Today, the Assembly special session was convened, the budget mess being the purpose. Thetax ideas being floated to "fix" it include 3 ideas I’ll talk about here, [plus,there’s a new tax on services and a vehicle fee increase].

Let me put it this way: When you get in your car [with a higher reg fee? or higher repair fees?], you pay a newoil tax. When you get to the store, you pay an increased sales tax. When you find you have less to spend because government is spending it for you, you may stop at the local watering hole and pay an increased alcohol tax per drink. Even then you may realize that dying won’t get you off the hook as the Fed death tax increases exponentially when the death taxphasedown expires Dec 31 2009, but that’s a Federal issue that I’ll leave out of the rest of this post.

The oil severance taxapplies to domestically produced oil…a sure fire incentive to decrease our dependence on foreign oil,yeah!

The sales tax increase, only temporary you know, of 1.5% is a surefire winner for boosting the economy going into… Read More

We here at the FlashReport are pleased to present this Guest Commentary, submitted by the Governor’s office, authored by David Crane. Mr. Crane is a Special Advisor to the Governor for Jobs and the Ecomony. Governor Schwarzenegger has called a special session of the legislature to deal with an $11.2 billion shortfall in the current fiscal year budget. He has introduced a plan to deal with this problem that contains billions of dollars in both cuts and new taxes. Crane discusses the Governor’s proposal below. You can read the Governor’s proposal as it was presented here (you can even watch a video of the Governor presenting his plan).

$11.2 BILLION SHORTFALL REQUIRES A TOUGH… Read More

In Congressional District 4, Tom’s lead edges up to 709 votes from 451 on election night. According to folks on the ground there, Rahm Emanual has his goon squad lawyers up there throwing their weight around with elections offices to try tohassle and intimidate the workers and election clerks processing the ballots still not handled.… Read More

The 2nd District, Wally Herger’s, came thru strong, with nearly 57%. Dan Lungren did OK, too, in the 3rd with 49 to 44% in a 4 way race. I’m at McClintock HQ right now in Roseville, where the numbers are very close…much closer than this district should be but it’s obviously a wacky year. Right now it sits at a 500 vote lead for Tom with a bunch left to count in Nevada County, where they have quit counting for the night. The McClintock crew is on top of it, monitoring thecounty officeswhereneeded overnight and early tomorrow morning.Thisseat has no business falling into the wrong hands and should be ours at the end of it, as Tom feels good about how the numbers will break to him. What a night.… Read More

The elves all had other plans this morning, so I am busy trying to compile the main news page. Look for it around 9am. After that, I will start tackling the 15 or so short analysis pieces that I would rather be writing right now! But, first things first…… Read More

Setting last nights unpleasantness aside for a moment, ithad beenexpected the Guv will announce a special session on our crumbling budget and call for that today, with the likelihood that the Assembly and Senate will convene that session Thursdayand immediately recess it. The caucuses meet anyway on Thursday to elect their caucus leaders so everyone will be in town anyway, the termed out and the newbies.Conveningit allows the special session budget committees to be formed and perhaps hammer out some fixes to the massive budget revenue shortfall..or not.

Republicans remain firm that no new tax, sales tax, tax onbusiness, whatever,will help fix thisslumped over economyor subsequently, state revenues.Instead removing dumb mandates like AB 32 could help kickstart some investor confidence, along with our position of tax credit incentives to employ people and invest in this state, not Nevada. We’ll see. It would figure that we only have til November 25 with this session as Thanksgiving is 2 days later and the true end of the term is November 30 at midnight. The new crop will be sworn in the… Read More

A good friend of mine who has always lived in the Midwest (Ohio, Indiana and Missouri) moved to California about two years ago. Yesterday was her first California election.

She called me today and left this message on my voice mail:

“Jennifer, so I live in a state that values the safety of its chickens more than the safety of its daughters?”

It’s sad, but true.… Read More

We’ll put out a Winners & Losers column for this General Election. Who should make the list? Who were the movers in front of the ballot measures? How about behind the scenes? Architects of legislative wins or defeats? How about some big local races? IE’s that worked? Didn’t work? Send in your suggestions, and we’ll try to see if we can’t inflate the egos of some winners — and dump on the losers (politely, in most cases).

Send in your suggestions here, or comment below.… Read More