Kids do it when they’re in trouble. Husbands do it when they want to watch a game instead of doing chores. Dogs do it when they bring you a toy after they’ve had an “accident.” Even army generals do it when they want to disguise their retreat or find a devious way to win. And, according to Machiavelli, so do politicians.

That’s what is happening with the California Forward budget reform proposals introduced by Democrat legislative leaders – they are a distraction to facilitate deception.

Maybe we should call the proposal a diversion – a game or smokescreen – instead of reform. The real goal of this effort is to allow Democrats to raise taxes with a majority vote and eliminate the power Republicans have to stop their overspending.

The proposed “reforms” are riddled with loopholes that will render them useless, but the major hole in budget policy – the reduced vote count to raise taxes – will allow Democrats to carry on with their drunken spending barrier free–despite what voters have said they want in every poll taken since Proposition 13 was passed in 1978.

The Santa Barbara County Taxpayers Association is opposed to AB 1604 by Assemblymember Pedro Nava (D-Santa Barbara) not just because it creates a whole new tax that will cause a larger drag on our economy, which is already struggling to recover.

We also oppose the deliberately misleading tactics being used to promote the oil severance tax. Assemblyman Nava and his supporters like to say that California is the only oil-producing state without a severance tax. This is true on its face, but is misleading.

California taxes oil producers in ways other states do not. For example, we have the highest corporate income tax in the country. Texas, Nevada and others have none. California charges a sales tax on the purchase of the expensive manufacturing equipment used in oil production. Most states do not.

California is already taxing oil producers at a high rate. The addition of the AB 1604 severance tax would give California yet another area where it has the highest taxes of all.

Recent revelations concerning the
fall of Lehman Bros. and other financial shenanigans have revealed the fun side
of accounting – fun, that is, as long as you don’t get too hung up about
honesty and the ethics of ripping off other people’s money ("OPM").   The staggeringly huge Lehman
bankruptcy, the biggest in the history of American business failures, recently
produced a 2,200 page report and related documents released by Anton Valukas,
the court-appointed examiner charged by Bankruptcy Judge James M. Peck, to
figure out just what happened. 
Judge Peck said Valukas’ report read "like a best-seller."  Here’s the short version.

So let’s say you have decided to
take advantage of today’s historic lows in home loan rates and refinance your
home – before interest rates start going up, perhaps later in the year.  You owe a lot of money on your credit
cards (having not learned that paying for those lavish dinners and weekend
getaways with plastic and then paying the minimum on your monthly bill is just
a dumb trap).  You also have those
student loans to the tune of umpety-ump thousand dollars and a nagging
obligation to support wife #1, even though you are on to the greener pastures
of wife #2, who spends your money like it is water.  It is obvious that if you listed all these debts, nobody in
their right mind would re-fi your house. 
What to do? What to do?

While she’s anything but an unbiased source, Janice Hahn makes a good point in her effort to have the state’s election cops shackle Gavin Newsom’s fund-raising efforts in the Democratic race for lieutenant governor.

The Los Angeles councilwoman and her attorneys have filed a complaint with the Fair Political Practices Commission, arguing that Newsom shouldn’t be allowed to accept money from anyone who gave him more than $6,500, the contribution limit for the LG race, during his aborted run for governor.

By collecting big contributions for his run for governor, spending the cash before dropping out and then raising new money from the same people to finance a run for lieutenant governor, Newsom “has flouted state (campaign finance) law in an unprecedented manner,” Hahn’s FPPC filing said.

The stakes are huge for both Newsom and Hahn, even if the power of the LG’s office isn’t. Since the contribution limit for the governor’s race is $25,900 and Newsom collected more than $2.3 million from a whole bunch of donors before waving the white flag, the San Francisco mayor has lots of deep-pocketed friends who could find themselves maxed out on contributions before the LG race even gets started.

Recently, Allan Zaremberg penned
a piece for Fox & Hounds announcing the launch of a new website, CalChamber2010.com, for the upcoming
gubernatorial election.

I think the one thing that struck me most about this site,
which any true politico should visit regardless of political stripe, was the
way that the site presents a depth of information in a highly organized and
approachable way. (Full disclosure: one
of my partners in Fox & Hounds, Bryan Merica, heads up the digital creative
shop that built the Chamber’s 2010 site.)

In particular, there are two really original features that I
haven’t seen anywhere else. Both of these features (Video Vault and
Head-to-Head comparison) can be accessed using the Chamber’s "widget" posted
below:

When I wanted to try out a restaurant or a store or hotel that’s new to me, I’d first go online to check out the reviews by patrons.

I wrote that in past tense for a reason: I don’t do that too much anymore. I grew too suspicious of supposed critiques by supposed customers.

You’ve probably noticed that many online reviews fall into one of two categories. Using restaurant reviews as an example, there are the flowery critics (“This breathtaking restaurant is amazingly superb in every imaginable way!”) and there are the snarky ones (“Expensive mush served by resentful dropouts in a hard-to-find place with sticky floors.”).

Reviews in the first category apparently are ginned up by restaurant owners or their mothers or their bankers. Those in the second apparently are written by competitors or ticked-off ex-employees.

Momentum, thy name is Meg Whitman. The newly released Field Poll caps an extraordinary surge in energy for the Republican gubernatorial candidate in less than one week.

Just a week ago, Whitman was being excoriated by the media for holding a press availability and then would not talk to the press. Questions were asked whether she could handle the heat of a political campaign and the knock-about, unscripted situations that test one’s mettle during a campaign.

She quickly turned those doubts around with two steady performances in front of the media microphones at the state Republican convention and topped it off with a confident turn at the Monday debate with Republican gubernatorial rival, Steve Poizner.

Now the Field Poll finds Whitman pulling away and trouncing Poizner by 63% to 14%. For good measure, the poll revealed for the first time Whitman was ahead of Democratic gubernatorial opponent, Jerry Brown, 46% to 43%.

Could there be a small break in the dam protecting records of California’s former governors?

Maybe. Last month, I received notice that former (and perhaps future) Gov. Jerry Brown had granted me a waiver from state laws that permit him and other former governors to restrict access to their papers for 50 years or until their death, whichever is later.

The waiver applies only to me, however, and not the public at large. (Peter Scheer of the California First Amendment Coalition told me that he received a similar waiver). The terrible 50-year restriction – part of a state law that effectively gives governors personal control over public papers – remains in place.

In an email, Zackery Morazzini, senior deputy attorney general, said my request for access was “only recently brought to the attention of the former Governor.”

What’s strange about that is that I filed the request in August of last year, and wrote about my request in the LA Times last November.

EDD released its “benchmarking” of 2009 payroll employment recently, and the results were dramatic. The monthly payroll surveys had indicated that payroll jobs declined during 2009 by 579,836 jobs. However, a fuller review of payroll data by EDD indicated the true job loss was 818,400 jobs—an additional 338,000 jobs lost. .

Taking this recent information, the chart below shows the payroll job numbers in California by sector in December 2006 and in December 2009—a period in which the state payroll jobs decreased by 1,400,000 jobs.