For several years now after each gubernatorial election, the UC Berkeley’s Institute for Governmental Studies hosts a post mortem seminar featuring members of the winning and losing campaign teams. This afternoon, members of the Westly, Angelides and Schwarzenegger campaign teams gathered on the Cal campus to discuss their perspectives on the ’06 primary. While there was nothing earth shattering said, there were some highlights worth sharing:

* The Wesley and Angelides staffers couldn’t make enough jokes about California’s new Democratic governor. Jude Barry, Wesley’s campaign manager, cracked, “This past year proved that it was a good year to be a Democrat. Two people proved that…Phil Angelides and Arnold Schwarzenegger."

* The animosity between the Westly and Angelides campaign teams was apparent, especially between Gary South (Westly) and Paul Maslin and Katie Merrill (Angelides). Gary South… Read More

My friend Grover Norquist passes this on from the White House office of Public Liaison:

Please join a special White House Conference Call on Monday, January 22nd, 2007 at 4:30 P.M.

We are pleased to announce that Monday’s call will feature Karl Rove who will give a preview of the President’s State of the Union Address. The call-in information is as follows:

Phone Number: 888-552-8613

Participant Code: 7759471

Leader Name: Tim Phelps… Read More

The U.S. Supreme Court has just announced it has decided to accept the appeal in Wisconsin Right to Life v. FEC and John McCain this term and it has established a briefing schedule. The case involves review of a lower Federal Court case that emasculates regulation of issue-oriented speech during pre-election periods in Federal elections that mentions candidate’s names, but does not contain "express advocacy." If the Supreme Court upholds the lower Federal court decision, the so-called "McCain-Feingold" law regulating Section 527 political committees will largely be gutted.… Read More

According to a survey commissioned by CBS 5 in San Francisco interviewed 500 Bay Area adults,57% of Bay Area adults oppose a ban on spanking; only 23% support a ban. Actually, depending on how many of those asked were in San Francisco, there probably would be more support for the ban if they had only clarified that this is a ban on parents spanking children. Lieber’s bill doesn’t ban adult-on-adult spanking, a popular past-time in parts of San Francisco…… Read More

Yesterday, the governor told the CoCo Times that when he was a child, he was routinely spanked. (The conversation was in response to a bill Assemblywoman Sally Lieber is planning to introduce that would prohibit children under three years from being spanked.)

“I grew up, I got smacked about everything. That was the way worked,” he said. “You know, I think it maybe had something to do with after the war. People were maybe more angry and more frustrated, you know, having lost the war or whatever else. So there was a lot of other things, a lot of drinking when I grew up."

But he does not parent the same way. Instead, he says that he learned from the parenting style of his wife’s family, which was "no physicality at all, just communication."

Humm….let me get this straight…no spanking results in a family full of ultra-left liberals while spanking your… Read More

From today’s Wall Street Journal Political Diary E-mail, read by business and political leaders around the nation:

Girl’s Talk

It was inevitable that after Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger broke his ironclad pledge against tax increases last week by proposing a universal health insurance plan that his old liberal critics would begin to taunt him.

Democratic Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, a veteran Arnold adversary, was first out of the gate. "This is a plan Assembly Democrats could have written," he crowed. But even more stinging was the New Republic. In its latest issue, its editors recalled the governor’s… Read More

FR friend Ron Nehring (pictured to the right), the incoming Chairman of the California Republican Party in just a few weeks, is out in Washington, D.C. for the Winter meeting of the Republican National Committee. There, the RNC members are gathered to elect new officers for the 2007-2008 term. Here is Ron’s "live" report, received literally moments ago: California’s Tim Morgan, Republican National Committeeman and CRP Rules Committee Chairman, was moments ago elected Treasurer of the Republican National Committee by acclamation here in Washington, D.C. The RNC is meeting here at the Grand Hyatt for its bi-annual organizational meeting. Among the… Read More

It would appear that the Governor is prepared to draw a line in the sand over whether the payroll and income tax increases that he proposes as part of his government-mandated healthcare proposal are, in fact, taxes!

The plan, in an of itself, is a repudiation of a lot of rhetoric that we have heard from Arnold Schwarzenegger going back to well before his election as Governor, as he has touted himself as a strong advocate of the free-market system. You can ask any of the centers of free-market thought from around the United States — the Cato Institute, the Foundation on Economic Education, the Heritage Foundation, the Reason Foundation, the Pacific Research Institute, the Claremont Foundation, and even our friends at the Wall Street Journal — I have personally spoken with or corresponded with folks from all of these bastions of free-market thought — and they are consistent with their opposition to the Governor’s proposal.

That said, the Governor apparently seems intent to refuse to allow the tax increases that would pull in billions of dollars in coerced revenue into state coffers to actually be called taxes. Governor, we have news for… Read More