Imagine an election where a proposal to increase taxes is declared by the taxing agency to have passed with fewer than 70 votes after the agency disqualified more than 1,500 ballots that would have swung the election the other way. Then imagine that the decision to invalidate these ballots was made by the agency after opening them and seeing how they had voted.  Read more >>

Readers of this column may do a double take to see CALPIRG and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association advocating an identical position. But when it comes to government transparency, we are surely reading off the same sheet of music.  Read more >>

A great line from Carly Simon's song You're So Vain is "you probably think this song is about you." Well, if you are reading this, Anthony Adams, rest assured that this column is not about you. It is about reasonable taxpayer expectations.  Read more >>

In Hollywood, when a studio is having problems with a screenplay, they often call on a skilled writer known as a "script doctor" to improve portions of dialogue, pacing or, in extreme cases, even the story line. Hollywood veteran Arnold Schwarzenegger apparently is having problems with one of his own productions, Proposition 1A on the May 19 special election ballot, a measure that would cost Californians $16 billion in additional taxes. So our governor is trying to rewrite the script himself. But in politics, this function is called a "spin doctor."  Read more >>

As portrayed in the 1970s movie about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Tora, Tora, Tora, Admiral Yamamoto states, after the attack, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." Turns out there is little historical evidence suggesting that the Admiral said any such thing. However, the line is illustrative of a self-evident truth: You don't kick a rabid dog; you don't poke a tiger with a stick; and you don't walk into a biker bar and start insulting Harleys.  Read more >>