the tobacco industry is contesting.

I live in a newly formed Congressional district. The top two vote getters today- regardless of party - will face each other in November. One of the slots will go to the rw Repuke. The other may well go to a county supervisor who is running as an Independent, though she was a Repuke until this election. She refuses to say which party she will caucus with. Politically unsophisticated people think her promises to straddle the fence are just what DC needs - not. Unfortunately the Dem in the race has chosen to go negative and sent out a bunch of fliers practically touting the supervisor as Satan. I think in this one the people in the district will be the losers.

Just curious

Repuke who was a rubber stamp for the R's is retiring. District now leans slightly Democratic, but the so-called Independent has a good shot. Have a feeling she's not about to change her R stripes, though.

I'll tolerate more feel-good taxing on cigarettes IF and WHEN CA finally puts a severance tax on oil companies extracting oil out of California for profit.

There are twenty-two oil states in this country. CA is in the top three, yet we're the ONLY state that has never and still doesn't tax oil companies, missing out on BILLIONS per year revenue, yet we have the highest gasoline prices, second only to Hawaii, than any other state in the Union. Tax them first before people decide to tax consumers. Again.

Also, cancer research paid for by donations by citizens who might never benefit from the cure they "discover" doesn't make sense to me especially when I know there are already alternative products available - but herbal. The U.S. cancer research community totally dismisses the power of Marine Coral Calcium + vitamin regiment that has proven to reverse cancer, or refused to acknowledge Carnivora as another herbal cure for the Big C, discovered by a German botanist and what President Reagan, in 1985, used religiously.

Not to give false hope, but for information purposes ONLY: According to Morton Walker, DPM, in an article entitled, "The Carnivora Cure for Cancer, AIDS and Other Pathologies" published in Immune Perspectives, Summer 1994: "The Carnivora extract is highly effective for the total elimination of the HIV virus in vivo from human blood and may be considered a cure for the autoimmune deficiency syndrome AIDS."

Carnivora (simple Venus flytrap extract) has cured my husband from a bad case of Colitis. Twenty centimeters of his intestines was badly infected and he bled profusely. In fact there was panic in our household since he thought he was going to die, as badly as he had bled. The $600 a month medicine he had to use before we discovered this did nothing but treat the symptoms. After using Carnivora, he stopped bleeding within a week and when he returned to the gastroenterologist some three weeks later, he was surprised to find hubby no longer had colitis. My husband is now colitis free for over four years.

because we need to channel any new source of revenue into people's needs right here and now, like the $1.2 billion impending cuts to Medi-Cal, not research that's years or decades from fruition. And I believe we're the only oil-producing jurisdiction on the entire face of the planet that does not have some sort of a severance tax or fee.

Slight quibble: I believe Alaska also has higher gas prices than we do. Then again, they have only a handful of intercity highways (same in HI).

Also, we now know that Carnivora is not a cure for Alzheimer's.

According to Rachel Maddow, it didn't pass.

I also just found an article that California gasoline prices are higher than both Hawaii and Alaska now. The article is from March 2011. Again, not mentioning that we are the only state in the union that doesn't charge oil companies for extracting OUR OIL. Ugh! And until they do, I'm not willing to see Californians being taxed more than we are already being taxed.

And at least in Alaska, thanks to that half-Gov, every Alaskan gets a $1,000 dollar check (I believe every year). What do Californians get? We can't even get our "senior senator" DiFi to get back money from the Federal government for our state for anything! This is why we voted for Mike Strimling - not that it helped much. He got less votes than Orly Taitz!

Yeah, too bad for St. Ronnie Carnivora couldn't cure Alzheimers , but I believe he used Carnivora to cure his cancer.

...and other downballot races. That made it easy to fill in my sample ballot, take it with me to my polling place, and complete my ballot in about 2 minutes.

or you could just leave those lines blank; the rest of the ballot would still count.

If we don't get it together in the fall, while we still won't give up the state (and the country, and the free world) to Robme , we could still blow a chance to pick up that magical two-thirds in the legislature, as well as hand a couple of swing House seats to the repukes.