This morning columnist Tim Rutten has an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times entitled, "GOP Hard-liners take aim at Cooley" — the substance of the piece being that Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley, who has announced a bid for the GOP nomination for Attorney General, is not a fan of California’s 3-Strikes-Law and has raised the ire of one of its authors, Mike Reynolds. Rutten quotes from Reynolds’ piece that ran here on the FlashReport (Rutten, of course, doesn’t reference this site as the source of the piece).

Former California Republican Party Chairman read the piece, and was motivated to e-mail over his own response to Rutten’s piece, for your reading pleasure…

I should probably add quickly that I have been in dialogue with Cooley’s campaign about having him pen a column for FR readers about his candidacy, but have had no luck in getting them to agree to do so.… Read More

According to latest returns for the election held yesterday, Mission Viejo councilman and the currently appointed Mayor, Lance MacLean has been recalled by 6,858 to 6,740, a total of 118 votes. A total of 1,140 votes remain to be counted, and knowledgeable observers state the margin of recall will narrow a little, but that the recall should stand, and MacLean will be forced out of office when the election is formally certified.

Successful recalls don’t happen that often – just ask Assemblyman Anthony Adams that question. The success of the Mission Viejo recall is something significant. It is also significant in who the biggest loser was as a result, which was not MacLean, the target of the recall, or Dale Tyler, a replacement candidate that lost. More on that later….

The "Notice of Recall" Mission Viejo citizens voted on that gave the reasons to recall MacLean, included a charge that he had voted for "lifetime medical benefits" at taxpayer expense for himself and other councilmembers, had voted for a tax increase, and that MacLean had been detained on a charge of assault and battery on a… Read More

Once again we are pleased to present a our weekly offering from the FlashReport’s new in-house political cartoonist, Eric Eisenhammer! Capitol politicos will already be chuckling as they look at Eric’s latest satirical look at Arnold Schwarzenegger.

To give this week’s cartoon some context — last week Governor Schwarzenegger unveiled a new video just outside of his office in the Capitol which plays (over and over again) a clip of President Barack Obama saying that the worst thing we can do in this economy is raise taxes. This hypocritical statement comes from a President who is actively supporting massive tax increases to fund his socialized healthcare scheme.

The point that the Governor is trying to make, as he has proposed a budget that largely avoids tax increases, is that Democrat legislators (who want to tax everything that moves, and then tax everything that doesn’t move) should heed the statement of the President.

While we support a no-new-taxes budget, we… Read More

This is a "must watch" video to see a Congressman who is completely out of touch with the major drought effecting his district. Liberal Democrat Jim Costa campaigned as a so-called "Blue Dog" (moderate) Democrat, but he votes virtually ALL OF THE TIME with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco.

Someone should perhaps remind the Congressman that unemployment in the San Joaquin Valley is nearly 20 percent and as high as 40 percent in some cities and that according to a recent University of California at Davis study, based on the water reductions outlined in the Delta outlined in the Delta smelt Biological Opinion, revenue losses in the San Joaquin Valley of California for 2009 will be $2.2 billion and job losses at… Read More

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

Hey, someone has to little out for the little guy. In this instance, I would be the "someone" — and the "little guy" is my friend Bill Whalen. Bill as many of you may know with Hoover over in Palo Alto, and has been a frequent commenter on things political. Bill is a former speechwriter for Governor Pete Wilson, and one of the more insightful people I know in politics.

When the FlashReport launched, Bill lent his talent and credibility to our site as a blogger, and he still contributes occasionally. Last December, Bill launched his own online blog, Poli-Cal, which you can find (and should bookmark) here. We do link his pieces on our main page — two of them are there today.

The reason I bring all of this up is that this morning I hopped over to the great new blog on California politics that is a joint venture of the Los Angeles Times and Capitol Weekly. Up until now it ran under an online masthead that simply read, "California Politics" — but today it has a new name – PolitCal."

I… Read More

Earlier this week, I penned a commentary where I pretty well laid out California Supreme Court Justice Ron George for making a number of contributions to the Hillary Clinton for President Campaign in 2008, aggregating to $2300. I drew the conclusion that George had made these contributions based solely on information taken off of the Federal Election Commission website, where a search of Ron George produced a listing of these donations to Clinton, identifying the giver as Ronald George, with an employer and occupation of State of California/Chief Justice (the graphic is a clip straight from the FEC website).

As it turns out, Chief Justice George did not make any contributions to the Presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, and that the information that is presented on the Federal Elections Commission website is not accurate. To be more specific, the FEC relies on campaigns to file specific donor information, which they then upload to their site,… Read More

OK, tales of the bizarre. So I linked to a website of conservative activist Aaron Park who had posted up documents about a 1990 case where Abel Maldonado had a judgment against him in the Santa Barbara County Superior Court over not making child support payments. But then 30 minutes later Park pulled down his post (pressure from..???). So I have pulled my blog post on it, as I am not comfortable leaving a dead link active on my site. Had to delete a tweet as well. Sigh.… Read More