“While working families are suffering, Jerry Brown and tax-grabbing lawmakers are cutting sweetheart deals with union bosses who contributed millions of dollars to their political campaigns…”

I am very pleased to share with FlashReport readers that today the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association announced a significant radio ad buy to alert Californians to Governor Brown’s plan for massive tax increases.

Californians deserve to know what is going on here in Sacramento. These taxes are yet another assault on working families in California, and we are not going to sit by while the state continues to be destroyed from the inside by the career politicians, tax-grabbers, and their government employee union cronies.

The radio spot highlights the State’s status as “worst” in many categories – including “worst place to do business” in America, among the worst tax climates, worst housing market, worst unemployment rate, and the list goes on.

The spot will run statewide in targeted… Read More

[Publisher’s Note: As part of an ongoing effort to bring original, thoughtful commentary to you here at the FlashReport, I am pleased to present this column from Kevin Dayton, State Government Affairs Director for the Association Builders and Contractors of California – Flash]

Culture Clash: The “Bakersfield Oil Field to Berkeley Sports Field Tax” By Kevin Dayton

On Monday, May 16, in front of sizable crowds of oil and gas industry workers, the California State Assembly’s Committee on Revenue and Taxation considered a tax bill that reflects the disdain of California’s coastal state legislators for the city of Bakersfield and its industrial base.

Assemblyman Warren Furutani (D-Long Beach) has introduced Assembly Bill 1326, the so-called “Fair Share for Fair Tuition Act,” which… Read More

Thursday night’s San Diego County Taxpayers Association Golden Watchdog and Fleece Awards dinner proved itself again to be one of the area’s premiere annual political events. As Chula Vista Mayor Cheryl Cox accepted a stuffed sheep to add to two previous city “awards” for fleecing taxpayers, she took a few seconds to rebut the honor, then ended her acceptance speech with “I’m going to take my sheep and get the flock out of here!”

Attendees watched a video of Cox, Oceanside City Councilman Jerry Kern, and San Diego Councilmembers Carl DeMaio and Kevin Faulconer — the latter two likely to vie for mayor next year — wake up in hotel room with a live chicken, but no memory of how they racked up a $130 million bill the size of the San Diego deficit. The ensuing Las Vegas romp was very loosely patterned after the movie “The Hangover.”

Here’s some coverage, including the “San Diego Hangover” video:

SD Rostra: Winners named at Golden Watchdog & Golden Fleece… Read More

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Yesterday the online investigative website California Watch broke a story that has stunned the political community of the Golden State. They published a story, complete with documentation, proving that the Speaker of the California State Assembly, John Perez, for nearly a decade made assertions that he was a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, when this simply was not true. Perez attended Cal, but never graduated. In his biography he boasted graduating, and subsequently news stories and political journals printed that he was a graduate as fact, which he did not dispute or seek to correct.

Suddenly the lie become, for Perez, the truth. At least until his lie helped him to establish bona fides that helped him to get elected to the State Assembly in 2008. Only after his election to the legislature is there an apparent effort to scrub biographies and put the falsehood in his past. All day long Perez’s office ignored the story. I spoke late yesterday afternoon with Lance Williams, the reporter who penned the story for California Watch — he told me that neither Perez nor his office would give him a comment.

Late last… Read More

Earlier today, the California Assembly passed the National Popular Vote (AB 459) on a 47-21 vote, and inflicted another tear on the great and frayed founding document of our Republic, the Constitution.

NPV reduces the Electoral College to mere window dressing and substitutes the direct election of the president – an idea the Founding Fathers explicitly rejected — in its stead. it amends the Constitution without bothering to amend the Constitution. To quote veteran conservative writer Quin Hilyer of The American Spectator, it is “an absolute disaster of an idea.”

I expect liberals to ignore the clear intent of the Founding Fathers and weaken the Constitution. But it’s deeply dispiriting when Republicans help them do it. These four GOP Assemblyman voted with the Democratic majority to toss the Electoral College into the garbage can:

I had a chance to sit with Art Laffer, Sally Pipes and a few supporters of the Pacific Research Institute Wednesday after lunch and Art and I shared some “old times” from the 1978 Proposition 13 campaign, when he began a strong association with Howard Jarvis as a rising star in economics, and I was serving as Jarvis’ lowly but eager assistant, carrying his brief case from speech to speech. There was never much reading material in Jarvis’ briefcase, but Laffer offered that he really was a genius, a guy with guts and native intelligence who never gave up trying after several failures to reform California’s skyrocketing property taxes.

It is not confidential that right after Proposition 13 passed by a landslide in June, 1978, that Jerry Brown called Art Laffer and they spent several days together in conference about how to implement it and what to expect in the economy. It is also no secret that Jarvis and Laffer both subsequently endorsed Democrat Jerry Brown for Governor because of his pledge to fully implement the initiative, which he honestly did do. (Jarvis also endorsed the Republican candidate, but the commercial he cut for Brown was… Read More

From today’s Wall Street Journal Political Diary E-mail…

Special Election Surprise in California Last year California voters approved an “open primary” in which all candidates compete on the same primary ballot and the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, head to a run off. It’s often presumed that open primaries advantage party moderates since candidates must appeal to a broader swath of voters to win both the primary and general elections. South Bay voters put that hypothesis to the test on Tuesday in the special election primary to replace retiring Democratic congresswoman Jane Harman.

According to the latest vote tally, which doesn’t take into account some 9,800 absentee and provisional ballots, Democrat Janice Hahn has won the primary by about 2,000 votes. Her victory isn’t a big surprise — Ms. Hahn is a longtime Los Angeles city council member and had the backing of most of California’s Democratic establishment, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein.… Read More

[Publisher’s Note: When I was approached by a mutual friend on behalf of Dave Kieffer, the new boss over at the state’s largest public employee union, SEIU, about whether I would be willing to feature a column from Kieffer here on the FlashReport, I have to admit I was taken a bit off guard. It is probably impossible to actually count up the number of times that contributors to this website, including yours truly, have derided the influence of public employee unions — often citing the SEIU specifically in critical commentaries.

It didn’t take me long, however, to determine that if the SEIU wants to take a direct message to the conservative statewide community, it would be both provocative and entertaining to open that forum to them. Just to double check my gut instinct, I reached out to some advisers who all agreed — run the piece. So without any further introduction, other than to say that the content of this column should really cause some angst for those who believe, as I do, that a broadening of… Read More