The Empire Strikes Back

Democratic and Republican insiders unveiled their latest attempt to undermine California’s 17-year-old term limits law. Gale Kaufman, who has worked with California teacher unions, and Matthew Dowd, a strategist for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s re-election campaign last year, revealed the initiative in a conference call this month.

To the amusement of reporters, the two strategists insisted their plan, which would have to be approved by voters early next year, actually improves term limits. "We believe it’s a good strengthening of term limits," Ms. Kaufman said, because the proposal would limit legislators to 12 years of total service in the legislature, rather than the 14 years… Read More

Well, sort of. It looks like the Long Beach City Council’s attempt to dictate to hotels what kind of union deals they must sign will be put to a vote of the people. The plan denies workers the right to vote. Today, the hotels will submit the signatures needed for a referendum. See here.Previous FR Post can be seen here.… Read More

Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the Minuteman Project, will be in Orange County Superior Court today, Department C-19, at 4:00 pm, seeking an ex parte order to try to win back control of the organization he founded in May of 2005. Gilchrist was thrown out of the organization as a Director and President in late January amid claims by other Directors that Gilchrist had bounced too many checks and was not properly managing the organization. Since then, the directors have conducted an audit and problems in the organization’s direct-mail fundraising program have surfaced, along with regulatory problems with the U.S. Postal Service and failure to file documents with the Internal Revenue Service and California Secretary of State.… Read More

I am not even sure how to preface this video of news coverage last Friday of a speech made in Seattle by John McCain.. So I won’t. It’s worth 23 seconds of your time. To be honest, I haven’t really felt like McCain has been pandering to the right (especially with his ‘global-warming-love-fest’ visit with Arnold Schwarzengger last week) — but apparently if he has, it may have been disengenuous? I guess the good news is that his appearance on increasing regulations to fight greenhouse gas emissions may have just been McCain ‘sucking up’ to the left-wing of the GOP?

Can you say, "Open mouth — insert foot?" … Read More

The John McCain for President Exploratory Committee just dropped a press release into my inbox where they announce the endorsement of McCain’s look at the Presidency by four current and one former California State Legislator…

And they are (the envelope please)…

State Senator Jeff Denham, Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia, Assemblyman George Plescia, Assemblyman Van Tran, and retired State Senator Jim Nielsen.

If you want to make the McCain folks feel better for having gone through the trouble of producing an elaborate media release, complete with quotes from all of these GOPers, you can pull up the release via the link immediately below. **Also, with a h/t to FR friend and Roll Call reporter David Drucker, RC has the following California GOP Members of Congress endorsing candidates for President so far:… Read More

There has been a lot of discussion in recent weeks about the effects of term-limits, as efforts are underway to create an additional election next February for an earlier California Presidential primary that some cynics believe is only taking place so that current legislative leaders can have one more crack at trying to relax term-limits before they themselves are forced to retire from office. Well, one impact of our current limits of three two-year terms in the State’s lower house is that, on the GOP side, well over a third of the seats held by the GOP will be "open seats" next year. Over the next few weeks, I will be attempting to take a closer look, well over a year out, at how the races are shaping up in these open GOP seats. Of course, the challenge of looking at the action in the seats this early is that one never knows who might get into the races later, and… Read More

The razor sharp close count in the recount in the results of the special election to fill the Orange County First Supervisorial seat vacated by Lou Correa when he was sworn into the Senate continues to slowly move along. This is the race where the top two vote gettings, Janet and Trung Ngyuen (no relation), ended up with just a seven vote margin between them, tilted in Trung’s direction. For most of last week and continuing into today, there has been a relatively agonizing recount taking place. The best place to read all of the latest on this is over at Matt Cunningham’s OC Blog/Red County website.

That said, below is a video courtesy of our friends at the OC Register’s Total Buzz Blog, where reporter Peggy Lowe has been down at the Registrar. It would appear that their video camera caught Trung Nguyen’s top legal beagle, Attorney Michael Schroder, telling NBC4 reporter Vikki Vargas the latest details on why, despite an apparent shift in the lead from Trung to Janet, all of the ballots must be counted… … Read More

Los Angeles County has numerous elections on March 6. One interesting race is the Redondo Beach race for City Treasurer. It features long time GOP incumbent Ernie O’Dell and a comeback for former Redondo Beach Mayor and GOP Assembly candidate Greg Hill. See previous FR Post on Hill’s candidacy. Need less to say this race has split friends of both and Republicans. Take a look at the story here.

Note to O’Dell: Endorsements by other city Treasurers probably doesn’t help you in RB. You are already considered qualified because you have been there 12 years… Read More