Last November, FR friend Joel Fox over at his Fox & Hounds website was prescient in his blog post saying that the action by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to both ban plastic shopping bags and impose a tax on paper bags would be challenged on the grounds that it violates newly-passed Proposition 26. Well today Hilex Poly, a large-scale producer of plastic grocery bags filed just that lawsuit. Under the state constitution, a tax on paper bags clearly would need to go to a vote of the people. However advocates are trying to say that because the ten-cent per bag tax is mandated by the government, but not collected by the government (grocers apply the fee and are then forced to spend the funds at the direction of the county), then it is not actually a tax. Of course that argument is ludicrous on its face.

“Los Angeles County’s bag ‘charge’ on consumers violates Proposition 26, which clearly requires local taxes be approved by a two-thirds vote. The ten-cent tax imposed on bags was never approved by voters much less by a… Read More

California Crime Watch: Dangerous Criminals Coming Soon to Your Community Assembly Republican Caucus

[Publisher’s Note: We are pleased to present this guest column and video from the Assembly Republican Caucus … Flash]

Under the Governor’s dangerous public safety realignment program which takes effect today, 52,000 offenders will no longer be serving time in state prison by 2013-14. They will instead be sent to overcrowded county jails.

Many criminals will only serve a fraction of their sentences, while others will be granted early release to make room for the influx of state felons into local communities.

Here is our video featuring former Board of Prison Terms Chairman, Assemblyman Jim Nielsen, outlining how this plan will put public safety at risk.

For additional information, visit: http://arc.asm.ca.gov/cacrimewatch/… Read More

In a striking blow to the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council and Labor Union bosses around the state, the San Diego Pension Reform measure appears to be on its way to the ballot box this morning.

Comprehensive Pension Reform (CPR) for San Diego is announcing at this moment that the campaign turned in a whopping 145,027 signatures to the San Diego City Clerk’s office early this morning to qualify the measure for the June 2012 ballot.

More than 120,000 of those signatures have been verified already using a 100% signature verification method, according to the CPR campaign. The 145,000+ signature turn-in is well in excess of the 94,346 valid signatures which are required to place the measure on the ballot.

In a failed effort that received much media attention, public employee union bosses attempted to keep this and other measures off the ballot by running phony radio ads to scare people from signing, over fear of identity theft. Today’s overwhelming turn-in proves that labor’s efforts to intimidate and deceive voters were trumped by the desire of citizens to achieve real pension reform.… Read More

I’m a car guy. Most of you know this. However, I’ve recently become the housing guy in Washington. This is not due to any direct background or experience. I have only bought 3 and sold 2 houses in my life, all of in which the captivating Mrs. Campbell and I have lived. It is partly because I serve on the committee that deals with such issues. But, it is mainly because I know we never go into recessions without housing and cars leading us in, and we never recover without housing and cars leading us out. These two industries are just too big a part of the economy and too important to the psyche of consumers. The car business is doing better of late, but housing is not. There are many reasons our economy stinks, but one of them is certainly because the housing market is still in a decline. The economy will not be strong again until we turn it around.

When you have a sick patient, the first rule is, “Do no harm”. The housing market is sick. Much of what is causing this sickness is the fact that the housing finance system, anchored by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, failed. We have to replace that system. As many of you know, I have a… Read More

I don’t usually comment on federal issues, finding as I do enough material in the strange stuff going on around me in Sacramento. But with the Legislature out of session and your pocketbook safe for a while, I thought I would note a bizarre comment recently from our beleaguered president. It’s worth noting, I think, both because it is typical of the arguments we often hear from the left, and because of what it says about the president’s respect for the intelligence of the American people.

The subject the president was addressing was immigration, specifically, the federal version of the so-called Dream Act. More generally, he was defending himself from the charge that he was somehow to blame for the current confused immigration situation that satisfies neither the left nor the right. And according to the White House web site’s transcript of the president’s comments, the comments I find curious, he said in defense, “I just have to continue to say this notion that somehow I can just change the laws unilaterally is just not true.”

Now, of course, precisely NO ONE of any sense, stature, or IQ above room temperature has ever expressed “this notion.”… Read More

CalBuzz has a lead item in today’s website entitled “Lies, Damn Lies: Howard Jarvis and Small Biz ‘Poll”. However, the picture of Jarvis that they use to punctuate their accusations includes an illegal and unauthorized use of the famous picture of Howard Jarvis that appeared in Time magazine, which is copyrighted material and privately owned by the HJTA and another organization. We were told the picture was sourced from the Google Images Library. The Google images Library clearly instructs any potential user that the picture “may be subject to copyright” and reports the picture back to a website that firmly, very clearly asserts a copyright on the picture and states “All material on this website is copyrighted.” One would think the experienced journalists at CalBuzz would understand copyrights for journalistic materials, including those clearly marked as such. CalBuzz says they will remove the offending material “by noon,” but all the damage will be done by then, when the website has received the majority of it’s page views. Beware a message of “lies, damn lies” that comes from a source… Read More

Yesterday at 5pm, KFI radio talk show hosts John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou hosted Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist, Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association’s Jon Coupal, and yours truly for a fun segment — united a group of anti-tax leader that were dubbed by Governor Jerry Brown as the “Legion of Acceptability” — Joe Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote about that here.

The premise of Brown’s assertion is that our group of taxpayer advocates is responsible for stopping his play to put taxes increases on a special election ballot this year. The reality is that the vast majority of GOP legislators opposed these tax increases because they are bad public policy, not because of anything printed here on the FlashReport or spoken on the John and Ken Show. Those few GOP legislators who were willing to put taxes on the ballot were thwarted by the public employee unions,… Read More

Solyndra is the kind of company certain politicians love because it provides a concrete example that can be used to justify a particular philosophy. It turns an abstract idea real.

In this case, the philosophy is one which liberals have developed to rationalize all types of regulations and subsidies of the kind America has otherwise spent fifty years moving away from. “Green jobs,” the story line goes, will be our future.

It sounds great. And politically, it’s even better: it’s suddenly acceptable to crush all kinds of businesses with regulations and taxes because the jobs that are destroyed will be replaced will all kinds of new “green jobs.” Everything will be fine. In his 2010 campaign for Governor, Democrat Jerry Brown citied such idealistic, clean, high-tech jobs almost daily.

Yet, “green jobs” is an abstract concept, and one which has proven to be largely a failure in the real economy. At best they occupy a niche, and no credible economic analysis can demonstrate a roadmap by which such jobs become anything more than a tiny sector of our giant economy.

The “green jobs” concept is an important one to keep the… Read More