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

Stark, Staring House Speaker Nancy Pelosi showed her true liberal colors when she briefly gave the nod to one of Congress’s most vocal liberals to replace scandal-ridden Charlie Rangel as chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. But sober second thoughts have now prevailed and Mr. Stark’s reign ended before it began. The unannounced reason was undoubtedly a revolt by saner members at this morning’s closed caucus meeting. Reports say that Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Chris Van Hollen… Read More

A FR reader brought to our attention that a local network news station in Sacramento, Channel 13 (the CBS affiliate), is running a video story here and a print story (below) that makes some… startling… observations about some circumstances surrounding Senator Ashburn’s arrest for Driving Under the Influence last evening… We’ll contact the Senator’s office to see if they have any comment on this CBS story…

Anti-Gay Lawmaker At Gay Club Before DUI Arrest CBS – 13 – Sacramento Sources tell CBS13 a state senator from Southern California was arrested for allegedly driving drunk after leaving Faces, a gay nightclub in midtown… Read More

The California Republican Party has gone through Jerry Brown’s "Announcement Video" and applied some truth serum. You should definitely watch this…

… Read More

It’s only early March and we already have "attack ring tones" being released. Below you can play this ditty released by the Whitman campaign. Their campaign advises that at CantTrustSteve.com you can download the ring-tone to your your phone – nice, just in time for the State GOP convention!

I hear Joe Mathews may have downloaded it already!

Always quick with response is Poizner’s Comm Director Jarrod Agen…

"When you’re an out-of-touch billionaire, it is easy to waste millions on negative ads in an attempt to be ‘humorous,’ but unfortunately there are millions of Californians out of work and struggling to find jobs. Meg Whitman has offered no plans to solve California’s economic crisis and all the jingles in the world won’t hide her endorsements of Barbara Boxer and Al Gore or her opposition to across-the-board tax cuts."… Read More

This weekend themembers of the California Republican Assembly, the state’s premier conservative grassroots GOP organization, will meet in Orange County for their annual convention. At this event, the CRA will consider making endorsements in Republican statewide primaries.

Below is a letter that was sent out to CRA convention delegates from well-respected former State Legislators and former CRA State President Dick Mountjoy — urging delegates to support an endorsement of Steve Poizner.

From what we hear, it will either be a Poizner endorsement or none at all — Whitman’s not in the hunt to gain support from this key group. But she’s making a play to try tstop Poizner from getting the required and tough 2/3rds vote. Both Poizner and Whitman are speaking at the event.

It is worthy of note that Poizner was endorsement by the CRA in his successful 2006 bid for Insurance Commissioner.

The Mountjoy Letter…

CRA Delegates: … Read More

Our modifications to the main page have met with some technical difficulties in publishing up today’s news links on the main page, and some functionality of the blog scan feature relative to the new main page tool. We are working on resolving the issues.… Read More

The main page will be up a little late today as we’ve been working with our development team on a widening of the main page. This minor change on the main page will allow us to feature more content there. We’ll write more about the changes, but you can check them out now.… Read More

You are probably going to have to look pretty far to find a Republican in the Capitol (well, with the exception of Abel "I’ll vote for anything to get confirmed" Maldonado, who is going to sign up for the latest proposal from newly minted Assembly Speaker John Perez to have the legislature pass budgets by majority vote.

Don’t get me wrong, from a philosophical perspective, it makes sense. Let the Democrats own the budget, and get out of this terrible system where Republicans are plied into voting for what is typically a terrible spending plan for California.

That said, the practical reality is that Republicans have very little leverage in the Capitol as it is, and the Democrats are doing such a, frankly, horrific job on the public policy front, that it would be almost criminal to give them even more unfettered and unchecked authority in the building.

In addition, I certainly didn’t hear Perez offering up anything concrete as a "trade off" as he asks his Republican colleagues to turn into Cheese-Eating Surrender… Read More