The campaign for the 59th Assembly District continues to heat up with the endorsement of Chris Lancaster by Senator Bob Margett, the previous Assemblyman from the old pre-gerrymandered 59th District. See my past link on this race starting hereand fellow FR poster Brad Mitzelfelt’s start here. See the press release below.… Read More

With Democrat 1St District OC Supervisor (former Assemblyman) Lou Correa running for the 34th Senate District, it is worth speculating on who would run for his supervisorial seat if Correa won.

Republicans failed to rally around one good candidate for the senate seat. Electoral favorite Assemblyman Van Tran decided to seek re-election so Assemblywoman Lynn Daucher is left to face off with conservative anti-illegal alien activist Lupe Moreno.

Correa is mid-term running safe, so there would be no race for supervisor unless Correa won the Primary (vs. Assemblyman Tom Umberg) and then beat the Republican in a district that gives a less than 2% registration advantage to Democrats today—and will be even or GOP plurality by… Read More

[UPDATE: According to sources this poll was actually conducted LAST SUMMER just days after Umberg’s affair was exposed in the press. Subsequent polling shows Umberg BEATING Correa by almost 2-to-1.]

Dick Rosengarten reports in the this weeks edition of his CALPEEK newsletter on CA politics that OC Supervisor Lou Correa is trouncing Assemblyman Tom Umberg in the race for the Democrat nomination in the 34th Senate District (Central Orange County including Santa Ana). According to Rosengarten, J. Moore Methods, Inc. (James Moore) a Dem pollster conducted the poll among 34th Senate District Democrats on behalf of State Senate President Don Perata.

I find it hard to believe that these are first run ballot test numbers. A sitting county supervisor (former legislator) vs. a member of the state assembly (present and past) should be a lot closer… Read More

The San Bernardino County Republican Party is encouraging the District Attorney’s Office and Registrar of Voters to aggressively investigate a recent rash of apparent voter-registration fraud the party alleges may have been committed by paid petition circulators in San Bernardino County. Similar allegations are also being investigated in the City of Rialto and the County of Orange.

Staff from the County Republican Party Central Committee were informed Thursday by the Registrar of Voters that registrations gathered by associates of the firm owned by the party’s recently retained voter-registration consultant, John Burkett of Riverside, may have included more than 3,000 instances of potential registration fraud over the past two months. A number of those alleged fraudulent registrations have been referred to the District Attorney’s Office.

County Republican Party Chairman Bill Postmus last week ordered a halt to the party’s paid voter registration program and ordered that no invoices for registrations submitted this year be paid until the County’s investigations are complete and all registrations to be paid for by the… Read More

It took the British publication “The Economist” to finally point out the fact that “The Daily Show” has replaced “Saturday Night Live” as the standard of American political satire. I was cooking dinner for Valerie, Ella and I when I read this in the column “Lexington” and sort of skimmed past this comment. But since the Simpsons were replaced by the dreary Oscars my mind kept sort of going back to this point. For most of us, for most of our ‘adult’ lives, Saturday Night Live has set the pace. In my memory, that usually revolved around Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton… after which I sort of dropped out of the club. Thinking about why I rarely watch SNL anymore tonight I first attributed it to age (“never trust anyone over 30”) but that didn’t really work the more I mulled it over.

I’m going to cross the Rubicon here: I don’t watch SNL very often any more because their skits drag. Particularly their political skits. They repeat the same joke over and over for like 10 minutes. They beat the point into your skull until you just want to throw a brick at the screen. Horatio and his… Read More

Rob Reiner’s use of taxpayer money to promote his ballot measure highlights a disturbing trend that has been developing at the local level for years in California.

It usually works something like this — a local government (school district, fire district, city or county) is trying to pass a bond or a local sales tax increase. This is an expensive proposition so often times the local government seeds the campaign with a little taxpayer money. Using taxpayer resources, they hire a public relations firm (really a political consultant), they conduct a survey to ‘test messages’, they begin mail and other efforts to create the need for the increase. Most of us have seen these ‘public relations campaigns, usually they are mail pieces claiming that schools are falling down, traffic is so congested we can’t get to work and police and fire protection is so low that we can’t leave our houses without fear of being mugged.

Some local governments spend 6 months to a year in this development stage, often times spending hundreds of thousands dollars that belong to taxpayers. Then when they put the measure on the… Read More

ENDORSED… Lt. Gov: McClintock SoS: McPherson Treas: Parrish AG: Poochigian Ins. Comm: Poizner Controller: Strickland SPI: Diane Lenning BOE 2: Leonard BOE 4: Forsch

NOT ENDORSED… The CRA did not endorse the Governor, nor did they endorse between Ray Haynes or Michelle Steel in BOE 3.

Word is that there was a move to co-endorse Arnold/Tom/Dick that fell just short of the 2/3.… Read More

This weekend, a couple hundred delegates are gathered at the Doubletree Hotel in Bakersfield for the biennial endorsing convention of the California Republican Assembly. The CRA is California’s oldest and most conservative Republican volunteer organization, with traditions that go back to its founding in the 1930’s. The CRA has been a pivotal force in California politics, a key player because of its direct influence on politics as well as the training grounds it provides for many who go on to seek elective office or otherwise get involved in the process. Speaking in the first-person, I spent a decade of ‘intense’ involvement with the CRA starting from being a club member and rising through the ranks to an eventual two-year term as State President from 1995-1997. Being elected CRA President was one of the greatest honors of my life. The things I learned, the perspective gained, the challenges met and overcome continue to provide me with guidance in the things I do today. I am… Read More