Last month the media threw a homecoming party for Nathan Fletcher after he announced that he was no longer a Republican. In the wake of the media celebration, some Republicans have wondered if this announcement will have lasting implications for the GOP. Is Fletcher’s announcement the beginning of a moderate uprising? Or is he just one candidate in a moderate district attempting to garner attention from the moderate-loving media? I believe it is the latter. And if that’s the case, what is in store for the future of the Republican Party?

Congress has an eighty percent disapproval rating according to a recent Politico poll. A recent field poll shows that eighty-five percent of Republicans in California disapprove of the job state legislators are doing in Sacramento. Maybe voters are sick of the same old, business-as-usual politics. Maybe they’re so sick of it, that they’ll decide to stop electing the business-as-usual, career politicians; maybe Republicans are ready to buck the status quo of recycled politicians and send in a new crop of young conservatives who haven’t accumulated a lifetime of political baggage.

What does the future… Read More

You may have seen Obama’s latest defense of the fantasy land he intends to expand that is the Welfare State in his campaign’s latest creation “The Life of Julia.” You can see below, but it paints a beautiful picture of how nobody could dare succeed in the United States without Obama’s expansion of the government.

I saw it a few days ago and was utterly disgusted and thought little about it until today. I stumbled upon Pulitzer Prize winning political cartoonist Michael Ramirez’s latest masterpiece. In one single cartoon Ramirez explains reality and refutes Obama’s 13-cartoon big government fairytale. I’ve posted them all below to illustrate and contrast the two sides. Enjoy:

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After months of very carefully managing expectations about his “evolving” position on gay marriage, President Obama suddenly found himself last week careening between powerful forces like the steel ball in Elton John’s “pinball wizard.” His own Vice President threw him into the pinball machine, and then his Education Secretary thrust the plunger, launching him into game.

This whole scene began unfolding the Sunday before North Carolina voters were to cast ballots on a proposed constitutional amendment to define marriage exclusively as the union of one man and one woman. At the same time that Biden was popping off that he was “very comfortable” with men marrying other men, polls were starting to show that the marriage amendment would likely pass. This after Obama had publicly opposed the North Carolina marriage amendment. Recall that North Carolina is so important to Obama’s reelection plans that he selected the state to host the Democratic nominating convention this September. Obama’s response to this unfolding drama was to cancel a scheduled Election Day campaign trip to the state. Then Arne Carlson, the barely-known Education Cabinet Secretary, upped… Read More

Below is today’s (5/15/12) lead editorial from the WALL ST JOURNAL. While we concentrate mostly on government pension problems, this worthy piece delves into the PRIVATE defined benefit morass — the “multiple employer”pensions the private sector unions have put in place in a number of industries.

Like public pensions, dishonestly is rife in this sector. Maybe even more so. Consider this excerpt: ——— Labor’s actuarial reading of one SEIU fund for health-care employees finds it 100.4% funded. Credit Suisse’s fair-value reading finds it 49.6% funded—or some $6.8 billion in the hole. ———-

The reason this problem is important to us all is that these pensions are “insured” by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, a federal agency. When the money runs out to pay these guaranteed pensions (and it surely will), the payout obligation shifts to — you guessed it — us taxpayers.

Sadly, it appears that this eye-opening editorial has a MAJOR error, one that unnecessarily detracts from the fundamental message.

The story asserts that the maximum pension payout covered by PBGC is only… Read More

Episode V – Housing: For those of you who perhaps are new “subscribers” to this “Report from my Laptop to Yours”, I have been writing a series on the things I think we need to do in order to bring about a new, extended period of substantial growth that offers prosperity to our people, refreshes our culture and preserves and extends our hegemony in world affairs. This is Episode V. (You see how I cleverly use roman numerals in order to add a degree of erudition to these writings. My close proximity to the ways of Hollywood has not been completely without influence.) If you missed the first four Episodes, you can find them on my website HERE.

Now on to Episode 5…..I mean V. Regular readers of this missive will know that restoring growth to the housing market is one of my major priorities in Congress. This is not because I’m a housing guy. I’m not really. I’m a car guy. But, the fact is that the car business and the housing business have some similarities. Both are high… Read More

On May 23rd, less than two weeks from now, the Los Angeles City Council is apparently poised to not only ban plastic shopping bags at every single grocery store in the largest city in America, but they are also planning to ban paper shopping bags as well. This may seem too stunningly idiotic a maneuver for you to actually believe, but yet it is true. I know you are going to ask the obvious question — if the politicians ban the most commonly used methods by which grocery shoppers take their purchased goods home, how in the hell to people get their groceries from the store to their homes? The answer is that the LA City Council has decided that you and every other shopper are going to buy those cloth bags like they sell over at Whole Foods for a buck a bag (not that most people in LA have ever set foot in a high-end store like Whole Foods). They will force you to buy them, and then they will train you like a monkey to remember to keep bringing those same cloth bags with you back to the store over and over (maybe they will follow the plastic and paper bag ban with a requirement that all trips to the grocery store must initiate from your home, not on the way home from… Read More

ByReps. Buck McKeon and Paul Ryan

Last year, as the federal government approached a limit on how much it could legally borrow, the Obama administration asked Congress to rubber-stamp an increase in the government’s borrowing authority without any spending cuts to match.

When House Republicans made clear that any increase in the debt limit must be accompanied by an even greater amount of spending reduction, the President insisted that he would not accept a debt-limit deal that did not include large tax increases on American families and businesses.

All of this work was made more difficult by the Senate’s failure to pass any budgets at all in 2010 or 2011. Nevertheless, both parties were eventually able to come together and avoid defaulting on the government’s obligations.

We succeeded in protecting hardworking taxpayers by securing a debt-limit increase that contained zero tax hikes.

Instead, we established caps on spending for government agencies, saving roughly $1… Read More

When the U.S. Supreme Court set the stage for the creation of so-called “Super-PACs” – independent groups that can spend unlimited money and raise corporate and union dollars in unlimited amounts to affect Federal elections – it did not mean that existing regulations of the Federal Election Commission banning “coordinated communications” between independent groups and official campaigns were set aside. In fact, the legality of the activities of such groups are absolutely founded on the notion of independence from control or coordination with official federal candidate campaign committees, according to the Supreme Court. So the FEC’s “non-coordination” regulations are a very important consideration in the realm of “Super-PACs.”

Last week, the campaign manager for Congressman Brad Sherman, Scott Abrams, filed a complaint against 30th Congressional District rival Congressman Howard Berman, and his campaign committee, alleging illegal coordinated communications between those Respondents and the independent Super-PAC supporting Berman, through Mr. Jerry Seedborg, a Long Beach-based political consultant and… Read More