California Governor Jerry Brown told a group of scientists in a speech on Monday that California is at the “epicenter” of global warming.

Only a few days prior, Brown blamed climate change for the rash of major wildfires in San Diego County.

Last week, Brown said that within a couple hundred years the seas could rise up to four feet, and put the Los Angeles International Airport under water. Brown’s statements brought back to mind George Kastanza from the Jerry Seinfeld show who famously said,“It’s not a lie if… Read More

Remember when plastic bags were foisted on the shopping public because cutting trees down for paper was bad? Introduced in the 1950’s, popular in the U.S. by the 1980’s, plastic bags were sold to the public as 100 percent reusable and recyclable. All types of plastic shopping bag can be recycled into new bags where effective collection schemes exist; some are even biodegradable.

Despite the fact that trees are a renewable resource, many stores and retail outlets accepted the plastic bags. “Paper or plastic?” became one of the most recognizable questions in America.

Flash forward to 2007, when the plastic bag began to smell like the… Read More

Ethics, even in politics, is based on adherence to moral principles. Honesty, integrity, loyalty, fairness, respect for others, lawfulness, pursuit of excellence and accountability, are principles.

G. K. Chesterton explained why: “Morality is always terribly complicated – to a man who has lost all his principles.”

The fundamental purpose of the American project was and still is individual freedom.

While many American freedoms have been eroded, we still hold the sanctity of the individual sacred in America. Americans believe that man is inherently free, whether a gift from God, or a fact of nature.

However, with freedoms and individual liberties increasingly plundered, many ask what the proper role of government is, as well as the proper role of the politician.

Especially in California, suffering under the cloud of recent scandals in the… Read More

As I walked out of the Capitol Thursday, May 1 at just after 5:00 pm, I noticed a fledgling labor rally beginning.

It was May Day, the date chosen by the Socialists and Communists for International Workers’ Day.

But there weren’t any of the usual purple shirt-wearing protestors – this crowd was a real potpourri of odd people, including a group of leathered, old hippies, acting as if their brains had been fried years ago by drugs.

As I was walked past, guest speaker Assemblyman Roger Dickinson, was introduced.

Dickinson, a Democrat from Sacramento, is known as a good friend to labor. Dickinson took the microphone and began to speak as if there were thousands of purple-shirt SEIU members in the crowd.

“The direction we are going is putting the wealth of this country in the hands of fewer and fewer, at the expense of everyone!” Assemblyman Roger Dickinson said.

So compelling was his statement, I stopped to write it down. But that was about as much as I could take; I didn’t stick around for the rest of the speech. I knew where it was going.

Income “inequality”

Democrats across the country… Read More

The list of businesses leaving California for greener pastures is long and growing. And now we can add Toyota to it.

The word ‘leakage’ is the new politically correct term used by legislators, the Governor, bureaucrats and the California Air Resources Board, to describe what happens when California businesses leave the state because of tax increases and stupendous regulations… as if any of them really know what it means for a business to make the difficult decision to close a location, terminate hundreds of employees, and physically move equipment, machinery, offices and records. And, the CEOmust figure in the cost of business interruption, as a business’s productivity will be undoubtedly be reduced after a move.

Who is “leaking?”

Apparently California is ‘leaking’ businesses… as if businesses and middle class families are dribbling away, or… Read More

Another Earth Day has come and gone, and with it, a great deal more environmental hypocrisy. Most of the practicing Earth Day disciplesare largely hypocritical, and are just as likely to be as significant consumers of the Earth’s resources as anyone else.

But hell hath no fury like a righteous environmentalist with a big budget and a… Read More

Many have recently observed there appears to be collusion between the United Farm Workers union and the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board, in an effort to boost the shrinking labor union by targeting one of the biggest non-union farming operations in the state.

Should they succeed in unionizing Gerawan Farming employees, adding the 5,000 Gerawan farmworkers would more than double union membership, and certainly boost the UFW’s economic status, and the ALRB’s worth to the state.

Conundrum

Several thousand-farm workers in California’s Central Valley have so far failed to get the state agriculture labor board to count their votes on a standard, legal labor union issue.

Why? Because the vote the farm workers took was to de-certify… Read More

Yesterday morning, Senate Bill 916 by Sen. Lou Correa, D-Santa Ana, was a bill about mandating use of bio-derived lubricating oil. But by yesterday evening, biofuel is off the table and gun control is back on.

California’s obsession with the most extreme environmental issues, and belief that if a new “green” product sounds good, it must be good, means the bill probably would have passed through the Legislature with flying colors.

Yesterday, the bill was gutted and amended into a gun control bill. “Talk about pyrrhic victory…” Tom Tanton emailed to me. Tanton, a Director at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, wrote an op-ed about it in Fox and Hounds recently. Tanton warned, “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”

It turns out Tanton was right.

The new gun control bill, SB 916

The new bill language is clearly not done cooking. Anticipate more amendments, as this bill appears to be a placeholder.

“Existing law prohibits the manufacture, importation, and sale… Read More