The California Fair Political Practices commission will be holding a public hearing tomorrow on twelve new areas of political campaigning that it is considering regulatory changes. Most of the proposals are actually good ones. But a couple are real stinkers (see below). The meeting will start at 1:00 pm Wednesday, November 17 at the FPPC headquarters in Sacramento, and will be held simultaneously by teleconference in Los Angeles at the Center for Government Studies, 10951 Pico Blvd., Ste. 120.

The new areas of regulation and the proposed additional regulations include: streamlining and improving access to electronic filings (a good idea); simplifying forms and reports (a good idea); streamlining deadlines for filing and making more sense of them (a good idea); increasing campaign finance thresholds (a good idea); create on electronic filing system that includes state and local election jurisdictions in one system (a good idea if it does not drive up the cost of compliance at the local level); improve ability to terminate old committees (a good idea); harmonize filing deadlines for different types of committees (probably a good idea);… Read More

The conventional wisdom in the Attorney General Race went something like this. Cooley wins; he has been elected three times as District Attorney in a large Democratic county. On top of that Harris is an extreme liberal. Cooley wins.

As of this writing Cooley is down by less than 14,000 votes as final returns are coming in. What happened?

To be fair Cooley is the top vote getter in Los Angeles County on the GOP ticket. Whitman lost by 30 points. Cooley is losing by 14 points. Obviously he did better. But the GOP experts thought he would do much better than a 14 pt. loss and secure an easy win.

Cooley’s first election as District Attorney was in 2000.Remember Y2K, the CSI premiere and Ja Ja Binks.In 2000he got in a run off with incumbent Gil Garcetti. Garcetti was punished by Los Angeles voters over his office’s handling of some high profile cases and Cooley got over 1.4 million votes and over 63% of the vote. If you remember Robert Blake and the O.J. (not the orange juice) trial you know what I mean.

If you remember back that far. That is my point. That is a decade ago. That was the last time Cooley… Read More

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

What happened to the Central Valley?

We’ve heard for years about the man-made water shortages, high unemployment, localLatinopoliticians switching to the Republican party and how unpopular are the democrats. The only problem is that 5 key counties failed to vote.

Where was the gusto ?

The statewide average of registered voters is about 55%. Yet Fresno [44.7%], Kern [53.1%] , Merced [50.9%], Stanislaus [50.7%] and Tulare [42.5%] didn’t pull their respective weights. Some Republican power bases performed well, such as Ventura [59.5%] and San Diego [ 60.3% ! ].

Had the 5 central valley counties voted at 55% , we might have a new congressman Andy Vidak. Steve Cooley would have netted an additional 30,000 votes. Today, Cooley is behind some 14,000 votes.

… Read More

Damn Stanford. $600 down the drain.

In my experience in life, people I have known who graduated from Stanford just think too hard. They are all smart, folks like election lawyers Chuck Bell, Dana Reed. But they just think too hard. And that is not necessarily a good thing.

I grew up in the Bay Area. My dad, who just had a high school education, had once hoped I’d go to Stanford. He used to take me to Stanford football games. I ended up gladly at USC, because I can think, but I do not think too hard. Though I did get admitted to Stanford Law School one summer for a very successful course in civil rights litigation which actually helped me in later life.

Nevertheless, the Stanford penchant for thinking too hard really nailed me and my 84 year old father in law yesterday, when freshman tailback Anthony Wilkerson, who was on his way to a 23 yard touchdown run against Arizona State in the last minute and a half of the game slid down untouched on the four yard line, thus… Read More

The 112th Congress of the United States will be sworn into office on January 5th, 2011. We Republicans will be back in the majority after 4 years of the Pelosi-controlled House. When the majority shifts, there will be opportunity to change much. Obviously, leaders and offices and people will shift around, but, since in our Constitution there are coequal parts of government with no superior branch of government, the House makes up its own rules. Those rules are newly approved by each congress and they determine how the House will be run. Traditionally, many of those rules do not change from congress to congress because they have been established by over 200 years of precedent, and they are the accepted way to engage in civil, but vigorous debate on the floor and in committees.

I have been appointed by soon-to-be-speaker John Boehner to the 22 member Transition Team, which is tasked with drafting those new rules, as well as other procedures on how we will run the place.

I hope we run it very, very differently than either Speaker Pelosi has or than we did prior to 2007.

I, obviously, do not agree with Pelosi’s policy choices over the last 4 years.… Read More

During the best of economic times, taxpayers need to be on their guard against special interests who are looking to make big bucks by putting their hands on your tax dollars. Of course, during especially difficult financial periods, like the recession in which we find ourselves today, we all need to be incredibly diligent to guard against this sort of thing — and we expect our politicians to be looking out for us.



That said, I have to once again raise the red cautionary flag for the taxpayers of Los Angeles County, who may have read with some interest that two business titans of the city — AEG Executive Tim Leiweke and Wasserman Media Group founder Casey Wasserman — are actively considering trying to build a pro-football stadium right in downtown Los Angeles (they want to nuke a big chunk of the Convention Center to do it).

The reason why this should worry Los Angelinos? These are the same folks who built the Staples Center and the LA Live! mall that received millions in taxpayer subsidies and continues to get special consideration on taxes… Read More

I’m a Navy Veteran. To some degree, I appreciate all the people and companies who are filling my inbox today with generic spam and ads that have “Thank You to our Veterans” in the subject line, and a variety of promotions and discounts they are offering to “honor my service”. It’s nice that these folks have Veterans on their minds this weekend, but honestly, if you are going to take the time to send me an email or conduct a sale, why don’t you ask me what I really want for Veterans’ Day? Don’t assume I want a mattress sale, a furniture sale, or a discount on my meal. If you really want to honor Veterans, ask us what we want. Here’s what I want for Veterans’ Day: · A pair of pants · A shirt … Read More