I am addicted to this show and watch it religiously. Sometimes while watching I would have to pause to check out his guests websites. That’s how cool the show is.

I am pleased to see Donny Deutsch offers on his blog a guest lineup which appears while the show is playing. Now I can kick back and relax while watching the episodes each night knowing I can check out his guest’s websites the following morning while drinking my coffee.

Los Angeles City Special Municipal Election

Proposition S offers to reduce City’s tax on communications users from 10% to 9%; modernize the ordinance to treat taxpayers equally regardless of technology used; exempt low-income senior-citizen and disabled households; to fund general municipal servers, such as 911, police, fire protection, street maintenance, parks and libraries.

Let me tell you why I am voting no on Proposition S. It’s a sham!

The city of Los Angeles has been illegally collecting a 10% tax on cellular phone services but the courts declared it as an invalid tax and a violation of Prop 218 due to the fact the city voters never voted for it.

If people vote yes on this Proposition our tax will be lowered to 9% but then there will be an additional tax placed on many of our other electronic communications. So basically we would be paying less in tax on the current service but we would then be paying a new tax on many additional electronic communication services. So in essence it will end up costing us much more.

But that’s not all!

The real pisser about this is the trickery taking place. They are trying to pull the wool over our eyes. Currently the City is appealing the courts and if they lose then there will be no tax on any electronic communications. If they lose, we will not have to pay a tax on any of these services. They are throwing in Proposition S as a way to get us to really vote yes to secure their tax knowing full well that they are playing dirty pool.

Their logic is if they tell us it’s a reduction in taxes we will vote it in, not knowingly voting in a tax which we should have never had to pay in the first place.

I almost want to become a politician to come in and clean up scams like these but then at the end of the day I would be a politician.

Vote No and we should ask for our money back.

Four of the largest southern California Indian tribes along with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger are pushing to amend an existing gaming compact with the state that would allow the expansion of their casinos. This expansion would make them some of the largest casinos in the world.

Out of all the propositions I have read, these required a bit of time to gather my thoughts and figure out which way to vote. As an avid poker junkie and a frequent visitor to these Indian Casinos it would seem obvious to vote yes to let them expand their operations. The trouble is, I am torn between my selfish desire to enjoy Vegas style casinos here in California and what I morally feel is the right thing to do.

In the simplest terms the Casinos are asking to expand their Nevada-style slot machines from 2,000 to 7,500. In exchange more payments would be made to the California General Fund. Governor Schwarzenegger is pushing for this as a way to pay down some of the 11 billion dollar fiscal deficit.

Schwarzenegger stipulates that by voting yes, 9 billion dollars in additional revenues would be collected over the next 20 years that can be used for public safety, local and State Law Enforcement, Senior Citizens, and Education.

Before we get too excited about all these billions of dollars in additional revenue, the state is only really looking at an additional $450 million per year. This equates to 0.3% of the state’s annual budget.

In an attempt to bring myself up to speed on all the issues surrounding this Indian Gaming act I have come across some extremely high emotions.

• There are those who feel Indians deserve to expand their Casino Empire and be allowed to make as much money as they can. It is about time Native Americans have a piece of the pie considering what the white man has done to them. When it comes to what the Native Americans have, no one has a right to complain.
• Then there are some Native Americans who themselves report that the wealth brought in from the Casinos are unfairly distributed to the smaller tribes. It has been reported by some tribe members that they have been expelled from their homes as a way for those with higher percentages of Native American blood can keep more of the distribution for themselves. The words “organized mafia” appears to get mentioned.

I have absolutely no idea if the claims made from Native Americans who have been expelled from their tribes for the sake of monetary gain are accurate, but I personally have been known to say we should give Native Americans anything within reason considering our brutal history with them. (Update: Video 1: Pechanga Membership Battle - Video 2: Tribe-Pechanga Casino Tribal Member Issues)

Anything in reason is how I’ve come to my decision to vote NO on this proposition. Casinos are basically money printing presses. The gambling odds are stacked in their favor over the long term and I see no reason for them to have a monopoly on all casino business here in California.

I’ve read somewhere each slot machine can bring in $130,000 a year after payouts. For purely selfish purposes I want a piece of that action.

Since Indian Gaming is a monopoly, their taxes should be much higher than what we are currently asking. The only competition for real Vegas style gambling in California are the Indian casinos themselves. The least they can do is pay two to three times what normal businesses would have to pay in state taxes.

Another thing that really has bugged me is the way this proposition is being presented to us Californians. Since our state is in fiscal trouble we must vote to allow the casinos to save us. The way I see it, if Indian Gaming can lower the states deficit problems then why don’t we just legalize gambling as a whole and impose a hefty tax which guarantees more money to the General Fund?

There are too many special interests to allow that to happen.

The California lottery was setup as a means to help pay down our deficit and as a way to contribute directly to education. From looking at the current state of our educational system I question how much that has helped.

Lastly, at the end of the day I just do not like slot machines (and the lottery for that matter) since they are nothing more than a senseless activity requiring zero skill. My grandmother used to call them “one arm bandits” as they stood there taking people’s money all day long.

When I was last at the Palms Hotel in Las Vegas there was a line to the cashier dedicated to only cashing employment checks. Sadly it was filled with people all the way around the corner. I fear all those new slot machines which the Indian Casinos want to add will attract the same type of low economic people.

If this is the road we must travel then the least we can do is see to it that a large percentage of our resident’s losses in these expanding casinos will come back to the state in the form of a high gaming tax.

Before I dive into this I want to give a public thanks to Cash Volume for pointing out the fact my site had been hacked.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed the traffic coming to this site phased out. I know I have not been the most active blogger but I did not think that was an excuse for the organic traffic to just die out.

A few months ago I had upgraded Wordpress to its most recent version. When I recently noticed the volume drop in traffic I thought that perhaps there were some coding errors with an incompatible plug-in as result from the upgrade.

When upgrading the site I did not really spend much time doing any quality control. I’ve been so busy working on other websites that actually pay the bills.

After quickly running down the list of plug-ins, I found the Cloud Tagging plug-in had failed. This failure had thus set into motion 1,000’s of unique urls that all pulled the content from my index page. Thus I now had 1,000’s of duplicate pages.

The 1,000’s of pages were a result of the keywords that were tagged in my blog posts that had their own unique URL. When this was working, the number of pages Google indexed was in the 1,000’s not 100’s which represent the true number of blog posts.

Because this site is just something to pass the time I did not want to spend hours upon hour’s hand editing all my blog posts with new tags. So I wrote a disallow function in the robots.txt file to prohibit the spiders from crawling any subdirectory that started with /tag/.

I then went into the Google Webmaster Console and asked them to remove all pages from their index that had /tag/. This seemed like the easiest thing for me to do.

Then something interesting occurred last week that completely took me by surprise.

I got an email via MyBlogLog user, Cash Volume. He had pointed out the fact many of my Adsense ads were displaying content that was not even relevant to this blog. They were displaying pharmaceutical ads.

He was kind enough to show me the ads in an image and then he went on to tell me that he peeked at my source code and there were dozens of hidden pharmaceutical links on all my pages.

After getting his emails I jumped into my WordPress theme and searched through all the code for this blogs theme. For the life of me I could not find anything.

I then found my way to the Wordpress core files and upon review I noticed that there were two files whose modified dates stood out from the rest. The files had been encrypted with some hash or something and I could only guess if those were the culprits. I had no idea.

At that point I just got fed up with the whole thing and quickly made a back up of some core files and directories and then deleted the entire site off of the server.

Once I had a clean directory I did a fresh install of WordPress and uploaded the files need to get this blog looking the same. I doubled check to see if that removed the spam links and it appears to have worked.

I hardly review live source code on my sites unless I am debugging a change made. I suppose this is something we should do on a regular basis.

As for why the traffic died I do not know for sure if it was hidden spam links or the mass duplicate content. Whatever it was, the new entries I had posted this past week have ranked very well in the SERPs for their respective keywords in quick time. This leads me to believe whatever penalty was placed on this domain has now been removed.

Could it be we have the next big leader of the internet revolution?

In 1990 Californians voted for a term limit law which limited the Assembly to six years and the Senate for 8 year. An argument has been made that the limits placed on these elected officials is breeding inexperience in our states government. The term limits on our elected officials is too short for anyone to seriously get a handle on the complexities of running the state of California.

93 is written so it appears the amount of time a person serves in the state legislature is reduced from 14 years to 12 and it would allow all the 12 years to be served entirely in the State Assembly, State Senate or a combination of both.

At first when I read this proposition my instinct was to vote yes. I agree experience is needed to run the state and we should give our elected officials the time needed to be proficient managers.  Because there are time limits on state legislatures, most of them spend their time focusing on their next political job and not on the state. By allowing them to stay in office longer (as long as we vote them to stay in) we give our elected officials time to learn the business.

Proponents of 93 make the case that lobbyists and other special interest groups have the upper hand with our government because the churn rate is so high and our government is filled with Freshman and Sophomores who lack the long term experience needed to run the state.

With that said why am I against 93? I have two issues with it.

The state is running a 14 billion deficit. As far as I am concerned the folks running things are not doing their jobs well enough.  The way this proposition was written it craftily grandfathers a select few of our current legislators who are due to end their terms the end of this year to hold their seats for another 4 – 6 years.

From all I’ve read this bill is being pushed by special interest groups who want these officials to stay in office longer; specifically, Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez and Senate President Perata.

I think these guys need to go.

Secondly, the original proposition which Californians voted in 1990 on terms limits still should hold for anyone who was elected into power before prop 93 takes over.  We voted thinking there were term limits and if those limits should change, let them change when those official have fulfilled their duties.

This prop smells funky to me. If it was really for the cause of experience and the state, no one should be grandfathered in.

Proposition 92 is designed to lower student fee’s in community colleges across California. Additionally it limits future fee increases practically locking in low student tuition rates. The proposition also guarantees that the community college system would become independent from state politics and be self governed.

When I first read about this proposition I thought it sounded really good. My thoughts were that lowering fees would allow more students to attend college and increase their education. More students would mean more college educated workers in the work force making it better for society as a whole.

After careful review it appears this proposition may actually hurt the state more than benefit it. Although prop 92 says they will not hurt K-12 funding or raise taxes I cannot see where they will get the money to fund this. Our state is already running at a deficit and the only way to fund such a plan would be to raise taxes of pull from the funds of other critical programs.

One of the main reasons I am voting down this prop is from reading the stats which I found from the arguments in favor. The average student is 28 years old and they will see their income jump from $25,600 to $47,571 three years after earning their degree. That’s a nice raise in income and quite an incentive for students to pay their way.

In various places around the web I’ve read that the students fees may represent no more than 5 percent of the real cost for students. Living expenses, books and transportation are the real costs for students.

Unless I see a real plan demonstrating where the monies will come to support this proposition, I am shooting it down.

Proposition 91 was created to prevent the state from spending gas tax revenues on endeavors not related to transportation.

This would appear to be a good thing to vote yes on if it were not for the fact that this measure had already been voted on in Nov 2006 under Prop 1A.

77% of the voters have already approved this measure. I plan to vote no or just leave it blank.