According to three Winston Group telephone surveys, 57% of Tea Party supporters are Republicans, while 41% are Democrats and Independents.  Winston Group, a Republican leaning firm, utilized three surveys, each consisting of 1,000 registered voters, between December and February to accumulate the relevant data on the burgeoning grassroots movement.

Here are some of the other pertinent highlights:

Nonpartisan, or 'decline to state', voters represent the fastest growing segment of California's electorate.  Generally speaking, these independents are highly educated, fiscally conservative, and socially moderate. Not tied to either parisan ideology, independent voters have supported both Democrats and Republicans in the golden state, and because of their rapidly growing influence, both major parties are mounting more serious efforts to win their critical votes.

Receiving little press attention over the Easter weekend, filings with the Security and Exchange Commission on April 2 revealed that WellPoint Inc.

The race is on to find a new representative for the 37th District in Riverside. Former state senator John Benoit relinquished his position in late 2009 in order to swap leadership roles, and become a member of the Riverside County Board of Supervisors instead. The Republican Benoit left a Southern California vacuum, which a number of candidates have actively been jockeying for. One of the candidates is Russ Bogh, a former representative of the 65th District of the California Assembly, and a longtime businessman.

With prospects for bipartisanship looking increasingly thin in the present political era, a surprising exception has arrived on the scene, bearing the best of fiscal reforms culled from both parties – and perhaps most significantly, the bill features a radical departure from previous action on the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT).

To better assess many of California's problems and some possible solutions, the following is from an interview I conducted this week with former New Mexico Governor, Gary Johnson.

When he ran for Governor of New Mexico as a Republican in the early 1990s, Gary Johnson was a long-shot, political outsider- a self-made, small business owner who wanted to apply business-like pragmatism to solve the state's problems.

Voyeurs and strippers and scandal, oh my! This past week’s scoop de jure was that Republican National Committee staffers had paid for party officials at a club in which most strict conservatives would not be caught dead.

This past Tuesday, President Obama signed legislation that is expected to increase access to college for millions of Americans.  The student loan overhaul was included as part of the health insurance reform package passed last week by the House and the Senate.

With the recent criticism Steve Poizner took in making illegal immigration a risky focal point of his gubernatorial drive, likely to go unnoticed are his fiscal stances regarding the state’s current problems.  Poizner is actually in lockstep with Governor Schwarzenegger in opposing the new federal healthcare mandate.

Parents of Chelsea King are backing Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher's (R-75th District) proposal for a new bill that will impose stricter mandates on convicted sex offenders. They are also calling for greater oversight and accountability of the state's parole system which many believe is failing to crack down on violators.