Archive for March, 2011
CalWatchdog: Jerry & His AG Want to Run Your Life
Mar 22nd
CalWatchdog editor Steven Greenhut paid me a nice complement yesterday: “I’m always glad to run your pieces.” And run one he did:
NEW: Brown, Harris Attack Suburban Growth
MARCH 21, 2011
By LAER PEARCE
The Santa Clarita Valley, a pleasant enough suburb of 250,000 in northern Los Angeles County, has the dubious distinction of the place most often targeted by terrorists over the eight seasons of the television show “24” – including the detonation of a nuclear bomb there during the premier of the 2007 season. Last Thursday, the Brown administration dropped its own nuke on the valley, trying to undo 10 years of regional planning in the name of saving the planet.
Hat-tip to The Deep Friar
Kamala Harris, the former San Francisco DA who never saw a criminal trial she couldn’t lose (which apparently is enough to get one elected California attorney general nowadays), sent a letter last week to the Los Angeles County planning department saying the Santa Clarita Valley Area Plan violates state law. She attacked the plan, which has been in development since 2001 as a blueprint for the Santa Clarita Valley’s future growth, because it doesn’t do enough to stop global warming by reducing the valley’s miniscule sliver of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Harris didn’t just send the letter – she publicized it through a news release and made sure it was posted on the Internet for all to see. “I think it’s kind of unprofessional to address the issues with the press rather than directly with the office you’ve been working with,” sniffed Los Angeles’ principal deputy county counsel, Elaine Lemke. [Continue reading]
Please click through. There’s more good stuff, and CalWatchdog wants to know you like reading about Crazifornia.
Property Rights, Crazifornia Style
Mar 17th
Watch the video on this website – Morongo Land Grab – if you want to see just how “crazi” property rights has become in California. An Indian tribe – the Morongos – has built a guard house and barriers across a public road to keep an American citizen from developing 41 acres he owns just the other side of the barriers.
The property owner, Lloyd Fields, can’t sue the tribe – its a “sovereign nation,” and can only be sued if it gives permission, which of course it won’t. So he’s been forced to sue the City of Banning for not defending its ownership of the road. And why isn’t the city trying to defend its ownership of the road? Can you say, “political contributions?”
Fields provides email addresses for the tribe and the city. I encourage you to drop them a note expressing your feelings on the matter, and also to forward the video to your friends.
Crazifornia a Neal Boortz Reading Assignment
Mar 17th
Crazifornia got a great plug this morning as Neal Boortz included my Daily Caller column from yesterday among this “Reading Assignments” for the day:
Here’s the latest example of how Governor Moonbeam in California Brown is not going to deal responsibly with the state’s unfunded government employee pension liabilities. In other words: he isn’t going to stand up to the unions.
The piece, also linked in the post below, shows how the new contract for California’s prison guards shows Brown’s true colors, as the union suffered no losses in the latest contract, despite the state hemorrhaging money because of ridiculously lucrative public employee union wages and pensions. Thanks, Neal!
Daily Caller: Brown’s Hand Is Union Made
Mar 16th
As California Budget Battle Sequel XXXVIII (Or is it LXXIX? I get so confused.) heats up, I actually got so ballistic I wrote a Daily Caller op/ed just one day after the one you see in the post below. Note the headline – they’ve agreed to brand my pieces with the “Crazifornia” moniker. Very cool.
CRAZIFORNIA: JERRY BROWN SHOWS HIS HAND – AND ITS UNION-MADE
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.
The details of the new California Correctional Police Officers Association contract haven’t yet been made public and haven’t yet been analyzed by people who, unlike me, can tell a POFF from a PLP. (If you’re curious, POFF II contributions are suspended for two years under the new contract and one PLP will be granted every 12 months.) Still, it’s easy to read the net result.
In a letter yesterday to his board of directors, CCPOA executive director Chuck Alexander wrote, “The majority of the rights and protections that exist in our old MOU have been carried forward in this new MOU.”
Any objective California governor would realize the state can’t afford to do that. It’s not like this is a union that needs more coddling. It has grown at a rate of almost 1,000 members a year since its formation in 1980. It has a 70-person staff that includes 20 lawyers. Even that’s apparently not enough, since Brown’s new contract with the union includes even more new positions. You’d think California was a state that’s not in a fiscal crisis. [Continue reading]
Daily Caller: Unions Sinking Brown’s Budget
Mar 16th
The good folks at The Daily Caller ran this piece by me on March 14:
In California, Unions are Sinking Brown’s Budget Proposal
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.
The colon was a publicity stunt by a Democrat assemblywoman from San Francisco, Fiona Ma, whose cause was fine even if her timing wasn’t. She put the 20-foot-long replica intestine on the capitol lawn to promote a resolution that declares March to be Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month, but it can’t help but be seen as a symbol for the constipation that’s blocking the state’s budget process, and the colon-full of bad news that’s hit California governor Jerry Brown.
The worst news for Brown broke early Monday morning when it became public that the “Gang of Five” Republican senators who were trying to find a middle ground with the governor have ended their budget talks. Both Connie Conway, the GOP Assembly leader, and a spokesman for Bill Emmerson, a Gang of Five senator, confirm that the talks are dead, but Brown’s camp insists they are continuing. [Continue reading]
Please do click through to read the rest. Not only is it brilliant and informative, but the folks at The Daily Caller want to know you’re interested in this stuff, so every hit helps.
