Working to format the interview with Arnie Steinberg that leads the main page today ate up my prime ‘commentary time’ today. So I will encourage you to read that piece. That said, there are a lot of crazy things in the news today, all featured on the main page.

President Bush talks of a foiled attempt by terrorists to attack LA. Susan Kennedy took $10k a month last year from a developer and someone it took the LA Times to let us know. Rep. Richard Pombo took his family on a 5,000 mile motorhome tour of national parks and billed the government? Then he called the trip a vacation on his website. Dumb. The Los Angeles Angels bested the City of Anaheim, 9 to 3. Barry Munitz, the high-spending head of the Getty Trust, is out. Much more more.

Did you miss my ten cents on Arnold and the upcoming GOP Convention? It is here.

Have a great day!

Jon… Read More

I and my family moved to Riverside County from Laguna Niguel to get a large style home that we can afford. I live in a large middle class neighborhood that is full of kids on bikes and skateboards. Our neighborhood is mostly crime free. The problem is some of the folks ten miles up the road from me are in a Megan’s Law Web Site Hot Zone. I like knowing where the paroled sexual predators in my neck of the woods are and that they stay away from my neighborhood. I rely on the State of California Department of Corrections to keep track of them. It is one of the services I don’t mind paying taxes for. It is bad enough that San Francisco liberals like Assemblyman Mark Leno want to make possession of child porn a traffic ticket type of offence, but it is now being reported that Department of Correction officials are placing sex offenders near elementary schools or just outright losing track of them.

This type behavior must stop and it will if Assemblyman Todd Spitzer (R-Orange) has anything to say about it. Spitzer represents a portion of Riverside County and we are lucky to have him. He is a bulldog at making public… Read More

Some think Orange County is undergoing a Pringle-ization. SeeFR’s Matt Cunningham’s post here.It must apply to everywhere except the jury that said the Anaheim Angels can now be called the Los Angels Angeles or the LA A of Alegally. See article here.… Read More

The nucleus of Governor Schwarzenegger’s re-election team is coming together. Here are some of the folks that are already (or are about to be) onboard to run the day-to-day operations of the re-elect, as confirmed by a source on the Governor’s re-election campaign:

As we have reported before, the Campaign Manager is Steve Schmidt. Schmidt comes back to California (where he worked on the Matt Fong campaign, among other efforts) straight from Washington, D.C., where he has been working closely with Vice President Dick Cheney. Most recently, Schmidt was the WH "jockey" in getting Justice Sam Alito through the Senate confirmation process. Also in major role with the campaign is strategist Matthew Dowd. Dowd has been a senior advisor to President Bush, and … Read More

Thanks to hard-hitting investiagtive journalism by the San Francisco Chronicle’s Todd Wallack, the alarming mismanagement of the University of California is bubbling to the fore. Once the crown jewel of California state government, the upper reaches of UC has become a swamp of favoritism, back-scratching and a cavalier attitude toward taxpayer money.

Frankly, I hadn’t been paying much attention to it until the 76th(!) issue of the Parsky Watch alerted me to the breadth of the mismanagement and the institutional resistance to real reform:

PW 76

February 6, 2006

Gerry parsky and the uc system finance scandals: What, me worry about taxpayer money?

Remind us: whose idea was it to appoint… Read More

I hate to be flippant but I can’t help myself. I spent six years toiling on the State GOP Board as regional Vice Chairman and than Treasurer. During this time we "managed" the State GOP Convention messages and tried to come out of every convention with a positive spin. In reality, that process is of little consequence to election outcomes.

The last GOP candidate for Governor to have a pre-primary endorsement got absolutely slaughtered in the general election. What hurt him the most was the security of not having to answer to his GOP base during the general election when it seemed everyone knew he was going to lose except him. And while Dan Lungren has gone onto a good place in the Congress, he’s been made even better by having to go through a tough, tough primary in 2004. You don’t forget lessons like that if you are smart.

Whether or not the Governor has our endorsement pre primary is irrelevant to his chances of prevailing in November. Voters don’t care whether we endorse him and neither do most conservatives.What they care about are issues and whether their nominee is true… Read More

That’s the headline of OC Register editorial writer Steve Greenhut’s latest post on Orange Punch blog:

The Pringle-ization of OC I mean that headline in the best-possible way. Bad ideas have a way of spreading, as one city after another embraces League of Cities plans to use eminent domain and increase tax revenues. Good ideas can spread, too, though, and Anaheim Mayor Curt Pringle [pictured] deserves much credit for the spread of good local government ideas to other places in Orange County. His city has been promoting business tax holidays, loosened zoning restrictions and other free-market freedom-friendly ideas. This has been controversial, which is amazing given that America was based on the ideas the city of Anaheim is trying to promote. But … Read More

Yesterday, the President of the United States transmitted to the United States Senate the nomination of Sandra Segal Ikuta to serve as a Judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Since January of 2004, Ikuta has been serving as a member of the Schwarzenegger Administration, as Deputy Secretary and General Counsel to the California Resources Agency.

Prior to being tapped by the Governor, Ikuta had been an attorney in the Los Angeles office of the prominent law firm of O’Melvany & Myers. In the past she had clerked for former United States Supreme Court Justice Sanda Day O’Conner, as well as for Judge Alex Kozinski on the 9th Circuit Court.

Ikuta is a Republican, and specializes in environmental law.… Read More