Regardless what a punk Carolina Panthers’ quarterback Cam Newton may or may not be, the ugly news that he will owe $137,900 in taxes — for losing the Super Bowl – shouldn’t be the thanks he gets.

The thanks is courtesy of California’s highest-in-the-nation tax rate of 13.3 percent, known as the “jock tax” – the nonresident income taxes that states and cities enforce on athletes performing in their jurisdictions.

As Kurt Bedenhausen explained in Forbes last week, “Newton will pay California 86.3% of his Super Bowl earnings if the Panthers win. Losing means his effective tax rate will be a whopping 172.2%. Oh yeah, he will also pay the IRS 40.5% on his… Read More

“If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

~Ronald Reagan

Despite California’s highest-in-the-nation taxes, a couple of Assembly Republicans have allegedly agreed to vote for Gov. Jerry Brown’s tax on health plans in the State of California.

Even if Brown is able to convince health insurers, he needs a two-thirds majority vote from the Legislature. And this is where Republican votes come in. Currently, Democrats do not have a supermajority, and need to peel off a couple of Republican votes for tax increases.

Predictably, Brown has been trying to convince Republicans his health plan tax is really “tax reform.”

“This is not a tax increase, no matter what anyone tells you,” he said during his State of the State address.

“It will be pretty easy to tell if this is a tax increase, or some sort of revenue neutral swapping of one tax for another,” said Jon Fleischman, publisher of the Flash… Read More

Rocky Chavez, a CaliforniaGOP candidate for U.S. Senate,isn’t just another empty suit or pretty face in politics. Chavez, a Republican Assemblyman from Oceanside, CA,served 28 years in the United States Marine Corps, rose to the rank of Colonel, and commanded 22,000 troops.

He later served as the acting Secretary of the California Department of Veterans Affairs, and then as the Vice… Read More

In a provocative and electrifying legal move, Gerawan Farming Company employee Silvia Lopez filed a legal brief to disqualify ALRB Board Member Genevieve Shiroma from the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, for bias and conflicts of interest.

Lopez cites evidence of Shiroma’s close political ties with the United Farm Workers union, and long time Democrat political operative Richie Ross. Silvia Lopez, a San Joaquin Valley farm worker, filed legal documents detailing payments over $120,000 from Shiroma to United Farm Workers’ Lobbyist Richie Ross, and documented Shiroma’s financial support of the author of a bill designed to help the UFW force itself on workers. UFW is the same union trying to force itself on the employees where Lopez works, as Lopez has fought for two years for her co-workers right to vote. Shiroma made the payments to the UFW’s lobbyist while she sat in judgment of issues directly involving that union, and while the workers ballots remain uncounted in a government vault

In 2013, I did an investigation of Shiroma and found some startling conflicts.

“In 1998, voters… Read More

There’s more good news for Gerawan Farming! Superior CourtJudge Timothy Frawley finds that the Agricultural Labor Relations Board IS subject to the California Public Records Act.

For several yearsI’ve been writing about Gerawan Farming in Fresno, and the company’s gutsy refusal to cave under the pressure of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board’s denial of farmworkers’ rights to vote for or against unionization.

Gerawan recently was granted a significant win by Sacramento Superior Court Judge Timothy Frawley, who agreed to the Gerawan’s request for documents in an unfair labor practice… Read More

As the Black Lives Matter protest in the San Francisco Bay Area on Martin Luther King Day blocked traffic on the Bay Bridge backing commuters up for nearly 45 minutes, Sacramento had its own Martin Luther King Day Parade hijacked.

The annual MLK Parade passes by my house, and through my downtown neighborhood every year. This year, a very large group marching behind the high school marching bands loudly chanted, “Hands up, Don’t shoot.” Led by a woman on a megaphone, they also chanted, “Black lives matter,” and “Hey hey, ho… Read More

There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.

– Madeleine Albright

Progressive feminists give us an insight into the twisted logic and rooted bigotry of feminism, their hypersensitivity to women-only issues, and a general loathing of men (unless these men are serial, sexual harassing, raping Democrats). The political and pop-culturefeminists who are leading the feminist movement today… Read More

I’ve written several times since 2009 about the ridiculous hassles I’ve had with the manypress credential hold-ups at the hands of the Capitol Correspondents Association and Assembly Speaker’s press office.

“Statehouse leaders affirmed a committee of journalists’ recommendation to reject press credentials for Watchdog.org, raising questions about both journalistic ethics and the First Amendment in the state’s vetting process, ethics experts say,” a recent Watchdog.org story reported. It could be my story.

I’ve been in a battle once again with the Capitol Correspondents Association of California media cartel over my annual request for Capitolpresscredentials renewal. I was informed at the end of the legislative session that the CCAC denied my request. Their reason this time is because the publisher of the Flash Report, one of the websites where I post my articles and columns, has a political consulting business, and the CCAC board feels payments to him violate the CCAC bylaws.

I… Read More