Professional distractions have kept me from writing here lately, but isn’t our Governor doing a wonderful job of facing down the union bosses on our state budget?!  I believe that this is truly Arnold’s time, the opportunity to establish the defining moments of his term in office, and his firm stand on the budget is fantastic.

     At the same time, Speaker Karen Bass is proving to be an unmovable and largely irrelevant but willing captive of the frightening bizarro world sought by the Service Employees International Union, whose best shot recently is to muster a press release claiming credit for a new budget, and blaming the structural deficits she and the Legislature’s Democrats have caused on the "national economic recession" (read: George W. Bush).  [It took the national Democrats over ten years to stop blaming the Reagan budget cuts of the ’80s for everything in the ’90s, I imagine Obama and Bass will be dumping on George Bush in the same manner thru the 2020s.]

     On a few other topics, we note Nativo Lopez, as predicted here, pled "not guilty" in the voter registration fraud case being pursued against him by Debra Bowen and the LA District Attorney.   We further predict he will not plead out and will beat the wrap.   No Los Angeles jury is going to convict Nativo Lopez of voter registration fraud, given all the fudge factors in the law as written.  All Nativo has to do is "hang in there."  That is not to say that I don’t believe in strict enforcement of voter fraud cases, however, this is not a voter fraud case.   It’s a registration case.   It’s about where Nativo actually sleeps, which is somewhere in southern California, and not whether he is an illegal voter.

     The U.S. Supreme Court has scheduled supplemental oral argument in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission for 10 am on September 9, focused on whether the ban on corporate contributions to political campaigns should be reconsidered.   In the so-called Austin decision, the Court upheld the power of government to bar corporate funds to support or oppose candidates for elected state offices.  In a part of the McConnell decision, the Justices upheld a provision of the 2002 campaign finance law that bars corporations and labor unions from using their funds to pay for radio or TV ads, during election season, that refer to a candidate for Congress or the Presidency, and appear to urge a vote for or against such a candidate. The Citizens United case is about it’s campaign-season film sharply attacking Hillary Rodham Clinton.  The supplemental argument is about whether Austin and McConnell should be over-ruled to allow corporate expenditures affecting campaigns.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.