December 28th, 2010
Kelsey Grammer has asked a judge to put a rush order on his divorce from Camille Grammer, so he can marry his girlfriend … TMZ has learned. (more)
December 22nd, 2010
Midway through Philip Rucker and Paul Kane’s story about Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s transition to minority leader comes an interesting bit of news. The California Democrat, vilified by Republicans in the last election, has turned to director Steven Spielberg for help rebranding House Democrats. (more)
December 20th, 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.” (more)
December 20th, 2010
The National Organization for Women has filed a complaint against Hooters for being an improper dining venue for minors. (more)
December 17th, 2010
1.) Establishment Republicans conflicted over whose back to pat for busted omnibus bill — Majority Leader Harry Reid folded during last night’s high-stakes po(r)ker game. Now Beltway types are racing to cement a narrative for exactly what made the GOP so bold. “The defeat of a pork-laden $1.1 trillion ‘omnibus’ spending bill in the Senate Thursday night was the first serious indication after the Nov. 2 election that the Tea Party movement has staying power and will be a force into 2011,” writes The Daily Caller’s Jon Ward. “Some Republicans on Capitol Hill said Thursday night that GOP leadership played a pivotal role as well. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was said to have pressured key GOP lawmakers to stand firm against the legislation, though some in leadership said the conference was fairly united against it from the beginning.” Less, uh, established folks, like Sen. Tom Coburn’s beard, were more willing to give all credit to the Tea Party: “It was 100 percent grassroots…The American people took it down,” said Coburn spokesman John Hart. Also, bitter Democrats, one of whom dejectedly chalked up the broke-down omnibus to Congressional Republicans being “a wholly owned subsidiary of the Tea Party.” (more)
December 16th, 2010
1.) It’s official: Everybody hates Genachowski’s plan to regulate the Internet — And yes, we do mean everybody: The lefty nutters at Free Press, former comic Al Franken, Republican FCC Commissioner Robert M. McDowell, and now, a group of Senate Republicans. The beef from the left–Franken, Free Press, and the supposed two million Americans who accidentally signed petitions thinking they were entering a contest for free Krispy Kreme–is that FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s proposed framework does not do enough to control the Internet. For instance, liberals are unhappy that cable companies would still have incentives under Genachowski’s policy to invest in creating faster, stronger, and better services, access to which could be priced at a higher rate than existing Internet services. Meanwhile, Republicans and McDowell are concerned about what the regulations would do–namely, establish “an unjustified and unnecessary expansion of government control over private enterprise.” In the middle of it all is Genachowski, a bureaucrat with the heart of a Marxist and the vertebral integrity of a plane-crash survivor. The FCC votes on Dec. 21. Don’t miss it. (more)
December 16th, 2010
For Tim Berry, a top Republican lobbyist for Time Warner, the timing couldn’t have been worse. (more)
December 9th, 2010
| 1.) Democrats angry that Obama is letting the ‘terrorists’ hold America for ‘ransom’ – Welcome to 2010, the year American Democrats made a mockery out of the many lives lost here and abroad over the last decade by comparing the fight over taxes to the acts of Islamic militants and Mexican drug cartels! “Just as we do not negotiate with international terrorists, we must stand up to the political terrorism of the Republicans in the United States Senate,” wrote California Democratic Party chairman John Burton in an email to California Democrats. Back in Washington, Pres. Obama’s offhand comment that Republicans are “hostage-takers” has inspired a liberal group to launch the “Hostage Prevention Initiative.” In actual terrorism news, Sergeant Jason Peto passed away at Bethesda Naval Medical Center yesterday from wounds inflicted by actual terrorists in late November. |
| 2.) House passes bill aimed at denying stupid immigrants citizenship – With the aid of a handful of Republican members, House Democrats yesterday passed the DREAM act. First proposed in 2001, the act “extends conditional legal status for five years to those illegal aliens who were younger than 16 when they entered the country, have lived in the U.S. for at least five years, and have a degree from a U.S. high school, or the equivalent,” reports The Hill. In addition, “beneficiaries can apply for an additional five years of conditional nonimmigrant status if they’ve completed at least two years of higher education or military service. Afterward, they could apply for permanent legal status.” Assuming Senate Democrats are able to muster enough votes, 17-year-olds, stupid kids, and pacifists will soon have to hike their happy asses back to the third-world war zones from whence they came. |
| 3.) Senate Republicans defend decision to set money on fire – Among all the hoopla about increasing the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars and giving the unemployed another full year to sort their business out, Republicans and Democrats from the midwest teamed up to defend ethanol subsidies. “Chuck Grassley, a Republican senator from Iowa, said in no uncertain terms that the new tax deal will include an extension of those ethanol subsidies,” reports The Daily Caller’s Amanda Carey. Grassley, who is a ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee, said that ethanol will somehow save us from having to buy oil from Venezuelan peckerwood Hugo Chavez. According to Marlo Lewis of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, that is a lie. “If it’s such a great bargain,” Lewis said, “why do we need a law to force us to buy it? The answer is it’s a great bargain for corn growers,” and “an incredible scam” for everybody else. Incidentally, Grassley is probably aware that our need for ethanol is bogus. “It’s important to remember that the incentive exists to help the producers of ethanol compete with the big oil industry, and remember the big oil industry has been well supported by the federal treasury for more than a whole century.” Shorter version: If you’re going to give pork to oil barons, why not give it to farmers, too? |
| 4.) Obama cronies continue to make mockery of president’s campaign promises of transparency – The civil liberties and open government group Electronic Frontier Foundation wanted to see if Freedom of Information Act requests under Obama had improved, per the president’s promise more than a year ago that they would. So the EFF decided to file multiple requests for the same FBI documents in order to see if the FBI withheld or redacted the same aspects every time. You won’t be surprised to hear that it didn’t. “In several cases, the FBI redacted more information in later-produced documents than it did in earlier-produced documents,” reports EFF. “In other cases, the FBI redacted differing amounts of information when it produced two copies of the same report in response to the same FOIA request. Sometimes the agency blocked out whole paragraphs, while at other times it blocked out only the key words that explain the details of its acts. What is interesting is that the FBI claimed the same FOIA exemptions in each version; it just applied them differently.” So, not only are agencies getting more secretive under Obama, they are apparently getting stupider as well. |
| 5.) Unemployment situation is worse than you thought – “Nearly 6 million Americans looked for work but weren’t able to find employment at all last year,” reports the Wall Street Journal. A report released Wednesday by the Labor Department “highlights the long-term unemployment problem that’s likely to linger for years. Some 5.8 million job-seekers were without work for the entire year in 2009, an increase of 2.7 million from a year earlier.” The problem is so bad, in fact, that the Labor Department is going to change how it tracks unemployment. “Starting in January,” reports the WSJ, “the Labor Department will begin tracking unemployment durations for up to five years instead of two years.” |
| 6.) Nobody is happy with the House spending bill – The spending bill that the House passed last night “would cap the annual operating budgets of federal agencies at the $1.2 trillion approved for the recently finished budget year — a $46 billion cut of more than 3 percent from President Barack Obama’s request,” reports the AP. The Senate version will be even bigger as “Senate Democrats are working on a different approach that would provide slightly more money and would include thousands of pet projects sought by lawmakers.” |
December 7th, 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. (more)
December 3rd, 2010
The rare, ribbon-shaped sea creature was far from home when it washed ashore in Malibu this week. (more)
December 2nd, 2010
After an election year shaped by anxiety about the economy and frustration with gridlock in Sacramento, a new survey by the Public Policy Institute of California has found that most state voters have little confidence in the ability of their elected leaders to work together. (more)
November 27th, 2010
A Los Angeles woman, traveling by air the day before Thanksgiving, did not want radiation from an airport full-body scanner; she also did not want TSA goons to grope her. So she wore a revealing bikini and avoided both radiation and groping. The Obama White House is not nearly so clever. China groped the missile defenses of our homeland and President Obama said and did nothing. No one noticed. Well, almost no one. (more)
November 22nd, 2010
A newly discovered exchange of e-mails led the House ethics committee on Friday to delay its trial of Representative Maxine Waters, a California Democrat accused of helping steer bailout money to a bank in which her husband owned shares. (more)
November 11th, 2010
Mel Gibson reportedly has been ordered to fork over $60,000 in back child support to his baby mama — and to let her live rent-free in his Sherman Oaks, Calif., home with their year-old daughter. (more)
November 10th, 2010
A younger generation of Democrats is chafing at being asked to stand aside and let a triumvirate of elders keep their leadership positions in the wake of a catastrophic midterm election result. (more)
November 9th, 2010
In 2008, millennial voters – those individuals between the ages of 18 and 29 – played a key role in then-candidate Barack Obama’s historic victory. While young voters came out in record numbers in 2008, the 2010 midterms were starkly different. Poll numbers appear to show what some call a general skepticism and lack of enthusiasm among young voters – a result that may have had a profound impact on midterm election results. (more)
November 8th, 2010
Member David Guaspari writes in, asking: (more)
November 8th, 2010
ABC News has learned exclusively that Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, will not challenge Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., for majority whip and has instead decided to run for reelection as chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. (more)
November 6th, 2010
Check out a sneak peek of The Oprah Winfrey Show’s exclusive interview with Michael Jackson three kids for an episode airing Monday (November 8). (more)
November 5th, 2010
Nick Lachey and Vanessa Minnillo are taking their relationship to the next level: They’re getting hitched! (more)
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