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    Flap’s Links and Comments for May 5th on 09:25

    These are my links for May 5th from 09:25 to 09:29:

    • California to delay sending DMV registration bills – Jerry Brown Holding Out for More Taxes – California drivers who are scheduled to register their cars in July are getting a reprieve –- as the state won’t be sending them their annual registration bill just yet and is waiving any late fees for at least a month.

      But the move is hardly a gift from the cash-strapped state. It is part of an effort by lawmakers and Gov. Jerry Brown to buy time to negotiate a budget package that includes hiking vehicle registration fees.

      Under current law, the annual vehicle license fee that drivers must pay is set to drop from 1.15% of a car’s value to .65% on July 1. But Brown wants to keep the fee at 1.15% — the difference amounts to $5 for every $1,000 a car is worth — and he signed a new law, SB 94, Wednesday to delay sending registration notices.

      The governor doesn’t want drivers to get a smaller bill this month and, should he succeed at extending the rate hike, a second bill asking them to make up the difference later.

      "It is going to eliminate some potential confusion and duplication," said Department of Finance spokesman H.D. Palmer.

      Roughly 2.4 million vehicles are registered in California each month, said Mike Marando, a spokesman for the Department of Motor Vehicles. Drivers with July registration dates will not receive their renewal notices the usual 60 days in advance and they will not have to pay late fees for 30 days, he said. In addition, highway patrol officers will be instructed to ignore late registrations in the month of July.

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      Come on Jerry. Just cut the budget.

      More political machinations from the California Democrats in order to exact more money from California taxpayers.

    • President 2012: Accepting award, Mitch Daniels highlights Syrian background – Mitch Daniels drew extensively on his Syrian heritage in accepting an award from an Arab-American group Wednesday night, connecting his own family’s journey to the United States with the uprisings unfolding in his ancestral homeland and elsewhere in the Arab world.

      “There have been the same stirrings, same yearnings for freedom that have busted loose elsewhere," the Indiana governor said during his second public appearance of the day in Washington. “May Syria and all the lands near it soon become places of peace, and freedom and self-determination.”

      Daniels, who gave a major education speech earlier in the day as he mulls a presidential bid, compared his paternal grandfather’s emigration from Syria to Ellis Island in 1905 to the broader struggles against dictatorship and autocracy in the Middle East, identifying the desire for freedom and a better life as the common threads.

      “The same dreams and the same hopes and the same determination to make a great life for themselves that brought Elias Esau Daniels to this country — of which he knew nothing, whose language he did not speak — is alive now in that part of the world,” Daniels said as he accepted the Kahlil Gabran "Spirit of Humanity" award at the Arab American Institute Awards Gala. "And they have a chance to bring the same sort of wonderful opportunities he made possible for my father and ultimately for me.

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      Read it all.

      Decision time coming for Daniels in the next 10 days….