Flying through Vegas this weekendI noticed this hand dryer. It is a little blurry (people don’t like cameras in restrooms).A rebel in the spirit of 1776 placed a sticker on it that says.

"Please push button and listen to a short message from the President"

Made my day.… Read More

According to our friends (NOT!) at the liberal Huffington Post, yours truly is the, "latest GOP official to criticize the Aghan War."

Only at the Huff and Puff can they make a whole blog post over a very public "tweet" from my Twitter account the other day.

What did I tweet? "For what it is worth, I’m an officer with the CA Republican Party and I can’t figure out what we are achieving in Afghanistan, at least not for the economic cost to US Taxpayers. Since I am not particularly isolationist, it means my government is failing to communicate well."

I’m open to being educated on the issue. And I admit that I spend most of my time following California politics, not international affairs.

I have been l listening to a lot of remarks from my good friend U.S. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher on the subject, and he seems to make a lot of… Read More

Rule 5 of the Republican National Committee establishes the office of Chairman of the Republican Party, states he or she shall be a full-time, paid employee, and shall serve as the "chief executive officer" of the Republican National Committee. The rule states that the Chairman can be removed by a 2/3rds vote of the entire Republican National Committee (made up generally by two representatives per state), and, most interestingly, that the Chairman "need not be a member of the Republican National Committee."

Michael Steele, the former Lt. Governor of Maryland, has been a disaster as Chairman of the RNC. Early in his term, reports surfaced that he was using his position, for which he is already paid handsomely from the funds people like you and I give to the party, to obtain paid speaking gigs for tens of thousands of dollars on the side and pocketing the money. He even signed a contract with a professional talent agency to book such speeches. Illegal? Probably not. Immoral? Possibly, depending on your morals. Bad judgment? Absolutely.

More recent evidence of bad judgment in RNC management found its way to… Read More

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

I have been in elected office for 10 years now. And of those 10 years, I have spent half of that time in the California State Legislature and the other half here in Congress. During that time, I have found that a common thread exists amongst elected Democrats. At least part of the reason they ran for and are in office now is to raise taxes on somebody or everybody and then spend that money on people and programs which they deem worthy. A fundamental tenet of the Democratic Party today is that government should tax more and spend more on lots of things.

But that ideology has just run headlong into political reality. Polling shows that one of the top two issues on the minds of Americans these days is the debt and the deficit. The other big issue is jobs and the economy. And Americans realize that the two are related. They understand that our crushing debt burden, up 81% since Democrats took over Congress in 2006, is one of the drags on the economy. So, spending money that increases the deficit and the debt even further is not very popular right now. And of course, there is an election in just over 4 months.

So, if you want to spend new money without earning the… Read More

Yesterday the Governor took the very serious step of ordering that the pay for most state employees be reduced to the federal minimum wage because the legislature has not put a budget in front of him by the Constitutional deadline of July 1st. We tracked down Lynelle Jolley, Communications Director at the Department of Personnel Administration, for a little Q&A on this action by the Governor…

FLASH: Why is the Governor doing this? JOLLEY: We’re trying to enforce the law. We don’t want to do it but are forced to because without a budget, there’s no authority to legally pay state workers their full salaries. Our State Constitution prohibits issuing payments without a legislative appropriation. For most of the state’s payroll, this appropriation comes through the annual state budget act.

When a taxpayer group brought suit against a former controller for issuing paychecks when there was no budget, the case ended up in the CA Supreme Court, which… Read More

[A version of this commentary appeared on FR early last year. This column has been revised and updated – Flash] It seems to me that Californians are getting what they asked for in State Controller John Chiang. The contrast between selecting Chiang or his opponent, taxpayer advocate Tony Strickland, on the November 2006 ballot could not have been more stark. While Strickland was openly supported by a cadre of pro-taxpayer organizations and leaders, the bulk of Chiang’s support came from the left-wing of the Democrat Party, and most significantly, from public employee unions eager to have yet another “tool” in an important state constitutional office, ready to be put into play should the need arise.… Read More

[A version of this commentary appeared on FR early last year. This column has been revised and updated – Flash]

It seems to me that Californians are getting what they asked for in State Controller John Chiang. The contrast between selecting Chiang or his opponent, taxpayer advocate Tony Strickland, on the November 2006 ballot could not have been more stark. While Strickland was openly supported by a cadre of pro-taxpayer organizations and leaders, the bulk of Chiang’s support came from the left-wing of the Democrat Party, and most significantly, from public employee unions eager to have yet another “tool” in an important state constitutional office, ready to be put into play should the need arise. (Below, left, is a photo of Chiang standing with all of his union supporters after being… Read More