Today at the Newsweek Magazine website, Pulitzer Award winning columnist George Will has an outstanding commentary on the U.S. Senate race here in California between incumbent Democrat Barbara Boxer and challenger Carly Fiorina. I reprint the first few paragraphs of the column below, then a link to the full piece. Take the time to read it!

Conservative political law observers have been rather pleased with the U.S. Supreme Court’s series of fairly recent rulings that have recognized the primacy of the First Amendment in political speech and have rolled back some infringing rules, namely, most of the McCain-Feingold "reforms," which would have had the Federal Election Commission actually banning books that mention people who are candidates for Federal office.

But the Roberts’ Court’s stalward support of free speech hasn’t resonated well at the Fair Political Practices Commission in Sacramento, which is apparently trying to revive in California the type of book-banning rules the Supreme Court has turned back nationwide. Today at 10:00 am, the FPPC will be holding an "interested persons" meeting at its headquarters to "elicit public input on possible Commission action focused on the Commission’s interpretation of ‘express advocacy.’" In nonlawyer talk, that means "hold onto your wallets" if you care about free speech.

"Express advocacy" is generally defined as a communication that… Read More

When former Fresno County Lincoln Club Board Member and current City Council member Lee Brand was elected to office in 2008, he didn’t wait long to make an impact on how the city does its business. First, Mr. Brand wrote the Better Business Act, adopted by the Council in 2009, it effectively ended city financed boondoggles by revising and revamping the process by which Fresno can enter into a partnership with a private developer.

But Brand wasn’t done there. This week, the Council will vote on the Labor Management Act, a groundbreaking outline that will govern the rules for how the city negotiates all future agreements with the public employee unions. You can read the Fresno Bee’s endorsement of the Act hereand I’ve uploaded an Executive Summary as part of this post.

A significant impetus behind Brand’s effort is the presence of "no layoff" clauses in most of the labor agreements. The Labor Management Act bans these in the future. Of course, all the unions hate that there will be sunshine on future negotiations. And… Read More

When he took over the Fair Political Practices chairmanship from Ross Johnson, Dan Schnur promised he would focus the efforts of the Commission to root out corruption in the Capitol and enforce legislative ethics. These are noble goals for any government agency, goals which would take the time and effort of the enforcement personnel in the agency, and would also make them work very hard at rooting out corruption, and discovering unethical behavior. Government employees, however, tend to be lazy, and are not always interested in working hard, so they pick easy targets.

I expect this week to be hit with an accusation from the FPPC. My crime – I forgot to terminate one of my five election committees, and didn’t file campaign reports for that committee. Of course, the committee didn’t collect for the periods when I thought it was terminated (and hasn’t collected any money from anyone other than me for four years), but the FPPC thought I was such a criminal that I should pay a $4000 fine for these "serious" violations of the law. Oh yeah, and I gave a $2000 contribution to Guy Houston (which I disclosed) from the wrong bank… Read More

The front page of the Wall Street Journal today featured a great article exposing the hypocrisy of unions. The title says it all: “To Protest Hiring of Nonunion Help, Union Hires Nonunion Pickets.”

According to the story, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters is hiring people (who are neither carpenters or in unions) to protest against nonunion companies. The union’s excuse? They claim “it’s really difficult to have [union members] come out, either because of parking or something else.” Really? If finding parking is the biggest deterrent to protesting against companies using nonunion workers, then maybe it isn’t a big priority for union members—just their power-greedy leadership.

Even better, the union asserts it’s helping the unemployed by paying nonunion picketers. I’m sure President Obama would approve of this job growth calculation.

California unions and interest groups are also participating in the rent-a-mob hypocrisy. “In California, one group is offering to pay $10 and up per hour to… Read More

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

When liberal State Senate President Darrell Steinberg announced that creating a new State Senate Office of Oversight and Outcomes, staffing it up with lefty ex-newspaper reporters, and then dispatching them to do their thing, looking at whatever they want, it is of course no surprise that they are not using this as an opportunity to look at how state government is functioning internally, but rather to determine if state government is adequately (to their mind) is doing a good job at being a regulator of business.

In this case, a column from David Lazurus (who if he is not a charter member of the ACLU, it is not out of lack of desire) highlights a report due out from the "Ex-Reporters On The Taxpayer Dole Blasting Private Companies" Commission today that, in essence, takes on the Public Utilities Commission for not being strict enough on telecom companies like Verizon and AT&T.

It is significant to note that their main beef with the PUC is that over the last few years, the aforementioned companies have not lost market share.… Read More

Today was the second of my weekly appearances on Sacramento conservative talk radio station KTKZ, spending a segment with popular radio talk show host and FR friend Eric Hogue (his columns on his Hogue News website are linked often on our site’s main page — very insightful).

You can listen to the audio of my interview with Eric below — our topics? The State Budget crisis – specifically Schwarzenegger vs. Chiang, remembering Senator Dave Cox, and how the tax increase issue will dominate the GOP race to succeed him…… Read More