"If you want to take the con out of Congress, vote for Sgt. Jeff Newsome."

That was Newsome’s comment (and apparent campaign slogan) yesterday as he became the eighth Republican and 10th candidatein the special to replace Duke Cunningham. (Read it here.) Obviously, he has a top notch consultant writing his stuff. Not.

In case you lost track, it’s now Bilbray,Earnest, Kaloogian, King, Morrow, Newsome, Turner, and Uke. That’s before the Dems. Sounds like a downtown law firm.

Many think that anyone like Newsome getting in the thing at this point will be grist, chewed up and spit out. My first prediction of the year: Sgt. Newsome, obviously well-meaning but having nary a clue thatone can’t winjust because of a cop title,is strikingly close to his 15 minutes.

That was the easy guess. The next: County Supervisor Pam Slater-Price will jump in within a matter of weeks and give all the guys in the race a run for their money, even on a… Read More

With the beginning of 2006, today marks exactly three months to-the-day that FlashReport.org went online! I would like to thank our thousands of readers for making our website kickoff a great one! It’s hard to believe that in just three months we have:

Linked to thousands of articles and columns on California politics Assembled weblog with 15 outstanding contributors from all around California who created almost 450 original posts! Have published over two dozen exclusive, original columns. Published nearly 90 separate original daily commentaries.

Your readership, referrals, tips, suggestions, and ideas have really helped this site to grow even in its first few months! In the next week, we will be unveiling the newest feature to the FlashReport website, which will be the ability for you, as a FR reader, to opt-in to site registration, which will allow you to then post your comments to my daily… Read More

Well the holidays are over and it is an election year, thus let the games begin. My new year started off in the delivery room with the birth of our first child, Miller Philip Paule, born at 5:45 PM on Jan 1st, 2006. As fellow FlashReport BLOGer Mike Spence pointed out to me, 18 hours too late for the 2005 tax deduction.

Now to bring this news back to FlashReport status and not just a cheap plug for the cutest baby ever born, I was a little shocked this morning to have a nurse walk in and take some of his blood for some State of California mandated tests. I would like to thank the State of California for attempting to care more about the health of my child then his mother and I do (yes this Libertarian minded scribe is using a heavy helping of sarcasm here).

Now back to my regular job as the Riverside County FlashReport man on the street. Dan Branstine is an attorney and candidate for the 66th Assembly District. The 66th stretches from Lake Elsinore, through Temecula and down to Fallbrook in San Diego County. It is… Read More

Although the mayor’s race will grab headlines this year in Oakland, another big story is the potential walkout by Oakland teachers. The teachers are working without a contract after rejecting an offer by the district last spring which did not give them the pay increase and protected benefit package that they wanted.

For the teachers unions, it always comes down to money. That’s why the Oakland Teachers Association is talking more and more about striking, likely in the early part of 2006. They want district officials to restore a four percent cut in pay they agreed to 2003 and don’t want to pay any additional money for their health care coverage. Unfortunately, … Read More

Sacramento Bee’s veteran political columnist, Dan Walters, pens a piece today where he laments that that despite extremely low public-approval ratings for the legislature, the partisan redistricting plan ensures that virtually every legislative seat will be retained by the political party that holds it now.

He does note two areas where seats held by Democrats are in trouble — the upper San Joaquin Valley (Stockton area) and central Orange County:

There will be, as noted earlier, a few vacant districts in which there could be at least a ghost of partisan competition in November, the gerrymander notwithstanding. The suburban San Joaquin Valley seat held by termed-out Democrat Barbara Matthews of Tracy, for example, could turn over because the Democrats have lost four percentage points of their voter registration margin in the last four years.

… Read More

This June may feature the dirtiest campaign in the history of Los Angeles. How dirty? Just over 270,000 tons of sludge. That’s right, sludge created by the sanitation departments in LA and OC when they treat and "clean" the sewagedonated by some of the finest citizens in LA and Orange counties. Perhaps even some from yours truly. This sludge is then used as fertilizer on some farms in Kern County.

Some in Kern County don’t like getting dumped on from those down under. They have qulaified an initiative that will ban the import of sludge from outside Kern County. It appears tha Kern County’ssludge doesn’t stink and is far superior to others and will not be banned. G

The Kern County Board of Supervisors will vote shortly on whether to adopt the initiative or place it on the ballot. I hope they do the election. Imagine all the great direct mail!!!!! See the article here.… Read More

I am fond of saying that the only good laws are the ones that begin with:

“Section ____ of the California _____ Code is hereby repealed.”

We really don’t need more laws, do we? Yet, for some reason, the state legislature is bent on regulating us more and more.

That is why you should read a great editorial in the OC Register that ran today, listing the editorial staff’s favorite new silly laws.

Several of the laws making the Register’s list pertain to conferring the right on certain consumer groups to cancel contracts with those from which the consumer agreed to purchase goods or services. In my book government has become far too big when it starts taking sides in private contractual arrangements to permit one side to undo an otherwise legally binding contract.… Read More

I served as former state Sen. John Lewis’ press secretary from 1991 to 1994, and taming the SCAQMD was one of his top legislative priorities. The recession of the early 1990s had hit California especially hard, and the state emreged from it much more slowly than the rest of the nation.

Not that that mattered to the pollutocrats running the SCAQMD, who cared not a whit that they were heloing to drive businesses across the state line into the welcoming arms of Nevada, Arizona and other states that were actively recruiting California businesses to their friendlier climes.

After reading a Lance Izumi op-ed published in the Orange County Register a few days ago, it seems clear that while the personalities on the SCAQMD Board of Directors may have changed, the agency’s culture hasn’t.

I thought then, and I still believe, that a powerful regional government like the AQMD, which combines executive legislative… Read More