“They put incompetent adults ahead of children,” Richard Riordan says of teachers unions who stand in the way of school reform.

The former mayor of Los Angeles took office shortly after the 1992 riots and shortly before the massive 1994 Northridge earthquake. Today, notes Riordan, the City of Angels faces a slate of different crises, from failing public schools to a fiscal calamity that has put the city on the brink of bankruptcy.

In this wide-ranging extended version of an interview that aired in January (and was shot in December), Riordan sits down with Reason.tv’s Tim Cavanaugh to discuss public-sector unions, privatization, LA’s dysfunctional government, why businesses are leaving the city, and why Arnold Schwarzenegger won’t golf with him.

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Following Judge Vinson’s declaration that Obamacare is in fact unconstitutional, many on the left have responded by seizing an old conservative lament – judicial activism.  The right has unnecessarily handed the left a minor rhetorical foothold by using the term in an ambiguous way in the past, albeit to criticize decisions fully deserving of such. Because of these past conservative attacks on judicial activism, attacks which were deserved but ill-defined, Obamacare’s defenders have managed to stumble onto some semblance of a point, though not the one they think. Judicial activism, properly understood, can be either good or bad, proper or improper.

It is necessary to start this discussion with some definitions. Specifically, just what is judicial activism? The worst partisans simply use the term to mean any decision they do not like. Some conservatives and liberals alike have used the term this way, and I suspect many Obamacare supporters are now using it thusly. Using judicial activism in this manner accomplishes nothing, as all sides simply talk past one another.

Another definition, one many on the right have historically embraced, holds that judicial activism occurs when judges reach beyond their institutional authority and write legislation, instead of judging it. Under this paradigm, activist judges are seen as supplanting the legislative will with their own policy preferences. This practice is certainly both that of an activist nature and deserving of condemnation, but is it wrong because the judge acted, or because he did so wrongly? It seems to me the real objection ought to be that such decisions stray from the Constitution. There are proper times to overrule legislative action, after all, and which leads me to the third definition.

The third definition is the one now being used by the left to criticize the decision overturning Obamacare, and simply holds that activism is the reversal of legislative acts. This definition is reasonably intuitive – the judiciary is “activist” when it acts – and conservatives have been willing to use it this way as well. For instance, it is this understanding of judicial activism that has lead some conservatives to counsel judicial deference in the face of legislative acts – that courts should only overturn the most egregious legislative overreaches. Hopefully, these conservatives are beginning to see the fault of this approach. The judiciary should be neither principally deferential nor confrontational; it should be Constitutional. Conservatives need to be more careful in their use of such phrases and better isolate the exact fault of particular judicial actions.

To understand this important distinction, let’s consider two landmark Supreme Court cases.

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All of my life I wanted to be an astronaut. I starting working in the Miami Planetarium at age 13; studied aeronautics and engineering and propulsion systems, and was stopped only by a 20/25 left eye during an exam for the US Air Force Academy. But space exploration has always been my primary passion.

Here is a video called THE FREE FRONTIER. You’re seeing it at Big Government because you will not find a cleaner contrast between what the government spends and wastes and ends up with, versus the almost mind-boggling results the private sector can achieve at a fraction — in some cases 4-5% — of the cost that you and I pay every day in the form of taxes.

My hope is that this video will give you hope.

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How easy is it to file a false claim in the Pigford settlement?

Have people been signing up for Pigford under the belief that it’s reparations for slavery?

Was the settlement intended to help black farmers hijacked to benefit people who had never farmed?

There has been conjecture and circumstantial evidence about these controversial questions surrounding the Pigford “Black Farmers” settlement for years but a complicit mainstream media’s lack of serious investigation has meant there has been little ‘hard evidence’ to prove or disprove these allegations.

Until now.

On Thursday, February 10th, at CPAC, I will release to the press, bloggers and citizen journalists two hours of complete, unedited audio of a behind-closed-doors meeting directly related to the Pigford case that show direct evidence of fraud and abuse in the settlement. This audio will be released with a set of notes making it easier to navigate and find specific sections and statements.

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President Obama’s proposed $53-billion more for “high-speed rail” (on top of a previous $10-billion) is a testimony to the power of adjectives.

If it were labeled “plain old rail travel” it would lack the pizzazz but would be far more accurate.  Understating costs, overstating benefits, and lots of supersonic rhetoric are the selling points for high-speed rail.

The “high speed” adjective invokes thoughts of bullet trains speeding at 150 mph, 200 mph or more.  The reality of Obama’s plan is—at best—the 85 mph that is the average speed of America’s fastest train, the Amtrak-run Acela.

When Obama claims his trains would reach 100 mph and more, he’s talking about peak speed reached only for short stretches, not the average.

How about pollution savings?  The supposed rail advantage depends on comparing apples to oranges.  If you compare auto emissions on highways, they’re no worse than rail emissions.  Rail has an advantage only if you compare long-distance train trips with car emissions from stop-and-go driving in the city.

An exhaustive Department of Energy analysis by Oak Ridge National Laboratory concludes, “intercity auto trips tend to be relatively efficient highway trips with higher-than-average vehicle occupancy rates — on average, they are as energy-efficient as rail intercity trips. Additionally, if passenger rail competes for modal share by moving to high speed service, its energy efficiency should be reduced somewhat12 — making overall energy savings even more problematic.”

The lack of energy or pollution savings leaves us with the key problem:  Huge expense with little benefit.

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House GOP leaders are lining up behind the conservative Republican Study Committee to support additional spending cuts next week when the 2011 continuing resolution reaches the floor. But even with leadership on board, will it be enough to hit the magic number of 218 votes?

Under a process not seen in years, members will be able to offer amendments to the CR under an “open rule.” Conservatives, lead by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), will offer one that achieves a full $100 billion cut in non-security discretionary spending. Last week GOP leaders put forth a plan that cuts $58 billion from the current fiscal year.

The RSC got a boost yesterday when Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) announced he would vote for additional cuts beyond the GOP’s initial $58 billion proposal. Last week his spokesman singled out the RSC as a group likely to propose additional cuts that Cantor would support.

“There has been a lot of talk on our side that members want to cut even further, and most of us welcome that talk and will be supporting yet even further cuts,” Cantor told reporters yesterday. He later added: “I’m going to be supportive of a lot of the amendments.”

It’s likely that Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) would support additional cuts, but he has not declared his intentions because members are still drafting amendments.

Other GOP leadership offices have followed Cantor’s lead. Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Conference Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.) and Chief Deputy Whip Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) all favor more spending cuts.

That’s good news for the RSC. But it still might not be enough to push the RSC’s $100 billion amendment over the top.

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Conservatives, as all political factions do from time to time, are having a family squabble involving the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).  It appears to be especially cantankerous this year.  The rub pertains to the increasing presence of gay-Republicans and the degree to which event organizers embrace or shun them.  Our country is in trouble.  The stakes are high.  Conservatives need to work together because they are right.  I offer a humble suggestion.  Conservatives need to check their hyphens at the door.

I attended my first CPAC in 1995.  It was amazing.  Spirits were high and guards were down as the who’s who’s in conservatism rubbed elbows with bright eyed young activists like me.  There were Christian-conservatives, libertarian-conservatives, black-conservatives Asian-conservatives and almost every group one could imagine in attendance.  All that mattered was that we were all patriots.

On the 100^th Anniversary of President Reagan’s birth, it is fitting that we remember why conservatism peaked under his leadership.  His style was elegant in its simplicity, and had a common theme that I love. You are uniquely blessed to have been born an American.  Not better, just blessed.  Every individual is valuable in God’s eyes.  Freedom is your birth right, join me in its cause.  If you are with me, great.  If not, get out of the way.   I think he would have an answer for the gay controversy at CPAC.

The Gipper was once challenged for taking campaign contributions from gays.  The challenger hoped to separate him from his evangelical support on account of his gay support.  He was challenged whether the contributions showed he agreed with the gays views.  He responded that their contributions showed they must agree with his views.  So it is with CPAC.  The attendance of ticket buying gays at CPAC shows that they support the CPAC views.

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Over the past week, Live Action has released six videos revealing Planned Parenthood’s willingness to aid and abet the sex traffickers of underage girls (see: liveaction.org). Since the beginning of our release, Planned Parenthood has attacked our organization and attempted to discredit the growing evidence of institutional and rampant abuse cover up. Here is a top six list of some of the deceiving statements that Planned Parenthood has made in just the past few days.

Deception 6) “We reported this to the FBI”

Planned Parenthood wrote the FBI a letter a week after our investigation, only after they realized that Live Action had conducted the sting.They say this themselves. As much as they may pretend, Planned Parenthood was not attempting to help send human traffickers to jail; they were attempting to pre-empt the release of Live Action’s footage.

If Planned Parenthood really cared about reporting potential sex traffickers to authorities, they would have called police while the pimp was in the clinic, or immediately after. Not wasting a minute. Planned Parenthood, where are the reports from the now SIX clinics we’ve released, that you immediately called the police?

Why did all your staffers, instead of refusing service or gathering information from the pimp about his sex ring to inform authorities, GIVE the pimp information about how to access the Planned Parenthood system for secret services?

Deception 5) Live Action Videos Are All “Doctored” and a “Hoax”

We have heard this tired claim from Planned Parenthood every time we release a video. Yet every time we’ve released a video, we post the full, unedited footage online for all to see, and send the full, unedited footage to state and federal authorities. Planned Parenthood can’t argue with the full footage.

See Vice-President Stuart Schear on camera claiming our tapes are doctored, then admitting he hasn’t even seen them.

Planned Parenthood, if you really think our videos are “fake”, “doctored” and a “hoax”, why did you yesterday claim that you will be retraining your entire staff of 11,000?

Deception 4) “We are retraining our entire staff of 11,000″

First of all, we have heard the “retraining staff” excuse before.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Lee Smith to discuss the uprising in Egypt, the threat of the Muslim Brotherhood, and threats it poses for the region.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Autumn of the Arab Patriarchs?
The Weekly Standard: Mubarak Calls Obama’s Bluff
Lee Smith’s Book – The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations
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From Americans for Prosperity, video of a public sector union protest yesterday on Capitol Hill. After years of steady pay increases, enhanced pension and other benefits and titanium-strength job security, public employee unions are starting to worry that the economic downturn may start to affect them. Poor dears.

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Even though the condition of the Oakland Unified School District is so bad that the state of California had to take it over, don’t expect the Oakland Education Association to be bothered with such trivialities.

So what if thousands of school children are trapped in lousy schools and will have few opportunities for success after they graduate? That’s not really what the Oakland teachers union is about, man. Providing students with a quality education isn’t really their bag.

You might say that the OEA has “progressed” beyond such things. These days the union is dedicating its time and energy to protesting. . .banks?

It’s sad but true.

Jack Gerson is one of the OEA’s most prominent leaders and a well-known radical agitator.  Recently Gerson explained that the union is partnering with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) to protest banks over foreclosures and the bailout money, at a time when public school employees are being asked to make cuts. (Why does Gerson matter?  You’ll have to wait ‘til the end!)

Before going any further, it is important to note that ACCE is simply the newest incarnation of the old war horse ACORN. The same corrupt officials who oversaw ACORN are still in charge.

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Tucked into the fatty, flabby folds of the nearly $1 trillion alleged “stimulus” bill foisted upon us (and our children, and their children, with interest) in 2009 was $7.2 billion for broadband Internet projects.

And from what we’ve learned, it’s been executed just as spectacularly well as has all the rest.

Large swaths of at least $2.5 billion of that coin were quintessential Washington – outmoded, redundant, and outright destructive of the private sector.

That heap went to the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) for its Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP).  Which was more slop in an already existing federal trough – the Rural Broadband Access Loan and Loan Guarantee Program.  Which was created by the 2002 Farm Bill – and then reslopped in the 2008 Farm Bill before again being reslopped in 2009.  It’s supposed to provide loans to help bring Internet broadband service to rural communities that do not yet have it.

And here we have the problems with government involvement – with which we’ve become all too familiar.

The government is tremendously good at screwing up the private sector with their myriad attempts at “helping” it.  The Leviathan fundamentally fails to grasp the Law of Unintended Consequences – or basic economics.

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I didn’t watch President Obama’s interview with Bill O’Reilly a couple of days ago, and that’s probably a good thing since I probably would have suffered a stroke if I actually heard Obama state, “I didn’t raise taxes once.”

This was such an absurd display of mendacity that even the left-leaning PolitiFact people had no choice but to conclude that Obama’s statement was false.

I suppose I could take a mature approach to this controversy and explain in mind-numbing detail why the President was wrong, but that wouldn’t be much fun. I’d much rather copy the guy who did the famous QE2 video and have some fun.

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Cap-and-tax may be dead in Congress but the Kyoto agenda of stealth energy taxes marches on at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Although the Clean Air Act was enacted in 1970, years before global warming was a gleam in Al Gore’s eye, and even though the statute says nothing about greenhouse gases (GHGs), EPA is now ‘legislating’ climate policy through the regulatory backdoor.

Today, a congressional panel will hold a hearing on legislation — the “Energy Tax Prevention Act” – to stop EPA’s power grab.

The bill, sponsored by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), and Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.), prohibits EPA from using the Clean Air Act to ‘enact’ costly controls on GHGs such as carbon dioxide (CO₂), the inescapable byproduct of the fossil fuels that provide 85 percent of our total energy supply.

EPA acknowledges that regulating GHGs via the Clean Air Act (CAA) leads to “absurd results” inimical to congressional intent. For example, EPA would have to extend CAA pre-construction and operating permit requirements, intended solely for large industrial facilities, to literally millions of non-industrial facilities such as office buildings, big box stores, and restaurants.

To avoid an administrative morass that would both paralyze environmental enforcement and freeze economic development, EPA decided to “tailor” – that is, amend – the statute’s numeric definitions of “major emitting facility” to exclude all but the largest GHG emitters from CAA permitting requirements.

But such “tailoring” only compounds the constitutional crisis created by EPA’s attempt to dictate climate policy to the nation.

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Today, in 1984, Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov died. Why does the American media always overstate the influence of dictators?

The enviros have succeeded in destroying both the environment and jobs with their radical legislative successes. First, it was their complete stranglehold on our nation’s energy policy: no new nuclear plants, a complete ban on exploring for natural gas domestically or for drilling for oil near our coasts. This forced us into the more hazardous and more expensive deep water drilling. This time they’ve succeeded with the outlawing of the lowly light bulb. The incandescent light bulb, the one Thomas Alva Edison invented in 1879, will be put to death in the US due to federal energy regulations. A law passed quietly in 2007 will be phased in next year with the final sales of incandescents occurring in 2014. Don’t blame Obama, this was done under George W. Bush’s watch.

death of the American light bulb

The liberals, who always cry for “choice”, don’t want to give the American consumer choice in choosing light bulbs. They’re apparently only pro-choice with baby killing. Otherwise, they will tell you just how to live your life, thank you. The banning of the incandescent light bulb meant that General Electric, the largest maker of light bulbs, had to close all their plants in the US. The last factory closed in Winchester, VA. in September of last year.  The jobs are now all in China. They’re the largest makers of the compact fluorescent bulbs, CFLs.  They’re not made here, in part, because they’re too hazardous.

Ironically, the CFL’s contain mercury, a highly toxic substance. A broken bulb can create an environmental nightmare and according to Scientific American at least one case of mercury poisoning has been linked to these bulbs.

Toxic cleanup crews may be necessary to contain a broken light bulb. I guess this is what the enviros mean by creating more “green jobs”. Cleaning up the mess that they’ve foisted on the American people through advocacy of their radical legislation. First, we ban imports of lead in Chinese toys and now this: forcing Americans to buy toxic light bulbs from the Chinese at the expenses of American jobs and consumer safety? What kind of insanity is this?

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Last month, President Barack Obama signed a highly publicized Executive Order demanding a government-wide review of existing laws to remove regulations that stifle job creation and hamper America’s economy. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is considering a new alcohol labeling requirement that would devastate America’s small brewers, hampering their ability to grow and hire new employees—and even to continue operating.

Big producers of alcoholic beverages are supporting a proposal before the federal Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) that would require manufacturers of alcoholic beverages to list the nutritional content of their products, such as calories, alcohol content, and carbohydrates.

Supporters of the proposal claim that it will help provide consumers with more information to make better choices, but the result will be an increase in production costs could force some brewers of craft beers to close their doors while depriving others of the funds they need to grow their business—and hire more workers. This will mean fewer varieties of beer, more expensive products, and fewer jobs throughout the entire nation, as every state is home to small breweries.

Larger breweries will have little problem absorbing the cost of the new rule. In addition to the economies of scale they enjoy from large-scale production, major brewers only produce a few limited beer lines. Having fewer products limits the cost of providing content analysis and labeling.

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A group affiliated with progressive rainmaker George Soros became the latest to join the in vogue assault on for-profit education, accusing proprietary colleges last week of offering predatory loans to satisfy referral rules governing financial aid.

The well-heeled National Consumer Law Center, masquerading as a legitimate consumer watchdog, released last Tuesday a report in which the group criticized the for-profit education industry for allegedly gaming the so-called “90/10″ rules, which mandates that at least ten percent of student financial aid must be secured from non-federal lenders.

Even beyond the support of Soros, NCLC counts The Institute For College and Success (TICAS) among its “generous” donors.

As BIG GOVERNMENT previously reported, TICAS was founded by Robert Shireman, who later became an advisor to President Barack Obama’s transition team and senior official in the Department of Education.

At TICAS, Shireman lobbied the federal government to more strictly redefine the regulatory regime governing for-profit schools. But finally installed as a member of bureaucracy he once lobbied, Shireman had the power and wherewithal to impose those regulations.

Already complicit in violating the president’s shallow ethics pledge to prevent lobbyists from joining his Administration, Shireman resigned his federal post in March last year. But before he left, Shireman’s DoE set the ball in motion — by hosting short-sellers with open intentions to cripple the industry for financial gain — to undermine career colleges.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Ben Smilowitz to discuss disaster relief in Haiti, and the need for greater oversight of disaster relief organizations.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

One Year Report On Transparency of Relief Groups Responding to 2010 Haiti Earthquake
The importance of disaster relief NGO transparency
Disaster Accountability Project releases report on transparency of relief organizations responding to the 2010 Haiti earthquake
Fraud plagues global health fund backed by Bono, others
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