April 26, 2004
California Political News and Views
published by Stephen Frank
stephenfrank@sbcglobal.net

Bumper sticker of the week:  KERRY: MAN OF MANY MANSIONS

Please feel free to forward this newsletter to your friends. They can
subscribe directly by sending an email to stephenfrank@sbcglobal.net


Major news story--- The Mayor of San Francisco knowingly violates the law
over 4,000 times and says "sue me".  Now a San Francisco member of the State
Assembly, Mark Leno, (while not related to Jay Leno, his legislation is as funny
as Jays' monologues) wants the legislature to allow same sex marriage. I guess
he never heard  Prop. 22, passed by the voters of California, overwhelmingly. 
The people said marriage is between a man a woman, period.  That is the law
in California.  Yet, San Francisco Democrats appear to be lawless
politicans...anything goes if they want it.  Some might call them hedonistic politicians,
but then they are from San Francisco.

On Tuesday Leno got an Assembly committee to pass his bill to violate Prop.
22.  What part of democracy don't the Democrats like--the fact people control
government?

Now is the time to write to Governor Schwarzenegger, asking him to uphold the
law and announce he would veto this bill.  Why should tax dollars be spent on
a bill that violates the voters decision?  The Governor made it clear during
the Recall he believes that marriage is between a man and a woman, only.  I
believe he was sincere and truthful, and I support his statement.  Now, lets
stop the lawlessness of San Francisco before it spreads even further.

A Boost For Gay Marriage In The State www.sacbee.com/content/politics/story/8990491p-9916630c.html

Four years after California voters approved a measure restricting marriage to
a man and a woman, an Assembly panel Tuesday endorsed a bill that would
legalize same-sex unions. "Never in the history of this country has this issue
moved forward through a legislative policy committee and passed out successfully,"
Assemblyman Mark Leno said after his measure cleared the Judiciary Committee.
Despite the 8-3 vote along party lines - with Democrats in favor and
Republicans opposed - AB 1967 faces substantial political hurdles this election year.

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Karen Hughes the first conservative/Republican speaker entirely brought and
paid for by UCSB Arts & Lectures in at least the last four years at UC Santa
Barbara. She will be speaking on Sunday April 25 at 3:00pm at Campbell Hall.
Hughes wrote the recently published "Lessons Learned in the White House" General Public $10 / UCSB students $8

Charge tickets by phone: (805) 893-3535 / www.artsandlectures.ucsb.edu or
email:
a&l-info@sa.ucsb.edu

If you are in the neighborhood, try to see it.  The great news is that UCSB
College Republicans are strong on this campus and very active.  Throughout
California they are growing and getting more successful each semester.  They just
held a widely successful state convention at UCLA, received lots of publicity
and exposed the UCLA administration as toadies of the Left and censors of free
speech

Thanks to Nick Romero for sending me the info at the Karen Hughes event.  If
you are nearby, show your support.

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DON'T FORGET-- DEFEAT BOXER!!!  Go to www.jonesforcalifornia.com and sign up
to give California a Senator who represents all of us.  Also, show Boxer that
the grass roots for a Republican counts as much as liberal/radicals do for
Howard Dean.  Go to the web site and donate what you can, $5, $10, $25 or $50 to
Bill Jones for Senate.  Send a message, the Boxer vote on the Laci and Connor
Bill will not be forgotten!  Go to www.jonesforcalifornia.com and donate what
you can afford.


Table of Contents

1)  Car Pool lines used to frustrate drivers, not help them
2)  Political Tidbits
3)  Unions stop Wal Mart--create higher costs for poor, loss of jobs
4)  Tax dollars for campaigns, not schools, liberal dream!
5)  Why do liberals want to keep poor and minorities uneducated?
6)  Educators lie about drop out rate--CYA in action
7)  Time to protect our voting rights.  Democrat Shelley allowed uncertified
systems
8)  Government releases criminals--they commit violent crimes--no surprise
9)  Another Gray Davis/union bought bill declared unconstitutional
10) Liberals: stop terrorism by stopping new housing for poor and middle class


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POLL FOR THE WEEK:

Question for this week:

SHOULD THE LEGISLATURE VIOLATE PROP. 22 AND ALLOW SAME SEX MARRIAGES IN
CALIFORNIA?

Yes or No answer to stephenfrank@sbcglobal.net   Please pass this poll to
your entire email list.  Thanks.

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1)  Using our gas tax money for social engineering.  The ghost of Adrianna
Gianturco and Jerry Brown must be in Sacramento.

Car-Pool Puttering www2.ocregister.com/ocrweb/ocr/article.do?id=91097

Just in case you still entertained the slightest notion that car-pool lanes
in California were intended to facilitate the smooth flow of traffic rather
than bully people into state-approved behavior, a bill making its way through the
state Legislature should disabuse you of that idea. It would allow hybrid
vehicles that get at least 45 miles to the gallon to use the car-pool lanes even
if they have but a single passenger. That makes the motivation clear.


2) Political Tidbits

A.  State Loses Suit, While Counties Lose Funding

http://www.dailybulletin.com/Stories/0,1413,203~23127~2093451,00.html

San Diego County's charge that the state mandated social services without
giving the county enough money to pay for it is correct, the courts have ruled.
And because of that, all other counties face a loss of funding unless the state
acts to prevent it. Clearly, that's what the state should do, and Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger is working to fix the problem. But the whole issue says much
about California's tangled, dysfunctional lines of responsibility for providing
and paying for public services.

B. Unions win, taxpayers and poor lose.

State Workers Will Keep All Holidays http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/story/9018543p-9944481c.html

Legislation to reduce the number of paid holidays for California's 200,000
state workers has died in an Assembly committee. AB 2460 would have reduced the
state's 14 paid holidays to 12. Each state department and agency would have
decided for itself which two to cut. The Assembly Public Employees, Retirement
and Social Security Committee rejected the bill by an 8-1 vote Wednesday.
Assemblyman John Campbell, an Irvine Republican who proposed AB 2460, touted the
bill as a way to improve service to the public and save more than $20 million in
overtime pay for staffing essential health and safety programs on holidays.

C. UC's Ill-Advised Raises http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/04/23/EDGKS68PH41.DTL

Talk about insensitivity. At exactly the moment that the University of
California is raising fees and turning away qualified freshmen, it is also
substantially raising the salaries of some top officials. Incoming UC San Diego
Chancellor Marye Ann Fox will earn $350,000, some $70,000 more than her predecessor.
In February, new UC Provost Marci Greenwood received a raise of $111,000 more
than her previous salary as chancellor of UC Santa Cruz. In June, UC Senior
Vice President Joseph Mullinix received a $78, 000 raise after he received
another job.

D. More Democrat corruption (they should work in the UN): 

Fund-Raising Complaints Filed Against Machado http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/story/9003913p-9929888c.html

State Sen. Mike Machado was accused in a civil lawsuit filed Wednesday of
violating state campaign finance laws in soliciting more than $1 million for a
4-year-old campaign account. The San Joaquin County Democrat used his old
campaign account to solicit larger donations than allowable under limits set by
Proposition 34, adopted by voters in November 2000, the suit claims. The
Sacramento Superior Court action and a related complaint to the state Fair Political
Practices Commission seek to alter Machado's fund-raising practices and to force
refunds of any illegal contributions.


3) Politicians are afraid to allow citizens the freedom of choice in
stores--yet same politicos don't mind giving woman right to abort their babies. 
Lesson:  Woman are smart enough for an abortion, but not smart enough to know where
to buy a loaf of bread.

S.F. Taking Steps To Lock Out Wal-Mart http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/04/20/BAG8N67NRE1.DTL

Retail giants such as Wal-Mart would be banned from San Francisco under
legislation to protect smaller stores considered by a Board of Supervisors
committee Monday. "Wal-Mart and those other large retailers have been making a very
aggressive push into the Bay Area. It threatens existing jobs and small,
neighborhood-serving businesses," said Supervisor Tom Ammiano, who co- sponsored the
ordinance with board members Bevan Dufty and Matt Gonzalez. "We need a higher
level of scrutiny of projects whose consequences would be this severe."

From Roger Hedgecock:

WAL-MART FACTS from the current edition of the Economist:

**8 out of 10 American households shop at Wal-Mart at least once a year

**Wal-Marts impact on the U.S. economy is so great that it has
single-handedly kept inflation in check. Driven down the inflation rate.

**Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in Mexico.

**Wal-Mart hires 600,000 people a year.

**At the monthly Wal-Mart real estate meeting in Bentonville, Arkansas the
firm approves more than a billion dollars worth of land purchases (every month)

**Wal-Mart has trouble in Germany in some part because Wal-Mart folks refuse
to learn to speak German.

**At any given moment Wal-Mart faces about 8,000 lawsuits.


4)  Take money from school and health care, less money for roads and public
safety--give the money to politicians to run for office instead.  This bill in
Sacramento is moving!  Beware.

Toward Cleaner Elections http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/04/20/EDGTO66II11.DTL

There may be no way to keep the influence of special-interest money out of
politics, but there are plenty of better ways than the dialing-for- dollars
democracy that rules the day in Sacramento. Assemblywoman Loni Hancock,
D-Berkeley, has proposed a system of public financing modeled after Maine and Arizona.
Under Hancock's AB2949, candidates who can establish their viability by raising
a certain threshold of $5 contributions from registered voters-- 500 such
donations for an Assembly candidate -- would be entitled to public financing. Her
bill faces a key vote today in the Assembly Elections Committee.


5) Liberals destroy educational opportunities for minority children...put
them into bad government schools.  In Washington, D.C., the parents are getting
out!  Why can't California parents also get good education for their children?

One Verdict on Vouchers
Washington Post   April 21, 2004 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29231-2004Apr20.html

DURING THE SCHOOL voucher debate in the District, critics often contended
that residents opposed the idea. Now there is evidence that the critics got it
wrong. Last week D.C. Parents for School Choice, a group that worked hard for
passage of the new publicly funded scholarship program, provided the Washington
Scholarship Fund with names of more than 1,400 families representing 3,000
students who are interested in the voucher program. If ever there was evidence of
a demand among parents for educational options, this is it.

The Washington Scholarship Fund, which administers the congressionally
approved scholarship program, will still have to work out the details, including
identifying parents and students eligible to receive as much as $7,500 a year in
tuition, fees and transportation costs to attend private or parochial schools
in the city. But parental interest is not at issue.

Even before D.C. Parents for School Choice delivered names to the scholarship
fund, it was plain that parents in the nation's capital were looking for
alternatives to the troubled D.C. public schools. It is no accident that more than
13,000 children have abandoned the regular public schools for public charter
schools, or that the District, with 37 public charter schools, is among the
leaders of the nationwide charter-school movement. Parents are looking for
something other than a public school system plagued by cost overruns, mismanaged
payrolls, and an administration incapable of purchasing enough toilet paper and
books. This fall, hundreds more low-income District students, armed with
federally funded vouchers, will search for another educational home. For that
exodus, the school board -- and D.C. Council members who voted yesterday to
preserve the discredited status quo in school governance -- can thank themselves.


6)  Educators may need ethics classes.  They refuse to tell the taxpayers and
parents the truth about our schools and the billions they appear to waste.

Public Schools Hiding Actual Dropout Counts http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~24781~2101643,00.html

The California Department of Education will shortly release its latest high
school dropout rates. It will do so with as little fanfare as possible, keeping
even the release date a secret, because even the people who compile these
phony numbers no longer bother to defend them. Until 1998, the CDE, in its annual
dropout press release, trumpeted a dropout rate that was derived from totally
unaudited reports from its districts. School district administrators,
reassured that nobody would double-check anything, simply assumed that students who
disappeared from class without an explanation had transferred elsewhere.


7) Has the time come to end the use of computer voting?  Shouldn't we have a
paper trail, at a minimum?  Why has Democrat Secretary of State Shelley
allowed uncertified voting machines.  Why has Democrat Bill Lockyer not used his
offic to stop this?  Why do Democrats like voting problems?

Voting panel recommends that California stop using touch-screen machines http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/04/22/politics1
656EDT0700.DTL

California should ban the use of 15,000 touch-screen voting machines in the
November election because the equipment malfunctioned in last month's primary,
an advisory panel said Thursday. The state Voting Systems and Procedures Panel
said that the machines made by Diebold Election Systems did not perform well
last month.... The panel cited a litany of other problems, including fears
that the systems are vulnerable to security breaches. The 8-0 recommendation
affects machines only in San Diego, Solano, Kern and San Joaquin counties. If
Secretary of State Kevin Shelley goes along with the recommendation, those
counties will have to revert to paper ballots.... Mark Radke, Diebold's marketing
director, said the company disagrees with the recommendation and plans to outline
its objections to Shelley, who has until April 30 to make a decision....


8)  Why Three Strikes are needed.  We need to keep career criminals inside
prisons, not on the streets.  Los Angeles have proved this point. 

L.A's In-And-Out Jails http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200%7E20954%7E2102181,00.html

At least 73 inmates released early this year from the Los Angeles County Jail
have been rearrested within weeks, in some cases days, on new charges as
serious as kidnapping and assault with a deadly weapon, according to an LAPD audit
obtained by the Daily News. The three-month Los Angeles Police Department
audit completed April 1 has fueled criticism of the controversial Sheriff's
Department program under which up to 400 inmates are being released from jail after
serving only a fraction of their sentences.


9)  Another baby step in returning sanity to the business climate in
California.  For years unions have been using tax dollars to fight business, now
businesses can do the same.  The better policy is to allow no one to use tax
dollars or government policy to interfere with contracts between businesses and
unions.

Labor Loses Battle In Appeals Court http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/04/22/BUGQ368ODM1.DTL

A California law prohibiting employers from using state funds for anti-union
activity violates federal labor law, a federal appeals court has ruled, in a
victory for business groups. The law "alters the balance of forces in the union
organizing process, interfering directly with a process protected by the
(National Labor Relations Act),'' the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San
Francisco said Tuesday. The union-sponsored law was signed in 2000 by then-Gov.
Gray Davis, who had vetoed an earlier version in 1999.


10) Liberal hypocrisy:  Senator Sheila Kuehl wants to stop terrorism.  Good! 
How?  By stopping the building of homes for the poor and middle class.  She
is the cause of high housing costs, prefers rich to poor.

Slow Growth To Fight Terrorism? http://www2.ocregister.com/ocrweb/ocr/article.do?id=91401 

Opponents of development and property rights are nothing if not clever. Their
latest plan to slow growth in Southern California - and thereby shut tens of
thousands of moderate income people out of the housing market - is being sold
as a means to help assure the nation's military preparedness. Today, the
California Senate is expected to hold hearings on SB 1462, which would create the
innocuous-sounding Southern California Military Greenway Commission. The idea
is to "consider the impact of new growth on military readiness activities
carried out on military bases, installations, and operating and training areas" as
well as land adjacent to military installations as well as air space and
training routes, according to the bill language.


Dear Kings County American Legion,
>
> As some of you may know, one of my sons serves in the military. He
>is now stateside, here in California. He called me yesterday to let me know
>how warm and Welcoming people were to him, and his troops, everywhere he
>goes. Telling me how people shake their hands, and thank them for being
>willing to serve, and fight, for not only our own freedoms, but so that
>others may have them also.
>
> But he also told me about an incident in the grocery store he
>stopped at yesterday while in uniform, on his way home from the base. He
>said that ahead of several people in front of him stood a woman dressed in
>a burkha.
>
> He said when she got to the cashier she loudly remarked about the
>US flag lapel pin the cashier wore on her smock. The cashier reached up
>and touched the pin, and said "Yes, I always wear it".
>
> The woman in the burkha then asked the cashier when she was going to
>stop bombing her countrymen, explaining that she was Iraqi.
>
> A gentleman standing behind my son stepped forward, putting his arm
>around my son's shoulders, and nodding towards my son, said in a calm and
>gentle voice to the Iraqi woman: "Lady, hundreds of thousands of men and
>women like this young man have fought and died so that you could stand
>here, in MY country and accuse a check-out cashier of bombing your
>countrymen. It is my belief that had you been this outspoken in YOUR OWN
>country we wouldn't need to be there today. But, hey? if you have now
>learned how to speak out so loudly and clearly I'll gladly pay your way
>back to Iraq so you can straighten out the mess you are obviously here to
>avoid."
>
> Everyone in line, and within hearing distance, cheered the older
>gentleman, coming forward as they reached for their wallets. The woman in
>the burkha left the store in silence!
>
> One Nation, UNDER GOD, Indivisible
>
> PERIOD!!!!