On my vacation this summer this is my reading:

Listening to America (Bill Moyers). Yeah he’s an annoying liberal but I read the first chapter and couldn’t put it down. Gives someone who didn’t live through the 1960’s a good feeling for what people from a variety of backgrounds thought about the social change.

Before the Dawn (Gerry Adams). Figure I should at least hear the other side.

Basic Brown (Willie Brown). Can’t believe I haven’t read it yet. Hey I don’t come out of the progressive Republican wing of the GOP. I think organizations provide better representation than civil servants.

The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett). I just can’t believe I haven’t read this before. Sam Spade. Classic but is it good?

The Thin Man (Dashiell Hammett). One of my favorite movies… I had no idea it was a book.

All The Kings Men (Robert Warren). Read it several years ago it needs another round. This is the fallback book.

Plus I saved up a couple weeks of The Economist and the New Yorker… Read More

In the ultimate reminder that elections have consequences, today liberal Democrat Governor Jerry Brown nominated liberal Democrat professor Goodwin Liu to a spot on the State Supreme Court. No doubt that all of the very valid and important reasons for why conservatives rallied to oppose confirming Liu to the U.S. Court of Appeals (he was nominated by President Obama, but has failed to gain confirmation by the U.S. Senate). Who can blame conservatives or moderates for opposing Liu? After all his record reads more like that of a political activist than a law professor.

From our friends at the American Conservative Union…

Liu has made it clear that he believes the Constitution is merely a guide to judicial decisions and that what he calls “our collective values,” “evolving norms” and “social understandings” should be the key to judicial decisions. Liu has backed race-based admissions to our universities in an amicus brief regarding a Seattle school district case. Liu’s views on criminal law have drawn the extraordinary opposition of 42 of California’s 58 county district attorneys. Here is what they had to say… Read More

The public worker pension debate rages on. And “rage” is the operative term when the unions and their allies discuss switching to 401-k plans from their current guaranteed defined benefit plans.

Carefully selected sob stories are popping up to justify continuing the public worker guaranteed pensions that are roughly three to four times what private sector workers can expect to receive upon retirement.

Rather than rehash the usual talking points, I’d like to here list what I consider some key oftenUNSTATED (and false) assumptions underlying the labor unions’ pitch:

1. “A government worker should be able to retire comfortably with their pension alone.” No need to otherwise save or invest. No stocks, no savings, no IRA’s, no home equity build-up, no payoff of mortgages and no inheritances. In the private sector, we look to these and other sources for improving our retirement years.

2. “City workers get zero social security.” Often that is not the case, as over their lives they earn sufficient credits in… Read More

House Speaker John Boehner just hit a homer on national TV in his well stated response to President Barack Hussein Obama’s speech on the debt limit tonight. He hit all the points, including that the House already passed a debt limit bill that doesn’t raise taxes, that the media is pretty much ignoring. Obama’s class warfare politics, yelling about “corporate jets” needing to be taxed, sounds more like Trotsky than John F. Kennedy. I imagine many of those jets fly to Las Vegas and I can’t imagine Obama winning Harry Reid’s Nevada in 2012!… Read More

It was supposed to be our salvation. In 1792, the first redistricting process in the United States, Eldridge Gerry figured out how to draw lines to favor his political party. One of his opponents said the districts looked like a salamander. Another said “that is not a salamander, it’s a Gerrymander. And a great political tradition in the United States was born.

The solution? A citizen commission, free from bias, drawing the lines, no politics, no partisanship. It didn’t work out that way here in California. What went wrong?

I supported the idea in the 1990’s, thinking it could work. Then I went through a redistricting process. Redistricting is the most political process there is. Jobs, careers, and power are at stake. I watched as Democrats in the Legislature erased and drew lines in their districts on their desks during session. They were intensely interested in the outcome. David Dreier and Ed Royce lived in Sacramento for a time while the lines were being drawn. Mike Briggs sold his vote on a tax increase for the Congressional seat that he thought would be his, and turned out to belong to Devin Nunez. Republicans in… Read More

Last Friday, a study was released that should have a seismic impact on the debate regarding school funding and, more specifically, how education dollars are spent. I’ve made no bones about the fact that I don’t think taxpayers should be asked for one more penny until it can be demonstrated that the billions we are already putting into our schools are being spent efficiently and for the benefit of students.

The National University System Institute for Policy Research released a study comparing school construction costs with the use of project labor agreements to those using a fair and open competitive bidding process. What they found not surprisingly is that the use of union giveaways results in significantly higher costs for taxpayers. Looking at more than 500 school construction projects over the last decade, the research was able to quantify that project labor agreements save anywhere from 13% to 15% to the overall cost of a project. The project sponsors get extra credit for having the prestigious Keston… Read More

Today, economic issues dominate the scene in America. We have record-breaking, unsustainable deficits and face credit downgrades and a looming debt crisis. We are supposedly in the middle of economic recovery, but no one can really feel it. Unemployment is stubbornly high and shows no signs of coming down any time soon. Inflation is now running over 3%, which is relatively low, but since savings accounts pay essentially nothing, the wealth of Americans is being eroded. Europe and, yes, even China have economic challenges. Decisions about issues as diverse as national defense, the environment and immigration are all now impacted by the economic prospects and our current fiscal situation.

President Obama has been the major contributor to these problems. He has massively grown spending, deficits and debt in a misguided and failed Keynesian attempt to fix the economy. His strong and very liberal ideology continues to churn out job-killing policies in the areas of health care, energy, finance and manufacturing. He claims to love the jobs created by these industries, but his administration does whatever it can to restrict the products that these industries make and to punish… Read More

My friend Allen Hemphill dug this unnoticed factoid out of a recent economic comparison study by CNBC, the economics network of NBC.

Among other things, they rated states for “workforce quality.” Of the top 25 states, 22 were “right to work” states — ALL the 22 right-to-work states.

Unions won’t be citing THIS study!

http://usna1957.wordpress.com/2011/07/05/important-information-hidden-among-the-facts/… Read More