regulated world of social media has created high-profile privacy and security controversies for companies like Facebook, Google and others that collect and disseminate massive amounts of personal data from millions of users worldwide — issues that could create political liabilities for politicians like Democrat Attorney General candidate Chris Kelly. Bringing order to that Wild West environment has given candidates like Mr. Kelly, formerly Facebook’s chief privacy officer, a chance to work on policy making long before they hold elected office. But social media companies like Facebook also sit at the heart of intense debates over online privacy. Mr. Kelly’s campaign will be a litmus test for how these privacy issues resonate with the public in the political arena, and also for how the strengths and vulnerabilities of a background in social media companies confers on other executives who may consider running for public office. Our friends over at California Watch have written about this in more detail. Check it out… Read More

This is the time in an election that reality sets in for some candidates. Those candidates that have embraced the energizer bunny strategy of walking to hundreds of households or writing handwritten notes to Republicans in a district of 50,000 voters start to realize why fund raising is so important.

This past weekend lots of candidates were out walking door to door. They probably worked really hard to speak to 100 people at most. I am being generous at 100. They are doing this because they are working hard and are sincere in their desire to win the election. Meanwhile another candidate with more resources is communicating with tens of thousands of voters at a time in the mailbox, radio, television, and/or automated calls.

Last week at this time many of these elections in races with more than 10,000 voters were close. All of the candidates were unknown. Just one week later the candidates with the resources to communicate to the electorate are making huge strides in earning votes with absentee and election day voters.

To the energizer bunny candidate — It just doesn’t seem fair. They would do a much better job in… Read More

What do we know about Elena Kagan, Obama’s supreme court nominee?

Well, we know she wrote a few years ago that the First Amendment needed to be looked at again because she didn’t like the idea of people "throwing money into political campaigns" under its protection, or words to that affect.

We know Elena graduated from Harvard Law School, like Barack Hussein Obama. We know she taught at the University of Chicago, like BHO. We know BHO was the first black editor of Harvard Law Review and Elena was the first woman Dean of the Harvard Law School. We know Elena got drunk when a liberal female friend, Elizabeth Holtzman, lost the New York U.S. Senate election in 1980 according to the Daily Princetonian. (I did too the same night in 1980 when Reagan was elected President but likely for different and happier reasons). We know she grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a privileged community, perhaps not so much as the Upper East side, but the site of Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera that my wife and I hang out at every now and then, and the fictional scene of the… Read More

A little whiel ago, Assembly Republicans held a press conference in the Capitol at which they made two points extremely clear.

The seeds of overspending sewn by the liberals who control the legislature have grown into a large, unmanageable spending problem.

I won’t reinvent the wheel. Longtime friend Steve Greenhut, who heads up the Pacific Research Institute’s Cal Watchdog Team, was at the press conference and writes about it here.

We’ll bring you some video footage later on, or in the morning.… Read More

Been on the road all day… But check out this video — it’s a campaign commercial for a candidate in Pennsylvania. But it’s a priceless depiction of San Francisco Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi… … Read More

Corey Gardner, the leading Republican candidate to take on Democrat Betsy Markey in Colorado (a top NRCC target), today launched a very clever website satirizing eBay, www.eBetsy.com. The site details the special interest money Markey has received.

Markey took out conservative firebrand Marilyn Musgrave, who served three terms in Congress, funded in large part by independent expenditures from billionaire heiress Pat Stryker. The district has 45,000 more Republicans than Democrats and Markey trails badly with unaffiliated voters. San Diegan Chris Hansen, a veteran manager, is running Gardner’s campaign.

Revolvis launched a similar strategy targeting first-term Assemblywoman Joan Buchanan, who our client, San Ramon Mayor Abram Wilson is facing in a rematch of 2008, highlighting Buchanan’s habit of abstaining from votes, www.wheresjoan.com.… Read More

Don Wagner, candidate for the 70th Assembly District, has prevailed in Westphal v. Wagner, a suit filed against Wagner and the South Orange County Community College Board of Trustees, to prevent theoffering of invocations at graduations, awards ceremonies, and other District functions.

The plaintiffs, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, sought an injunction but after months of discovery, including depostions from Wagner and other trustees, and reviewing thousands of pages of documents, the aetheists could not make their case that the District was violating the establishment clause of the Constitution. The court denied the motion and invocations can continue.

However, this case is not necessarily over. The aetheists may force this to trial and there is always a chance that Wagner et al could be defeated.

Bottom line, however, is that Wagner and the Board of Trustees stood against the effort to ban invocations andreligious freedom and the First Amendment prevailed.

* Don Wagner is a client of Revolvis… Read More