The Sacramento Bee is reporting that state employees will see their salaries slashed to the federal minimum wage until the state budget is passed. They'd be paid back their full salary when the budget stalemate is over.

Read the story here.

Congressman Kevin McCarthy was on Fox News Tuesday afternoon discussing the "All of the Above" American Energy Tour he's been on.

McCarthy just got back from a trip with other congress members to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay and the Arctic coastal plain to learn about solutions to achieve energy independence and lower gas price prices.
 

Watch the appearance here.

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Is Dean Florez all talk? No, says Jim Boren up at the Fresno Bee.

He talks about all kinds of legislation Florez has carried in the wake of farmworker fatalities, air pollution reports and the state's bungling of a software contract.

Sure Florez calls a lot of press conferences and ruffles a lot of feathers, Boren writes, but he also gets a lot done and could be a good lieutenant governor candidate after all.

Read and see if you agree!

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Obama has traveled to Afghanistan and is expected to go to Iraq. He is also scheduled to visit Jordan, Israel, Germany, France and England.

And the media's heavy hitters will be there every step of the way.

Is Obama's trip getting a disproportionate amount of news coverage, or is this to be expected since his inexperience in world affairs is so much an issue in the race for president?

Dean Florez offered up a legal opinion today saying the California State Lottery can offer merchandise — he's thinking free gasoline — as a lottery prize. (Opinion attached).

The opinion is from the state non-partisan Legislative Counsel, which Florez asked to weigh in.  Lottery Director Joan Borucki has said California can't afford to award free gasoline because state law restricts how much lottery money can go toward prizes.

“I’ve received a very positive response from many folks who are ready to play a lottery game for a gas prize.  People keep asking me ‘Where can I buy my ticket?’ ever since I announced the concept," Florez said in a news release today.

What do you think of the idea? Would you buy more lottery tickets?

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A majority of Central Valley voters support a ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage but they may not get their way in November because statewide, more folks oppose it.

That’s according to a Field Poll released Friday that found 51 percent of likely voters statewide say they’ll vote against Proposition 8 compared to 42 percent who say they’ll vote yes.

In the Central Valley, the poll showed, the measure is winning 54 percent to 39 percent, with 7 percent undecided.

Proposition supporters hope to block a May ruling by the California Supreme Court legalizing gay marriage.

The Field Research Corp. talked to a random sample of 672 likely voters from July 8-14. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.

 

What a great story from ocregister.com:

When more than 19,000 Fountain Valley residents picked up their PennySaver last week, they got more than just the usual apartment and job listings.

They got an advertisement on the back page in which Ocean View School District Trustee John Briscoe urged them to tell the Fountain Valley School District to display the national motto, "In God We Trust,'' in the district board room.

In the advertisement released to the entire city, Briscoe chides the district for not pursuing the motto, calling it "dangerous and distracting", not honoring Flag Day, not honoring Veterans Day, not singing the American patriotic song and being generally unpatriotic.

Read the whole story here.

Apparently the school board and Briscoe have disagreed before.

According to Briscoe, he purchased the $500 ad with his own money in response to the district's unanimous June 12 decision not to pursue a display of "In God We Trust" in the board room. During the meeting, trustees had also refused to join him when he asked them to sing two verses of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee."

I went looking through the campaign finance reports of Democrat Fran Florez and Republican Danny Gilmore the other day. What stood out most to me was the $4,600 Florez has taken from payday lenders — $3,600 from Advance America, and $1,000 from Check Into Cash of California (based in Cleveland, Tenn.).

Florez told me she didn't solicit the money from the industry specifically; she has held two fundraisers in Sacramento and invited the usual suspects.

“I don’t have anything against somebody who’s in business to make a profit," she said. “I wouldn’t want to tell anybody what is fair and unfair.”

She said they're like mortgage lenders — some are good and some are bad, and they should be judged as individuals.

The entire industry has been under fire from poverty advocates, who say the fees charged amount to APRs of hundreds of percents, and point to stories of people who take out one payday loan but have to get another, then another, The industry responds that taking out a payday loan and paying that fee is cheaper than paying the bounced check fees that banks will charge.

— James Geluso

John McCain and Barack Obama are neck-and-neck in the Central Valley, though many are undecided or like someone else, according to Field Poll  results out Wednesday.

If the election were held now, 39.6 percent would vote for McCain while 38.8 percent would choose Obama, the early-July polling showed. Eight percent chose “other” while 13.6 percent said “don’t know.”

It showed statewide, though, Obama trouncing McCain 53.5 percent to 30.3 percent.
Other valley tidbits:

• 18 percent of McCain voters are “very enthusiastic” about the Arizona senator’s candidacy while 49 percent of Obama backers feel that way about the Illinois senator.

• 47 percent of registered Democrats or non-partisans think Obama should choose Sen. Hillary Clinton as his running mate while 43 percent think he shouldn’t. Statewide, more people think Obama shouldn’t choose Clinton.

• Among likely voters, McCain has better image ratings: 53 percent favorable, 30 percent unfavorable. Obama’s are 42 percent favorable, 36 percent unfavorable. 

The findings came from talking to 672 likely voters statewide in English and Spanish from July 8 to 14. The maximum sampling error for that many likely voters is plus or minus 3.9 percentage points, Field Poll said.

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One would imagine that most readers of the New Yorker magazine are intelligent enough to understand satire, but most viewers of cable TV are probably not.

That's my take on the latest issue of the magazine which depicts Barack Obama as a Muslim and his wife as a black radical (with automatic rifle and afro).

There's also a picture of Osama bin Laden over the fireplace and an American flag burning underneath it!

— Andrew Mockett