Flashreport Blog

For your edification, here’s your media bias story of the day. The national media made a story out of a nonstory — a mini-rally of tiny proportions. Typical was NPR’s piece describing the rally as the “counterweight to the Tea Party” — a protest outside the White House. Backed by numerous heavyweight leftist groups such as the AFL-CIO,MoveOn.org, the National Organization for Women, Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Democracy for America, and National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, the story got great media play, as all such political mega-rallies in DC deserve.

But there were only 100 people at this heavily sponsored rally. And that’s the “counterweight to the Tea Party”????

SUURRREEEEE.

BTW, the photo below is a TEA PARTY rally, tens of thousands strong — not the media-ballyhooed pathetic gathering of 100 — mostly paid staffers of the sponsoring left wing outfits.

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(Cross-posted from JohnHrabe.com)

I admit it. I’m a bit naïve. I thought that eight state legislators traveling with an influential lobbyistto Cuba was, you know, news.

Not only did the Capitol press corps cover similar trips to Taiwan and Poland, but this story coincided with Beyonce and Jay-Z’s jaunt to the same Caribbean island. The nonprofit that organized the trip claims to provide humanitarian grants to other nonprofits, but, according to its only tax return, has donated $0 to domestic and foreign charities. Plus, at least one legislator, Asm. Katcho Achadjian, R-San Luis Obispo, admits that he first tried to use his campaign funds to pay for the trip. CA Common Cause says that California’s campaign finance laws “allow campaign funds to be spent on almost anything under the… Read More

The American Republic was and is a “Grand Experiment”. Before and after the Constitution was written and adopted, some of the Founding Fathers were overtly concerned about the rise of factions or political parties. One of the more famous quotes from John Adams ran “There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the Republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.” However, once electoral reality set in, many of the Founding Fathers became intimately involved in the formation of the primeval American party system.

I believe that political parties are an important ‘check and balance’ in the American Republic, and that the intellectual movement that advocates a system largely based on independent officeholders is idealistic – well meaning but misguided. Please note that when I refer to “independent candidates” I am referring to candidates without a political party, who are truly independent, not to candidates who run as part of some… Read More

“Forget about logic,” Jack advised. My analytics instructor says that all logic is mere tautology. She says it is impossible to learn anything through logic that you did not already know.” Robert A. Heinlein, Tunnel in the Sky

What about facts? There are certainly facts we don’t already know. According to the logic of the labor union spokespersons who relentlessly lobby and negotiate for higher wages and benefits for public sector workers, they are still underpaid because they have higher levels of education than the average worker. According to the logic ofAFSCME Local 3336, the only reason anyone might think public sector employees are overpaid is because of right wing propaganda. Yet it seems the many studies that fund their own analyses come from taxpayer supported institutions staffed with unionized faculty, or think tanks funded by grants from public employee unions.

But why impugn the sources? Why consider their logic? Why not just present the facts and let journalists, policymakers, and voters employ their own logic to form an opinion?

That is… Read More

Democrats in Sacramento are not being shy about using their supra-majority clout in both chambers of the state Legislature, and they are offering a host of bad new bills to change the election process. Here are just a few of them:

-AB 530, by Assemblymember Sharon Quirk-Silva, Orange County’s newest Democrat lawmaker, would allow counties to accept absentee ballot applications over the phone;

-SB 29, by Senator Lou Correa, would allow counting of mail-in ballots received as long as three days after the election;

-AB 400, Assemblyman Fong, would require content in initiative petitions to name top donors paying to circulate the petitions;

-SB 756, Senator Galgiani, allows Election Day voter registration to begin immediately in 2014, instead of waiting for an online voter registration system in development;

-AB 938, by Assemblymember Shirley Weber, would allow some felons, such as postrelease felons under supervision (a type of parole) to vote;

-AB 149, also by Assemblymember Weber, which would require that voter information packages and registration cards be provided to all inmates at county jails and state prisons.

There… Read More

Last Friday, my CalWatchDog colleague Katy Grimes and I first broke the story that at least two legislators traveled to Cuba with Darius Anderson, one of Sacramento’s most influential lobbyists. Our first report was only able to identify State Sen. Cathleen Galgiani, D-Livingston, and Assemblyman Katcho Achadjian, R-San Luis Obispo, as two legislators that joined the delegation.

On Friday, we contacted every member of the state Senate to track down any other participants. We’ve been working our way through the State Assembly, but have only received sporadic responses from legislative offices. Now, we know why.

Thanks to outstanding work by the San Luis Obispo Tribune, Asm. Achadjian’s hometown paper, we now know that eight legislators participated in the secret trip to Cuba. In defense of his trip to a foreign country with a registered lobbyist, Achadjian said, “It is also important to note that the delegation included seven other… Read More

On April 1, the Democrats running Sacramento took a perfectly good bill and – in the spirit of April Fools’ Day – made fools of California’s voters and college students.

Voters approved the Proposition 30 tax increase on last year’s ballot in order to protect education. For too long, politicians in the legislature have been wasting dollars that should have been spent on our schools and colleges by giving them away to their own special interests. But with Proposition 30, voters said no to continuing that waste.

That’s why the Republicans proposed Assembly Bill 67. As originally written before the Democrats pulled their April Fools prank, AB 67 would have prohibited California’s colleges and universities from increasing tuition during the seven years that Proposition 30 raises taxes. Voters were promised that those taxes would go to education. A tuition freeze honors that promise. AB 67 assured that Sacramento won’t spend the extra money on lower priority things. It assured that our colleges and universities won’t be starved for cash again, and forced to raise tuition on hard working California families. And it assured that promises made by… Read More

Readers of this column are fully aware that the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association is the leading voice for California’s beleaguered homeowners and citizen taxpayers. For that reason, we have frequently confronted situations where California’s political elites attempt to silence our voice or limit the access conferred to others in communicating our message to the public at large.

Just last year, you may recall, Senate Pro Tem, Darrell Steinberg, intentionally shut off the camera which was airing what was specifically designated as a “public hearing” at the Capitol just as HJTA’s representative was about to testify on the horrible impacts of Proposition 30. Agree with us or not, we had an important message to share with all California voters as to why imposing the highest income tax and sales tax rates in America was a bad idea. Pulling the plug on the public access channel was such an unwarranted act of censorship that even the usually liberal media was outraged.

Well, here we go again.

Today, April 8, 2013, the Assembly Committee on Revenue and Taxation is holding a 3 hour hearing on Proposition 13. And yet the organization which is… Read More