Blogger Breakfast Roundup From This Morning

After a late night last night of schmoozing and meetings, I was up at the crack of dawn to head over to the Bear Flag blogger's roundtable. This list of bloggers there were as follows:

Tom Del Baccaro of Political Vanguard(meeting organizer)
Jon Fleischman of Flashreport
Scott Schmidt of Boi From Troy
Steve Frank of CA Political News
Sacto Dan of Sacto Dan Blog
Aaron Park of Roseville Conservative
Socal Pundit
Joel Strom
and yours truly of Powder Blue Report

My goal for this gathering was to ask the candidates for office who came before us what their stance was on illegal immigration...the number one issue in the state by a wide margin. This issue is having a negative effect on all facets of life in California and any politician who doesn't see this doesn't deserve to be elected in my opinion.

The order of candidates to stop by our meeting was as follows:

Michelle Steel....running for Board of Equalization
Pierre Prosper....running for Attorney General
Tony Strickland....running for State Controller
Chuck Poochigian....running for Attorney General
Steve Poizner....running for Insurance Commissioner
Frank Luntz....political consultant par excellence
Abel Maldonaldo....running for State controller

So first up was Michelle Steel. She gave us a quick rundown of her background...Japanese immigrant, came to the US for the opportunity. She is running for BOE because of run ins with state beaucrats over the years over tax questions. She related the story of how her mother i think it was, was levied taxes against her that she didn't owe, but because of the language barrier, her mother didn't fight the assessment. As far as the political dynamics of this race, her main competition is Assemblyman Ray Haynes. Michelle says that she has raised over $600k for this race so far. That is a nice chunck of change for an office no one really knows much about. The last I looked, Mr. Haynes has only a fraction of Michelle's money as cash on hand, but he has good name ID in the district and he gets a lot of free earmed media on shows like John & Ken. I'd call this race a toss up at this point.

The next candidate to grace us with his presence was Pierre Prosper. He is the son of Haitian immigrants and grew up in New York. He has a great pedigree to run for this office. He has worked for the Los Angeles DA's office prosecuting gangs, federal prosecutor who went after war crimes in Rhawanda back in the 90's, and he's worked in the DOJ on the war on terror. Jon Fleischman asked him about the political dynamics of the race. He wanted to know why people should vote for him in light of his seemingly quick jump into the AG race recently. It seemed to be a slam on him for being a Johnny come lately to the California political scene. I asked him about what he would do about our runaway illegal immigration problem. He wants to be very aggressive in enforcing the law in this area...very good answer. He also supports cities like Costa Mesa in starting to crackdown on this issue. Lastly he disagees with the President on the latest issue of the ports flap. This was another good answer IMO. I really like this guy.

Tony Strickland was the next candidate to answer our questions. He gave us a rundown of his achievements while in office. He told of how he decided to sue Gray Davis over the energy contracts Gumby(Gray Davis) locked the state into. He told us how a lot of his colleagues said he was making a mistake by taking the governor on this issue and that he would get all of his legislation vetoed because of it. He said he didn't get elected to cave in. The first thing he wants to do if elected as Controller is audit the LAUSD. He says there is so much waste and fraud in LAUSD right now. I would agree. He is also going to refuse to sign checks for the appointed members of various state commissions that receive upwards of $100/year for going to one meeting a month. I like that idea as well. He said that he asked Arnold this morning to remove Rob "Meathead" Reiner from the first five commission because of recent revelations of Meathead using taxpayer funds for those recent annoying preschool ads on radio. He wants Steve Westly to start doing his job he was elected to do. Lastly he said he wants to see the LAUSD broken up. Great interview I thought.