The California Legislature has demonstrated once again how irrelevant and unnecessary it is as a full-time body.

The Assembly Public Safety Committee just passed a bill making illegal gun sales “illegaler,” according to Sam Paredes, Executive Director ofGun Owners of California.

AB 1695,“The Stop Illegal Gun Sales Act,”by Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Oakland, passed the Assembly Public Safety committee on a party line vote. “The Act takes aim at the flow of guns onto the black market—just like the guns used in San Bernardino,” he said.

Bonta knows it is already illegal, but never mind that.

“Oakland was home to 89 murders last year—among the highest rates in the state. We must end… Read More

Carl’s Jr. World Headquarters is leaving the Golden State for the Volunteer State. But the move has nothing to do with volunteerism, and everything to do with hospitality.

CKE Restaurants, Inc., the parent company of Carl’s Jr. was founded in Anaheim 60 years ago. After several years of researching options, CKE Restaurants, Inc. is finally moving its California headquarters to Nashville, Tennessee, a state with no income tax, and a friendly business environment.

In March 2011, I met Andy Puzder, CEO ofCKE Restaurants, Inc., the parent company of Carl’s Jr., Green Burrito and Hardees… Read More

Cigarettes are now illegal in San Francisco for anyone under 21, and soon to be throughout California.

The Sanctuary City by the Bay has a long list of sanctioned banned items: trans fats, the circus,sugary sodas, the Happy Meal and free toy, plastic bags, plastic water bottles, goldfish, baby chickens and ducklings, chewing tobacco, hollow-point bullets, firearms in advertising, wood burning stoves, drones, the Segway, hoverboards, and they tried to ban circumcision.

The list of banned items was all done in the name of public health. But these same San Francisco Nanny-Supervisors support public urination, needle exchanges, public nudity, pot smoking, free condoms, abortion… Read More

Two Assembly bills were just introduced addressing labor union transparency and designed to offer a choice of labor unions, and to force unions to open up their books.

Assemblywoman ShannonGrove, R-Bakersfield, is working with union employees who have been fighting the Service Employees International Union for transparency, and they’ve been educating members of their option to opt out of paying the share of dues that is used for political purposes. This is information the Union does not tell it’s members.

The bills are on behalf of the workers. Most media has reported that the bills are an attack on… Read More

Last year, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bill to give the Legislature more oversight over the California Air Resources Board. Some say lawmakers then retributively amended language out of Senate Bill 350 by Sen. Pres. Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, which was Brown’s proposal for a 50 percent cut in petroleum use for transportation that the CARB was all set to enforce.

The CARB holds cap-and-trade auctions, which extort and extract money from California businesses deemed polluters by the state. In his 2016 budget, Gov. Brown carved out more than $1 billionof cap-and-trade revenueto pay for his High Speed Train to nowhere.

The high-speed rail project, expected to be finished in 2033, was originally supposed travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles in two hours and 40 minutes. That was the ballot initiative promise in 2009, which intoxicated voters who narrowly… Read More

While the state of California is extracting billions of dollars from businesses and utilities through the California Air Resources Board’s cap-and-trade program auctions, the Legislature can’t decide how to spend the billions.

Instead, lawmakers have been arguing over how to direct the monies into their own districts on some rather dubious projects, and predictably, on public transit and light rail trains.

Gov. Jerry Brown has his own dubious project: He carved out more than $1 billionof cap-and-trade revenue… Read More

California state budgets no longer require a two-thirds vote of the Legislature to be passed, butthere are still budget games, deals and hinky promises that happen in the process.. However, tax increases do still require two-thirds vote.

This year, Gov. Jerry Brown had proposed tax increases – a gas tax hike, a road tax for miles driven, a car registration hike, and a health plan tax… to name a few.

In order to get these tax increases approved, Brown and his administration use arm-twisting and extortive tactics on lawmakers who show resistance.

In… Read More

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