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In The News
The Republican Liberty Caucus of California is dedicated to bringing our message to the public and keeping activists informed. We will work to make the text of our press releases and relevant news articles available to the public from our website. Keep checking back here for the most current information.
California State of Mind
August 31st, 2008
George Will
If John McCain becomes president, he will be confronted by a Congress with significantly larger Democratic majorities than today's -- majorities furious about high hopes dashed by an eighth Republican victory in 11 presidential elections. And if the normal pattern of off-year elections obtains in 2010, those majorities will expand.

So McCain would have to deal with a hostile legislature for four years, as Arnold Schwarzenegger has done for almost five years. For that reason, and because these two self-styled post-partisan, reach-across-the-aisle mavericks admire one another -- McCain has given Schwarzenegger a starring role Monday at the Republican convention -- it is pertinent to survey Schwarzenegger's governorship of one-eighth of America's population.
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Republican Central Committee Members Battle Among Themselves Over Seats
August 30th, 2008
The Alameda County Constitutional Republicans, many of whom are members of the RLC, recently won a number of seats on the County GOP Central Committee. Some people were unhappy about this, including the Central Committee Chairman, and decided to immediately sue the pro-liberty group.
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Food Apartheid: Banning Fast Food in Poor Neighborhoods
July 31st, 2008
The war on fat has just crossed a major red line. The Los Angeles City Council has passed an ordinance prohibiting construction of new fast-food restaurants in a 32-square-mile area inhabited by 500,000 low-income people.

We're not talking anymore about preaching diet and exercise, disclosing calorie counts, or restricting sodas in schools. We're talking about banning the sale of food to adults. Treating French fries like cigarettes or liquor. I didn't think this would happen in the United States anytime soon. I was wrong.

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San Diego is State’s Number One “Nanny City,” According to Magazine
July 30th, 2008
San Diego is the worst "nanny city" in California, according to a survey in a leading libertarian journal.

The August/September issue of Reason magazine, which promotes "free minds and free markets," rated San Diego as the sixth-worst of 35 large U.S. cities ---- worse than Los Angeles; Portland, Ore.; and even San Francisco, considered by many limited-government advocates to be the most overweening city of all.

The survey focused on personal freedoms such as gun rights, and enforcement of laws relating to traffic, alcohol, marijuana and prostitution, rather than taxation or broader business regulations. Forbes magazine and others have already published numerous studies on the varying costs of doing business, Radley Balko, the magazine's senior editor, said in an interview Wednesday.
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New Report Attempts to Tally California’s Cost of Remediation
July 30th, 2008
A new report from the libertarian-leaning Pacific Research Institute attempts to calculate the total costs Californians bear as a result of students who graduate from high school unprepared for college.
The report, scheduled for release today, estimates that each wave of freshmen entering California’s public colleges in need of remediation annually costs the state at least $3.9-billion, and perhaps as much as $13.9-billion or more.

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“Give Me Trans Fat or Give Me Death”
July 30th, 2008
Readers are taking the ban on cooking with trans fats in California restaurants surprisingly seriously, viewing the measure as an infringement upon our basic civil liberties.
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Now Playing at Reason.tv: Raiding California—Drew Carey on Medical Marijuana and Minors
June 15th, 2008
Should medical marijuana be kept from minors at all costs? Why is it that pharmacists can dispense amphetamines without getting busted, but legal operators who dispense medical marijuana face prison time? Why do armed federal agents persist in raiding California?
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Lifelong Republican finds himself unlikely hero of gay rights activists
May 22nd, 2008
California Chief Justice Ronald George could have taken the easy road in the legal conflict over gay marriage.

But as a crowd gathered outside the state Supreme Court's headquarters last Thursday morning, anxiously awaiting a ruling on the fate of same-sex marriage, George had already decided that the time was ripe for his court to make the hard decision and rewrite California's civil rights landscape.

When the clock struck 10 a.m. and the Supreme Court released its decision, George knew his court had made history.
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Same-Sex Marriage and Racial Justice Find Common Ground
May 17th, 2008
Not long into the oral argument before the California Supreme Court in March over whether gay and lesbian couples have a constitutional right to marry, Chief Justice Ronald M. George showed his hand.

Three times he quoted from the court’s 1948 decision in Perez v. Sharp that struck down a state ban on interracial marriage, a high point in the history of a prestigious and influential court.

“The essence of the right to marry is freedom to join in marriage with the person of one’s choice,” Chief Justice George said, quoting Perez.
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Same-sex marriage is no threat to society
May 17th, 2008
I keep thinking that if same-sex marriage posed such a threat, why isn't it clear to me or millions of others? We understand other obvious threats, such as disease or armed robbers or sour milk.

If gay marriage is so inherently threatening to society, and if we're telling the truth when we say we want to preserve that social order, why isn't the gay-marriage "threat" obvious? I grew up in the church; how come gay marriage doesn't threaten me?

Because it isn't a threat.
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California Focus: Tax man grabs jocks, and more
February 23rd, 2007
Duane Hoffman is a tax auditor who tracks professional athletes, and specifically their "duty days" in California. The state then shakes them down for state taxes at the same high rates as residents. According to a report in the Sacramento Bee, this brings in some $100 million annually, including $163,000 from a three-day trip by the New York Knicks and $106,000 from the 2006 California sojourn of Yankee infielder Alex Rodriguez. As we noted when we first covered this story in 2004, this confiscatory activity is not limited to athletes.

The tax also applies to a blues singer from Chicago, a home-care nurse from Nevada, and a novelist from Montana. According to the Los Angeles Times, an out-of-state salesman earning $50,000 a year, about $200 a day, would owe 9.3 percent of that, $18.60 a day, to California. Such people are not as easy to track as Shaquille O'Neal and other professional athletes, whose stellar salaries, usually public knowledge, make them an easy target for the "jock tax" that actually applies to everyone. Like all taxes, it has consequences.

Because other states retaliate, California's money grab is really a kind of zero-sum game. The Bee's report also notes that high taxes make contracts with California teams worth less money, and that state tax laws are now a factor in contract negotiations. It may not come out in the sports pages, but athletes have solid fiscal grounds for wanting to work elsewhere. So does everybody else, and many are doing so.
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Advocacy group’s suit calls on U.S. to acknowledge pot’s medicinal value
February 22nd, 2007
A patient advocacy group sued the federal government Wednesday to try to force U.S. health agencies to acknowledge that marijuana has merit as a medicine.

The lawsuit by Americans for Safe Access follows a two-year effort to reverse what it calls a "misinformation campaign" by U.S. health agencies.

Americans for Safe Access is suing under the Data Quality Act, a little-known statute that lets citizens challenge the accuracy of government-disseminated information.

The Oakland-based group filed a petition in October 2004 asking the United States to reverse its staunch opposition to pot as medicine. After months of delays, the government rejected the petition.
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Lawmaker drops bill to give LAUSD board hefty raises
February 22nd, 2007
A California lawmaker who proposed legislation that would have given Los Angeles Unified school board members six-figure salaries said Wednesday that he is abandoning the proposal.

Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally, D-Compton, said he now believes voters should determine board members' pay and that he plans to withdraw his legislation.

The move, which became public earlier this week and drew widespread criticism, would have allowed boards overseeing 500,000 students or more to become full-time employees and vote themselves hefty pay hikes.

LAUSD board members - currently part time with salaries of $24,000 a year - would have seen raises of 600 percent, to $171,000 a year.
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Promises give way at first sight of bond money
February 22nd, 2007
As California voters last year considered Proposition 1B, the $20 billion transportation bond sponsored by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature, they were told that the money would be distributed through normal channels -- not earmarked by politicians eager to bring home the bacon without regard to the greater transportation needs of the state.

At the same time, however, the governor and legislative leaders promised voters in every part of the state that they would benefit if the bond passed. As they campaigned, the leaders distributed lists of specific highway projects they said would get money from the bond, easing congestion and shortening commutes.

But those two sets of promises were in conflict. The politicians could not guarantee that any project would be built if they were really going to let the professionals in the state bureaucracy hand out the money. Now we are seeing the results of that contradiction.
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California prison drug treatment called waste of money
February 22nd, 2007
California's $1-billion investment in drug treatment for prisoners since 1989 has been "a complete waste of money," the state's inspector general said Wednesday, and has done nothing to reduce the number of inmates cycling in and out of custody.

One study of the two largest in-prison programs found that recidivism rates for inmates who participated were actually a bit higher than those of a group of convicts who did not receive treatment, Inspector General Matt Cate said.

He said corrections officials were told in more than 20 reports since 1997 that the programs were failing but did nothing to fix them, choosing instead to expand them and fund more studies of their results.
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