Posted 9:11 PM by Gerald Klaas
Exclusive from the Drudge Report:

18:01 ET: JACK KEMP THINKING OF RUN FOR CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR /// Kemp has property in Fillmore, CA and looking into residence, sources tell DRUDGE... 'Feels he could be a consensus candidate,' top source says... wires, newspapers, networks chasing.... MORE... KEMP: Los Angeles native, former Vice Presidential candidate (Dole) in 1996....former Secretary of HUD for Bush 41....Congressman from Buffalo New York, engineered big Reagan early 80's tax cut...

Very interesting development. Gray Davis may get a run for his money yet.

Posted 9:33 PM by Gerald Klaas
I couldn't have said it better myself, thank you David P. Shreiner for your opinion piece 'Democracy:' It's a threat to our republic.

Posted 11:09 PM by Gerald Klaas
Bravo to Allen Hacker for today's quotable quote. While discussing the compromised Constitutionalist position being taken in a specific WorldNetDaily article (all due respect to Joseph Farah), Allen says:

Constitutions don't contain laws about specific crimes, and they don't restrict citizens, they restrict governments.

Thanks for sharing your ever so consistent logic with us, Allen.
- G.

Posted 10:59 PM by Gerald Klaas
Dan Walters is a columnist for the Sacramento Bee who writes about California politics. In my opinion, he's generally right on the money. Today, Dan Walters writes about the hypocrisy of California democratic legislators claiming that supermajority requirements for tax increases is undemocratic. Meanwhile they accept supermajorities in other areas. One area that Dan missed is the three-fourths majority of states ratifying Constitutional amendments.

Posted 8:01 AM by Gerald Klaas
Even though Doug has already agreed to stop pirating music, I thought I'd point to this article that was published (in syndication) in today's Sacramento Bee about how copyright violation is a Constitutional violation. There isn't much leeway here, we need to be as clear on this issue as we are on taxes, states' rights, gun ownership, the right to petition, and ALL the rest of our founding documents.

Posted 7:16 AM by Gerald Klaas
Proposition 98 was passed by California voters in 1988. Like most California propositions, I voted against it. (It was later amended by Prop. 111) Prop 98 was the beginning of the spending orgy Californians approved during the economic good times of the 1990's. This was one of those propositions that should never have made it to the ballot. Californians, if they even vote, tend to not read their voter pamphlets and instead rely on what is presented in the 30 second TV ads right before an election. Sad but true. This proposition was so complicated, I'm sure that 80% of the people voting for it had no idea what it meant, they just knew the TV said schools would get "minimum funding". That sounds pretty good, unless you compare it year to year, and also take into account that it takes away the discretion that we invest in our legislature.

Today's local monopoly newspaper published another of my letters to the editor regarding a recent story on the public education bureaucrat's union being worried about Proposition 98.

The Association of California School Administrators is concerned about the integrity of Proposition 98, the 1988 ballot initiative that guaranteed what was touted as "minimum funding" to California schools.

I remember very clearly the advertisements proclaiming "minimum funding, that's not too much!" Of course, as all voters should do, I read the proposition word for word in my voter pamphlet, and found that "minimum funding" was code for what mathematicians call a "monotonic increasing sequence."

It doesn't take a course in advanced calculus to figure out that funding that never goes down in either pure numbers or percentages will eventually eat the entire budget (not just the 50 percent it currently consumes).

Proposition 98 was a bad idea then, it's a bad idea still. This is a great time to kill it.

Gerald Klaas, Sacramento