This week, Los Angeles County okayed a new regulation banning the throwing of Frisbees or footballs on the beaches – which, of course, destroys the purpose of living in Southern California in the first place.  The first offense will earn you a hefty $100 fine; the second, $200; the third and beyond, $500.  You can, of course, apply for a permit.  For parents with industrious children, holes deeper than 18 inches are also banned – so get your kids the cheap plastic shovels or pay a fine.

What’s the point of this law?  Unless it’s to prevent horrific incidents like this, the only point is to raise cash for the state.  This has become the MO for California law enforcement: higher ticket costs, more tickets written.  California is now a police state – except when it comes to policing actual crime in hard-hit areas.  The state, counties, and cities task police officers with going after soccer moms going 45 in a 35 zone rather than monitoring drug-ridden precincts.

The trend is obvious, and California motorists know it: as McClatchy reported back in August 2011, “As the state and cities wrestled with shrinking revenue and growing budget gaps, the California Highway Patrol issued about 200,000 more traffic citations in 2009 than it did two years before.  Sacramento Superior Court, meanwhile, processed about 37,000 more traffic filings last year than in 2006 – a 16 percent increase.”  The size of the fines has escalated dramatically, too: “With the average fine costing as much as $250 and rising, the increase in CHP tickets produced as much as $50 million over two years. That money went to state and local courts, crime labs and other purposes.”

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A teacher charged with 23 counts of lewd conduct for allegedly molesting and abusing children in his classroom evaded actual termination from the Los Angeles Unified School District enabling him to retain his lifetime health benefits.

Former Miramonte Elementary School teacher Mark Berndt, 61, was exposed for blindfolding children ages 6 to 10 and molesting them after a film processor reported the existence of a film roll of 40 pictures depicting Berndt blindfolding young girls and taping their mouths shut. Police later found 400 more incriminating photos in Berndt’s home. The charges Berndt currently faces are for acts from 2008-2010.

According to a Los Angeles Times report:

Some photos allegedly showed Berndt with his arm around children or his hand over their mouths. Other photos showed children with live bugs the size of hissing cockroaches on their mouths or faces.

Others depicted girls with what appears to be a spoon up to their mouths as if they were going to ingest a clear-white liquid. Children were fed Berndt’s semen from a spoon or on cookies, investigators said.

Kids reported being fed something distasteful. A blue plastic spoon and container found in the trash in his classroom tested positive for his semen, authorities said.

The kids reportedly told police their teacher said it was a game and the substance was “sugar.”

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You just have to love it when government uses taxpayer resources to convince taxpayers to cough up more.  It takes an unusually large set of brass ones to do such a thing.

But that’s apparently how they roll in the Western School District, near Battle Creek, Michigan.

Apparently unaware for the past dozen years that technology can play a role in improving education, school officials want to raise taxes (about $180 annually for a $100,000 home) to pay for technology upgrades.

The school district has blurred ethical lines in order to accomplish its mission.

The “Vote Yes!” campaign posted a picture on Facebook of what appear to be elementary students standing in campaign t-shirts giving the thumbs up.  It had the caption, “These future WHS Panther wrestlers hope you support the bond proposal and vote ‘YES’ on February 28th.”

Source: Western Schools Bond Facebook page

[Here is a screen grab of the Facebook page, should it “conveniently” disappear.]

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How much bailing out does one company need? After receiving some $50 billion in tax dollars from us courtesy of Obama’s “cash stash,” GM is claiming success with a “big profit” with last year’s third quarter report, and in his recent State of the Union Speech, President Obama claimed that GM was “back on top as the world’s number one automaker.” But true or not, if all is coming up roses for GM, why is the company now lobbying the individual states for mini bailouts?

That is exactly what is happening. The new “big success” automaker is spending millions hiring lobbyists to squeeze more millions out of state legislatures. As Justin Owen notes, GM has “turned to another, smaller government teat” by putting its hand out to the states. GM, Owen says, “has received another $1.7 billion in taxpayer-funded grants and tax abatements.”

This is no accident of timing, either. GM admitted to the Tennessee Watchdog that begging to the states for tax dollars is a concerted effort.

“We are increasing our activity with the states obviously, in the communities in which we operate. In doing this, we’ve invested more than $6 billion (throughout the states) during the last five years and brought 15,000 people back to work. So, the activity at the state level is important to us. Our lobbying is comparable to what our competitors are doing throughout the states,” said GM spokesman Greg Martin.

For the Watchdog, Christopher Butler found that GM has received more than $1.5 billion from Michigan, $7.5 million in tax incentives from Kentucky, over $10 million from Texas, and over $2 million from Indiana. Ohio and Maryland have given to the GM bailout fund, too, with tax incentives and other giveaways. (more…)

Public officials are scrambling in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in California Redevelopment Agency vs. Matosantos to react to their loss of tax-increment financed redevelopment, which served as their piggy-bank under the Community Redevelopment Law for the past 65 years. The California State Legislature and their crony capitalist allies will desperately try to resurrect new tax and economic incentives to reclaim their ability to interfere in the California real estate markets. But barring any last-minute emergency legislation, many redevelopment agencies will go into financial distress and be forced to hammer-sale huge amounts of depressed California real estate to avoid default.

Redevelopment agencies incurred debt to finance “improvements” to properties held by private developers. The primary source of redevelopment district financing has been tax-allocation bonds that pledged the property tax increment increases in assessed valuation to the redevelopment districts as the sole source of payment for tax-free municipal bonds financing unsecured advances from local cities and counties as start-up capital.

Given the speculative nature of real estate development, prospectus for redevelopment bonds were loaded with risk factors; including decline in the value of real estate, failure of the project to generate increased tax increment, and changes in California state law. Given that local cities and counties generally dominate and control the redevelopment districts, local politicians also appear to substantial liability regarding the activities of the districts. Unfortunately, all three risk factors identified in the prospectus have now occurred.

According to Seth Merewitz, Municipal & Redevelopment Law partner at Best Best & Krieger:

“If redevelopment is not reinstated in some fashion by the legislature, then the successor agencies will be charged with meeting enforceable obligations entered into by the redevelopment agency as well as performing many other wind down functions. Moreover, the successor agencies will begin the process of selling off all of the commercial, industrial, residential and even vacant land assets currently held by redevelopment agencies across California. This inventory of property for sale throughout the state will present vast opportunities for investors to pick up real estate assets and trigger future economic development or add more real estate inventory to a flooded and depressed market.”

Many redevelopment districts now fantasize they can enter into Public-Private Partnerships to maintain their unfinished projects.

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From the Iowa Department of Public Safety and the State of Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, the following press release:

Des Moines, IOWA — Today, Friday, January 20, 2012, Zachary Edwards, age 29, from Des Moines, Iowa, was arrested and criminally charged with Identity Theft, an Aggravated Misdemeanor (Iowa  Code 715A.8(2)).  Edwards turned himself in to Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) agents this afternoon at the Polk County Jail.  He was then booked into the jail with a set bail of $2,000, cash or surety.

According to the Criminal Complaint, on June 24, 2011, Edwards fraudulently used, or attempted to use, the identity of Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz and/or Secretary Schultz’s brother, Thomas Schultz, with the intent to obtain a benefit, in an alleged scheme to falsely implicate Secretary Schultz in perceived illegal or unethical behavior while in office.

Read the full press release here.

Edwards was the 2008 Iowa New Media Director for Barack Obama’s campaign.  The Iowa Republican reported earlier that he is also the Director of New Media for Link Strategies, but the website has apparently since scrubbed all mention of Zach Edwards. However, you can see an earlier snapshot of the page through WayBackMachine. (more…)

First term Phoenix area Arizona State Senator Kyrsten Sinema has thrown her hat in the ring to stand for the US House of Representatives from the newly created 9th Congressional District

Kyrsten Sinema

Kyrsten Sinema is widely known as leftist and a “progressive”. However there has been virtually no media scrutiny of Sinema’s documented ties to the Arizona Communist Party – the local affiliate of the pro China/pro Cuba Communist Party USA.

Before becoming an Arizona State Representative, Kyrsten Sinema was a signatory to an advertisement “May Day and Cinco de Mayo greetings” placed in the Communist Party paper People’s Weekly World May 4, 2002. Such ads were traditionally placed in the Communist Party paper every May Day, sponsored by local party clubs, members or supporters:

People's Weekly World May 4, 2002 May Day and Cinco de Mayo greetings

Arizona’s progressive community extends May Day and Cinco de Mayo greetings to all our friends across the country. We commit ourselves to resist the Bush Administration’s drive for ever increasing military spending and a neverending state of war. We must redouble our efforts to build a people’s coalition that will drive the ultra right out of Congress next November.

Co-signing the advertisement with Sinema were Communist Party USA members Joe Bernick, Jack Blawis, Lem Harris, Lorenzo Torrez, Anita Torrez, Carolyn Trowbridge, Steve Valencia, the Tucson and East Valley Clubs of the Communist Party  and party fronts the Arizona Peace Council and the Salt of the Earth Labor College.

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In the land where the dead rise to vote, it is long known that the election code the state operates under is absurd. Illinois has taken ballot engineering to an art form to ensure the election results are known before the first vote is cast. Like all complex systems, however, they are bound to fail in spectacular ways.

Illinois has a long process to challenge the petitions of anyone who files for office. It is often used to keep “outsiders” off the ballot either by ensnaring them in hypertechnical offenses or simply bog a candidate down in thousands of dollars in legal fees and bury their campaign by attrition. Vote fraud is difficult to undertake on a large scale and requires many people and resources to accomplish quietly. Why resort to fraud when you can simply ensure the voters don’t have a choice to begin with?

As an example, if you file your petition paperwork with a paperclip instead of a staple, that is cause to remove you from the ballot. As a historical note, President Obama won his first election to the Illinois State Senate by removing every opponent, including the incumbent, from the ballot–thereby running unopposed. This process has been used to dramatic effect to settle elections long before voters have a say. What good is the right to vote if you don’t have any choices?

However, this system has now broken down with every candidate for president in Illinois having their paperwork challenged and all the flaws for each candidate are apparently fatal. Several candidates didn’t use their home addresses on their petitions, one didn’t use an Illinois notary to notarize their paperwork and another put in “statewide” for the district they were running in instead of “Illinois”. Even Obama was challenged, but I assume those are birther challenges and we’ll just move past those.

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DC Mayor Vincent Gray has called upon the National Park Service to remove Occupy DC Protesters from McPherson Square.

Local media is reporting that Mayor Gray seen a letter to National Park Service Officials dated January 12, 2012. The Mayor in his letter cited an ongoing rat infestation and other health concerns.

The Mayor states in his letter than the park, which is owned and operated by the National Park Services in infested with rats, the Mayor also express concern with the overall health of the protestors and the risk of hypothermia.

The Mayor’s letter comes weeks after complaints from local merchants, workers and others in and around McPherson Square about the increase level of rats since the protestors set up their encampment back in September. Back on January 3rd D.C. Department of Health Officials inspected the McPherson Square encampment and conditions then lead to the protesters closing down their hot food tent voluntarily

The Mayor called upon the protesters to move to Freedom Plaza where another encampment of Occupy DC protesters is housed. Both encampments are located in National Park Service properties and the Mayor’s letter prompted the Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa R-Calif. to issue a statement echoing the Mayor’s concerns about McPherson Square encampment.

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In Wisconsin, Governor Walker’s public union reforms are pummeling the Big Labor narrative by saving taxpayer dollars and teachers’ jobs. Meanwhile, the professional class-warriors who get rich pushing “solidarity” force districts into layoffs by refusing to revisit unaffordable contracts.

After similar reforms failed in Ohio thanks to a smear campaign exceeding $30 million, Ohio’s public workers are enjoying the sort of union victory that’s often accompanied by a pink slip.

A month ago I shared stories from around the state of firings caused by the same union bosses who screeched against Governor Kasich’s “attack on workers.” To the surprise of neither of my website’s readers, this avoidable trend continues.

Voters who opposed reform have caused the very problems Big Labor insisted reform would create:

Marion Police say they are committed to answering the city’s 9-1-1 calls but come the [sic] January 1st, callers could see delays in response times.

That’s because the [sic] 15 officers are being cut from the department.  Another position is expected to be eliminated in 2012.

Emphasis mine. Delayed response times were one of the many unexplained evils that would have allegedly resulted from making public employees a little more accountable to the public.

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Albany Police Chief Steven Krokoff came under heavy criticism by fans of the Occupy “movement” after he ordered the clearing of their downtown encampment pursuant to a court order. The arguments over the actions by police have raged since the December 23 conflagration with Chief Krokoff getting savaged repeatedly by the media and some city councilmen alike. But this week Krokoff confronted his critics, and he wasn’t gentle about it!

Chief Steven Krokoff (Image Credit: The Troy Record)

The big criticism arose when officers used pepper spray when the Occupiers became violent. Since then, several Councilmen, such as Anton Konev, have criticized the police, saying that their actions were unnecessary. Konev, for instance, has announced that he has no confidence in the Chief and is angling to have him fired. Naturally, Konev has been an open agitator for and supporter of Occupy Albany.

But on January 6, Chief Krokoff came before the city council with a strong defense of his and his officers’ actions, delivering a withering blast to some of the councilmen that have come to the defense of the lawless Occupiers.

In what the Albany Times Union called a “scorching offensive,” Chief Krokoff scolded members of the City Council for supporting the criminal element of the Occupiers instead of supporting their own police department. (more…)

The enormous cost to American cities of the Occupy Wall Street “occupations” is now starting to become clear. As of the end of the first two months of the nationwide occupy events, the movement that claims to represent 99% of us cost state taxpayers at least $13 million in police overtime and other municipal services, according to a survey by The Associated Press. By all accounts, that number will continue to rise.

In October the Los Angeles City Council unanimously approved a joint resolution to officially “support” the Occupy L.A. demonstration and “demand accountability and results from the banks we invest taxpayer dollars in.” By December, taxpayers learned they will be “investing” in something else: Occupy LA cost Los Angeles taxpayers, many of them the 99 percenters, at least $2.3 million. LA Mayor Villaraigosa says he will deal with the stunning costs, not by suing those responsible for the damages but by implementing budget cuts that will of course hurt the 99 percenters.

Cities such as Oakland, which spent $2.5 million in the aftermath of occupiers vandalizing public property, shutting down a critical port, trespassing, and committing countless other street crimes, have paid a dear price because of their “reactive approach” to the occupation.

The national cookie cutter approach to OWS was to be as politically correct as possible. City leaders collectively engaged in a hand-wringing mantra of “It’s their right of free speech… we must not interfere!” Add the fact that with “Big Banking” as the OWS target, city leaders had nothing to lose by throwing their support behind the benevolent freedom fighters. Trouble is, they actually had a lot to lose. (more…)

Remember this video?

Though this clip was replayed again and again- a sign that Americans were “awakened” as a result of the realization that President Obama and the liberal Democrats were, indeed, on the path to “fundamentally transform” the nation- the sad, but accurate, phrase used by the woman speaking is, “sleeping giant.” Conservative America has been a “sleeping giant.”

Most Americans describe themselves as “conservative.” And conservatives, by nature, tend to mind their own business. Unless, of course, their “own business” is being run over by a controlling, liberal president and his cronies.

American conservatives have indeed had to rouse themselves out of a somewhat complacent sleep and get to work. They have done so formidably, as evidenced by the election, in 2010, of a large number of conservative members of Congress. But, more work awaits, and time is fleeting.

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I’ve written before about whether California is the Greece of America, in part because of crazy policies such as overpaid bureaucrats and expensive forms of political correctness,

And we all know that California has one of the nation’s greediest governments, imposing confiscatory tax rates on a shrinking pool of productive citizens.

So it is hardly surprising that the Golden State is falling behind, losing jobs and investment to more sensible states such as Texas.

But not everybody is learning the right lessons from California’s fiscal and economic mess.

There’s a group of crazies who want to increase the top tax rate by five percentage points, an increase of about 50 percent. And they have made Kim Kardashian the poster child for their proposed ballot initiative.

I’m relatively clueless about popular culture, but even I’m aware that there is a group of people know as the Kardashian sisters. I don’t know who they are or what they do, but I gather they are famous in sort of the same way Paris Hilton was briefly famous.

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LAS VEGAS – While the Great Recession has affected almost all Americans, Nevadans may be the hardest hit. The state leads the nation in unemployment (13 percent) and home foreclosures (three times the national average).

Because of the faltering economy and slowed tax revenue, the Clark County School District needs to cut $78 million from its budget over the next two years. The district must do this either by freezing teacher pay and finding a more affordable employee health insurance carrier, or by laying off 1,000 educators as early as next month.

The first alternative is obviously preferable, because students would be adversely affected by larger class sizes and the loss of many enthusiastic young teachers. Unfortunately, the second option may be unavoidable, because the district has been unable to negotiate a new contract with its teachers union, the Clark County Education Association (CCEA).

CCSD is the fifth largest school district in the nation, serving around 310,000 students in 340 schools in and around Las Vegas. The district is also the largest employer in Nevada with some 33,000 employees, 18,000 of which are teachers.

The main sticking point seems to be the district’s desire to find a less expensive health insurance provider. CCEA members currently receive health insurance from the Teachers Health Trust, a company actually owned and operated by their union. (more…)

Ironic that the movement has forced the kind of austerity measures it protested coming from Congress.

From CBS Los Angeles:

City agencies have been ordered to calculate what was spent on the Occupy LA protests.

Repairs to City Hall’s lawn where the Occupy group set up camp on Oct. 1 will require an estimated $400,000. The police action to clear out the encampment on Nov. 30 cost more than $700,000.

Additional expenses are attributed to hauling away debris from the camp, and cleaning up graffiti that defaced City Hall marble walls and trees. (more…)

Following a tip from a reader, Big Government has discovered that a radical immigration group, Voces De La Frontera (Voices of the Frontier/VDLF), has infiltrated the public school system in Racine, Wisconsin by working with an approved student group.

School Officials in the Racine Unified School District tell Big Government that they had no idea that the approved group, Youth Empowered in the Struggle (YES), had become the youth arm of Voces De La Frontera (Voices of the Frontier/VDLF), a well-financed leftist movement with a membership of several thousand, headquartered in Milwaukee with two satellite offices in Racine and Kenosha.

According to sources within the school district, several hundred students have joined YES and affiliated themselves with VDLF, an organization that has also recruited some of the teachers–who apparently promote the group’s agenda in their classrooms.

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May the city of New Orleans subject local tour guides to hundreds of dollars in fines and five months in jail for engaging in unauthorized talking?

This is the question the Institute for Justice (IJ) seeks to answer in a federal lawsuit filed on December 13 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana.  Four New Orleans tour guides are joining forces with IJ to strike down New Orleans’ tour guide licensing scheme as a violation of their fundamental constitutional rights:

According to First Amendment expert Matt Miller of the Institute for Justice, seen the above video:

The government cannot be in the business of deciding who may speak and who may not.  The Constitution protects your right to communicate for a living, whether you are a journalist, a musician or a tour guide.

New Orleans requires every tour guide to pass a history exam, undergo a drug test and pass an FBI criminal background check every two years merely for speaking.  People who give tours without a license face fines up to $300 per occurrence and five months in jail.

City officials are currently breaking up tours led by guides that don’t have the government’s permission.

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LANGUAGE WARNING – Dozens of Occupy DC protesters were arrested on K Street in Washington D.C. today for obstruction of a public highway. When we at MRCTV arrived, police began the process of arresting the participants.

However, while the protesters were lying in the streets, blocking traffic, and refusing to move, one Occupy participant warned them to move because they did not have the money to bail them out. We interviewed him while the arrests were underway and he told us they were not instructed to be arrested at that given time. The protester insinuates, like other videos have shown, arrests from the Occupy movements are staged as theatrics to draw attention to the group- which one attendee told us off camera.

Officer Hugh Carew from the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department told MRCTV that 62 people have been arrested. Of the 62, the public affairs official stated 61 were for obstruction of a public highway. He was unsure about the last arrest.

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