Yesterday, the release was issued from the Governor’s office that he has tapped a prominent personal injury lawyer, a Democrat, to be a judge on the Santa Cruz Superior Court – Paul Burdick.

Burdick’s appointment comes in the County of Santa Cruz where the Santa Cruz Sentinal had reported that a Democratic Women’s Club of Santa Cruz County was lobbying for the appointment of a Democrat, and a woman. I guess they got 50% of what they were looking for.

Burdick has some history as a public defender, according to today’s Sentinal article:

At the start of his legal career in 1979, … Read More

President Bush has nominated Sandra S. Ikuta to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal. Ikuta was recently appointed by Governor Schwarzenegger to serve as a member of the California Resources Agency. (Read the release here.)

Prior to serving as a member of the Resources Agency, Ikuta was a partner at the Los Angeles office of O’Melveny & Myers where she has practiced since 1990. She previously served as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She earned her law degree from the University of California, Los Angeles and holds a Master of Science from Columbia University School of Journalism. She also has an undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Ikuta, 49, is a resident of Los Angeles and a registered Republican.… Read More

Working to format the interview with Arnie Steinberg that leads the main page today ate up my prime ‘commentary time’ today. So I will encourage you to read that piece. That said, there are a lot of crazy things in the news today, all featured on the main page.

President Bush talks of a foiled attempt by terrorists to attack LA. Susan Kennedy took $10k a month last year from a developer and someone it took the LA Times to let us know. Rep. Richard Pombo took his family on a 5,000 mile motorhome tour of national parks and billed the government? Then he called the trip a vacation on his website. Dumb. The Los Angeles Angels bested the City of Anaheim, 9 to 3. Barry Munitz, the high-spending head of the Getty Trust, is out. Much more more.

Did you miss my ten cents on Arnold and the upcoming GOP Convention? It is here.

Have a great day!

Jon

**There is more – click the… Read More

Working to format the interview with Arnie Steinberg that leads the main page today ate up my prime ‘commentary time’ today. So I will encourage you to read that piece. That said, there are a lot of crazy things in the news today, all featured on the main page.

President Bush talks of a foiled attempt by terrorists to attack LA. Susan Kennedy took $10k a month last year from a developer and someone it took the LA Times to let us know. Rep. Richard Pombo took his family on a 5,000 mile motorhome tour of national parks and billed the government? Then he called the trip a vacation on his website. Dumb. The Los Angeles Angels bested the City of Anaheim, 9 to 3. Barry Munitz, the high-spending head of the Getty Trust, is out. Much more more.

Did you miss my ten cents on Arnold and the upcoming GOP Convention? It is here.

Have a great day!

Jon… Read More

I and my family moved to Riverside County from Laguna Niguel to get a large style home that we can afford. I live in a large middle class neighborhood that is full of kids on bikes and skateboards. Our neighborhood is mostly crime free. The problem is some of the folks ten miles up the road from me are in a Megan’s Law Web Site Hot Zone. I like knowing where the paroled sexual predators in my neck of the woods are and that they stay away from my neighborhood. I rely on the State of California Department of Corrections to keep track of them. It is one of the services I don’t mind paying taxes for. It is bad enough that San Francisco liberals like Assemblyman Mark Leno want to make possession of child porn a traffic ticket type of offence, but it is now being reported that Department of Correction officials are placing sex offenders near elementary schools or just outright losing track of them.

This type behavior must stop and it will if Assemblyman Todd Spitzer (R-Orange) has anything to say about it. Spitzer represents a portion of Riverside County and we are lucky to have him. He is a bulldog at making public… Read More

Some think Orange County is undergoing a Pringle-ization. SeeFR’s Matt Cunningham’s post here.It must apply to everywhere except the jury that said the Anaheim Angels can now be called the Los Angels Angeles or the LA A of Alegally. See article here.… Read More

The nucleus of Governor Schwarzenegger’s re-election team is coming together. Here are some of the folks that are already (or are about to be) onboard to run the day-to-day operations of the re-elect, as confirmed by a source on the Governor’s re-election campaign:

As we have reported before, the Campaign Manager is Steve Schmidt. Schmidt comes back to California (where he worked on the Matt Fong campaign, among other efforts) straight from Washington, D.C., where he has been working closely with Vice President Dick Cheney. Most recently, Schmidt was the WH "jockey" in getting Justice Sam Alito through the Senate confirmation process. Also in major role with the campaign is strategist Matthew Dowd. Dowd has been a senior advisor to President Bush, and … Read More

Thanks to hard-hitting investiagtive journalism by the San Francisco Chronicle’s Todd Wallack, the alarming mismanagement of the University of California is bubbling to the fore. Once the crown jewel of California state government, the upper reaches of UC has become a swamp of favoritism, back-scratching and a cavalier attitude toward taxpayer money.

Frankly, I hadn’t been paying much attention to it until the 76th(!) issue of the Parsky Watch alerted me to the breadth of the mismanagement and the institutional resistance to real reform:

PW 76

February 6, 2006

Gerry parsky and the uc system finance scandals: What, me worry about taxpayer money?

Remind us: whose idea was it to appoint… Read More