Yesterday, a court ruled that the uncounted 12,500 ballots in Riverside County, which arrived late to the Registrar through no fault of the voters, will be tallied. The Riverside Registar of Voters staff immediately started working, doing so throughout the night, posting the lastest update at 6:00 a.m. this morning.

Juan Vargas picked up a net of 10 votes since the ruling, with his lead over Mary Salas "jumping" from 12 to 22 votes.

Of the 12,500 remaining ballots in Riverside, Jim Sills at San Diego Rostra is estimating that approximately 450 of them are Democratic ballots in Senate District 40.

Here’s all the info at Rostra.… Read More

News today of the conviction of 10 Russian spies and a CIA-KGB spy swap for 4 of our own in the Soviet Union has hit the news. But not so evident is what the spies actually did, and who they were. However, one of them has a shockingly interesting background. He received his Masters Degree in Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard University in 2000 under the false name of Donald Howard Heathfield. His real name is Andrey Bezrukov, and he spied right under Harvard’s nose in Cambridge, Mass.

How somebody pulls off a masquerade using a Boston Brahmin name like Heathfield when they really have an Eastern European cabbage patch name like Bezrukov is beyond me. I also can’t figure out the linguistics. I wonder if Andrey really mastered the New England English accent as well? So much for security features at our nation’s leading university. Beyond his academic success at Harvard, all we know about Andrey is that he met with a U.S. government employee in 2004 "to discuss nuclear weapons research." Could you imagine if this guy ended up with a big bureaucrat job in the U.S. Department of Defense?… Read More

This just in from State Senator (and soon to be Congressman) Jeff Denham… Denham has submitted this ballot argument against the "Porkulus" (as we call it), the massive water bond that is currently scheduled to appear on the November ballot. Advocates of the bond want to push the vote off to 2012 — presumably their internal polling shows that spending such vast amounts of money during a recession is not too popular with taxpayers…

Here what Denham submitted to the Secretary of State: The politicians and the special interests are at it again! Not only have they racked up a $19 billion deficit but now they are trying to con Californians into voting for a phony $11 billion water bond. Proposition 18 is a pork measure that gives billions of dollars to… Read More

MEMORANDUM

TO: Interested Parties FR: Martin Wilson, Campaign Manager, Carly for California RE: Pick up the phone…California is calling __________________________________________________

I guess it’s not a secret anymore; we’ve got ourselves a little old competitive Senate race here in California. The Field Poll shows Barbara Boxer and Carly Fiorina in a statistical tie, 47 percent to 44 percent. This represents a 30-point improvement for Carly since Field first matched up the two in March 2009. Most importantly, Carly has closed a 15-point gap since January 2010. Trends are stubborn things, and Barbara Boxer has found out that this trend is not her friend. Looks like Barbara Boxer has earned herself a spot on the endangered politicians list.

The political environmental assessment for Barbara Boxer is bleak. Her job performance ratings are 42 percent/48 percent approve/disapprove in this most recent poll. In previous years when she was running for re-election,… Read More

MEMORANDUM

TO: Interested Parties FR: Martin Wilson, Campaign Manager, Carly for California RE: Pick up the phone…California is calling __________________________________________________

I guess it’s not a secret anymore; we’ve got ourselves a little old competitive Senate race here in California. The Field Poll shows Barbara Boxer and Carly Fiorina in a statistical tie, 47 percent to 44 percent. This represents a 30-point improvement for Carly since Field first matched up the two in March 2009. Most importantly, Carly has closed a 15-point gap since January 2010. Trends are stubborn things, and Barbara Boxer has found out that this trend is not her friend. Looks like Barbara Boxer has earned herself a spot on the endangered politicians list.

**There is more – click the link**… Read More

John Fund in today’s Wall Street Journal Political Diary E-mail…… Read More

Today was the first of my weekly appearances on Sacramento conservative talk radio station KTKZ, spending a segment with popular radio talk show host and FR friend Eric Hogue (his columns on his Hogue News website are linked often on our site’s main page — very insightful).

You can listen to the audio of my interview with Eric below — our topics? The Field poll results in the Governor and U.S. Senate races, and a bit on the budget crisis.… Read More

FR has covered the controversy of the competing claims of leadership of the Republican Party of Los Angeles (RPLAC) of Jane Barnett and Robert Vaughn, including the outcome of the May 26, 2010 court case. The court ruled in Barnett’s favor.

A reporter called me right before the case for a comment and I told the reporter that the outcome of a court case wouldn’t decide the future of the RPLAC, but the following weeks Central Committee elections would. I should point out I have been an elected RPLAC member for almost two decades. Yikes!. And I am a local Lincoln Club Chair.

Here is a quick look at it. I should note that RPLAC could have over 200 members. With people elected from districts that have little GOP registration to some that have a lot. Some District are very small, like the LA portion of the 61t AD. Needless to say in some districts you get whomever runs and that is it.

As I look at the winners, Barnett clearly was the winner. She had help from the LA County Lincoln Club that bought slates in the very competitive areas.

There help had a big… Read More