SURVEY ON CALIFORNIANS AND THE FUTURE

WHAT ELECTION? CANDIDATES SKIRT THE ISSUES, VOTERS TUNE OUT Voters remain skeptical about cost of bond measures; Majority want Democrats to control Congress, but also want third party

Over the next couple of weeks, the FlashReport will be profiling a few campaign MVP’s for our readers…

When looking at all of the campaign operatives on the GOP side of the isle this cycle, a small group of notables rose to the surface, the first of which we are happy to recognize as our pick for Team Arnold MVP — and the winner is… Katie Levinson, the Communications Director for Californians for Schwarzenegger! Congratulations, Katie!

You can actually probably tell the day that Katie Levinson started with her important and central position with the Governor’s re-election campaign — that would be the day that someone turned "on" the power switch, and the Schwarzenegger Public Relations Machine has been operating at full speed ever since. Levinson is rather famously an import into the California political scene as a part of "Team Schmidt" — the young and energetic group of folks that worked with Schwarzenegger Campaign Manager Steve Schmidt on President Bush’s 2004 re-election efforts, whom… Read More

What could be more fun than watching "progressive" candidates in Berkeley duke it out over how to improve the city’s business climate?

One city council candidate, George Beier, has an 11 point plan, including ideas such as such as building a "People’s Café" in Berkeley’s (in)famous People’s Park and creating a "Free Speech Trail" to point out historic free speech places on Telegraph Avenue. Now, that’ll really draw new companies and jobs to their wacky city!

Berkeley residents are still reeling from the closure of their beloved Cody’s flagship bookstore on Telegraph Avenue. While they would love to point the finger at the big retailers, they have only themselves to blame for the loss of this independent bookstore. Telegraph can be a nasty… Read More

Bob Salladay, the LA Times reporter behind the newspaper’s new Political Muscle blog, has a great post up today about Democrat lieutenant governor candidate John Garamendi holding a campaign event to speak on "vital concerns impacted by your vote on November 7, 2006" in a taxpayer-owned Sacramento Legislative Office Building. A quick-thinking and resourceful Republican staffer caught some photos and recorded audio of Garamendi committing an act that surely wouldn’t pass the legislative Rules Committees’ smell test if it were any other person or hosted by any other non-union group. Salladay includes a flier used to promote the event that I’ve chosen to attach below.

Garamendi’s action is disgusting to me because legislative staffers receive literally hours of indoctrination on office etiquette and ethics. They are… Read More

The California Voter Foundation has been around since 1994 and is most well known for its online voter guide. It’s founder, Kim Alexander, and I go way back — to before we were both bit by the political bug.

Anyways, Kim and several of her friends can be seen singing the "The Proposition Song" – a musical tribute to the wacky 13-issue long ballot. Hear the song and see it being sung by going here.

I was trying to figure out how to hijack the You Tube video so that I could have the song display the FR’s recommended ballot picks as each was referenced during the song. No such luck.

Besides, I am fairly certain the the Jon Fleischman ballot and the Kim Alexander ballot are NOT the same… OK, very sure. Check out the song – it’s great!… Read More

The wave of taxpayer groups and fiscally conservative leaders urging a sweeping NO on all five bond measures continues to grow. Lew Uhler’s influential National Tax Limitation Committee PAC has posted its ballot recommendations, and they oppose all nine spending measures, including recommending a NO on 1B, 1C, 1D, 1E and 84 — the five big bad bonds packages.… Read More

We’re down to less than two weeks left in the campaign.

We know how all but 3 down-ticket races are going to end up.

How LG, Controller, and Sec State turn out is still to be determined. Lots of decisions still are to be made and lots of money is still to be spent.

Each campaign still has some significant cash that will make a difference in the outcome. But legitimately, these three races are looking like they will be more shaped by independent expenditure efforts than by their respective campaigns.

And that isn’t a knock on the campaigns. The slates have been bought. The research has been done. It’s just that with the cash left for the last 13 days, these IE’s have far more to spend than any down ticket candidate.

On the Dem side, the Unions have pulled their money out of Angelides’ sinking ship. How much will they really end up spending on down ticket races? And where will they focus their efforts? These will be big questions in the coming 13 days.

First to see some major action on the Dem side is John Chiang, who yesterday received a $262,000 tv buy from the unions.

On the Republican side, some businesses are putting… Read More

There is some rhetoric flying around about what the Governor was and was not supporting by way of public employee pension reform last year. The Governor was supporting a change in pensions that would have shifted public sector employees from what is called a “defined benefit” program to what is called a “defined contribution” program. This change, which would have applied to only new hires (all existing public employees would be ‘grandfathered’ under the current rules), would have simply moved the methodology behind public sector retirement benifits to those used in the private sector.

In a defined benefits system, if an employee works for a set number of years, there is a specific formula of exactly how much the employer (in this case, the government) would pay a retiree, based on factors like their last salary, etc.

In a defined contributions system, the employer makes a specified contribution each pay period, or month, or year, into a retirement account for that employee (often times employees can augment this amount). Then this fund (like a 401k) grows over time resulting in an eventual retirement “nest… Read More