A few months back, longtime FR friend Dan Weintraub of the Sacramento Bee started on a new project for the Sunday Opinion page of the Bee. This new feature is called "The Conversation" — they pick a topic, and ask someone to pen a lead editorial on the subject, and then get a couple of others to pen smaller companion pieces (to start a "conversation"). Today’s topic is the Future of the Republican Party and the lead editorial on the topic is penned by yours truly. The other, shorter columns are from Tony Quinn and State Senator Abel Maldonado. The Bee’s editorial board also weighed in with their own ten cents (with some sort of bizarre "we need a Republican Party that believes government should be smaller, but we think they shouldn’t be intractable and should actually compromise to give us bigger government — bizarre).… Read More

A few months back, longtime FR friend Dan Weintraub of the Sacramento Bee started on a new project for the Sunday Opinion page of the Bee. This new feature is called "The Conversation" — they pick a topic, and ask someone to pen a lead editorial on the subject, and then get a couple of others to pen smaller companion pieces (to start a "conversation"). Today’s topic is the Future of the Republican Party and the lead editorial on the topic is penned by yours truly. The other, shorter columns are from Tony Quinn and State Senator Abel Maldonado. The Bee’s editorial board also weighed in with their own ten cents (with some sort of bizarre "we need a Republican Party that believes government should be smaller, but we think they shouldn’t be intractable and should actually compromise to give us bigger government — bizarre).… Read More

Our own Shawn Steel, who is Republican National Committeeman from California, has penned this piece which appears in Politico today. It is worth a read. A healthy critique of the incumbent RNC Chairman Mike… Mike who?

MIKE WHO? By Shawn Steel A friend of mine recently attended a “where do Republicans go from here?” session with a selected group of high-powered politicos — congressmen, legislators, donors, party leaders and activists — in the Republican citadel of Orange County, Calif. It was a group closely attuned to GOP politics. As a test, one of the congressmen queried the group, “Who is the chairman of the Republican National Committee?” drawing blank expressions as attendees racked their brains. Only two could come up with the correct answer —… Read More

SEIU’s response to the Governor’s executive order regarding state employees is so typical and predictable, but I find it thoroughly offensive this time. Usually, I can’t bring myself to emote over their antics, but today I’m fuming.

The business section of today’s Valley Times newspaper gave data to support my gut feeling for several weeks…the East Bay is taking the brunt of the unemployment burdens for the Bay Area, and is in fact, outpacing the state’s monthly unemployment rate by more than 2 to 1. The article by George Avalos states, “During the last 12 months, the Bay Area has lost 31,200 jobs. The East Bay accounted for 72 percent of all the jobs lost in the nine-county region in the last year. That is a stunning reversal from recent years, when the East Bay was the employment engine of the Bay Area economy, sometimes producing more than half the jobs in the Bay Area.”

It’s getting tough in my neighborhood. At every gathering I attend, the conversation always turns to either who has lost their job or who is afraid they will. Families are having a very tough time, and these are hard working people who have put in 60-80 hours a week to… Read More

We would like to wish our readers a Merry Christmas or a Happy Hannukah, and a great New Years. The FlashReport is currently in our "holiday break" mode, where we offer much more limited coverage. This takes place annually from the Saturday before Christmas through New Years Day. Traditionally the political news coverage is very slow, and it gives the elves here a chance to recharge their batteries before we return full steam ahead on January 2nd. The FlashReport Weblog on California Politics will be up and running during our seasonal break, and so we encourage you to keep an eye on it. Thank you so much for making 2008 the most successful year yet, by any measurable standard, for the FlashReport. We had more blog posts and more featured columns than any other year. We’ve had more readers (by far) than we’ve had since we began as an e-mail newsletter in 2001. We’ve had more visibility in terms of being mentioned in other blogs or in main stream media publications, and done more interviews than even before on television, radio, and for print media.

We… Read More

Here is an exclusive commentary from Cameron Smyth, Chairman of the Assembly Republican Caucus:

Governor Is Right to Veto Unconstitutional Democrat Budget Plan By Assembly Republican Caucus Chairman Cameron Smyth

Rather than working with the Governor and Republicans to bridge our budget differences, Democrats embarked upon a different course Thursday.

Ignoring the Constitution and the will of the people, they tried to impose billions in higher taxes through a simple majority vote of the Legislature. The Democrat budget plan would send you and your family a $10.8 billion tax bill to bail them out for the years of reckless budgets and out-of-touch priorities by the liberal majority that caused our budget crisis in the first place.

They call their plan a “balanced” approach, but the only balance is that every kind of tax you can… Read More

A reminder to our loyal readers that since we started the FlashReport as an e-mail newsletter back in 2001, and then shifted to a website format in 2005, we have maintained an annual tradition of giving the "elves" an annual break starting the Saturday before Christmas, extending through New Years. During the break, the main page of the site is officially closed. While we will have links up to help you navigate to many of the news sources that we go to when we compile links, we will not be populating the main page with links until January 2nd.

As we have done in the past, we are "leaving the lights on" over on the FlashReport blog page, and so look for new content to continue to appear there over the holidays — especially if we are covering any kind of breaking news.

I will not be going out of town, and is the past is an indicator, will still be surfing the web for news, and highlighting a few of the "must reads" each day on the blog — though don’t look for too many early morning posts!

Have a great holiday season, and thanks for making 2008 the most successful one in the seven years we’ve been at… Read More

It would appear, based on public statements from Democrat Legislative leaders, that dealing with the state’s fiscal mess is being punted until after the New Year. This after Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger pledged yesterday to veto an outrageous scheme concocted primary by State Senate President Darrell Steinberg — passing over $8 billion in new taxes (income, gas, sales, and more) on just a majority vote!

Fortunately for California taxpayers, the vice-like iron grip that the public employee unions have on Democrats in the legislature is so rock-solid that Steinberg and Assembly Speaker Karen Bass could not muster up the votes to give the Governor some "economic stimulus" policy changes that he wants in a tax-increase package, many of which relax labor law requirements on employers (California has some of the most notorious anti-business laws in the nation). So the Governor has said he will veto the package, and while he specifically avoided opining on the issue of the illegal votes to increase taxes, we’ll take the veto as a victory for taxpayers this round. That said, it is rather oxymoronic to say that you want to have… Read More