State Senator Dave Cox, of Sacramento, has passed away after a fight against cancer that lasted for over a decade. Our sympathies and prayers go out to the Senator’s family, staff and friends. You can read more about his passing on the Sacramento Bee website here. The th Beee piece calls Cox a "moderate conservative" — but for our part, in a legislature dominated by ultra-liberals, we found ourselves in alignment with Cox all of the time. At the end of the day, the most defining vote between whether one was a liberal or conservative Republican that came up in the legislature the last decade was the 2009 budget deal, and the passing of the largest tax increase in the history of any state (and the placement of even more taxes as Proposition 1A on the ballot). Cox was a vote against that, for which he should be praised for standing tall for the taxpayers in his district, and around California.

Much… Read More

With a h/t to the Twitter feed of Meg Whitman campaign adviser Mike Murphy, here is a new hard-hitting ad from Whitman that will go up starting tomorrow. Yes, it’s only mid-July… … Read More

Over the weekend I received an update from Judie Soderlund of the Fiorina for U.S. Senate campaign regarding the status of potential debates with incumbent Democrat Barbara Boxer…

From Julie… I wanted to provide you with a real time update with regard to e debates in the Senate race. Today, we learned that the Boxer campaign, despite the fact that there is a meeting scheduled Monday at 2pm to discuss the Boxer campaign’s either acceptance or counterproposal to our June 23 proposal of a series of seven debates, has decided not to provide any feedback to us. Instead they have but attempted to “blow up” negotiations after simple and repeated requests by our campaign for a counter-proposal in an effort to make Monday’s… Read More

I’ve seen some pretty sorry stuff in politics over the years, but this has to be one of the sorriest.

Nick Popaditch is a proud Marine with a Silver Star anda Purple Heart. He’s also the Republican nominee for Congress against incumbent Bob Filner in California’s 51st District, covering portions of South San Diego County and all of Imperial County.In a district with a significant Democratic registration advantage, many would say Popaditch has an uphill battle in November.

His chances of winning office area far different analysis and discussion, however, than whether it’s fair game for a major newspaper in the district to make a mockery of war injuries Popaditch sustained in Iraq, during the battle of Fallujah. (See the editorial cartoon below.)

Free press? Yes. A media embarrassment? That too. You be the judge.

Read the letter below…

Saturday’s… Read More

Yesterday, a court ruled that the uncounted 12,500 ballots in Riverside County, which arrived late to the Registrar through no fault of the voters, will be tallied. The Riverside Registar of Voters staff immediately started working, doing so throughout the night, posting the lastest update at 6:00 a.m. this morning.

Juan Vargas picked up a net of 10 votes since the ruling, with his lead over Mary Salas "jumping" from 12 to 22 votes.

Of the 12,500 remaining ballots in Riverside, Jim Sills at San Diego Rostra is estimating that approximately 450 of them are Democratic ballots in Senate District 40.

Here’s all the info at Rostra.… Read More

News today of the conviction of 10 Russian spies and a CIA-KGB spy swap for 4 of our own in the Soviet Union has hit the news. But not so evident is what the spies actually did, and who they were. However, one of them has a shockingly interesting background. He received his Masters Degree in Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard University in 2000 under the false name of Donald Howard Heathfield. His real name is Andrey Bezrukov, and he spied right under Harvard’s nose in Cambridge, Mass.

How somebody pulls off a masquerade using a Boston Brahmin name like Heathfield when they really have an Eastern European cabbage patch name like Bezrukov is beyond me. I also can’t figure out the linguistics. I wonder if Andrey really mastered the New England English accent as well? So much for security features at our nation’s leading university. Beyond his academic success at Harvard, all we know about Andrey is that he met with a U.S. government employee in 2004 "to discuss nuclear weapons research." Could you imagine if this guy ended up with a big bureaucrat job in the U.S. Department of Defense?… Read More

Today was the first 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 Field poll results in the Governor and U.S. Senate races, and a bit on the budget crisis.… Read More

John Fund in today’s Wall Street Journal Political Diary E-mail…… Read More