[Orange County] government workers receive an “average full-career pension of $81,372 for miscellaneous [employees], which includes all nonsafety retirees, and $99,366 for safety [mostly police and fire] retirees of all Orange County cities enrolled in CalPERS.”
Stockton update: “After only one full budget year, the city has already broken three fundamental promises and is destined to return to insolvency within four years.”
This story is so strange I suspect it could only happen in California. (Playboy link, so it may be blocked at your place of work.) Despite the large number of guns. ($5 million for 1,200 guns? I call BS. That would mean each gun was slightly more expensive than the list price for a bolt-action Barrett .50 BMG sniper rifle. The photos mostly show pretty common hunting rifles.)
But I missed this follow-up in Deadspin, because it’s pretty far from my regular reading list, plus the Gawker ickiness factor.
But there does seem to be enough smoke there to suggest some sort of fire:
Johnson is a youngish, attractive Democrat with a reputation as a national leader on education issues, a gift for making powerful friends, and a superficially impressive background—UC Berkeley, a long run as a top NBA star, a successful business career. He’s just the sort of politician a lot of people want to believe, and a lot of people have done so. His mayoralty will even soon be the subject of a laudatory entry in ESPN’s acclaimed 30 For 30 documentary series.
The scandals didn’t much matter in 2008, when he easily won election in the face of credible accusations that he’d molested teenage girls, defrauded the federal government of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and lorded over an empire of slum holdings. And they haven’t much mattered since, as he’s gone from success to success, his star rising ever higher in the Democratic Party firmament through most of his career.
As mayor, he’s incurred sexual harassment charges in the course of waging a bizarre war on an obscure non-profit organization; soaked taxpayers in his hometown for hundreds of millions of dollars to build a new arena for the Sacramento Kings; and used public employees to do his own private political work while attempting to hide the evidence by keeping email records off the books, Hillary Clinton-style.
Deadspin lays the cause of Johnson’s recent actions to his desire to profit from private charter schools.
Johnson’s latest scandal involves:
“He got a major national law firm to sue both the city of Sacramento and the Sacramento News & Review simply because the tiny weekly newspaper had filed a public-records request.”
He’s claiming attorney/client privilege for any records related to the NCBM.
He’s asserting that “40 people besides Johnson whom they claim are covered by attorney/client privilege, including 10 lawyers from the firm who worked for Johnson on NCBM-related matters,” also including “every member of his official mayoral staff—including communications director Ben Sosenko, chief of staff Daniel Conway, and advisors[sic] Patti Bisharat, Cassandra Jennings, Helen Hewitt, and Adrianne Hall.”
“Lots of folks who used Sacramento city government titles and worked out of City Hall while doing Johnson’s dirty work in the NCBM fiasco were in fact not employed by the city government. They were instead charter school advocates, funded by charter school ideologues, who kept their true allegiances and mission hidden.”
“Johnson has a history of not abiding by disclosure rules. In 2012, the California Fair Political Practices Commission (CFPPC), a panel charged with enforcing state financial disclosure laws, found that Johnson had failed to report at least 25 donations totaling $3.1 million made at his direction to his non-profits…To settle the case, Johnson agreed to pay a fine of $37,500, the largest penalty ever handed down to a public official in the state for non-disclosure violations.”
One need not embrace Deadspin’s, er, spin, which seems to be an attempt to keep money keep money going to failing unionized public schools (which I take to be their real reason in going after Johnson) to see many of Johnson’s actions as unethical and probably illegal.
Now, I happen to be a lot more pro-charter school than Deadspin evidently is. So if Kevin Johnson’s people want to contact me and explain his side of the story, I’d be happy to run a follow-up…
“So we know that 99% of the data has been adjusted, and we know that over 80% of the reported warming in the lower 48 States over the entire 20th Century was due to adjustments – the raw data simply do not show this warming.”
Mark Steyn offers another dispatch from post-Jewish Europe. Bonus: Facebook is going to “do more” to suppress anti-“refugee” posts.
Islamic State fighters start defecting because ISIS can’t make payroll. Time to consider marrying Len Trexler…
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas says he’s no longer bound by Oslo Accords. Because why should you let a little piece of paper get in the way of the all-important task of exterminating the Jews?
Texas had five of the ten fastest growing metropolitan areas in 2014. Austin isn’t on this list, but Midland and San Angelo are numbers one and two. (San Jose, California’s lone entry, checks in at eight.)
“Instead of building freeways, expanding ports, restoring bridges and aqueducts, and constructing dams, desalination plants, and power stations, California’s taxpayers are pouring tens of billions each year into public sector pension funds.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
“Texas is like Australia with the handbrake off. There is no individual income tax and no corporate income tax, which explains the state’s rapid economic and population growth. A recent downturn has sparked some concern, however. Apparently Texas will only create another 150,000 jobs during 2015 – about the same number as Australia, from a population only a few million larger. In a good year, that number of jobs is easily generated by a single Texan city.” Also: IowaHawk’s illegal human organ trafficking!
Theory: The people flooding into Europe are innocent families of refugees fleeing war. Reality: “young men [heaving] rocks at the authorities and showing up on YouTube videos shouting Allahu Akbar.”
“There is something shallow and decadent about a pontiff who prioritizes “climate change” even as every last Christian is driven from the Archeparchy of Mosul. What will they say of such a pope? That he fiddled with the thermostat while Rome burned?”
I increasingly think the Democrat/Muslim union has to do with old-fashioned relativism. Democrats don’t actually believe that women’s rights and gay rights apply to everyone; white people: sure. Arabs? Well, who am I to judge? And Muslims know this.
When Robby George is just dumbfounded as to why all these Muslims support the party of abortion on demand and gay marriage, the answer seems pretty clear to me: They’re supporting the party of abortion on demand and gay marriage for infidels
Another:
I think the issue is more that they see Muslims as a new potential mascot group that they can champion and therefore obtain that cheap sense of moral superiority that comes with riding in like a white knight. I think a lot of liberal attitudes towards minorities aren’t actually based on the good of the minorities, but how good it makes the liberals feel to champion them. Muslims are (as of now) a tiny, insignificant minority. They’re mostly kinda swarthy, so the “it’s racism” meme is easily transferable, and a significant chunk of liberals loathe Christianity.
The opaque, dishonest nature by which ObamaCare was passed ensured that the full brunt of many provisions wouldn’t be felt before Obama’s 2012 reelection bid. While that stratagem worked for Obama, it also ensured that ObamaCare would turn into an unending supply of timebomb policies with unpleasant consequences which would continue to plague Democrats (and America) long after the bill’s passage.
And those bombs continue continue to explode:
“The more time Americans have had to experience the health care reform legislation first-hand, the more obvious it has become that, like virtually all government-controlled social experiments, Obamacare’s waste of taxpayers’ money has grown to epic levels. And there’s no sign the poorly managed program is improving.”
ObamaCare deductibles are now rising seven times faster than inflation. “Premiums have risen nearly $5,000 since Obama promised to cut them.”
Even Democrat’s own direct-mail advertising admits that “fewer than half of all U.S. doctors accept Medicaid,” a direct consequence of ObamaCare’s “cost control” features while dumping millions more patients into Medicaid.
All of which explains why ObamaCare remains deeply unpopular with voters, with 52% viewing it unfavorably, and 36% very unfavorably.
The solution is obvious: Reduce federal coverage mandates to reduce premiums and deductibles. Instead, Mrs. Clinton wants even more mandates that are guaranteed to make premiums and deductibles rise even higher.
First, on Tuesday in Iowa, Mrs. Clinton released her plan to make prescription drugs more “affordable.” (Sound familiar?) She proposes capping patients’ monthly out-of-pocket prescription costs at $250. Making insurers pay more toward retail drug costs ensures those costs will be passed on to employers and policy holders through premium increases, forcing the young and healthy to further subsidize the old and the sick. And Mrs. Clinton wants to stick it to drug makers by prohibiting them from deducting the cost of advertising on their taxes (as other kinds of businesses can) and shortening their patents, which will give them shorter horizons to recover their sizable investments. Making it more expensive for pharmaceutical companies to do business will either increase the costs of drugs or prevent their development in the first place.
Then, on Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton said she wants to expand the “free” services mandated under Obamacare to include three doctor visits per year, on top of preventive care such as vaccines and screenings. When Democrats were selling Obamacare to taxpayers, they said fully covered preventive care would help reduce overall health care spending by giving Americans an incentive to take better care of themselves and not avoid seeking care because of cost concerns. But the law of supply and demand can’t be suspended by Congress; increasing demand for health care increases costs. Now Mrs. Clinton wants sick care to be fully covered as well, which will — wait for it — increase demand for a limited supply of doctors and providers, and increase costs through higher premiums and deductibles. She also wants to deny insurers the ability to charge higher out-of-network costs for hospital care when those very networks help insurers keep costs down.
And there’s plenty more time for more ObamaCare-fueled rate and deductible explosions between now and the 2016 election…
When you start grabbing a third pull quote from a piece is when you realize that it needs a post of its own. Such is the case with this Nick Cohen piece on why Jeremy Corbyn’s election has finally forced him to leave the left. Though centered on UK politics, much of it applies to the social justice warrior/victimhood identity politics left in this country as well.
The shift of left-wing thought towards movements it would once have denounced as racist, imperialist and fascistic has been building for years. I come from a left-wing family, marched against Margaret Thatcher and was one of the first journalists to denounce New Labour’s embrace of corporate capitalism — and I don’t regret any of it. But slowly, too slowly I am ashamed to say, I began to notice that left-wing politics had turned rancid.
Snip.
In 2007 I tried to make amends, and published What’s Left. If they were true to their professed principles, my book argued, modern leftists would search out secular forces in the Muslim world — Iranian and Arab feminists, say, Kurdish socialists or Muslim liberals struggling against reactionary clerics here in Britain — and embrace them as comrades. Instead, they preferred to excuse half the anti-western theocrats and dictators on the planet. As, in their quiet way, did many in the liberal mainstream. Throughout that period, I never heard the BBC demanding of ‘progressives’ how they could call themselves left-wing when they had not a word of comfort for the Iraqi and Afghan liberals al-Qaeda was slaughtering.
The triumph of Jeremy Corbyn has led to What’s Left sales picking up, and readers acclaiming my alleged prescience. Grateful though I am, I cannot accept the compliment. I never imagined that left-wing politics would get as bad as they have become. I assumed that when the criminally irresponsible Blair flew off in his Learjet, the better angels of the left’s nature would re-assert themselves.
What a fool I was.
Snip.
The fact remains that the Labour party has just endorsed an apologist for Putin’s imperial aggression; a man who did not just appear on the propaganda channel of Russia, which invades its neighbours and persecutes gays, but also of Iran, whose hangmen actually execute gays. Labour’s new leader sees a moral equivalence between 9/11 and the assassination of bin Laden, and associates with every variety of women-hating, queer-bashing, Jew-baiting jihadi, holocaust denier and 9/11 truther. His supporters know it, but they don’t care.
Snip.
The half-educated fanatics are in control now. I do not see how in conscience I can stay with their movement or vote for their party. I am not going to pretend the next time I meet Owen Jones or those Labour politicians who serve in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet that we are still members of the same happy family. There are differences that cannot and should not be smoothed over.
I realise now what I should have known years ago. The causes I most care about — secularism, freedom of speech, universal human rights — are not their causes. Whatever they pretend, when the crunch comes, they will always put sectarian unity first, and find reasons to be elsewhere.
The Advisory Board will be made up of Naomi Aberly, Jeremy Bird, former Dallas Mayor and Ambassador Ron Kirk, Congressman Joaquin Castro, Eric Johnson, Austin Ligon, Jennifer Longoria, Brownsville Mayor Tony Martinez, Eddy Morales, Amber Mostyn, Carrin F. Patman, Carrin Mauritz Patman, Marvin Ragsdale, Kirk Rudy, and Lynda Tran. Jenn Brown, who started as executive director for Battleground Texas, is now chairwoman of the advisory board.
Sure, that’s Battleground Texas’ big problem: Not enough advisers.
The real news here, I think, is the demotion-by-promotion of Jenn Brown.
Ron Kirk might back Hillary (who he’s donated to), or he might back Biden.
I think the advisory board may be a move to cement Battleground Texas more firmly in Hillary’s orbit, thus foreclosing the possibility that Bernie Sanders might start picking up activist support in Texas. After all, she still needs to win the primary before getting to the general…
Is it 10? I may have missed one or two along the way.
Funny how Planned Parenthood’s defenders always speak as though it is a sacred charity, but when Planned Parenthood personnel don’t know they’re on camera, it’s “an industry.”
Here’s the unedited version of the main talk for comparison:
I know I should be talking about Trump or immigration or jihad, but fresh takes just aren’t occurring to me this morning. So instead, let’s just talk about newly minted Labour head Jeremy Corbyn’s freakshow of a shadow cabinet. (For those not conversant with UK political terms, the “shadow cabinet” is the cabinet of the opposition party (in this case Labour) which would (theoretically) take over if the Tories were to lose power over a no-confidence vote; since the Tories currently enjoy an absolute majority, it would take a pretty big political upheaval for this to happen before 2020.) Evidently it was quite difficult for Corbyn to even find Labour MPs willing to take positions in his shadow cabinet.
A few choice examples:
Kerry McCarthy, shadow secretary of agriculture, is a hardcore vegan, and I’m sure her absolute opposition to meat will really help Labour win back not only the British butcher industry, but also the working class white voters that used to be Labour’s largest block of support. She’s also a supporter of homeopathic medicine.
The new Shadow Chancellor (finance minister) is John McDonnell, who openly states his desire to overthrow capitalism, wants to nationalize banks, praised the IRA for it’s bomb-setting and killing activity, and has fantasized about traveling back in time to assassinate Margaret Thatcher.
Shadow defense secretary Maria Eagle’s biggest issues seem to be gay rights and opposition to mink farming, neither of which tend to weigh heavily in defense policy.
Diane Abbott, shadow secretary of state for International Development, once said that “blonde, blue-eyed Finnish girls” at London hospitals were unsuitable as nurses because they had “never met a black person before” and that “white people love playing ‘divide & rule.'”
This isn’t just a “let’s have a laugh at the expense of the far left freaks” post (fun though that may be). To a large extent, personnel is policy, and this shows how quickly extreme left-wing/Social Justice Warrior ideas can take root at the center of a major political party if they have enough adherents in the overclass. Right now, there’s no shortage of Democratic Party activist who would love to make veganism the official policy of the United States government, and as Obama appointees have shown, would not let little things like “laws” (or the lack thereof) stand in the way of implementing their extremist policies were they be placed in a position of power.