The Democratic Party gave one of its best speaking slots at this week’s Democratic National Convention --- the slot immediately before former President Bill Clinton’s --- to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. That’s a sign that Villaraigosa’s career is on an upward trajectory despite his dismal record as mayor. The city of Los Angeles is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and is expected to run a $1.4 billion deficit over the next four years.
12:59 PM 01/06/2012
The budget that California Governor Jerry Brown unveiled yesterday is a masterpiece in nonchalance and non-responsiveness in the face of crisis --- and worse, it includes a bold signal that California, already one of the most anti-business states in the union, will be doing even more to drive business owners and the jobs they create elsewhere.
9:37 AM 10/25/2011
It should come as no surprise that the leftist legislators and authoritarian bureaucrats who run California are vehemently opposed to fireworks shows. After all, the shows are always fun and usually patriotic.
5:55 PM 10/22/2011
Mary Nichols, one of the most dangerous women in America, looked out into the packed California Air Resources Board (CARB) hearing room late Thursday after an eight-hour hearing and declared, “We’ve done something important.”
11:12 PM 05/30/2011
California’s system of initiatives, referendums and recalls, which started nearly a century ago as a defiant act of progressivism under the mantra of “people power,” has performed pretty much as one would expect. It’s brought the system to its knees.
9:27 AM 05/25/2011
In Tracy, California, where the massive California Water Project pumps stand ready to move up to 15,450 cubic feet of Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta water southward every single second, it’s been a busy spring.
10:44 AM 05/17/2011
In California budget politics, the May budget revision is the second-most exciting milestone, topped only by the feverish betting on how many months, days and hours will pass beyond the constitutional budget deadline before the governor finally signs the budget. This year’s revision, released by Governor Jerry Brown yesterday, proved no exception.
10:10 AM 05/06/2011
California, once a state that could easily justify the adjective “golden,” nowadays seems to always find itself at the bottom of lists Californians would rather be at the top of -- like quality of education -- and at the top of lists they’d like to be at the bottom of -- like the most recent: largest public employee pension fund losses.
7:38 PM 05/02/2011
There couldn’t be a better friend to radical anti-oil environmentalists than the sand dune lizard. No, wait. Perhaps the alternative energy true believers in the federal government, from the president down, are even better friends to the radicals. We’ll know soon enough, thanks to a fight that’s pitting lizards against oil producers.
10:59 PM 03/15/2011
California’s 32,000 prison guards and parole officers -- notorious for enjoying political clout wildly exceeding their meager numbers -- tried to negotiate a new contract with former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for four years but got nowhere. After just three months of negotiations with Jerry Brown, they got their contract, and hapless Californians got the clearest signal yet that Brown is not going to deal responsibly with the state’s unfunded public employee pension liabilities of as much as $500 billion.
7:11 PM 03/14/2011
Talk about crappy timing for California’s Democrats: An oversized colon was sitting on the California capitol’s north lawn Monday, even as budget talks broke down and the powerful California State Employees Association and the California Teachers Association rallied on the capitol’s south lawn for higher taxes.
12:12 PM 02/25/2011
Unlike their brethren in Wisconsin, California’s teachers and their allies in other public employee unions haven’t been chanting and waving signs at the state capitol. After all, why should they? The very man who gave them collective bargaining rights in the first place is back in the governor’s office. The Democrats they funded and voted for have overwhelming majorities in the Senate and Assembly -- and thanks to their funding of Proposition 25 last November, a mere simple majority will be needed to pass Jerry Brown’s budget, which doesn’t lay a finger on state employee pensions.
1:01 PM 02/07/2011
The too-long-tolerated crime of leftist university students depriving invited speakers of their freedom of speech by drowning them out with shouts and threats of violence is finally getting its day in court. And, true to form, that great defender of freedom of speech, the American Civil Liberties Union, is defending the very students who showed no appreciation whatsoever of others’ freedom to express views contrary to their own.
Don’t think for a minute that Jim Gilchrist of The Minutemen is finally getting long-delayed justice for being shouted down and physically assaulted by Columbia University student radicals in 2006. No, it doesn’t look like prosecutors in New York are ready yet to bring charges against liberals who silence conservatives. But in California’s Orange County, things are different, and DA Tony Rackauckas has refused to drop charges against eleven Muslim student radicals who are charged with conspiracy and disrupting a public event when they forced Israel’s soft-spoken ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, from the stage on Feb. 8 of last year. The students all have been charged with two misdemeanors, and face only minor penalties -- probably a few months of probation and a few days of community service or, at worst, six months in jail.
6:15 PM 01/30/2011
Finally, a survey has shown that through diligence, hard work and unending commitment, California’s universities -- Berkeley in particular -- are the best in the whole wide world. Unfortunately, it’s for all the wrong reasons. Here’s why:
5:46 PM 01/16/2011
When the Star Chamber ruled atop Great Britain’s legal system for 150 years until its demise in 1641, it was characterized by secrecy, intrigue, and the often arbitrary and oppressive dispensing of what could hardly be called justice. California has its own Star Chamber, the California Coastal Commission, lorded over, for the time being at least, by a portly grandmother from Malibu, Sara Wan.
9:43 AM 01/05/2011
A popular Christmas card that made the rounds in Southern California this year featured Bell, California’s $800,000-a-year defamed city manager Robert Rizzo in a Santa hat accompanied by lyrics to be sung to the tune of Silver Bells:
10:11 AM 01/03/2011
Yesterday, Arnold Schwarzenegger signed his last gubernatorial documents and spiffed up the governor’s office so he could get his security deposit back as the next tenant prepared to move in today.
3:41 PM 12/20/2010
Thanks to the ubiquitous ads from California’s dairy farmers, we all know California cows are happy cows -- but how unhappy it must be to be a California cowfish! According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 98 percent of California’s bays and estuaries are unfit for aquatic life and 96 percent are unfit for fish consumption. Those statistics came from the introduction to the 2004 California Ocean Protection Act (COPA), which also says, “California has some of the most productive, diverse, and unique ocean life in the world.”
9:52 AM 12/07/2010
After the 2010 midterms, you could almost hear conservative pundits dismissing California as the land of fruits, nuts and irrelevancy. They couldn’t be further from the truth. Even though California doggedly stayed left while nearly every other state veered right, it still remains the supercharged engine for America’s progressive movement. If anything, the midterms just stomped down its accelerator.
