I was going to go off and try to explain the various forms of stupidity that are looming over this inane and insane plan by the LA City Council to ban non-reusable bags (which is freaking out people all over the place, including the people who make reusable bags*), but it makes my head hurt, and that’s not the important thing right now. The important thing is to spread the word:
FLY, YOU FOOLS.
Continue reading #RSRH LA City Council reminds us: Democratic politicians hate industry.
It is starting to get, well, kind of bad. The San Francisco Chronicle – not precisely a hotbed of conservative activism – has collated some of the things that Stark has been saying lately:
The 80-year-old Democrat, in a meeting with Chronicle editors and reporters this week, appeared to be confused about Solyndra, the Fremont solar power company whose collapse has fueled Republican criticism of the Obama administration’s energy policies this election year.
“I wish I had enough expense allowance to get one of those new S’s that Solyndra’s going to make down there – the electric car,” Stark said, after being asked about the company. “They run $60,000 to $90,000.”
Continue reading #rsrh I… I think that it is time that Pete Stark (D, CA) goes home.
I got nothing about this story about Alameda County (California) Supervisor Nadia Lockyer (wife to California Treasurer Bill Lockyer) and an alleged sex tape allegedly involving her and a former meth addict. Well. Almost nothing.
:ahem:
NAME.
THAT.
PARTY!!!!!
…And no, the name of the party is not “methamphetamine.”
Moe Lane
(Via Instapundit, via AoSHQ)
Not the main point, which is that she’s self-identifying as one of those rubes who doesn’t quite understand why the Democratic party considers her a handy cash cow. There’s something darkly entertaining about watching a California liberal whine about how she’s not going to give any money to Obama until he starts acting like a ‘leader;’ madam, if the President was capable of such things we would have seen it on, oh, January 20th, 2009. That was when I knew that Obama was incapable of seizing the opportunities given unto him. That’s when I truly knew that this man was weak.
Anyway, my problem is with this:
Ro Khanna, a Democratic rising star in the South Bay, also has Buell’s support and donations, as he mulls a future run against 20-term incumbent Rep. Pete Stark in the new 15th Congressional District.
Continue reading #rsrh Got a problem with this Susie Tompkins Buell story.
Come, I will conceal nothing from you: the Ricky Gill campaign is busily bringing up the odd detail that his likely opponent for CA-09 – Rep. Jerry McNerney, who was essentially accused by ProPublica last month of having that district redrawn for his benefit – has not yet moved into CA-09. Given that McNerney’s been putting this move off since at least last July, I think that this is a perfectly reasonable observation of the Ricky Gill campaign to make. I understand that redistricting can make for temporary confusion and delay until things straighten out again, but at this point failing to find a new place to live in the district that you want to represents a certain lack of, ah, drive*.
As you probably recall, we interviewed Ricky last month at RedState. Check out the interview.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*We will now pause while Democrats search frantically for any Republican legislator from the last thirty years who did not instantly relocate his or her primary residence because of redistricting. Alas for them, it’s not really unlikely that any hypothetical GOP legislator had gone through the trouble of (allegedly) designing their district first. In other words: shenanigans are one thing, but sloppy, ill-planned shenanigans? That’s kind of… embarrassing, no?
To summarize: $92.6 billion in spending (7% increase over last year’s); $9.2 billion deficit over eighteen months (half in the first six months, the other half in the next twelve). Brown is requesting $7 billion in new taxes, mostly from raising the sales tax again (to 7.75%) but with a faux-populist-friendly soak-the-rich* (actually, soak-the-small-business-owner) increase to 10.3%. Or the state can ‘cut’ an additional $4.8 billion in educational aid (he’s already planning to reduce poverty assistance by $4.2 billion): the most increased spending appears to be in tax relief/local government**… and education. In other words, that cut would actually be mostly in a projected increase in education spending, which means that it’s not really a cut at all.
Or, to summarize the summary: Brown’s bailing out the municipalities; and he’s trying to blackmail the Californian populace into a tax hike to pay for it by threatening to wipe out an increase in K-12 education funds if they don’t vote said hike in. See how that works? Increase spending in a line-item; then call the threat to remove that increase a ‘budget cut’ and use it to justify a ‘temporary’ tax. It’s a great scam; or, rather, it was a great scam twenty years ago, when there was more give in the system. Today, it’s just kind of alarming. Continue reading Gov. Jerry Brown’s (D, CA) new budget: more spending and higher taxes!
I’m assuming that, you understand: but, given that portions of said law have just been declared unconstitutional (live by the Commerce Clause, DIE BY IT, ye progressives) by a federal judge; and given that it’s about to hit the 9th Circuit Circus, which means that it’ll be overturned on appeal; and given that the reason why we in this business call it the “9th Circus” in the first place is because the Supremes always seem to have to swoop in and smack them around a bit… well. It’s not the most unreasonable assumption in the world.
Via Twitter (annoyingly, it’s hard to properly link to there on the iPad).
Before we talk about this race, some quick background on this district: as you probably know, California did some severe internal redistricting after 2010. What you probably didn‘t know – but probably suspected anyway – is that the Democrats who run the state managed to pervert was supposed to be a nonpartisan process by the blatant use of astroturf, front groups, and damaging and/or starving the ability of redistricting commissions to detect both.
The not-exactly-known-for-being-nice-to-conservatives-and-libertarians group ProPublica has a lot of the gory details; held up for particular disgust in that article is the case of Democratic Rep. Jerry McNerney, who had on the payroll Paul Mitchell, a redistricting consultant who just happened (according to ProPuiblica) to draw the maps for a supposed grassroots site called OneSanJoaquin. OneSanJoaquin provided astroturf arguments to the commission designing the CA-09 district: “[t]ranscripts show that more than a dozen people delivered or sent the canned testimony to the commission, which accepted it without question. There’s no sign that commissioners were aware some of the letters had been downloaded from the mysterious OneSanJoaquin page. ” End result? McNerney is now literally moving from an old district that he barely won to a new one that’s scored as D+7. Yes, literally: the man doesn’t even live in this district.
And thus we come to Ricky Gill, who is somewhat determined to not let McNerney do that without a fight. Ricky is a local resident who was appointed to California’s State Board of Education by the previous governor; and while he’s very young (when he announced his candidacy earlier this year he was only 24) he’s already demonstrated an ability to outraise his opponent*. We talked about the race and the district: Continue reading RS Interview: Ricky Gill (R CAND, CA-09 PRI)
So, Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D) writes an article for the Hill today called “Opinion: Obama would rather be university professor than president” in which he writes:
Let me be clear, I’m not trying to disparage professors.
My immediate response?
You failed.
Not much else to say there, except of course to note that while I recognize that Rep. Cardoza is perhaps justifiably bitter that redistricting has booted him out of Congress, why is he pausing from the laudable activity of yelling at Obama to take out his bitterness on the GOP? Seriously, ‘goat rodeo clowns’ is a great epithet, but shouldn’t he be reserving it for the California state legislature, which has been busily screwing up the state for almost as long as I have been alive?
I may be using ‘subtle’ in a somewhat ironic fashion.
Mark Reed is running in a redrawn district featuring incumbent Democrats Brad Sherman and Howard Berman. Come, I will conceal nothing from you: dropping a nuke in your campaign ad is, shall we say, controversial. On the other hand, Reed has absolutely nothing to lose in provoking Sherman & Berman into having a fight over who is more pro-Israel, which they were going to do anyway. On the gripping hand, I linked to it, didn’t I? Means it worked, more or less.
Moe Lane
PS: If you’re wondering, the primary is nonpartisan and the top two candidates go to the general. The polling is old and suspect, but suggests that Reed has a shot at second place. Interesting days.
