Profiles in courage

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Via B-Daddy. This is jaw-droppingly stunning: if there is a bigger case of management-speak bullshit bingo than what Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, gives in the first minute of this clip regarding the admninistration's budget proposal, we have yet to hear it.

"Leaders are supposed to fix problems"

They've pretty much given up. Geithner admits they don't have any plan nor any actual desire to get long-range debt, which is driven by currently unsustainable entitlements in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, under control.


More lying to the American public will have to suffice because Geithner's basis for opposition to Paul Ryan's budget is simply, "We don't like yours".


This is what passes for leadership in this country in 2012. Four more years of cowardice and shameful cynicism. We can't wait.

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Another Wisconsin "civility" update

We didn't get around to posting this until now but this went down a couple of days ago in Mad-town where Republican state senator Glenn Grothman, trying to get inside the state capitol building, is descended upon by the angry mob and saved by Democratic state representative, Brett Hulsey.

Banging on drums, the tie-dye t-shirts, not showering for days, acting completely berzerk... it's the hippie generation's last gasp.



Mildly NSFWoH as the f-bombs start dropping at the 2:10 mark.






And looky here. Grothman running some smack regarding the homeless shelter that has come of the capitol building.







UPDATE: Republicans in Wisconsin, tiring of the fleebaggers "standing with the workers of Wisconsin" by holing-up in Illinois, go all in.

Pressure ratcheted up on absent Senate Democrats Thursday, as they were found in contempt by GOP senators and Gov. Scott Walker said he will start sending out layoff notices to state unions and workers by the end of Friday if the standoff over his budget-repair bill isn't resolved.

Also Thursday, Republicans in the state Senate found Democrats in contempt - a move that means Democrats could be taken into custody.

"We simply cannot have democracy be held hostage because the minority wants to prove a point," said Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau).

The Senate adopted the resolution to find Democrats in contempt on a 19-0 vote. It says they are violating a Senate rule that requires senators to receive a leave of absence before being absent for a day.

Fitzgerald said that Republicans were initially "nervous" about taking such a step but that Democrats have created a "constitutional crisis."

"This is not about a budget-repair bill or about politics," Fitzgerald said. "This is much bigger than that and the minority party has forced our hand . . .  They're insulting the very fabric of our representative democracy."

Questions of constitutionality abound. Stay tuned.


H/T: Hot Air

Partly cloudy with late local clearing..?

Anza-Borrego state park, the state park we visit the most, is not out of the woods yet but it may be spared the ax originally intended for it in the latest budget deal that was cobbled together two weeks ago in Sacramento.

A variety of options including state-federal partnering, a new vehicle registration fee and raising entrance fees at the sites themselves are all being considered as means to finance the continuing operation of the parks.

An option that didn’t appear in the article nor have we heard it discussed much is turning over operations of the park to Nature Conservancy, a non-profit group that oversees many ecological set-asides and preserves here in California, the country and around the world. We think it’s an intriguing proposition that should be explored.

At the risk of sounding hypocritical, we don’t think raising the entrance fees by a nominal amount at the state parks is all that bad of an idea. Wait a minute… weren’t we just saying in the previous post that in market economics, raising the price on something will not necessarily generate a corresponding increase in revenue? Yes, but we think that the state park situation is slightly different.

From an intuitive standpoint, we can’t see a family of four that takes the time and effort to pack lunches, load-up the mini-van with kids, dogs, day packs, hiking boots and whatnot will balk at a day trip to the Cuyamacas or Torrey Pines state preserve merely because the entrance fee was bumped up $10.

The direct benefit aspect of a fee increase would seem to be more politically, psychologically and economically palatable than the more indirect aspect the imposition of a vehicle registration hike would be. Pay to play or pay as you go, right.

Anyway, we would love to hear some ideas from you all as to what you think can be done to preserve the continued operation of California’s excellent state parks.

Thin slicing and mailing it in on a Tuesday night

We don’t have the energy to get into this tonight so we’re letting KT do the heavy lifting on the budget agreement that will shore-up the $26 billion deficit that was reached in Sacto yesterday, here.

And knowing little about the actual deal that was hatched, one thing we are confident of is that when you see this degree of glad-handing, back-slapping and pols generally pleased as punch with themselves, it’s time to cover your backside.

Remember, it's only a "concept". (UPDATED)

(UPDATE #1): Well, that didn’t take long. As predicted, the fix is already in. A day after announcing the Porkulus Surge, the President adopted a get-tough approach to putting together a budget exhorting Congress to adopt pay-go rules. No new spending unless it could be paid for with budget cuts elsewhere or new taxes. And no exemptions – repeat – no exemptions… he really, really means it… except for, you know, the $2.5 trillion for universal health care over the next 10 years.

The "pay-as-you-go" budget formula plan is significantly weaker than a proposal Obama issued with little fanfare last month.

It would carve out about $2.5 trillion worth of exemptions for Obama's priorities over the next decade. His health care reform plan also would get a green light to run big deficits in its early years. But over a decade, Congress would have to come up with money to cover those early year deficits.

Try to suppress your laughter a little, please.

(here endeth the update)
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Employing the latest ruse in an attempt to get China to purchase more U.S. debt, President Obama, yesterday, rolled out a challenge to Congress to “pay-go” or pay as you go, meaning they could only pay for new entitlement spending by raising taxes or coming up with budget cuts.

Sounds pretty good, right? You only pay for stuff if you have the money for it.

The only problem is, it’s complete bunk. Back at Seminary, we did not have an Honor Code, we had an Honor Concept and the running gag there was to be mindful of the distinction and to act accordingly.

So, it’s not binding – it’s only a challenge. And when “pay as you go” was in play back in the 90s, it was common practice to simply exempt areas of the budget from any cuts. So, in effect, it made the raising taxes to pay for new entitlement spending the only effective option for paying for it. Now, you don’t think that this, the most ethical Congress in history would resort to such parliamentary chicanery, now do you?

Lastly, this pay-go “concept” is not meant to effect legislation on a yearly basis, meaning the books don’t have to be balanced at the end of the fiscal year but rather over the coming decade which means there is really no check on the President’s and Congress’s current and future spending plans as someone else will have to deal with the mess some ten years down the road. So, thank god, there is nothing to worry abot - the deferred responsibility program is still on track

Let’s go to the scoreboard…

Pay-go on a scale of 1 - 10. Effectiveness: 0 Cynicism: 8.5

Time to look in the mirror?

So, now that we’ve successfully shot down the budget propositions, now what?

And since we’re asking, just how much of the blame for the state’s budget mess is of our own, meaning “we the voters”, doing? It’s certainly a fair question and not from the standpoint of “we keep voting the same types of knuckle heads into office” – not that that is not a valid point. We’re sure it happens from time to time but we can’t recall the last time a bond measure that involved education or transportation got shot down by the voters.

The absolute fact of the matter is, we love bond measures! A few billion here to build a high-speed rail from L.A. to San Fran? Sure. Another few hundred million to repair schools? You betcha. And $6 billion for stem cell research? No problemo.

To be fair, each individual bond measure stands on its own, merit-wise. We’re not here to trash any individual bond or the bond initiative process but to call attention to the failure of the royal “we” to realize that each bond measure passed will require an obligation on the state’s general fund in way of interest payments. We lied. We don’t have $20-30 billion to build this rail road and we don’t have the money for stem cell research. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

At some point, Californians are going to have to come to grips with the fact that there is an actual price tag associated with these bond measures that requires some sober assessment instead of the reflexive impulse to hit/fill-in/punch-out the “Yes” button/bubble/chad that suggests the level of cognitive internal debate for a random bond measure was, “You had me at ‘It’s for the children’”.

And, we suppose, an equally fair retort to this is: Where on god’s green earth does all that bond revenue go? We keep being asked to pass (and we do) education bond after education bond which set atop already the rather large K-12 slice of the state’s budget pie and then we are told K-12 is grossly under-funded, our students are under-performing and we’re facing a shortage of teachers. What in the hell is going on here and how can this be?

This provides a nice segue to return to our normally-scheduled bashing of Sacramento politicians.

Courage: your definition may vary

"Mark our words: There's not going to be any more taxes from this body"

So says California Assembly GOP leader Mike Villnes after the state Senate pulled an all-nighter to pass the budget and which was sent to the Assembly this morning for rapid passage and which contained horse-trading provisions as an open-ballot primary referendum and dropping a 12 cent/gallon hike of the gasoline tax.

And if you believe what Villnes says, we’ve got some beach front property in Yuma we’d like you to take a look at.

This “budget” includes $12.5 billion in tax increases which includes raising personal income taxes, already the highest in the nation and a 1 cent on the dollar raising of the state sales tax also the highest in the nation. Vehicle registration fees will also double under this budget and the irony of these same outrageous fees paid under former Governor Gray Davis that was used as one of the rallying points to recall him and which paved the way for the current governor was not lost on us.

And we’re supposed to be mollified by $14.8 billion in spending cuts much of which aren’t real cuts just cuts to the automatic budget increases for that particular budget line item.

Well, it was a game effort by the G.O.P., but as we like to say about our fair city here in the extreme southwest corner of the nation… San Diego: the city that almost gets it right.

Republican legislators had a golden opportunity to end business as usual in Sacramento and they failed. With a chance to upset the apple cart, cheese-off a bunch of people and stand athwart the back-asswards nature of how this state is managed, they caved.

And for his part, Governor Scharzenegger called the legislator’s work “courageous”, proving that Sacramento and those inhabiting it are foreign to the planet the rest of us live on as we attempt to reconcile how it is that sticking the tax payers with an additional $12.5 billion in taxes and $14.8 billion in smoke’n’mirrors budget cuts is some how “courageous”.

More good news

We often, in San Diego, think of pension scandals as being associated with the city. But, as longtime readers know, I think the county's pension enhancements and subsequent scramble is the most under-appreciated fiscal atrocity to have occurred in the last decade in local government.

The San Diego County’s pension fund has lost $2.5 Billion in this latest market downturn but it could have been largely avoided had not the county board of supervisors decided to increase their own and their workers’ pension benefits by 50 percent back in '02.

At the time, the spin was that this increase in benefits would retain and recruit quality employees but the moment this benefits increase became law, what do you think happened? Yep, experienced county workers flooded the county with retirement notices leaving the county on the hook to start paying out those increased bennies immediately as well as being saddled with the additional burden of paying salaries to new hires. Nice job, Supes.
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In other news today, the state of California, currently in debt to the tune of $42 Billion remains locked in a stalemate in Sacramento as the Democrats in alliance with Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, are attempting to pass a budget that includes just what any taxpayer living out the reality of a recession wants to hear, $14.4 billion in tax increases.

The fact that the state of California, the 7th largest economy in the world and which possesses an abundance of resources both natural and human finds itself in this mess remains baffling and is testament to the prevailing notion among many living here that simply refusing to accept another $14.4 Billion in taxes in a state that already has the highest income, sales and gas taxes in the nation is somehow “selfish” or “short-sighted”.

What more does one need to know about politics in California that even the President, who has been criticized in these very pages for his Neo-New Deal crypto-Socialist economic policies, has enough God-given common sense to throw a middle class tax cut into porkulus just to soothe the savage Jarvis in us.

More here from the L.A. Times and the lone Republican Senator who holds the keys to this whole deal and his rather odd demands in exchange for his vote including the sacking of th GOP Senate leader for his complicity with the Governor in this travesty... in the story, not one of his demands.

H/T: Special thanks to Mongo who turned us on to Voice of San Diego, (story link at top of page) which at first read would seem to be a very nice alternative to the San Diego Union-Tribune and which appears to be committed to focusing on San Diego politics and finances. Oh, we've also rolled it on our "From the Source" section in the right hand margin.

Governor Schwarzenegger: locking up the youth vote

Boy oh boy… to be a grade-schooler or middle-schooler in California today and be told that the Governor… the Governor of all people wants to add another week to your summer.

The latest budget proposal from Governor Schwarzenegger is to reduce the 2009-10 school year by one week. The estimated savings is $1.1. billion.

One less week in that mental gulag of public education and one more week of carefree, golden bliss.

And it’s not like they’re learing much anyway as commenter to linked article, lilaclady, so brilliantly illustrates:

jCA used to have one of the best school systems in our nation. Now it's one of the worst. Maybe the Gov. should slose ALL schools. They can't get much wors. What can he imagine can come with the end of our school system. Right now it stinks! As a teacher, I used to pay out of my pocket over $2500 a year to get thinks for my kids. HELLO - things ned to change - FOR THE BETTER!!!!!!

Indeed, take it from a teacher who would know just how much a waste of time it is to have your child sitting through 7 hours of mind-numbing, grammar destroying indoctrination when he/she could be out contributing the economy by working in an Service America Obama Youth Brigade.

And if you believe, like parent Neil Nunley, that our children “are our precious, precious commodity”, then like any other ol’ commodity like iron/ore or vine-ripened tomatoes, there’s much more efficient uses for them than to just be sitting around on their can all day.