Greetings from the California Republican Party State Convention. As you can see by the timestamp on this commentary that it is very late, indeed, and so this will not be a long one. The State GOP is gathered at the Renaissance Esmerlda Hotel in Indian Wells, out in the Coachella Valley east of Los Angeles. I am not going to spend a lot of time talking about Governor Schwarzenegger’s speech to conventioneers at last night’s dinner banquet. You can pretty much read about what he said in a plethora of articles highlighted on our main page (look for various comments from me in the San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, and the San Diego Union Tribune). In short, the Governor came before us, declared that the State GOP was in trouble, and in essence prescribed that the ‘cure’ for our party’s ills is to move to the left on major policy issues in order to capture the political center. Frankly, and to be honest, I couldn’t disagree more. First and foremost, the purpose of a political party is to achieve it’s public policy goals. No where in our goal is a massive and costly government… Read More

Mr. Mayor, please tell us in California that you didn’t mean to say what you said.

I don’t really watch Glenn Beck very often, but Rudy Giuliani was on today and said that it should NOT be a crime to be here in this country illegally.

Read the full transcript for yourself: http://www.glennbeck.com/news/09072007.shtml

My favorite part is below:

GLENN: Should it be [a crime]?

GIULIANI: Should it be? No, it shouldn’t be because the government wouldn’t be able to prosecute it. We couldn’t prosecute 12 million people. We have only 2 million people in jail right now for all the crimes that are committed in the country, 2.5 million. If you were to make it a crime, you would have to take the resources of the criminal justice system and increase it by about 6. In other words, you’d have to take all the 800,000 police, and who knows how many police we would have to… Read More

by a 34-37 vote… Read More

Update: The call was lifted earlier and only four more aye votes were cast, making it 32-34. There are 77 members present to vote on today’s file. SB 110, that would create a prison sentencing commission, basically allowing "another 2nd chance"for criminals convicted of serious crimes to have reduced sentences, was onour floor minutes ago. It has run into problems with even many of the Dems as it is on call with a 28 aye to 34 no count…wow. [6 Dems voting "no", all Reps present, "no"]… Read More

Moments ago, the California Assembly voted down the misguided attempt of Gloria Romero to impose a "sentencing commission" on Californians that would have surely resulted in the release of dangerous criminals back onto our streets. While the bill may still come up in some neutered form, for now, the Assembly has reaffirmed our commitment to public safety.… Read More

As noted here a couple of weeks ago, Shaun Flanigan recently left as Assemblyman George Plescia’s chief of staff, replaced by Janelle Riella.

The scoop today is that COS Chip Englander is leaving Assemblyman Joel Anderson’s employ, hooking up withMercury Public Affairs next month. Mercury is a part of the Fleishman-Hillard International Communications network (not the same spelling as the FR publisher’s last name). Steve Schmidt, former campaign manager for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, is a Mercury partner and runs the Sacramento office. Another partner is Terry Nelson (former Bush-Cheney national political director). Many even say that Mercury houses thesingle largest collection of major Republican campaign consultants in America. Chip, who will bemoving to New York City to work out of the main Manhattan office,says "I’m deeply saddened to move on, but I’m getting married this month and this opportunity is too incredible to pass… Read More

I thought it was quite magnanimous of the industry group that represents private hospitals to summarily announce that they are "willing" to endure a $1.7 billion tax on all private hospitals as part of a "health care solution" for California with the notion that a huge percentage of this tax will come right back to them in government support.

A few thoughts come to mind. The first is that if the private hospitals in this association want to contribute $1.7 billion to some sort of program to assist those without insurance, that’s their choice. But leave government out of it. They can simply assess their members and use this pot of money to subsidize providing services in their hospitals to those in need. Of course look for a lot of that $1.7 billion cost to be passed along to those very patients seeking services. Why? Well, private hospitals are businesses. They cannot operate in the red. They have investors and stockholders who expect a return on their funds. The reality of the… Read More

In 1997, Tom Hudson on my staff came to me with a great idea–why don’t we distribute our presidential delegates to the winner of the primary in each congressional district? At that time, California had about 180 presidential delegates (three per congressional district and about 21 bonus delegates), all of which were awarded to the presidential candidate that won the most votes in the presidential primary. Given this system, most presidential candidates would show up in California about a year away from the primary, have a bunch of fundraisers in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sacramento, then come in about two weeks before the primary and spend several million dollars on commercials. Not a system designed to build a stronger party operation.

My experience in politics taught me two principles of politics. Principles dictate positions. Systems dictate strategies. If California Republicans wanted a stronger party operation, they had to devise systems that encouraged people to develop that operation. A winner take all by congressional district system would do that. California has double the delegates of any other state, and five or six… Read More