Jim Ledford won’t reveal his donors. No agency has a single copy of his campaign finance report. He claims He has nothing to hide. (Exceptpossibly union money. See here.)

Assemblywoman Runner has asked him to show us the money! See article here.He won’t do it.

Memo to Ledford: Any candidate that truly had filed and reported everything caught up in this mess would have posted his reports on the web.… Read More

This Tuesday is a big election day throughout California, with a lot going on including a nationally-watched special election for Congress in San Diego, a heated battle between two Democrats for the honor of going up against Arnold Schwarzenegger this fall, Rob Reiner’s tax hike/government-run preschool scheme, and much more. All of those things and more have been talked about on this website. I am going to take a few minutes, though, and talk about a race that is near and dear to my heart. My apologies to the vast majority of FR readers who hail from outside of "The OC" — but I want to take a few minutes to urge my several thousand Orange County readers to vote to re-elect my boss, Orange County Sheriff Michael Carona. If you are reading this column, and live outside of Orange County, but have family, friends or acquaintances here, please contact them and ask them to vote for Sheriff Carona. I have known Mike Carona for nearly fifteen years. He and I first met when he was the… Read More

From the Wall Street Journal Political Diary:

Busting Busby

Mainstream media outlets will be closely watching the special election tomorrow to fill the House seat of former San Diego Congressman Duke Cunningham, who has been sentenced to federal prison for bribery. Should Democrat Francine Busby defeat Republican Brian Bilbray in a heavily GOP district, it would embolden Democratic hopes of winning control of Congress.

But almost no national media outlet has covered the late-breaking news that may decide the election. Last Thursday, Ms. Busby addressed a group of supporters and in response to a question in Spanish about how someone who was an illegal alien could help, she answered: "You don’t need papers for voting," she said.… Read More

On Thursday, my job was all but done. The mail was written, printed, and dropped. The radio buys were running. The paid calls were recorded and scheduled. So, like most every election, I decided to spend the last few days walking precincts so I could get a first hand feel of what the electorate was thinking.

Over the weekend I walked two large precincts – one in Vista and one in Carlsbad – in North County San Diego. The targets were GOP and Decline to State Primary voters. Probably close to a total of 250 households, of which I spoke to around 85… maybe more.

The temperature the first day (Vista) was a boiling 95 and I drew a hilly precinct in an inland upper middle-class community called Shadowridge. This precinct is not in the hotly contested CD50. It is represented by Congressman Darrell Issa, and amusingly I actually ended up walking his precinct and knocking on his door (he wasn’t home). The second day, mercifully, the weather was in the 70’s and I was fairly near the coast in another upper middle-class community. In the second precinct, I was in the middle of the Bilbray-Busby brawl. These are both very, very Republican and… Read More

In speeches across the region this year I’ve been talking about the misery index in politics this year – but building a head of steam since the 2004 Presidential election. At the heart of the misery is this: Conservatives are miserable over record federal spending, the immigration debacle and the failure of the Congress and President to lead on domestic issues. GOP moderates are miserable because they hated the appointment of two pro life Supreme Court Justices, Democrat moderates are miserable because they have to look at the three stooges – Pelosi, Reid and Dean as the standard bearers of their Party. Democrat liberals are miserable because they HATE, I mean HATE, the President. Peggy Noonan writes more about this phenomenon here. As you see the dismal turnout across the State tomorrow ask yourself this question: who INSPIRES YOU?… Read More

The Schwarzenegger campaign insists they have no preference on which Democratic candidate for govenor ends up as their opponent. In truth, they’ll probably be able to run pretty much the same campaign against either Phil Angelides or Steve Westly.

But running against Angelides would be so much more fun.

Today’s Sacramento Bee reports on the anti-Arnold’s visit to an African-American congregation in East Oakland, where he promised the attendees that "wants to create a California ‘where the governor stands side by side with people like Barbara Lee, whether it’s the genocide in Darfur or the horrible war in Iraq."

Putting aside for a moment the lack of foreign policy decision-making in a governor’s portfolio, Angelides just promised the people of the state that he "stands side by side" with the only member of the House of Representatives who, on September 15, 2001, voted against authorizing the use of military force against those responsible for the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon four days earlier.

I don’t know of anyone who’s in favor… Read More

The Orange County Registrar of Voter‘s office used to be a statewide embarrassment. Every Election Night, eager politicos waited for the excruciatingly slow county election bureaucracy to tabulate the results. It wasn‘t unusual to wait until lat at night just to get the first round of absentee voters. It was like the tabulating was being done in "bullet time" — which is cool in The Matrix but not cool when waiting on the outcome of elections.

All that began changing rapidly with the accession of Neal Kelley as first Acting OC Registrar, and now as the permanent OC Registrar of Voters. Kelley is busily bringing his office into the 21st Century.

You can watch ballot boxes bring brought into the OC Registrar‘s on the… Read More

The State Industrial Welfare Commission has the authority, apparently, to hike the state’s wage mandates on private employers, without any action of the State Legislature. That seems like a poor set-up. Mandates on employers like this should require a vote of the people’s representatives EVERY time. If jobs are going to be cut due to regulation on businesses, someone in elected office should be responsible, not some extremely obscure commission. Anyways, if you haven’t been following the debate over the minimum wage between the Governor and legislative Democrats, here is a short breakdown:

The Democrats want to raise the minimum wage. The Republican Governor wants to raise the mandated wage. Republican legislators, overwhelmingly, do NOT want to increase the mandated wage. The Republican Governor wants a $1 an hour hike. The Democrats also want $1 (they would probably go for $10 if they could), but also want to create an ‘auto-pilot’ indexing to inflation of the mandated wage). The Governor had one of the few GOP supporters … Read More