“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight; nothing he cares about more than his own personal safety; is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better persons than himself.”

– John Stuart Mill

There are 26 million veterans in the United States.  This weekend we honor them and our fallen heroes.  No one appreciates peace more than a veteran.   The crazy “peace” protestors who are the media darlings and who get all the attention for their juvenile antics have no idea either what is peace or how it’s achieved.  It’s not achieved by holding hands with  your enemies and singing Kumbaya in a circle.  Peace is not free, and often comes only with bloodshed.  If you need confirmation, just ask our Founding Fathers.

“When politicians leave this earth, their bodies lie in state, while thousands note their passing, and proclaim that they were great. The papers tell of their life stories, from the time that they were young. But the passing of a Veteran goes unnoticed and unsung. Is the greatest contribution to the welfare of this land, Some jerk who breaks his promise and cons his fellow man? Or the ordinary fellow, who in time of war and strife, Goes off to serve his country and offers up his life?” A. Lawrence Vaincourt

There is no better tribute to our fallen on this Memorial Day than to watch this video of a class of 3rd graders singing this love song.  Get out your hanky.  If you don’t need it while watching, you’re either not an American or you need therapy.

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Border fence? Papers? Immigration reform?

San Francisco has just decided that they will no longer cooperate with the feds when they arrest juveniles who commit felonies. This is being done in the spirit of their Sanctuary law.  Sanctuary for violent law breakers, that is.   San Francisco has always welcomed illegal aliens and provided them every service imaginable while thumbing their noses at the feds.

President Obama and his lame side-kick, otherwise know as Attorney General Eric Holder recently prosecuted the State of Arizona because Arizona had passed a law, with wording mimicking the federal statutes, to enforce immigration laws.  Holder claimed the state was precluded from passing these type of laws as the state was “pre-empted” by the feds.    However, Obama and Holder see no “pre-emption” policy violation when states and cities pass laws designed to defeat or circumvent federal laws. That’s apparently lawful according to the brain trusts that run the Attorney General’s office.   Do you need more evidence that we live in an Alice in Wonderland world, a world full of left wing rodents running the government?

Not all states are giving into the alien felons.   Utah recently enacted a law that would check the citizenship status of all those persons arrested for felonies.  This is what the feds want. They allegedly want felons deported.  However, this week a federal judge struck down Utah’s attempt to identify arrested illegal alien felons because it’s too much like the Arizona law!     Excuse me your honor, but how exactly do we know which felons to turn over to the feds- if we can’t ask for proof of legal presence in our country?

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Ronald Reagan’s poignant question to then President Jimmy Carter during a debate in 1980 clinched the presidential election. Carter presided over one of the worst economies. The economy had tanked and inflation had skyrocketed. Additionally, Iranian radicals had held 52 Americans hostage for almost a year. But that’s nothing compared to our nation’s economic malaise brought to you courtesy of Obama’s presidency.

Compared to the current economy, Carter was presiding over a picnic.

The first political ad for Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign was just released. It’s a pre-emptive measure. It’s also a powerful ad that will now set a new standard for the GOP.

Skyrocketing Debt.The national debt doubled from $5 trillion to $10 trillion on Bush’s watch. This was outrageous. This increase in national debt additionally increases interest payments to the bond holders. Americans must then pay the extra taxes just to satisfy the increased interest payments to satisfy those bond holders. In fairness, much of the increased debt was associated with 9/11 and the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which, at the outset, had bi-partisan congressional approval. Even so, there were critics of Bush from those fiscally responsible players on the left, “We pay in interest four times more than we spend on education and four times what it will cost to cover 10 million children with health insurance for five years,” Pelosi sternly warned in 2007. “That’s fiscal irresponsibility.”

Obama, by comparison, went into an absolute spending frenzy and increased the debt to an unsustainable and new historical record. Pelosi, the left and their media echo are all silent. Obama maintained Bush’s wars and even started his own new and unpopular war in Libya. He did this without congressional approval or even consultation. More silence.

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“Never before has such a low bar been set for certifying such a gargantuan class”
Judge Sandra Ikuta writing in her dissent against class certification of the Walmart lawsuit in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Walmart is getting sued by 6 women for sex discrimination; this despite the fact that most of the employees are women. The ambulance-chasing shysters fomenting this case succeeded in getting “class” status for their few plaintiffs from the notorious 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. One of the primary tests for certifying a lawsuit as a “class” is for the court to determine whether the named plaintiffs are sufficiently representative of the class. Additionally, the court must determine if actual discrimination occurred and that this discrimination was likely to be widespread and effect a large class; in this case, a half of million female employees.

This sad case began with a few hapless women who couldn’t qualify as managers, but wishing they were managers. These people are rolling the dice with their litigation lottery scam. These women ended up telling sad stories of how they didn’t get their promotions to manager due to discrimination (yes, it’s true, Walmart has a strict policy against promoting morons). This is not a tort, unless those people can show, with evidence, that they were passed over because they were a woman. In the Walmart case, the attorneys for the plaintiffs used a combination of sob stories, anecdotal evidence and statistics. The statistics showed nothing.

The Walmart case, filed in 2001, against the Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer by six female workers who claimed the company paid women less than men and gave them fewer promotions. Their evidence? They said that 65 percent of Wal-Mart’s hourly employees were women, while just 33 percent of the company’s management team is female. So what? These statistics are not proof of wrongdoing. They’re the same sort of phony statistics that feminists and their media echo have used for years saying that women only make 70 cents of the dollar compared to men. That’s baloney.

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The National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), a group of angry, feminist lawyers are intimidating high school districts throughout the nation.  They want schools to offer exactly equal opportunities to girls as to boys in high school sports by establishing a strict quota system.  To some, this may sound fair on its surface, but in reality, its execution has meant the closure of popular varsity sports for men throughout the nation in favor of female sport teams where coaches can hardly muster a team or find a league to play in and which generates even less public interest.

When very small girls are given toy trucks to play with, they naturally reject them; boys don’t.  These behaviors have been well documented in studies of six month old children by researchers. This is way before gender stereo types are inculcated into the children. Boys like to wrestle, girls don’t. Shall we force girls to have wrestling teams or just abandon boy’s teams if we can’t have an equal girl’s team?   Yet, this is the precisely the scenario being played out throughout the nation.   There are differences between genders and throughout history, and in disparate civilizations, men were the warriors and the athletes well before federal Title IX programs which tried to artificially level the playing field.

Title IX of the Federal Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits intentional gender-based discrimination in most educational programs that receive federal funds.  The debate that has been shadowing Title IX is not due to the law itself, which on its face is reasonable.  The debate has been about defining “discrimination” and then identifying the remedies for this discrimination if and when discovered.

Title IX actually outlaws reaching these goals by the use of quotas.

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We have a major oil crisis unfolding now and where’s Obama?  He was last spotted giving aid and comfort to public union thugs in their battle against the taxpayers of Wisconsin.

We now, this week, have oil prices busting through $100 a barrel. This will create major havoc to our already anemic economy. How did we get here?  Our president has a moratorium on nearly all domestic oil production: we can’t drill off our coasts, nor Alaska and certainly not the gulf.  We can’t build nuclear power plants, dam rivers, explore for natural gas or mine coal.   We’re stuck with windmills and failing solar power companies- companies that can’t even stay in business after billions in taxpayer subsidies.  This is an energy policy written by hippies.   Please, if our Community Organizer-In-Chief really wants a windmill, let’s just go buy him a propeller that he can put onto his beanie cap.  We hope that’ll satisfy his urge for wind, because all the windmills in the nation couldn’t power up Bezerkely, CA.

What happens with oil prices rising? Who are the winners and losers?

• Arab tyrants and mullahs who fund al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas are the biggest beneficiaries.
• The American workers suffer, as their jobs are transferred overseas when we ban production here.
• The American consumer pays a not-so-hidden tax at the pump with the increased prices.
• Business are hurt with extra costs,  laying off still more workers.
• Finally, rising prices on everything.  Prices on all food and products will increase with the added costs to both the manufacture and distribution of the merchandise.

How did we get to this precarious a place?  You can thank the first, propeller-beanie-president, Jimmie Carter.

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It doesn’t seem to matter if it’s foreign relations or domestic disputes, President Obama is always on the wrong side of history.  Millions took to the street during Iran’s Green Revolution that protested a patently phony election which declared Ahmadinejad the president within an hour of the polls closing.  That mind blowing speed is not bad for a country mired with an authoritarian religion and culture based in the 7th century.  It’s also impossible.  Yet, our president kept silent for 10 days in 2009.

His initial comments were actually supportive of the government. We wouldn’t want to be construed as meddling, would we?  Ultimately, his only admonition to the government was to be nice to the demonstrators. That worked well. Ask all the dead ones.  He never called for new elections or even to request that the opposition to be a part of any negotiations.

But fast forward to today in Wisconsin.  We have a democratically elected Governor Scott Walker and a state legislature with a state that’s going broke because of the burden of union payrolls and pensions.  Here is a Republican governor and a Republican legislature that wants to do the right thing, reign in out-of-control spending and balance the budget.  Hmm, isn’t this something the American people think Obama should be doing in Washington?   Remember, the last election in 2010?  Republican swept the House.  So what does Obama do?  He has the nerve to open his yap to object to the Wisconsin governor and release the dogs to attack and bring havoc to his state. This is Ahmadinejad and his goons redux here in America. Obama is inciting a riot. Outrageous.

It’s outrageous on several fronts:

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The Commerce Clause that regulates interstate commerce is at issue in the legal battle of Obamacare.  Can the federal government tell individuals that they must buy insurance?  Not as well known is how the same commerce clause is destroying farms and raising food prices by stopping the flow of water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Rivers to the Central Valley in California.      The feds at the urging of the state government has literally turned off the tap, destroying prime farmland in order to benefit the sex lives of the Delta Smelt.

Approximately 85-90% of the water from this primary source has been shut off to the Central Valley.   The smelt is a fish so insignificant that no one other than the Bezerkely-enviro-wackos and some local fisherman have heard about this tiny fish.

The smelt is fish that is native to California and, for the most part, is known to fisherman simply as “bait”.   The California enviros’ zeal to increase the population of smelt has led to a terrible federal, legal decision that shut down the water to thousands of farmers in the Central Valley; the nation’s largest and most productive farm land.    Thousands of farmers there are suffering with unemployment over 20%, scores of farms have been lost and tens of thousands of agricultural workers are now without jobs.   If California didn’t have enough economic problems, you can add shooting yourself in the foot.  The inmates are now officially running the asylum.   If we needed a poster for enviro-insanity it would be the promotion of the lowly smelt over the interests of: farmers, food production, food prices, jobs and California families.

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Our last Republican to hold statewide office was Governor Pete Wilson who left the office in 1999. I’m not counting the last, failed action-star who just left the office and was about as Republican as Nancy Pelosi. Schwarzenegger supported both Cap and Trade, and Obamacare. The Republican brand has died in California. Many folks have been doing the post mortem. In the last election cycle, despite the Republican resurgence throughout the country, not a blip of hope was on the screen here.

How bad was it during the last election cycle? When the electorate chooses Barbara “general, call me senator” Boxer over a former HP chief Carly Fiorina, it’s bad. They chose an anti-death penalty Attorney General, Kamala Harris who even refused to apply a death penalty to cop killers. California chose Ms. Harris over Steve Cooley, a republican who was a successful DA from Los Angeles. Additionally, Ms. Harris had the lowest conviction rate of any big city district attorney.No Republican won any constitutional office in the state in 2010. It was a wipeout.

“There’s been a broad repudiation of traditional conservative Republicans in California,” said Tony Quinn, a former GOP analyst and co-editor of the California Target Book, which tracks state politics. “There are almost no areas in the state that can be considered safely Republican anymore.”

To add insult to injury, since 2004 GOP registration shrank by 317,000 at the same time Democrats picked up 563,000. That’s a whopping democrat advantage of over three quarters of a million voters.

Where’s our leadership? Here’s where -attending mock funerals for the party. There was one recently held for the GOP where Duf Sundheim, a former state GOP chair declared, “Republicans, as a brand, are dead.” Can we please resolve now not to elect GOP chairmen named; Duf, or Biff or Buff or any other caricature names of the idle white and rich?

Ok, we get it. It’s now time for our wake up call. We need to shift gears and get this beat up truck down the track. I haven’t heard much in the way of new or inspiring ideas from any of the state GOP party apparatchik.

Here are some positive ideas:
Focus on economic issues.
Face reality. As much as they’re important to many of us, social issues are a loser in California. Although the GOP won on the defense of marriage initiative; they just barely won. It’s not a winner issue for the GOP particularly if they want to attract new and younger voters going forward. That’s just the facts.

We need to focus in on putting statewide ballot propositions before the voters that are sponsored by Republicans working in coalitions and improve the GOP brand. Ideas that show we are the leaders.

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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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Thanks to Ronald Reagan’s legacy and a legal miscalculation by leftist environmentalists, this week a California judge stopped the implementation of California’s Cap and Trade law: better known as Cap and Tax. This is the same type of carbon trading that Al Gore has hawked for years, but failed to get through the most radical Democrat Congress in generations. That’s how bad it was. Of course, that didn’t stop whacked out California from passing a Draconian version of the same job killing scheme.

To add insult to injury, the so called “republican” Governor Schwarzenegger signed the bill into law in 2006. It was opposed by the Chamber of Commerce and most sane taxpayers (admittedly, CA doesn’t have enough of those). The opponents claimed that the law would drive out business to other states and dramatically increase the cost of energy. Energy costs would, of course, be passed on, driving up the cost of everything else-in the midst of the nation’s worst recession.

The voters of California even had an opportunity last year to put the brakes on it at the ballot box with Proposition 23, but the environmental left spent millions fighting the proposition. It wouldn’t even have scrapped the whole law, but only would have suspended the Cap and Tax until state unemployment dropped below 5.5% for four consecutive quarters. The proposition was defeated overwhelmingly. Considering our unemployment rate is well over 12% here, the California voters essentially supported assisted economic-suicide of their own state.

It took two forces working together to finally defeat Cap and Tax: a group of radical Lefties and Ronald Reagan to put the brakes on this law.

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From Bob Dylan’s lyrics to a real California workplace policy, progress is being made. Despite an economy on life support with only weeks, if not hours, remaining to survive fiscally before the State Treasurer of California begins issuing IOU’s for payments, legislators have come up with a plan. Their plan is now to force employers to accept employees who come to work stoned. This should really help light-up the ailing economy. It may sound like a joke, but it’s serious.

A state lawmaker in California, during the nation’s worst recession, wants to outlaw employers from firing workers who come to work stoned. Isn’t that special? Or course the worker must have a medical marijuana card, which in California you can get at the checkout line in most supermarkets, or about as easily. Sneeze and you’ve got it.

So now truck drivers, heavy machine operators, accountants and secretaries all can continue their weekend binges into Monday. How else can a single bill: endanger lives, lose productivity, get the few remaining businesses to pack up and leave the state, while simultaneously encouraging increased drug use? That’s a four-fer! You get four objectives satisfied with a single law. Way to go, California! Who said California couldn’t get any higher?

No way that this type of insanity would ever pass the sober state legislature. Uh, wrong again. Pass the joint man, you just ain’t paying attention, dude. The legislature overwhelming passed this same bill in 2007, but was vetoed by the then Governor Arnold, who was probably stoned at the time. Now, with Governor Brown as the new sheriff in town, who knows? Brown doesn’t want to alienate his union base.

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We’re now 25 billion dollars in the red in California.  The governor along with his Democrat controlled legislature will never do the right thing. They’re the same folks who brought you this mess.  When Governor Brown was previously the governor he signed the Dills Act in 1978 that gave civil servants the right to collective bargaining.  He did this on his very first day in office as governor.  This revolutionary enactment was the beginning of the end or our state. Now, with the power of government labor unions unchecked, state employees, now the largest unionized force of any state, have controlled the legislative agenda for the past 30 years.  Their sweetheart pension plans are a marvel to their political strength and are unmatched anywhere in the private sector.  This is why although state workers’ pensions are the single largest problem in this budget crisis, Brown has not even mentioned it in his new “reform” proposals.   He has however mentioned tax increases, or as he calls them tax “extensions”. A two-thirds margin of Californians overwhelmingly opposes tax increases as a solution.

Here’s the problem, notwithstanding a current state budget deficit of 25 billion dollars, the state has 700 billion dollars in unfunded pension liabilities.   This is ticking time bomb. No matter how much we cut and balance today’s budget, we will never catch up and meet the needs of the ridiculously high unfunded pensions.  This is the problem.   Brown’s budget may take away state workers’ cell phones and some social services dollars, but seriously, big deal.  This is just more smoke and mirrors. It just kicks the can down the road. This will not solve our major structural problem.

Legalizing online poker, taxing marijuana (both proposed) and taxing air (already passed through cap and trade) will not solve the budget problems.  The latter is a way of taxing the few manufacturing industries still dumb enough to be creating jobs in California.  If they hadn’t got the memo earlier, this bill should be a neon sign. Get out of Dodge.  We don’t see many folks clamoring for yet cleaner air, but we see millions looking for work.

Our legislature has been hallucinating for decades. They didn’t see the current budget crisis coming?

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