FR friend Shane Goldmacher has a starting blog post over at the Los Angeles Times Politi-cal website where he reveals that the California Department of Public Health (which collects money from a tax on cigarette passed by voters back in 1988 to then use for a number of purposes including anti-smoking education) made a decision to run a taxpayer funded anti-smoking ad — during the Superbowl!

The decision to place and fund this ad was apparently made by Colleen Stevens at the state health department. From the Goldmacher piece… For her part, Colleen Stevens, chief of the Tobacco Control Media Campaign at the California Department of Public Health, said she was thrilled by the Super Bowl exposure. The year’s football game drew a record 111 million viewers nationally, according the Nielsen’s estimates. The state’s ad aired at least in Los… Read More

The MSM has reported that Secretary of State Debra Bowen is considering running to replace Jane Harman in the U.S. House of Representatives, who recently quit her job representing the 36th CD, based in southern and coastal Los Angeles County (see map here).

If Bowen (pictured left) runs, it raises an interesting question, first broached today by our friends at CalBuzz. The Secretary of State’s chief… Read More

It’s being reported that Governor Jerry Brown flew down to Los Angeles yesterday to go pitch the businesses in the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce on why they should support his budget plan (and put pressure on GOP legislators to do the same). Jerry Brown just doesn’t get it. Look in the rear view mirror. In 2009, the very same taxes he wants to extend for five years were enacted as part of a budget deal that spawned an ill-fated ballot measure that would have extended the taxes for just two more years. That ballot measure, as everyone knows, was defeated by almost a two-to-one margin in a June 2009 special election.

I wonder if Jerry Brown is aware of the fact that the “business community” in California (most notably the CalChamber) supported both the terrible budget deal and the passage of the extension of the taxes that appeared on the ballot. It was a clear demonstration of a disconnect between California voters and big business (of course in that budget deal, the Chamber backed higher income, sales and… Read More

Conservative Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, a fresher face on the national scene,will be very much in the spotlight at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, opening today at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel on upper Connecticut, N.W. in Washington, D.C. And a last minute addition appears to be Donald Trump! CPAC promoters are stating that registration hit 10,000 people yesterday, a staggering number. Other major speakers on the agenda through this weekend, include Newt Gingrich, Senator and Congressman Rand and Ron Paul; Congressmen Paul Ryan and Allen West (West is a black Republican just elected to a Florida district in the recent anti-Obama landslide), Senators Lee, McConnell, and Thune; Governors Daniels, Barbour (both formerly Reagan White House officials) and Perry; and my buddy Herman Cain, former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza and a former Federal Reserveofficial, among many others.

Much of the conference will be available on the CSPAN channels. Speeches will also be available in real time at the CPAC website,… Read More

Prominent California Democrat strategist and consultant Garry South predicts Republicans pick up the United States Senate in 2012… From today’s Wall Street Journal Political Diary E-mail…

Webb Exit Tilts Senate Map How much trouble are Democrats in as a result of Virginia Sen. Jim Webb’s decision to retire in a normally Republican state? A great deal if, you listen to Democratic consultant Garry South. "It would take divine intervention to save Democratic control of the Senate in 2012," Mr. South told Politico.com. "Neither party can defend 23 Senate seats in a single election year."… Read More

Random Thoughts On The Passing California Political Scene…

Sometime in the not-so-distant past, some smart people at the San Francisco Chronicle decided that in order to try and make more income from their website, they would start to charge a fee to read some of the online articles. For our purposes, this has meant that as I we compile political stories from over 80 websites for the FlashReport main page, we regularly have to skip stories from the Chronicle (supposedly these stories get unblocked a couple of days later, when our readers no longer care about the news of a couple of days ago). It is amazing to me that only now, almost two years after many of them voted to put it on the ballot, that state legislators are starting to realize how terrible Proposition 14 actually is — and understand that it actually makes things worse in California (if that is possible). Before the passage of Prop. 14, we had a primary election so that political parties could determine nominees through a broad process that … Read More

From today’s Wall Street Journal Political Diary E-mail… … Read More

My wife Janice and I are in Washington, D.C. visiting old haunts (she is a veteran of the city, too, having served as Deputy Chief Counsel of the Republican National Committee), and I’m preparing for CPAC and the American Conservative Union Board meeting later today.

We visited the Pentagon Memorial for the victims of 9/11 for the first time yesterday. There is no more sobering justification for our continued presence in Afghanistan than this spot. Here are a few pictures of the grounds:

Benches pointing to the Pentagon each memorialize a person killed on the plane. Benches pointing out from the Pentagon memorialize a person killed inside the Pentagon during the 9/11 attack on our country.… Read More