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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WINTER HAVEN, Fla. – Deric Feacher had a very worthwhile dream.

He wanted to establish a charter school in his hometown that specialized in helping disadvantaged and at-risk students earn their high school diplomas.

So he did what Florida law required. He took his proposal for the new charter school to the Polk County School Board’s Charter Review Committee, two different times. And twice he came away without permission to open his school, according to the Sunshine State News.

What was the committee’s hang-up? Were members afraid that Feacher would establish a bad school? Do they have a problem with the idea of creating a special school for children who are struggling in traditional schools?

It was nothing like that. The board members were just worried about losing money.

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Today, the 9th Circuit upheld the absurd ruling of Judge Vaughn Walker of the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, striking down Proposition 8, the voter-approved constitutional amendment that would uphold traditional marriage in the state. The ruling itself was highly political and in no way legally oriented. “Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians,” wrote the Court, “and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior… the Constitution simply does not allow for ‘laws of this sort.’”

This, of course, is blatantly false. To begin, the Constitution says nothing about marriage whatsoever, which means that its definition is left to the states to decide. Second, there are plenty of great reasons to uphold traditional marriage and to disapprove alternative forms of marriage, ranging from thousands of years of history to state interest in childbirth to state interest in child rearing. Thirdly, the notion that the “equal protection” clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution applies to homosexual behavior rather than innate distinctions like race is absurd. Marriage laws approve and disapprove behavior, not status. While gay rights advocates like to equate race and sexuality, the two are vastly different – you can’t shake your race, but your behavior can always change, no matter how unpleasant that change may be. Behavior is routinely regulated by the states and invariably affects people differently based on whether or not they engage in said behavior.

Leave aside the absolutely correct charges that this ruling is a legal abomination, and the fact that our judiciary wields far too much clout overall. Let’s focus instead, for a moment, on the impact this ruling will have on the presidential race.

President Obama has been able to elude the question of same-sex marriage overall. His slippery rhetoric indicates that he’s pro-civil unions but anti-same sex marriage but is “evolving.” This ruling will force him to take a side. He will likely attempt to suggest that this is a decision best left to the courts, but he’s never taken that position before – see, for example, campaign finance reform. It’s unlikely that the gay community or the religious community will allow him to get away with that. (more…)

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – A federal appeals court on Tuesday declared California’s same-sex marriage ban to be unconstitutional, putting the bitterly contested, voter-approved law on track for likely consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that a lower court judge correctly interpreted the U.S. Constitution and Supreme Court precedents when he declared in 2010 that Proposition 8 was a violation of the civil rights of gays and lesbians.

It was unclear when gay marriages might resume in California. Lawyers for Proposition 8 sponsors and for the two couples who successfully sued to overturn the ban have repeatedly said they would consider appealing to a larger panel of the court and then the U.S. Supreme Court if they did not receive a favorable ruling from the 9th Circuit.

“Although the Constitution permits communities to enact most laws they believe to be desirable, it requires that there be at least a legitimate reason for the passage of a law that treats different classes of people differently. There was no such reason that Proposition 8 could have been enacted,” the ruling states.

The panel also said there was no evidence that former Chief U.S. Judge Vaughn Walker was biased and should have disclosed before he issued his decision that he was gay and in a long-term relationship with another man.

The ruling came more than a year after the appeals court heard arguments in the case.

Proposition 8 backers had asked the 9th Circuit to set aside Walker’s ruling on both constitutional grounds and because of the thorny issue of the judge’s personal life. It was the first instance of an American jurist’s sexual orientation being cited as grounds for overturning a court decision. (more…)

State Controller John shocked California legislators this week when he sent a letter announcing that the State will run out of cash on March 8th without the legislature agreeing to allow the State Treasurer to delay $2.4 billion in payments to universities, counties and Medi-Cal, plus borrowing another $3.3 billion from Wall Street bankers.

The Controller’s announcement comes just two weeks after California Gov. Jerry Brown gave his State of the State speech to the Legislature, then immediately hit the road in a two-day campaign swing through Southern California to tout his November ballot initiative to raise taxes on all Californians. At a stop with 50 of Orange County’s top business leaders and CEOs, the Governor outlined how he was already making severe budget cuts, reorganizing state government, and implementing a 12-point pension reform plan.

Brown said he offered these actions as credibility before asking business to support his November tax initiative. The Governor added that he welcomed California’s future population growth and assured his audience that the State’s future is bright. Brown reiterated his support for the nation’s first high-speed rail system and for expeditious completion of the environmental review on a proposed project to fix the state’s water delivery system that has devastated Central California farmers.

California lawmakers had been assured by the Brown Administration’s Department of Finance that the State had sufficient cash reserves through the end of the State’s June 30th fiscal year. But Controller Chaing warned that for the first six months of the fiscal year state tax revenues came in at $2.6 billion below budget and spending came in at $2.6 billion over budget.

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SPRINGFIELD — Illinois, unable to solve its long-running financial problems, was given the lowest credit rating of any state in the country by Moody’s Investors Service on Friday, a move that will increase costs to taxpayers.

A second agency, Standard & Poor’s, left its Illinois rating unchanged but warned of a negative outlook that could lead to a downgrade in the future. A day earlier, Fitch Ratings also left the rating unchanged and declared a stable outlook.

Lower credit ratings generally mean the state winds up paying more interest when it borrows money by selling bonds.

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Big Government contributor Charles C. Johnson writes against California’s bid to abolish capital punishment in the Los Angeles Times. He thanks Big Government contributor and past assemblyman Chuck Devore of the Texas Public Policy Foundation for the Texas and California death penalty comparisons.

With a drug cocktail that puts death row inmates to sleep, California’s capital punishment can hardly be said to be cruel — but it is so unusual that death row inmates in the Golden State routinely die of old age or by suicide. When, or more likely if, justice comes, it doesn’t come cheap. By some estimates, it costs $100,000 a year per prisoner to keep California’s 718 inmates alive on death row, thanks in part to the endless, often frivolous appeals brought by inmates and death penalty opponents. If capital punishment is prohibitively expensive, it is because those professionally seeking to abolish it have made it so.

Even death penalty supporters, such as Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye of the California Supreme Court, have given up. “I don’t think it is working,” the newly appointed chief justice told The Times last week. California’s death penalty requires “structural change, and we don’t have the money.” Still, Californians need a “merit-based discussion on its effectiveness and costs.” But the chief justice ignored why that load continues to mount: death penalty opponents.

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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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As so often happens in California, the worst of consequences comes from the best of intentions. “We need a system where voters choose the politicians, not where politicians choose the voters,” Governor Schwarzenegger proclaimed and so, with much fanfare, Californians passed Prop. 11 in 2008, hoping to change forever the way the state redraws its state office political boundaries every ten years.

Proposition 20 passed in 2010 added the task of re-drawing the boundaries of California’s congressional Democrats to the California Citizen’s Redistricting Commission. Voters put redistricting in the hands of a supposedly indifferent citizens’s commission. Decisions were to be guide by public testimony and open debate, and not by state legislatures with their supposed self-interest and constituents to appease.

But California’s congressional Democrat delegation still found a way to tinker with the results. Today ProPublica, a non-profit investigative journalism organization, published a piece titled, “How Democrats Fooled California’s Redistricting Commission,” that lays out this bold conclusion:

As part of a national look at redistricting, ProPublica reconstructed the Democrats’ stealth success in California, drawing on internal memos, emails, interviews with participants and map analysis. What emerges is a portrait of skilled political professionals armed with modern mapping software and detailed voter information who managed to replicate the results of the smoked-filled rooms of old.

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“Lakewood is not really a suburb anymore, it’s a particular kind of urban place that looks suburban superficially but which is netted fully in an urban fabric,” says author D.J. Waldie who is most famous for writing Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, set in 1950s Lakewood, California.

Waldie sat down with Reason Magazine Editor in Chief Matt Welch, who also grew up in Lakewood, to talk about city planning and the unique issues affecting suburbia in 2011. For 34 years, Waldie served as the Public Information Officer for the city of Lakewood and still lives in the house he grew up in.

The film rights to Holy Land were bought in late 2010 by actor James Franco for a possible movie.

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I just sent a comment to the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) regarding its proposal to list the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard (DSL) on the “endangered” list of the Endangered Species Act, and I feel great about it.   Absolutely great!  After I pressed the “enter” button on my computer and sent this comment to the FWS, I celebrated by eating a third of a roll of raw Christmas cookie dough instead of baking these cookies for an up-coming Christmas party.  My friends at the party will understand – this was done in the name of something big!

My comment to the FWS can be found here.  I encourage everyone in west Texas and eastern New Mexico to submit a similar comment (either e-mail or snail-mail) to the FWS by using this link.  Your jobs and economy are at stake. All comments are due by January 19, 2012.

In fact, you don’t even need to live in west Texas or eastern New Mexico to submit a comment to the FWS.  You can write as an American who will be affected by such a ruling.  And believe me, if this little lizard is listed as “endangered,” we will all be affected in a big way.

Here is how it works: some critter somewhere gets listed as endangered, and the US government springs into action.  To stop everyone else’s actions.

In this case, this lizard hangs out in a small bush called the shinnery oak tree and sleeps in the sands nearby.  This lizard seems to live only in an oil-rich part of the country (oil exploration companies, take note), specifically the Permian Basin area of west Texas and eastern New Mexico.  There have been previous efforts to list this lizard as endangered, and last year a formal proposal was made to do just that.  The proposal was originally to be acted on by this month, but Senators Cornyn and Inhofe wrote a letter to the Interior Department, which prompted new deadlines for this proposal, including the new comment deadline.

An endangered listing for the DSL would ruin the oil drilling industry in the Permian Basin, that area of west Texas and eastern New Mexico that produces about 20% of all the oil from the lower 48 states and 5% of total oil produced in the US.  The oil produced there also constitutes 68% of all oil produced in the state of Texas.

The FWS proposal itself, found here, contemplates not only denying all new oil-drilling permits, but curtailing current oil drilling, seismic testing and even operating oil pipelines in the area.  All these activities supposedly disrupt the DSL, possibly leading to its extinction.

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The federal government is in the midst of a crackdown on medical marijuana dispensaries across the state of California.

This is despite repeated claims from President Obama and his Department of Justice that they would not devote federal resources to circumventing state medical marijuana laws.

“The law has been hijacked by profiteers who are motivated not by compassion, but by money,” said Melinda Haag, one of California’s U.S. Attorneys, at a DOJ press conference on October 11, 2011.

Aaron Sandusky, owner of G3 Holistic, a group of medical marijuana dispensaries in California’s Inland Empire, is one such target of the DOJ’s crackdown on medical marijuana “profiteers.” The DOJ sent him a letter promising to shut down his operations within 14 days. And they followed through.

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In a move that grabbed attention among the technology and retail business communities, three senators—Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY), Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN)—introduced legislation aimed at allowing states to require online-only, out-of-state retailers to collect and remit to states tax on sales made to residents of those states.

In a press release, the three senators touted their legislation as an effort to give states “the option to collect sales and use tax revenues from out-of-state sellers through a new, simplified tax system,” but “only if they adopt certain minimum simplification requirements and provide sellers with additional notices on the collection requirements.”  The Enzi-Durbin-Alexander bill also “exempts sellers who make less than $500,000 in total remote sales in the year preceding the sale.”  It reportedly has the support of big bricks-and-mortar retailers like Wal-Mart and Home Depot, as well as Amazon.com.

In multiple states around the country over the past year, legislators and officials have been looking to sales made by out-of-state, online-only retailers as a potential revenue stream capable of being tapped in order to help fill budget holes. California has been notably aggressive in pursuing a so-called “Amazon Tax,” which would force retailers like Amazon.com and O.co to collect and remit to the state sales tax on sales made to Californians.

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Despite all the talk of fixing it, California’s budget is still a mess. One of those “fixes” was implemented last summer when the state Legislature increased revenue projections by $4 billion to avoid balancing the budget. Of course, the problem with using such “phantom money” is that it often has a habit of disappearing when you need it most. And it has disappeared just when money for schools is needed. Now deep cuts are on the table. The people lose again.

Naturally the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office recently reported that the state will receive virtually none of the $4 billion in projected revenue, forcing the state to make some tough decisions in the coming weeks. On the table are major cuts to the education budget, including shortening the school year by a week, not to mention cuts to in-home healthcare programs, and programs for people with developmental disabilities.

Obviously Californian’s budget needs all the help it can get but it looks like it’s business as usual in Sacramento. For instance, an upcoming ballot measure sponsored by a career politician would baffle anyone that truly understands the mess California is in. The so-called California Cancer Research Act coming before voters in June, asks California voters to raise taxes by nearly $1 billion for a whole new perpetual bureaucracy. That is unacceptable to voters. Maddeningly this new program doesn’t even guarantee that the money will be spent in the state! Apparently former state Sen. Pro Tem Don Perata, the career politician pushing the measure, thinks Californians who already paying some of the highest taxes in the nation should reach deeper into their pockets just to potentially send that money across state lines to benefit others. And all the while the budget for the education for those same taxpayer’s kids is about to be slashed.

So, what is the “solution” proposed by Democrats in Sacramento? Raise taxes, of course.

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While the teacher unions of Oakland, California are enjoying the Occupy protests, just down the road in the Alameda school district, the teachers union has been busy working on behalf of its top priority.

Surprise, surprise – students are not at the top of the union concern list.

It seems the district was in the rare position of having $1.1 million left over from last year’s budget.

Alameda school board members, being the student advocates they are, voted 4-1 on Oct. 25 to use the money to purchase textbooks, fund programs aimed at boosting math, reading and writing skills, pay for after-school programs at two underperforming schools and establish a program designed to encourage parents to be more involved in their kids’ education.

That certainly sounds like a reasonable use of school funds, particularly during a period of economic distress and lackluster student performance.

But the Alameda Education Association, the district’s teachers union, objects to that plan. Union leaders want the money spent on bonuses for teachers.

School board members say they will take care of the teachers in the next round of contract negotiations, which are scheduled to begin in January. But that’s not good enough for the union.

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The illegal immigration debate could not be any hotter. While JW was protecting the rights of Maryland citizens to stop tuition breaks for illegal aliens in Maryland, on October 14, a federal court blocked provisions of Alabama’s new tough illegal immigration enforcement law from taking effect — at the urging of the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) — while allowing other provisions to be enforced. At the same time, Arizona’s illegal immigration enforcement law, SB 1070, is expected to go before the U.S. Supreme Court soon (Judicial Watch currently represents the Arizona State Legislature in court and recently filed an amicus curiae brief with the High Court, which began its current term on October 3).

In the midst of this firestorm, Judicial Watch took aggressive action, launching a national television advertising campaign to combat illegal immigration. The purpose of the campaign is to collect petitions from the American people to send to the governors of all 50 states, urging them to obey and enforce all laws against illegal immigration. This campaign to encourage our nation’s governors to stand strong on illegal immigration law enforcement has become more urgent now that the Obama DOJ has decided to sue states for merely trying to protect their citizens from the scourge of illegal immigration.

But it’s not just the federal government that is to blame. Some states have decided to side with the illegal aliens, rolling out the welcome mat for illegal aliens through costly and unlawful sanctuary policies. That’s why we’re going national with this petition campaign. The petition campaign is being driven by a series of television advertisements that began broadcasting this week in California, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, as well as nationwide on Fox Business News (FBN) and the Military Channel.

In this new national campaign, Judicial Watch asks Americans take a stand on this illegal immigration crisis:

The cost of illegal immigration is a burden on every taxpaying citizen. That’s why Judicial Watch fights hard to hold politicians accountable when they violate and undermine immigration law. Take a stand. Sign this petition and tell your state governor to enforce our federal immigration laws.

The objective of our television campaign is to educate the public and encourage citizens to petition their government in support of the rule of law. Here’s what our petition states (If you’d like to sign off on these principles, then please click here and join our cause!):

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Jerry Brown, California’s quirky Governor, has made a credible first step on the road to reforming the State’s insolvent public pension plans. The state is the global leader for financially irresponsible government by racking-up $350 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. But with the threat of California’s credit rating being cut to the same “junk” level that is destroying Greece; the Governor has offered a 12 step recovery program to begin the long journey back to solvency.

The new urgency to reform California’s public pensions is being driven by the Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) new public sector accounting rules that will require the State of California and local governments to triple their annual pension contributions. There is no law that can force California to comply with GASB; but failure to do so will result in the State’s auditor issuing a “qualified opinion” regarding the reliability of the state’s financials. Eighteen months ago Greece’s auditors issued this type of opinion. The credit rating agencies downgraded Greece’s debt; causing borrowing costs rise above to 20% and destroy the nation.

California first enacted its public sector defined benefit pension plan in 1932, shortly before the enactment of Social Security. The legislation, just like Social Security, was designed to require work until age 65, when average life expectancy of Americans was only 60 years of age. Consequently, the average public employees, just like Social Security, were both required to contribute for decades for retirement payments they would never receive. But through labor union negotiations, the average age of retirement eligibility was whittled down to 53.75 years of age from 65; while the life expectancy rose from to 78.2 years. When the average California public employee retires today they should expect initially receive $35,000 a year pension payment that is expected to rise by a 3% cost-of-living increases for the next 24.5 years. The income steam necessary to pay for the combination of today’s public sector early retirement eligibility and longer expected lifetime to receive payments has driven the costs of pension payments up from $573,484 to $1,277,445.

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From The Hill:

In Thursday’s retirement announcement, [U.S. Rep Dennis] Cardoza said he’s “dismayed by the administration’s failure to understand and effectively address the current housing foreclosure crisis.”

“Home foreclosures are destroying communities and crushing our economy,” he said, “and the administration’s inaction is infuriating.”

Cardoza also took a shot at the news media for what he characterized as a “general lack of attention to moderate members of Congress.”

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As a result of years of budget deficits and wasteful spending by the state legislature, California faces difficult budget challenges for the next ten years. This bad news is courtesy of a recent analysis of the state’s long-term debt obligations by state Treasurer Bill Lockyer. The analysis adds to a growing list of bad fiscal news for California, a state already struggling under the nation’s worst credit rating and suffering the highest unemployment in the country at 12%.

Even as California deals with this financial crisis, a career politician is pushing a ballot measure that would raise taxes by nearly $1 billion — but doesn’t allocate one penny to balance the state budget, pay down its debt, or to fund existing critical programs like education and public safety. This measure, the so-called California Cancer Research Act, would mandate a new bureaucracy with six political appointees that can spend tax money on buildings, salaries and benefits. This includes $16 million spent on overhead and $117 million on new buildings and facilities. These are not one-time expenditures, as such spending will continue year after year.

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Another in a long line of explosions and other catastrophic safety failures occurred at the end of September when a natural gas pipeline built and owned by Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) ruptured in Roseville, California. This is just of a piece of the failure of PG&E to ensure public safety, a failure that the so-called government watchdog agency set up to watch the utility, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), has seemingly done little to mitigate.

Now, not only has PG&E failed to safeguard the public, but the company is insisting that ratepayers foot the bill for repairs and new safety programs to the tune of some $2.2 billion. Government watchdog CPUC seems wholly content to stand aside while they do it.

Michael R. Peevey, President of the CPUC, has been at the helm of the regulatory commission during many of the worst failures of public safety. Yet, even as he’s claimed he intends to make major changes in the agency, Governor Jerry Brown has not sacked Peevey, whose term ends in 2014. Taxpayers are left asking, why not?

Peevey has been a disaster. He has reigned over some of the most disastrous failures which have caused the deaths of nearly a dozen Californians. His soft stance seems to have allowed PG&E to act with impunity and arrogance, all to the detriment of ratepayers’ pocketbooks and their very safety. (more…)