April, 2010

High speed rail slows down
Friday, April 30th, 2010

APRIL 30, 2010 Is it possible that the push for high speed rail in California could be slowing down? Recent economic troubles notwithstanding, it seemed that everyone, from the lowly citizen to the lowlier legislator, wanted a fleet of high-speed trains to shoot up and down the state at 200-plus ...

Irresponsible boycott bandwagon
Friday, April 30th, 2010

APRIL 30, 2010 The recent spate of political leaders in California calling for financial sanctions and boycotts of Arizona businesses, is irresponsible and demonstrates that none of them truly care about the people hurt along the way. I am not just talking about the business owners, although t...

Get in line, take a number
Monday, April 26th, 2010

APRIL 26, 2010 I've experienced several months where, for one reason or another, I've been stuck wrestling with various bureaucracies, of the governmental and corporate variety. It's a frustrating, time-consuming and, ultimately, dehumanizing process. You're always a number. Most everyone at the ...

Inhaling CARB’s Hot Air
Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

APRIL 22, 2010 On Thursday, it was hard to tell what was stranger: The man walking around the first floor of the Cal/EPA headquarters in Sacramento covered in about 500 plastic shopping bags or the California Air Resources Board (CARB) hearing going on one flight up. Of the two, Shopping Bag Man ...

Snake Oil Legislators
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

APRIL 21, 2010 Nearly every person I talk to is either feeling the crush of the bad economy or knows people who are really suffering. Which leads me to believe that most California legislators don’t run in the same circles that I do. Most of the folks that I know are small business owners, entr...

A plea to liberals for pension reform
Sunday, April 18th, 2010

APRIL 19, 2010 You know the pension tsunami is getting close to the shore when the mainstream media are filled with hard-hitting stories about the coming crisis, such as the front-page Sacramento Bee and Fresno Bee article last Sunday documenting the way huge pension costs for retired public empl...

Ronald Reagan, tax hiker
Thursday, April 15th, 2010

APRIL 15, 2010 It’s Tax Day, so I decided to dedicate this space to celebrate California’s greatest tax and spend governor. The one who, more than any of the other 38 men who’ve run the state, hit residents with bigger taxes and grew government more than any other. Yes, I’m talking abo...

Pension crater bigger than thought
Monday, April 12th, 2010

APRIL 12, 2010 A new report from Stanford University's well-respected economic policy institute has revealed that those of us who have been warning about California's severely underfunded public employee retirement systems have, quite frankly, been wrong. We have been understating the scope of...

Entire state government is broken
Thursday, April 8th, 2010

APRIL 9, 2010 “Democracy,” H.L. Mencken told us, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” I was thinking of this little slice of Mencken wisdom while reading an unintentionally hilarious April 7  LA Times blog post. “Californi...

Moonbeam is as Moonbeam does
Monday, April 5th, 2010

APRIL 5, 2010 Now that Attorney General Jerry Brown has officially announced his candidacy for governor, we're getting to re-live some California political history as pundits and reporters think back to Brown's first stint as governor along with some of the entertaining facets of his long and biz...