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Joel Kotkin says CA Dems risk blue collar rebellion.
If California is to change course and again become a place of opportunity, the impetus is likely to come not from the perennially shrinking Republican Party but from working-class and middle-class Democrats.
This group, long quiescent, has emerged most notably in opposition to the state’s anti-global warming cap-and-trade policies, which will force up energy prices. Recently, some 16 Democratic Assembly members, led by Fresno’s Henry Perea, asked the state to suspend the cap-and-trade program, which will add as much as a dollar to what already are among the highest gasoline prices in the nation.
In some senses, this budding blue-collar rebellion exposes the essential contradiction between the party’s now-dominant gentry Left and its much larger and less well-off voting base. For the people who fund the party – public employee unions, Silicon Valley and Hollywood – higher energy prices are more than worth the advantages. Public unions get to administer the program and gain in power and employment while venture capitalists and firms, like Google, get to profit on mandated “green energy” schemes.
What’s in it for Hollywood? Well, entertainment companies are shifting production elsewhere in response to subsidies offered by other states, localities and companies, so high energy costs and growing impoverishment across Southern California doesn’t figure to really hurt their businesses. Furthermore, by embracing “green” policies, the famously narcissistic Hollywood crowd also gets to feel good about themselves, a motivation not to be underestimated.
This upside, however, does not cancel out hoary factors such as geography, race and class. One can expect lock-step support for any proposed shade of green from most coastal Democrats. Among lawmakers, the new Democratic dissenters don’t tend to come from Malibu or PortolaValley. They often represent heavily Latino areas of the Inland Empire and Central Valley, where people tend to have less money, longer drives to work and a harder time affording a decent home. Cap and trade’s impact on gasoline prices – which could approach an additional $2 a gallon by 2020 – is a very big deal in these regions. …
Sherman Frederick posts on Lois Lerner’s salty language.
If you want government to live up to the ideals under which this country was formed, you’re going to be called names.
Get used to it, because periodically the people who run government grow drunk with power and become a toxic combination of corrupt, cruel and petty. It can happen to a president; it can happen to a dogcatcher; and it can happen to all stripes of bureaucrats in between.
There’s no better example of this than how the federal government treats the tea party.
Sen. Harry Reid, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and President Barrack Obama have all tried to marginalize the tea party movement because it threatens their tax-’n’-spend status quo. Respectively, they have called these citizens “extremists,” “Astroturf” (the opposite of grass roots) and “haters.”
But perhaps the insult that best captures the attitude of government gone adrift came from embattled former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner. She calls them “ass—–.”
Lois Lerner isn’t the first government employee to go sour. And Reid, Pelosi and Obama won’t be the last pompous politicians to forget the power of a country founded upon extending dignity toward every human being, regardless of race, gender, religion, politics, financial status and all such other external means of discrimination. …
Mark Tapscott thinks it is time to view the administration as a criminal enterprise.
See a tree with 20 apples hanging on it and reasonable people conclude it’s an apple tree. So is it a criminal conspiracy when 20 government employees illegally destroy important official emails?
If that seems like an extreme question, consider the steadily accumulating evidence about the Obama administration’s modus operandi with potentially incriminating documents subpoenaed by Congress: A scandal erupts. Congressional hearings are held. Documents are requested and withheld. Subpoenas are issued. Contempt charges threatened. A few documents dribble out.
Then come the admissions that, oh by the way, emails required by multiple federal laws to be preserved have either been destroyed or “lost.”
The latest example comes from the Department of Health and Human Services, which admitted Wednesday that hundreds of Obamacare emails subpoenaed in 2013 by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform were destroyed months ago. …
Sharyl Attkisson has more on elusive federal documents.
When it comes to accountability questions, one owes the benefit of the doubt to the U.S. government, whoever may be in charge. Managing the massive federal bureaucracy isn’t easy. Responding to the demands from the public, the press and Congress for public information can be time consuming. However, it becomes increasingly difficult to suspend disbelief in the multiple instances in which the Obama administration is obstructing the release of, or losing, documents in major investigations.
In Fast and Furious, President Obama declared executive privilege to withhold documents in a controversy that the White House claimed revealed no evidence of White House involvement. Of course, if all the evidence isn’t turned over, then how is one to be confident no evidence exists? Further, multiple federal agencies have refused to turn over many documents requested in the case under the Freedom of Information Act as far back as 2011.
In the instance of Benghazi, the Obama administration failed to turn over requested documents when asked by Congress and requested under Freedom of Information law. Only recently, nearly two years after-the-fact, under court order, did it produce some withheld material to the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, which sued the State Department for failing to respond to its Freedom of Information requests. The documents continue to contradict the Obama administration’s narratives surrounding the September 11, 2012 Benghazi attacks.
With the IRS, President Obama insisted there wasn’t a “smidgen” of corruption surrounding the tax agency’s targeting of conservatives. But a key IRS official, Lois Lerner, refused to testify to Congress. And the IRS “lost” subpoenaed documents generated by Lerner and other key officials. These may include documents that Lerner sent to outside agencies and officials. Though the IRS says it will turn over tens of thousands of other documents, it’s hard to feel confident that the most damning ones, if any existed, will have been miraculously saved. …
Further proof of “gangster government” the Examiner editors write on obstruction of inspectors general.
Billions of tax dollars are being lost every day to waste, fraud and corruption in the federal government, but President Obama’s administration is blocking inspectors general — the officials who are most likely to find and expose such wrongdoing — from doing their jobs. That’s the disturbing message given to Congress and the American people this week from a majority of the federal government’s 78 IGs. The blocking occurs when agency lawyers deny the authority of IGs to gain access to relevant documents and officials.
The 47 IGs minced no words: “Each of us strongly supports the principle that an inspector general must have complete, unfiltered, and timely access to all information and materials available to the agency that relate to that IG’s oversight activities, without unreasonable administrative burdens. The importance of this principle, which was codified by Congress in Section 6(a)(1) of the Inspector General Act of 1978, as amended (the IG Act), cannot be overstated. Refusing, restricting, or delaying an IG’s access to documents leads to incomplete, inaccurate, or significantly delayed findings or recommendations, which in turn may prevent the agency from promptly correcting serious problems and deprive Congress of timely information regarding the agency’s performance. …
Jennifer Rubin posts on lateness.
The Post documents what anyone following President Obama’s speeches and press conferences knows: He is really late. A lot. “Obama has been a cumulative 2,121 minutes late to events in 2014. That’s 35 hours, 21 minutes — or almost a day and a half — that his audiences have been waiting for him to speak.” On average, that is only 11 minutes per event, but in some cases (for his Wednesday afternoon press conference, for example) he can be an hour late. (George W. Bush was famously punctual.)
But why is he so late? We can only speculate. But it’s a widely studied behavior in the population as a whole, so there is some informed analysis on the topic. Psychologists have several explanations for habitual lateness:
Angry people who behave with almost exaggerated calm and courtesy might nevertheless express their anger through passive means, …
… lateness is the most obvious form of procrastination. We don’t procrastinate tasks that we are adept at and from which we derive satisfaction or praise. In the case of Obama, it’s understandable that he procrastinates, given how poorly his speeches and press conferences have been received of late. He is often angry, defensive or evasive — and, more than ever before in his political career, challenged openly. Mainstream media figures routinely rip his performances as either dishonest (e.g. refusing to admit he lied on “you can keep your doctor”) or lackadaisical and detached. I’m sure he’d rather hang around with aides who tell him what a swell job he is doing, how mean his opponents are and how misinformed everyone else is.
We don’t really know precisely why he’s late, but one thing is for certain. If he cared about keeping others waiting or acknowledged that his behavior is downright rude, he wouldn’t do it.
IFL Science says if you forget to get out in the sun, you might forget to.
Adding to an ever-growing body of evidence, a new study has found that vitamin D deficiency is associated with a substantially increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s and dementia. While previous studies have drawn similar conclusions, this is the largest, most robust study carried out to date. The results have been published in the journal Neurology.
Vitamin D is an essential vitamin that is produced by the body upon exposure of the skin to sunlight, but it can also be found in small amounts in certain foods such as oily fish. It plays a variety of roles in the body and over recent years our understanding of how it helps to maintain optimum health has dramatically increased. For example, it’s thought to reduce the risk of certain bone diseases, bacterial and viral infections and autoimmune diseases.
Interestingly, some studies have hinted that vitamin D may play a neuroprotective role. In support of this idea, several recent studies have found links between vitamin D deficiency and the risk of dementia and cognitive decline. However, one study also found no associations in men.
To find out more, an international team of researchers, headed by scientists at the University of Exeter, …