Love Stinks — At Least It Does For Skunks This Time of Year

(Editor’s Note: Recently, a subscriber mentioned that he had seen a surprisingly large number of dead skunks littering the highways from Sacramento to Santa Rosa. The chief correspondent of California’s Capitol said, he too had seen numerous largely two-dimensional skunks along Highway 152, Highway 156 Highway 101 and Highway 1 on a late January trip to Monterey as well as along Fair Oaks Blvd.    Read more »

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Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Moe…

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The Origin of the Name of One of California’s Oldest Cities

Founded in 1850, Antioch is one of California’s oldest cities. At the time though it was known as Smith‘s Landing after two of its first residents, Rev. Joseph H. Smith and his brother, W. W. Smith.

They initially homesteaded what was called New York Landing, roughly today’s Pittsburg, on 10 riverfront acres apiece given to them by the first American settler in the area, a Dr.    Read more »

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Ronald Reagan Offers His Views on Government and Politics

“Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.” “The government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: if it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it.”    Read more »

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This, Allegedly, From The Gipper…

Sitting down with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at a summit meeting, President Reagan supposedly told Gorbachev this:

Two guys are standing in line waiting for a couple of vodkas. Finally, one becomes exasperated and says, “This is ridiculous. I’m going to go and kill Gorbachev.”

The guy leaves and comes back 20 minutes later.    Read more »

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It May Cost More to Collect The Cell Phones Than Keep Them

(Editor’s Note: Refreshing to see in the Budget Letter that “ongoing device refresh” is still permissable. In the alliterative Reduction Instructions, is “sum” kind of like “add up?” And in the Exemption Request “Is shared resource pooling what regular folk think of as “sharing?”)

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After 14 Years, a Republican Is Back on the Senate Rostrum

The Democratic majority California State Senate has made history, of a sort.

When Senate President Pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg, a Sacramento Democrat, agreed to GOP Sen. Jean Fuller’s request to be one of the Senate’s presiding officers she became the first Republican to be allowed to do so in 14 years.    Read more »

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Everything Old is New Again Except Now Wrapped In Green

With a flurry of media advisories, a press kit and a press conference, the Democratic leaders of the Legislature introduced a package of four bills February 2 they said would create green jobs and boost the state’s economy.

The Clean Energy Jobs Initiative, as they called it, was touted as “a plan to jumpstart California’s clean energy business sector and spur job creation.”    Read more »

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Change in Accounting in Brown’s Budget Costs Public Schools

Public schools receive $1.5 billion less because of an accounting change employed by Gov. Jerry Brown in his January budget proposal, according to the Legislative Analyst.

In a January 31 briefing, the analyst chided the Brown administration for “not describing the new approach and its implications in its public budget documents” but said, “while imperfectly executed” the new method has “some merit.”    Read more »

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