Click on WORD or PDF for full content
The decision by Toyota U.S. to leave California and move its headquarters to Texas is the subject of Joel Kotkin’s column this week.
The most important news to hit Southern California last week did not involve the heinous Donald Sterling, but Toyota’s decision to pull its U.S. headquarters out of the Los Angeles region in favor of greater Dallas. This is part of an ongoing process of disinvestment in the L.A. region, particularly among industrially related companies, that could presage a further weakening of the state’s middle class economy.
The Toyota decision also reflects the continued erosion of California’s historic economic diversity, which provided both stability and a wide variety of jobs to the state’s workers. …
… The Toyota relocation from Torrance will eliminate 3,000 or more generally high-wage jobs, something that usually accompanies the presence of headquarters operations. It will cost the region, most particularly, the SouthBay, an important corporate citizen, as, over time, the carmaker will likely shift its philanthropic emphasis toward Texas and its various manufacturing sectors. …
Common Core education standards have created a lot of heat. Jennifer Rubin tries to cool it down.
If you didn’t think there could be a debate more irrational and misleading than the one over immigration reform (and the knee-jerk insistence on the misleading term “amnesty” by opponents) think again. Take a look at the arguments these days about Common Core.
Opponents falsely call the Common Core a federal mandate (states developed it) and/or a curriculum (that is left entirely to the states and local school districts). It is, rather, one attempt, or one part of an attempt, to respond to the reality that U.S. kids wind up in remedial classes in college and do a lot worse than a lot of international competitors, especially when it comes to the reasoning skills and proficiencies needed to compete in a global economy. (If nothing else, read Amanda Ripley’s “The Smartest Kids in the World,” but be prepared to be very upset about the state of U.S. education.) There are lots of reasons for this, but many of the excuses (e.g. stratified American society, not enough money, teachers’ unions) miss the mark. And while admirable, school choice is not a cure-all and sidesteps the question of what skills American kids must master. …
Jonathan Tobin wonders why Rand Paul is helping out a vulnerable Democrat in North Carolina.
Over the weekend, as the New York Times reported, Senator Rand Paul hosted Rupert Murdoch at the Kentucky Derby. While we don’t know whether this interesting attempt by the 2016 presidential hopeful to ingratiate himself with the influential media mogul paid off, apparently neither of the two made any money at the track while betting on the ponies. The horse Paul was backing in the big race “died” in the last hundred yards, while Murdoch left Louisville saying that he had “contributed enough to Kentucky.” But Paul’s not done betting on horses that are probably not fated to win.
Yesterday he was in North Carolina campaigning for Greg Brannon, one of the candidates in the Republican senatorial primary. Paul has been fairly cautious in the past few years about trying to exercise influence in this manner but by showing up on the eve of today’s primary, rather than just mailing in an endorsement, he was gambling his reputation on the fortunes of a fellow libertarian who has been trailing frontrunner Tom Tillis by double digits throughout the race.
While there is little doubt about who will finish first tonight in North Carolina, Brannon is hoping to keep Tillis’s vote under the 40 percent mark. That would force a runoff to be held on July 15. As it happens, embattled Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan is hoping for the same outcome. …
More on Rand’s foolishness from Allysia Finley. Mike Huckabee is being stupid in NC too.
North Carolina House Speaker Thom Tillis, along with GOP Gov. Pat McCrory, has led nothing short of a Copernican revolution in government reform this past year. Strange then that Rand Paul should be allying with liberal groups and rallying tea party groups against Mr. Tillis in Tuesday’s GOP Senate primary.
Few Republican primaries are as significant and hotly contested as North Carolina’s. A new Public Policy Polling survey shows Mr. Tillis leading obstetrician Greg Brannon by 12 points and Baptist pastor Mark Harris by 25. But here’s the rub: Mr. Tillis is sitting right on the 40% cusp necessary to avoid a runoff, and as the poll notes the momentum is “on the anti-establishment candidates’ side.” A week ago Mr. Tillis was leading the doctor by 26 points and preacher by 35.
However, Mr. Paul and his second fiddle, Utah Senator Mike Lee, have been urging local tea party groups to back Mr. Brannon. And Mike Huckabee —who, recall, was Todd Akin’s biggest supporter—has anointed Mr. Harris as the choice for Christian conservatives. Liberal groups have also poured $4 million into ads against Mr. Tillis, whom they perceive as the most viable candidate to take on Kay Hagan in the fall. …
The good news is that Thom Tillis was able to fight off the interference from Rand Paul and Mike Huck. Eliana Johnson on The Tillis win.
… State-house speaker Thom Tillis emerged victorious Tuesday evening, capturing over 45 percent of the vote and easily clearing the 40 percent threshold that would have sent him into a July run-off with the second-place finisher. Obstetrician Greg Brannon and Mark Harris, a Baptist pastor, who ran to Tillis’s right, divided the tea-party vote and finished with 27 and 17 percent respectively.
Tillis will face Kay Hagan, one of the Senate’s most vulnerable incumbents — her approval rating dropped to an all-time low of 33 percent in March — in November’s midterm election. Among Republicans, the seat is considered among their most promising pick-up opportunities, and one that the party must win if it is to retake the Senate majority.
Tillis and his establishment backers, who include John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and Mitt Romney, succeeded on Tuesday in avoiding a real showdown with the Tea Party in a July run-off, where he would have faced second-place finisher Brannon one-on-one.
Outside groups like Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and the business-friendly Chamber of Commerce poured over $2 million into the race on Tillis’s behalf to avoid that scenario. …
Now, important investing advice from Dilbert’s Blog.
… I started testing an investment strategy a few years ago that is producing positive results. Yes, I am aware that my small sample is meaningless. And the numbers I present aren’t annualized or compared to their same-industry cousins that did even better. But I want you to hear the strategy just so you can keep an eye on it going forward.
The investment idea is that the news always exaggerates risks. This is an extension of the Adams Law of Slow Moving Disasters that says humans generally figure out how to avoid big disasters when they see them coming.
So, for example, when BP stock was in the toilet, and the news media kept telling us the Gulf would be ruined for decades, I loaded up on BP stock because I predicted the opposite: a better-than-expected clean-up. That prediction turned out right. So far, that investment has paid about a 5% dividend in recent years and the stock itself is up 19%. (You should interpret that as just “up” because I haven’t compared the performance to the market in general that is also up.)
When the news was reporting that Iranian leaders were on a suicide mission to develop a nuclear bomb to destroy Israel and their own country, I assumed it would all work out peacefully and I invested heavily in a beaten-down EFT of Israeli stocks. It’s the biggest single investment I’ve ever made. That’s up 26% …
From Nautilus Blog we learn more elephants are needed in the New England forests.
Elephant dung perfumes the air, a fresh, sweet smell, with undertones of sour vegetation. These balls of waste, scattered across the Kenyan landscape, carry the aroma of the bush, an open sea of acacia trees, aloe vera, Sansevieria, and drapes of elephant pudding, a succulent vine that tastes like salty snap beans but smells like bread dough.
Without elephants, Kenya would look and smell different than it does today. It would not support the Samburu warriors herding cattle or the fleet packs of ungulates bounding past them. Without large herbivores, the wilderness would look much more like sparsely inhabited parts of the Americas, Europe, and Siberia—forests dominated by large trees, with mainly small animals darting about in the shadows. This may seem like a healthy ecosystem, but some researchers say it is far from natural—or ideal. Giant herbivores have shaped Earth’s ecosystems for millennia. Today, only Africa retains a hint of epochs past, when large animals, or “megafauna,” dictated the shape of the landscape on every habitable continent. A world without large herbivores—much of the world today—means a loss of grassland, scrub forest, biodiversity. Hello trees, good-bye wilderness.
Matthew Mihlbachler, a paleontologist, sits at a table on the 8th floor of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. We’re surrounded by fossilized Jumbos, giants in varying shades of white and ivory, animal remains from the order Proboscidea that evolved about 55 million years ago and includes elephants, mammoths, and mastodons.
“Proboscidea moved through the landscape knocking down trees and pushing them over,” Mihlbachler says. “They are deforesters basically.” The scientist teaches anatomy at the New York Institute of Technology, College of Osteopathic Medicine. His research focus, however, is paleoecology and large herbivores. …
And to top off the week, Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.
Fallon: A new study says that many dog owners are giving anti-anxiety medicines to their pets to reduce stress. Then dogs said, “Or you could just sell the vacuum.”
Conan: Michelle Obama’s brother has been fired as Oregon States basketball coach. Like most Americans who lost their job, he blames Obama.
Conan: A new report says being optimistic or pessimistic may be largely genetic. So, in the words of my father, we’re all screwed.