Vote Note on the Covid Relief and Omnibus Spending Package: When Its Too Good To Be True…

The covid relief provisions in this bill are immensely popular – they provide $600 direct cash payments to individuals earning up to $75,000, (plus $600 per child), a $1,200 per month bonus to unemployment benefits, and $325 billion in PPP forgivable loans to businesses.

But I cannot in good conscience vote for it. When something seems too good to be true, it usually is.

If the aid were targeted to those who have been devastated by the lockdowns, it might be justified. But the bill makes no such distinction. Neither the personal nor first-time PPP grants are contingent on the recipient being financially harmed by the lockdowns. (Although the second round PPP grants do to some extent). The aid is wholly inadequate for those who were harmed and wholly unnecessary for those who weren’t. In effect, this becomes a massive wealth transfer from victims to non-victims.

For example, the waiter whose income has been slashed will get the same $600 as the government bureaucrat who’s been enjoying a steady paycheck at home. A thriving law firm qualifies for… Read More

When I was younger, I was involved in various charities. I went to meetings, did fundraising calls and generally spent a lot of time involved in various nonprofit organizations. The endless meetings with people droning on became unappealing over time. We were still sending checks and donating our used goods, but some aspects of these organizations where people ruled by the size of their wallets and there were crosscurrent purposes became unattractive. It caused me to alter my path to helping people.

My journey started with a contractor from a major construction project. Near the end when we needed him most he took a leave due to medical issues. His substitutes failed us which ended up in a legal dispute. We were able to connect with him and found out that he had ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), a devastating progressive disease over which we have made little progress the last 80 years. He and I started having regular conversations and became fast friends while I tracked his situation. He made every effort to fully live his life with a positive attitude. Our conversations became a regular part of my life and we met for lunch when we could, even during the… Read More

Here’s a bizarre SAN DIEGO U-T story detailing how absurdly expensive the city’s homeless shelter is during this pandemic. It’s bizarre because the newspaper is actually acting like it’s a NEWSpaper!

If it weren’t for the pandemic, it would be cheaper to book our homeless on luxury cruises — where the low-end cost can vary from $100 to $200 per person per day. Probably bigger group discounts could be negotiated. BTW, that cruise ship comparison is MY observation — not the U-T’s.… Read More

Since mid-January of 2020, we have been harangued with breathless rantings from leftist politicians and their propaganda arm, affectionately known as the “mainstream media” surrounding the spread of the disease they call “Covid-19” (an ominous name for a new strain of the flu, of which there have been hundreds). Their hysterical hype have told us that millions of us were going to die, that our intensive care units in hospitals would be overrun, that there was no avoiding this pestilence, that we couldn’t talk, sing, or visit with each other, or engage in any other of the basic signs of humanity, like shaking hands or hugging, because we would kill each other with this dreaded disease. We were told we couldn’t go to church, or even earn a basic living, or else we would kill our neighbor. We have been ordered to stay locked in our homes and, should we decide to leave our house, we were forced to dress up like bank robbers to avoid catching or spreading the germs that could kill off our entire society.

None of the prognostications of the imminent demise of the human species by this perilous plague have come true, but we are still being… Read More

This week I announced I’ll be the first 100 percent citizen-backed California Legislator. Specifically, I am declining all contributions from the “Third House.” That’s the term for the Special Interest lobbyists, with offices encircling the Capitol, that account for the vast majority of political funding in California.

The Third House is the Swamp on Steroids. While lobbyists may have enormous influence in Washington, in California they literally run the Capitol. That’s why it’s called the Third House: they control the first two houses, the Assembly and Senate.

Every Legislator gets… Read More

Two groups that have been spoken about often during the 2020 pandemic have been school teachers and restaurant workers. Though both groups have a large number currently not working, the two groups are dramatically different in how they have been treated by our governments. Let’s take a look at the difference and compare/contrast their realities.

School teachers are largely public employees and they principally belong to public employee unions. It is estimated there are more than four million teachers in our country. They are principally represented by two unions – National Education Association (NEA) with 2.2 million members and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) with 1.7 million members. In the well-known ruling (Janus), the Supreme Court made it illegal for these unions to command membership. The unions (in cahoots with state governments and local school districts) have placed significant obstacles in front of anyone wanting to opt out. Teachers have their money taken out of their paychecks beginning the very first day on the job. Those funds are used to buy political influence at the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Some say the teachers’ unions are the… Read More

The Democrats are always coming up with snappy new terms to describe their political antics. “Medicare for All,” “Public Option,” “Democratic Socialism” and “Progressives” are samples of current nomenclature. The terms typically replace a prior term that has failed to capture public acceptance. The press simply follows suit, never questioning the new terms and phrases as they become commonly used by the press. Soon the rest of us are forced to use terms du jour or we are scorned. It is not clear who came up with the term “People of Color,” but there is not a more deceitful and manipulative term than this.

The term basically divides everyone into two groups – White people and everyone else. It treats each group as if it were homogenized. The usage of “people of color” has been traced back as far as 1796. That was really when there were two non-white groups: Blacks and Native Americans. Today that has radically changed.

It is foolish to state that all Whites are just that – people of the same ilk. There are many White Americans with whom I have zero in common. There are many Jewish White Americans I believe live on another planet… Read More

Use of the emergency power by an executive is always evil. It may be a necessary evil, but its use is evil. That is why the executive must use it with extreme caution and in very rare circumstances.

In most cases, such as a natural disaster, the executive power is used to “cut through” the red tape of government, like, in 1993, after the Northridge Earthquake, Governor Pete Wilson used the emergency powers granted to him to remove the environmental obstacles to rebuilding the Santa Monica Freeway in Los Angeles. We now know that a freeway can be planned and built in 60 days, and not the 23 years it takes if we are forced to follow the maze of regulations imposed by the various government agencies. Or, in the case of the fires, houses can be rebuilt in weeks, and not years, when the emergency powers are used to waive the regulatory requirements for rebuilding a home. In those cases, and many others, where the danger is imminent or the damage unpredictable and devastating, use of the emergency powers, while still very evil, because they avoid legislative and public input into government policy, are absolutely necessary to avoid compounding the damage… Read More