Farewell To My Friends

I have spent a lot of time trying to think of what I would say to each of you in this, my last, Monday Morning Memorandum. God, and some gonzo lawyer, has put an end to this phase of my political career, and I personally don’t have the hardware or the training to send this out each week to the 30 or so thousand of you that receive this memo. So, I have to end this commentary, for the moment. If I can, I will resume it, but for the moment, this is the last of my comments to you.

14 years is a long time, and I have spent that time in Sacramento doing what I can to change the direction of California. For the moment, it appears that I have been unsuccessful, but I know that my duty has been done. I stood for what I believed was right. I expressed that belief at every occasion, and I fought the battles necessary. For that, I have earned great friends and a good life.

To my constituents in Western Riverside and Northern San Diego Counties, thank you. It has been a great honor in my life to be able to represent you. You invested a level of faith in my abilities. I only hope that I have justified the faith you had in me. To the others who have fought the good fight, I only hope that from time to time something I have said and done helps you continue the fight. Our country and our state are worth fighting for. The freedom our founding fathers secured with their blood, and each succeeding generation has preserved with theirs, is unique in this world, and it is our duty to pass it along to our children. No sacrifice is too great to ensure that we preserve that legacy. It would be a sad comment if our posterity were to look back at our time and said, “They ruined it for us.” It is our responsibility to ensure their futures.

There will always be those who say that compromise and peace are better than freedom. We will be exhorted to lay down our arms to “work together” with those who would expand their power at the expense of our freedom. That is the siren’s song. We cannot destroy our children’s future freedom on the shoals of a compromise to achieve a peace that increases the power of government. Diligence in the preservation of freedom requires a willingness to ignore the insults of those who counsel surrender to power. Our short term distress and unease will yield to the long term internal peace in the knowledge that we have done our duty for our children and grandchildren, that we have preserved this great republic for their enjoyment as our forbears preserved it for us.

The battle is never over. Even now, after this last election, some are telling us to give up, to “just get along” with those who have made it clear that their acquisition of power is more important than freedom for our children. My counsel is this: Never give up. This is just one short term setback in the return of a national and state government that recognizes its limits and its power. The next election is just two years away, but freedom sacrificed for short term peace may never be regained.

I don’t know what will happen to me. I do know that the cause for which I have fought these last 14 years is an important cause. It is the cause for which hundreds of thousands have fought and died throughout the entire history of our Republic. It is the cause of limited government, individual freedom, and family. It is the cause of freedom.

In my time in the Legislature, I have had the opportunity to cut your taxes, and the opportunity to participate in a small way in the historic recall of a Governor. I have had the opportunity to fight against every increase in the size of state government, and to fight for families and the children not yet born. I may not have succeeded in all my endeavors, but I have never turned from a fight. I never will, and I hope you don’t either.

Thank you.

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Let's do our part to thank veterans

http://www.dailybulletin.com/opinions/ci_4627233

11-09-06

All Americans owe a debt of gratitude to the men and women who have served in uniform. I feel strongly that we must do more to recognize the contributions of veterans and to express appreciation. On Veterans Day - and throughout the year - I would like to see Americans take the following steps to show our individual and collective thanks: Think about veterans. Take a moment to remember those who have served in the armed forces.

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School district devours classroom funding

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/op-ed/
editorial2/20061105-9999-mz1ed5bottom.html

11-06-06

One of the enduring mysteries of our public school system is why spending more money does almost nothing to better educate our children. The answers are troubling. For openers, California pours far too much money into the maw of school district bureaucracies. Consider San Diego Unified, which in 2001 spent 62.5 percent of its operating budget inside its classrooms. That's according to SchoolMatters, a neutral clearinghouse for federal data. This year the district's budget calls for just 53 percent. So a key measure of efficiency is in free-fall.


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World listens in online when Cal professor teaches physics

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/
c/a/2006/11/06/BAGCVM6PHC1.DTL

11-06-06

UC Berkeley physics Professor Richard A. Muller finds himself suddenly popular in some surprising corners of the world. It turns out self-starting students in 35 states and 43 countries have been watching the 90-minute "Physics for Future Presidents" talks he gives every Tuesday and Thursday morning to a packed lecture hall of 300 undergrads on campus. And the list is growing.

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Election could drive minimum-wage hike

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-minwage
9nov09,1,4304720.story?coll=la-headlines-
business

11-09-06

The first raise in the U.S. minimum wage in a decade has become a very likely possibility following Tuesday's Democratic election victories and passage of minimum-wage ballot measures in six states. President Bush suggested Wednesday that he would agree to a hike in the federal minimum, set at $5.15 an hour since 1997. This could restore a bit of California's competitive edge by making its recently passed minimum-wage hike less out of line with other states.

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Santa Ana is now nation's largest city with an all-Latino city council
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-
santaana9nov09,1,1362569.story?coll=la-
headlines-california

11-09-06

Santa Ana has already been anointed the most Spanish-speaking city in the United States. Now, it is the largest U.S. city with an all-Latino city council. On Tuesday, three Latino candidates won seats on the city's seven-member council, joining four other Latino incumbents. According to the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, no other city with a population over 300,000 holds that distinction.

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San Bernardino's bad luck underlies its crime wave

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-
sbmurders6nov06,1,1000463.story?coll=la-
headlines-california

11-06-06

As daylight faded in San Bernardino, Reggie Brown, 12, traced a familiar path on his red bike: from Home Avenue to the white house on Magnolia Street where his friend Anthony Ramirez, 11, lived before he was shot to death. One evening in June, nearly a dozen neighborhood kids were choosing teams for a pickup basketball game at nearby Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School when a 15-year-old aspiring gang member fired into the crowd, striking Anthony in the back.


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State ads blur lines of political influence

http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/71366.html

11-06-06

California's state auditor last week issued a scathing review of the practices of a commission created in 1998 when voters approved a tobacco tax increase to fund services for young children. The California Children and Families Commission, the auditors said, used shoddy practices and violated state law in awarding millions of dollars in contracts to private firms for public relations work to promote its causes. But these transgressions, serious as they are, were run-of-the-mill government malfeasance. The commission skirted bidding rules and failed to account properly for costs. These problems can be corrected with better controls and improved oversight. People who broke the law can be prosecuted.


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New York Plans to Make Gender Personal Choice

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/07/nyregion/07
gender.html?ei=5090&en=2586a6f49b530f49&ex=
1320555600&adxnnl=1&partner=rssuserland&emc
=rss&pagewanted=print&adxnnlx=1162953783-
nH7zdytSjxXLuNR7opwHNA

11-7-06

Separating anatomy from what it means to be a man or a woman, New York City is moving forward with a plan to let people alter the sex on their birth certificate even if they have not had sex-change surgery. Under the rule being considered by the city’s Board of Health, which is likely to be adopted soon, people born in the city would be able to change the documented sex on their birth certificates by providing affidavits from a doctor and a mental health professional laying out why their patients should be considered members of the opposite sex, and asserting that their proposed change would be permanent. Applicants would have to have changed their name and shown that they had lived in their adopted gender for at least two years, but there would be no explicit medical requirements.

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Full legislative text, analyses and votes are available on the State web server at:
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov

Assemblyman Haynes’ office can be reached at (951) 699-1113 in Temecula, California
or in the Capitol in Sacramento at (916) 319-2066

To subscribe to this Memorandum by e-mail, please send a request to:

Assemblymember.haynes@assembly.ca.gov

To Contact California State Senators:
http://www.sen.ca.gov/~newsen/senators/
senators.htp

To Contact California State Assemblymembers:
http://www.assembly.ca.gov/acs/
acsframeset7text.htm

From - the editor@ccnews.org - it has been a pleausre and joy to stand in the wing watching and assisting the Monday Morning Memorandum as a blog with real satisfaction. Assembyman Haynes, you have done an outstanding job and you are much appreciated by the people of California. We will not forget you. Instead we will pray for God's blessing of protection, direction and favor (pdf) over this next phase of your life. The best is yet to come! Thank you for your leadership and sacrifice as a public servant!

Fight For Freedom

FREEDOM COSTS

November 6, 2006

This is a call to action. For too long, we have been told to “vote our pocketbooks.” That sort of selfishness has left us with a selfish government. We can no longer vote “our pocketbook,” we must vote for our children’s political freedom.

For those who may wonder what they can do to vote for freedom, it is simple. We need to vote for smaller government, less taxes, property rights, and candidates who support these principles.

That’s it, and that has to become a moral imperative for those of us who believe in these principles.

Bonds grow government. Taxes grow government. Property rights shrink government, and shrink government taxes.

That is why the Governor’s opposition to Proposition 90 makes absolutely no sense.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I like Governor Schwarzenegger, and he is the better candidate by far. Even when I was criticizing him for growing state government too much, I still wanted him to be re-elected. The alternative would be disastrous. That desire, however, doesn’t mean that I abandon all common sense.

In his statement opposing Proposition 90, the Governor said that he believed “independent analysts” who said that Proposition 90 would lead to “higher taxes,” and that is why he is opposing the initiative. Of course in reality, his bonds are more likely to lead to higher taxes than Proposition 90, but even assuming that were not so, when have those in “government” been worried about increasing taxes? The independent analysts the Governor cited have openly and consistently advocated for greater taxes for welfare and other government programs. It appears that the only time they apparently worry about increased taxes is when the government is going to have to pay out money if it intrudes on individual freedom.

More important, the independent analysts are not all that independent. They work for government, and ignored the evidence brought to them that Proposition 90 will not cost any more money. Unfortunately, for these “independent analysts,” they sacrificed their independence to achieve a political goal, that is, the defeat of Proposition 90.

Even if the initiative would cost more money, the cost would be justifiable, since the major role of government is to protect our personal security and our individual freedom. Having said that, however, I don’t believe Proposition 90 will increase government costs one penny. What it will do is change the government’s behavior. Right now, government can trample on an individual’s property rights with impunity. Proposition 90 will hold those government officials accountable if they do so. That is fair and proper. To complain that a government agency may have to pay if that agency abuses a landowner is akin to arguing that it is unfair to require someone to pay for an accident they caused. It is nonsensical.

I don’t expect our elected officials to understand the nuances of protecting freedom, but it is fair to expect them to do all they can to protect individual freedom, not government prerogative. Unfortunately, the Governor chose government over the individual when choosing to oppose Proposition 90. The Sacramento establishment opposed 90, and the Governor chose not to fight that establishment.

We, however, can fight that establishment. We can choose freedom. We can choose property rights. We can choose to limit the power of government and to limit government prerogative when it interferes with our individual freedom. We can do that when we vote. Many Americans have fought and died to protect our freedom. We can honor their sacrifice and their legacy by choosing to exercise our vote to promote and protect freedom. Voting for freedom is not that great a sacrifice, but it can make all the difference in the world for the future we are creating for our children.


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Taxing Decisions

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/
20061101/news_lz1ed1top.html

11-01-06

You are not alone if you think this year's voter information booklet, which seems as thick as the San Diego phone book, is pretty intimidating. Thankfully, however, help has arrived from the Tax Foundation. In a recent study, the respected Washington think tank reports that California's tax policies make it more hostile to business when compared with other states. Last year, California's “business tax climate” was the nation's ninth-worst; this year it is the nation's sixth-worst, surpassed only by those rust-bucket engines of innovation in New York, Ohio, New Jersey, Vermont and Rhode Island.

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819 More From Class Of ’06 Pass California Exit Exam

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/
news/local/15909108.htm

110-02-06

When more than 40,000 seniors from the Class of 2006 failed to pass the California High School Exit Exam before graduation in June, many schools offered prep classes and extra help. The hope was that educators would track the students who didn't receive a diploma and encourage them to keep taking the test until they graduated from high school. But five months after graduation season, only 819 students -- about 2 percent of the former seniors who didn't pass the exam last year -- have earned winning marks and the chance for their high school diploma.

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Is the Sky Really Falling? A Review of Recent Global Warming Scare Stories

by Patrick J. Michaels, The Cato Institute

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.
php?pub_id=6622

08-23-06

Executive Summary

In the last two years, a remarkable amount of disturbing news has been published concerning global warming, largely concentrating on melting of polar ice, tropical storms and hurricanes, and mass extinctions. The sheer volume of these stories appears to be moving the American political process toward some type of policy restricting emissions of carbon dioxide. It is highly improbable, in a statistical sense, that new information added to any existing forecast is almost always “bad” or “good”; rather, each new finding has an equal probability of making a forecast worse or better. Consequently, the preponderance of bad news almost certainly means that something is missing, both in the process of science itself and in the reporting of science. This paper examines in detail both recent scientific reports on climate change and the communication of those reports. Needless to say, the unreported information is usually counter to the bad news. Reports of rapid disintegration of Greenland’s ice ignore the fact that the region was warmer than it is now for several decades in the early 20th century, before humans could have had much influence on climate. Similar stories concerning Antarctica neglect the fact that the net temperature trend in recent decades is negative, or that warming the surrounding ocean can serve only to enhance snowfall, resulting in a gain in ice. Global warming affects hurricanes in both positive and negative fashions, and there is no relationship between the severity of storms and ocean-surface temperature, once a commonly exceeded threshold temperature is reached. Reports of massive species extinction also turn out to be impressively flawed. This constellation of half-truths and misstatements is a predictable consequence of the way that science is now conducted, where issues compete with each other for public support. Unfortunately, this creates a culture of negativity that is reflected in the recent spate of global warming reports.

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Sun Delivers For Oakland Mail Plant

http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune/
localnews/ci_4584229

11-01-06

Chevron is going solar. The San Ramon-based energy company today unveils one of the nation's larger solar arrays, a nearly 1-megawatt system atop the U.S. Postal Service's processing plant in West Oakland. The solar array, combined with energy-efficiency improvements made throughout the cavernous sorting plant, will save the agency an easy $1 million a year and cut power purchases from Pacific Gas & Electric Co. by nearly one-third.

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Choices, choices, choices

http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/47308.html

11-01-06

When it comes to natural gas, California faces a quandary. On one hand, the state does not have a terminal anywhere along its coast that can off-load LNG (natural gas that is stored in a ship in its super-cooled, liquefied form). On the other hand, California does have an increasing demand for natural gas. It has become the clean-burning fuel of choice to generate electricity and heat homes. Yet new domestic supplies aren't keeping up with future demands.

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The Audacity of Hospitals

Do you want cheese with that whine?
Written By: Greg Scandlen, Health Care News, The Heartland Institute

http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=19987

11-01-06

When it comes to audacity, no industry has hospitals beat. For how many years have you heard them whine about the inappropriate use of emergency rooms? The hospitals are especially unhappy because they are the providers of first resort for all the illegal immigrants coming into the country, which adds an enormous burden to their finances. So the federal government appropriates one billion dollars to help with that problem ... and the hospitals can't be bothered to collect it. A September 19 Chicago Tribune article quoted the director of the federal Center for Medicare Management, Herb Kuhn, as saying, "We are really not certain why providers are not claiming the money." The article lists a number of excuses the hospitals give. They complain they might have to hire a staffer to apply for the funds because the application process is too complicated. The feds won't give them enough money (so they would rather have none). And reason number one is that it would be rude to ask patients about their immigration status.

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Brewer’s Millions

http://dailynews.com/opinions/ci_4581983

11-01-06

If the cliché that you get what you pay for holds true in public education, then the Los Angeles Unified School District will soon have an educational miracle-worker as superintendent. It better. Because absent some truly extraordinary leadership, it's hard to see how the taxpayers of Los Angeles aren't overpaying for incoming Superintendent David Brewer III. Aside from his staggering six-figure salary, just look at Brewer's other perks: A $45,000 annual expense account. A $3,000 monthly housing allowance. Plus a car - and a driver.

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Neither rain, nor sleet, nor squirrel ...

‘It was a freak thing,’ PA letter-carrier says after attack by jumpy rodent

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15530693/

11-02-06

OIL CITY, Pa. - Letter carriers occasionally have to deal with angry dogs or maybe even a spider’s nest in a mailbox, but a mean squirrel?

Barb Dougherty, a 30-year Postal Service employee, said she was attacked and bitten Monday by a squirrel while delivering mail in Oil City, about 75 miles north of Pittsburgh.

“It was a freak thing. It was traumatic,” Dougherty told The Derrick newspaper. “I saw it there on the porch, put the mail in the box and turned to walk away and it jumped on me.”

She said the animal ran up her leg and onto her back.

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Full legislative text, analyses and votes are available on the State web server at:
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov

Assemblyman Haynes’ office can be reached at (951) 699-1113 in Temecula, California
or in the Capitol in Sacramento at (916) 319-2066

To subscribe to this Memorandum by e-mail, please send a request to:
Assemblymember.haynes@assembly.ca.gov

To Contact California State Senators:
http://www.sen.ca.gov/~newsen/senators/
senators.htp

To Contact California State Assemblymembers:
http://www.assembly.ca.gov/acs/
acsframeset7text.htm