Today will be my final Flash Report post. I am off to work on a few other new ventures, including being a candidate for seat on a local water board here in Southwest Riverside County. Another great commentator and Riverside political insider, Barry Nestande,is going to take on the task of Riverside County Blogger. Best of luck to Berry. It has been a great experience being part of the first wave of Bloggers at the FlashReport. Thanks again for the oppertunity Jon.… Read More

That’s right. In one week we will see if voters in Rosemead will recall the last part of the council majority that voted to allow Wal-Mart to come to the city. See past posts about lawsuits and the recall here.

To their credit, Wal-Mart has stepped up to the plate and spentover $200,000 to protect those that voted for it. That is a lot of profit from toliet paper. But with union and leftist attacks on Wal-Mart increasing they have to go to bat for those willing to allow them to compete. See article here.The San Gabriel Valley Tribune today also editorialized against the recall. They rightly pint out that this development brings much needed sales tax revenue and shopping access to Rosemead. By the way ,over 35% of employees will be Rosemead residents. (Hope Wal-Mart supporters registered them to vote). See editorial here.

Of course, the Wal-Mart grand opening is any day now.… Read More

Public Opinion Strategies is a nationally-recognized polling firm that specializes in political opinion research. I have known their California point-man, Steve Kinney, for many years. We have worked together on many campaigns, and I highly value his work, and his opinion. So when I heard that POS had just completed a survey that included questions on race for State Controller, I gave him a call right away. You see, there could not be a more stark contrast between two candidates than we have with Republican Tony Strickland (pictured to the left) and Democrat John Chiang (pictured below). The office of the Controller has a lot of important responsibilities, and based on the gerrymander of the four Board of Equalization districts (two are solid Dem, two are GOP), whomever is the occupant of the Controller’s office will be the deciding… Read More

This afternoon Phil Angelides’ Campaign Manager, Cathy Calfo, fessed up on behalf of Phil Angelides that their campaign was, in fact, the source of the recorded information ‘leaked’ to the Los Angeles Times. Calfo says she neither she nor Angelides has prior knowledge that this was being done, and were not pleased. They also acknowledge that over four hours of audio recordings were downloaded from the Governor’s website, of which only six minutes has so-far been released.

You can read more detail where I found out about this, over on Dan Weintraub’s blog.

Looks like Angelides has successfully moved the media spin away from his penchant to tax everything over to his enethical behavior.

As an aside, I wonder how it feels for… Read More

Today Governor Schwarzenegger has an opinion piece published in the Los Angeles Times on the immigration issue, where he counsels all people who are engaged in the public debate on the illegal immigration issue to stay ‘civil’ in their discourse. I was reading through the column early this morning and would have spilled my coffee, if I had some, when I read this paragraph:

The Governor has pledged to sign one of the FR ‘TWENTY WORST BILLS’ TODAY! SAY IT ISN’T SO!

The Governor has announced that today he is going to sign legislation to stiffen the regulation that the State of California imposes on businesses, large and small, mandating that they pay their employees more money.

This is a bad idea for so many reasons, but given the fact that state government finances are precariously tied to the health of the California economy, this kind of regulation is exactly what we DON’T NEED. Hiking the wage mandate on employers causes employers to have to let some employees go, and increases their costs which will lead to some businesses that are on the edge to shut down or move their operations out of the state.

Yes, it is true that if Angelides were Governor, we would be looking at the larger increase in the wage mandate, and an indexing of the wage to the rate of inflation (making it automatically increase in the future).

I will end on this sobering note:… Read More

[I don’t know if Joe J. knows movieslike he knows music, but the title presumes he does. This blog post is slightly more than a restatement of my comments to Jon’s commentary below.]

I think it may be a tad bit hasty to accuse the Angelides camp of theft at this point in time. From what I’ve read, the Governor’s staff (or someone on the Governor’s staff) may have saved files in an incorrect location – like… Read More

SHAME ON PHIL ANGELIDES!

Dictionary.com defines ethics as: