With budget issues occupying the nation, now’s time yet again to compare Texas’ successful Red State model with California’s failing Blue State model:
Like Detroit’s retirement fund (or Greek public servants), some retired Sacramento government employees were evidently used to receiving thirteen monthly checks a year. Now a federal judge has said enough.
People Stockton’s bankruptcy plan screws: creditors and taxpayers. And who won’t be required to take a haircut? CalPERS retirees.
Vallejo took much the same tack during their bankruptcy (higher taxes and no pension reform). Well, guess what? They’re broke again.
CalPERS isn’t the only underfunded California retirement system. There’s also CalSTRS, the teacher’s retirement system. “CalSTRS’ funding ratio falling to 67% in 2012 from 98% in 2001, well below the 80% considered fiscally sound.”
CalPERS? 12,1999 receive more than $100,000 annually. Topped by Bruce Malkenhorst, of the corrupt city of Vernon, who pulled in more than a half-million annually, until the pension review board cut it back to a “mere” $115,000.
We believe the State continues to face eight other significant high-risk issues: the state budget, funding for the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, funding retiree health benefits for state employees, funding for deteriorating infrastructure, ensuring a stable supply of electricity, workforce and succession planning, strengthening emergency preparedness, and providing effective oversight of the State’s information technology.
California’s new feudalism. “Like medieval serfs, increasing numbers of Californians are downwardly mobile, and doing worse than their parents.”
The 10 year anniversary of the Gray Davis recall. “We learned that the problem wasn’t just Davis and that simply changing who is governor wasn’t enough to make California government work. Schwarzenegger wasn’t a bad governor, but he failed to solve the state’s basic budget problems.”
With a wave of people signing up for ObamaCare, what is California to do? Why, obviously, cut Medicaid payouts!
Al Jazeera headline: Tea party makes California inroads. Actual story: “For the first time, the tea party’s California caucus has a table at the state’s Republican fall convention.” That’s less an “inroad” than an “in-driveway”…
Rick Perry to California: “We don’t judge success on the number of people we have on public assistance.”
“Texas’ unemployment rate has now been lower than the national average, and California’s, for 80 consecutive months.”
In non-political, Halloween-related California news, it’s tarantula mating season in California. Just in case you needed another reason to leave California…
In the myriad actions the Obama Administration has undertaken in the wake of the government shutdown triggered by Harry Reid’s refusal to consider legislation duly and constitutionally passed by the house, it should now be obvious that it is the most spiteful, petty and vindictive presidential administration in history. It is one thing to play political hardball as part of the shutdown, it is quite another for Obama’s minions to go out of their way to inflict harm on innocent Americans because Obama isn’t getting his way.
Consider:
Obama had the Park Service block off access to World War II and other veterans memorialsdespite the fact they’re normally open to the public. By erecting barricades that are not normally there, Democrats have insulted America’s veterans as a petulant political ploy.
They’ve actually tried to have state parks shut down, just to spite people for not giving Obama everything he wants.
They disabled the Amber Alert website, despite the fact that it takes more effort to put up a notice than to leave the website up and running (if not updated). However, they left Michelle Obama’s wesbsite up, because that’s so much more important than kidnapped children.
Plus dozens of other petty, unnecessary actions that are blatantly geared toward inflicting as much pain on innocent Americans as possible:
These actions do not befit the President of the United State of America. Indeed, they do not befit a small town city councilman, much less the leader of the free world. He’s like a co-worker who didn’t get their way and who thenceforth makes life difficult for everyone in the office who disagreed with them out of sheer spite.
Further, when you consider that Obama didn’t let the shutdown close the golf course on federal land he wanted to use, it’s obvious that he believes that sacrifice is for other people. It’s impossible to imagine Ronald Reagan or either George Bush attempting to inflict pain on innocent Americans merely because they didn’t get their way, much less any of them insulting America’s veterans.
By his actions, Obama has proven himself a petty, spiteful, vindictive little creep who is unworthy being being President of the United States. All his mean-spirited attacks on common Americans should do is stiffen the spines of Republicans in congress, and convince them never to give in to his petty tyranny.
Thomas Sowell: “There is really nothing complicated about the facts. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted all the money required to keep all government activities going — except for Obamacare…You cannot blame other people for not giving you everything you want. And it is a fraud to blame them when you refuse to use the money they did vote for, even when it is ample to pay for everything else in the government…When Barack Obama keeps claiming that it is some new outrage for those who control the money to try to change government policy by granting or withholding money, that is simply a bald-faced lie.”
The “only man to enroll in Obamacare” is an OFA shill. Also a liar. “Bill Henderson told me that both he and his son were interested in getting coverage, but that he had not enrolled in any plan yet, and to his knowledge, neither had his son.” Ace has the blow-by-blow dissection of Henderson’s story coming part.
Obituary watch: Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, Army of North Vietnam. Like Erwin Rommel or Heinz Guderian, Giap was a brilliant general who fought for an evil government.
Liberals have staged another one of their regular hissy fits over the government shutdown. What they don’t seem to realize is that this is exactly how divided government is supposed to work. The Founding Fathers were tremendously suspicious of investing too much power in any one person, which is exactly why they set up the executive legislative and Judicial branches in opposition to each other. This is why the executive and legislative have to work together to pass laws, and why the House and Senate must agree with each other. If everyone gets a veto on the process, then no one portion of the federal government can seize power over another. By refusing to go to conference, Harry Reid is shirking the legislative branches constitutional duty to pass a budget.
Forcing the White House and the Senate to come together and negotiate is part of the constitutional design. This is why Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill had to negotiate compromises during several shutdowns in the 1980s.
But Obama, as he’s proven time and time again, is no Reagan.
There’s been a lot of criticism of John Cornyn in Tea Party circles over his failure to back Ted Cruz in procedural votes on the ObamaCare defunding fight. Given that, the muttering over someone primarying Cornyn have grown much louder.
Can anyone take Cornyn? It’s something of a tall order. He had some $6 million on hand as of the July reporting period, and any potential candidate will have a much latter start than Ted Cruz had when he beat David Dewhurst.
I queried a few people more tied-in than I, and three names of possible Cornyn challengers came up:
U.S. Congressman Louie Gohmert was the most popular choice. Gohmert is a solid conservative, and Mark Levin has even put up a Draft Congressman Gohmert for U.S. Senate page on Facebook. The drawback is that Gohmert isn’t wealthy enough to self-fund, and his East Texas district puts him far away from the Houston and Metroplex fundraising pools that would be necessary to fund a statewide campaign.
U.S. Congressman Michael McCaul was a very close second. McCaul is widely considered to be “conservative enough” (and has an ACU rating of 91%) and with a personal fortune estimated to be around $300 million (his wife is the daughter of the founder of Clear Channel), he could clearly self-fund. McCaul was considering a Senate run in 2012, but ultimately opted against it.
Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willet has also been mentioned as a possible candidate, and he’s well-respected among conservatives. But stepping from the Texas Supreme Court to the U.S. Senate is a tall order (Cornyn did it via a stint as Texas Attorney General), and Willet has joked about not being rich, so self-funding is probably out for him as well.
(Unmentioned by anyone, but someone who’s family connections would bring instant media coverage: George P. Bush. But name recognition and family connections only take you so far. Bush would go from an overwhelming favorite for Land Commissioner to a distinct underdog in a Senate race, plus there’s no guarantee he would be any more conservative than Cornyn. And Tea Party opinion of the Bush Dynasty is not exactly one of, shall we say, unrestrained affection.)
It’s going to be a tall order to take out a sitting U.S. Senator, barring scandal or even more deviation from conservative principles. But of those mentioned, McCaul probably has the best shot to beat Cornyn.
When it comes to ObamaCare, it turns out that Democrats lied about, well, pretty much everything. “Millions of low-income Americans won’t receive coverage. Many workers at small businesses won’t get a choice of insurance plans right away. Large employers won’t need to provide insurance for another year. Far more states than expected won’t run their own insurance marketplaces. And a growing number of workers won’t get to keep their employer-provided coverage.”
There is new leadership in the GOP, whether the party wants to admit it or not: Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Jeff Sessions
The popular reaction to Cruz will be immediate and noticeable; the more the old bulls carp, the more the public will rally to Cruz’s side.
conservatives understand that rather than form a third party, their only hope is to seize control of the corrupt, rotting hulk of the GOP.
The Cruz faction in the Senate, and its allies in the House (whose leadership is now up for grabs) must now press their advantage. The louder the Democrats squawk, the more they are wounded; the one thing they’ve long feared is a direct assault on their core beliefs as translated into actions, and the deleterious effects of Obamacare, just now being felt by the population, are the most vivid proof of the failure of Progressivism that conservatives could wish for.
There is no reason to think the Tea Party, if properly organized and harnessed, cannot be even more potent next year than it was in 2010, especially now that its members know the government really was out to get them.
“Ted Cruz spoke on the Senate floor for 21 hours for a simple purpose: to focus the eyes of Washington and the nation on the fact that Obamacare has failed.”
Everyone know the real problem in Washington, D.C. is not that the debt limit is too low, it’s that government is too big and spends too much money that it doesn’t have, and meddles in things best left up to free citizens. Just as Ted Cruz did, we need to make those same points over and over again in the ongoing debt limit and ObamaCare battles, because we’re right.
I’m in the awkward position of supporting Ted Cruz et. al.’s attempt to defund-via-narrow-procedural-filibuster-followed-by-Democrats-blinking strategy while also believing that the effort is almost certainly doomed to failure. The reason it’s doomed is that it requires complex (and somewhat counter-intuitive) Senate rule voting maneuvers, and for Harry Reid and the Democratic majority to give in on key points, which I think is very unlikely. Nor do I agree with the “repeal it now or we’re stuck with ObamaCare for all time” rhetoric. There are no lost causes in American politics, because there are no won causes. The Great Recession isn’t making Obama and the Democratic crony cohort any more popular, making a GOP takeover of the the Senate in 2014 (and of White House in 2016, very possibly by Cruz himself) increasingly likely.
But I do think Cruz’s filibuster is necessary because he’s making the case for repeal and forcing the GOP establishment to either back him or show their true colors. All signs point to ObamaCare becoming more and more unpopular as time goes on, making repeal a winning issue. But the first step is actually fighting for repeal, and Ted Cruz is there.
Harping on a theme he’s harped on before, Mickey Kaus dinged Ted Cruz (again) for not opposing illegal alien amnesty with the single-minded focus Kaus thinks he should. (“You didn’t clap loud enough! Tinkerbell is dead!Amnesty is Alive!”) This criticism is misguided:
Mickey Kaus is a Democrat and an ObamaCare supporter, albeit an entirely more reasonable example of each than usually found, as well as an amnesty opponent. Thus dinging Ted Cruz for fighting ObamaCare rather than amnesty is basically saying “A Republican senator is fighting hard against a program I support but not fighting hard enough against a program I oppose.”
Those doubting Cruz’s opposition to amnesty should take another look at what he said about it back when I interviewed him in 2011:
Cruz fought and voted against amnesty when it was before the Senate, but now it’s before the House. Given that whole “bicameral legislature” idea, the issue is beyond Cruz’s legislative purvey.
While I won’t go so far as to declare amnesty dead (as some have), if only because the GOP establishment seems to have a limitless appetite for suicidal compromise, its chances this legislative session do look slim, and all that was accomplished without Cruz taking the leading role against it.
Given all that, Kaus continuing to harp on Cruz’s appears to be of an idee fixe on Kaus’ part than real criticism.
