The more things change...

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Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that the state of California is in some dire fiscal circumstances and word came down on Friday that things are not getting any better. In the news:

California's tax revenue plummeted in July, missing expectations by nearly $539 million and raising fears that deep education cuts will be needed to keep the state budget balanced.

The bad news, announced Tuesday, came less than two months after Gov. Jerry Brown and state lawmakers patched together a budget on the assumption that a budding economic recovery would produce a $4-billion revenue windfall. Those hopes are now fading.

The plunge occurred before the recent Wall Street gyrations that wiped away many of the year's stock-market gains. If the economy remains sluggish and the $4 billion does not materialize, cuts in public schools, universities, libraries, child care, and services for the elderly and frail will automatically take effect.

"Every drop in revenues puts us closer to the drastic trigger cuts that could be imposed next year," state Controller John Chiang said in a statement accompanying his July revenue report.

Oops. Our bad. The linked article above is from August of last year.

And how did we get into that particular mess? From June of last year:

Abandoning negotiations with Republican lawmakers, Gov. Jerry Brown struck a deal with Democrats for a budget that assumes billions of dollars in fresh revenue — but could lead to major service cuts if the money doesn't materialize.

The proposal, which Democrats said they would pass as soon as Tuesday, does not include the renewed tax hikes that the governor had been pushing to put before voters. But it does contain some charges that Democrats believe they can legally raise without GOP support.

$11 billion worth of fresh revenue to be precise. And since Brown and the Sacto Democrats gave no specifics of where this unanticipated revenue was going to come from, you would not be wrong in assuming it was to be delivered on the backs of unicorns bounding over rainbows.

So, when you paper over budgets with hapless and laughable gimmickry, it should come as no big surprise that this is where we currently are:

California’s budget deficit has swelled to $16 billion after tax collections trailed projections amid the tepid economic recovery, Governor Jerry Brown said in a comment on his Twitter post.

The shortfall has widened from the $9.2 billion Brown estimated in January, after lawmakers resisted the Democrat’s call for cost cuts, the federal government blocked other reductions and April income-tax revenue missed budget forecasts by $2 billion. On May 14, he’s set to unveil a revised spending plan and to say how he would erase the gap.

Brown, 74, set out an initial budget in January with $92.6 billion in spending for fiscal 2013, which begins in July. That plan stripped more than $4 billion from health and welfare programs while relying on higher income and sales taxes. The levy increases will go before voters in November. If rejected, schools will lose $4.8 billion midway through the year.

“We are still recovering from the worst recession since the 1930s,” Brown said in a YouTube video cited on his Twitter post. “Tax receipts are coming lower than expected and the federal government and the courts have blocked us from making billions of necessary budget reductions. The result is that we are now facing a $16 billion deficit.”

First of all, we aren't aware of the degree and purpose of federal meddling in California's budget matters so if anyone has any details, please feel free to share.

The ballot initiative Brown is pushing would raise the sales tax, already the highest in the nation from 7.25 to 7.5 and would also raise taxes on those making over $250,000 and would raise taxes on those making over $1 million from 10.3 to 13.3, the highest in the land.

In a state hobbled by a bad economy and horrible self-induced economic/regulatory policy that is driving businesses and rich people out of the state, it is baffling to us how piling on more bad economic policy in way of taxing consumers and the rich and their businesses is going to balance the books.

In the face of all evidence to the contrary, we are seeing the rigid ideology of statist tax and spenders at work here in California. They simply cannot bring themselves to think and act in any other manner.

Quickies: the evolving editon

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A round-up of news items, articles, columns and blog posts that caught our eye this past (two) weeks.






Roger Simon of Politico is outrageously outraged over GSA, Hookergate, Walter Reed, Citizens United, etc., can't quite get himself to come around to being outraged over the top domestic law enforcement agency running a gun-running scheme.





And when you lose Dana Milbank:

The preezy of the United Steezy is making me queasy.

I’m not troubled by President Obama’s slow jam with Jimmy Fallon, who dubbed the commander in chief “preezy” during Obama’s appearance on late-night TV. No, preezy is making me queasy because his nonstop campaigning is looking, well, sleazy — and his ad suggesting that Mitt Romney wouldn’t have killed Osama bin Laden is just the beginning of it.

In a political culture that long ago surrendered to the permanent campaign, Obama has managed to take things to a whole new level. According to statistics compiled for a book to be published this summer, the president has already set a record for total first-term fundraisers — 191 — and that’s only through March 6. Measured in terms of events that benefit his reelection bid, Obama’s total (inflated in part by relaxed fundraising rules) exceeds the combined total of George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter.

Don't worry, though. It's stll all Bush's fault.






Taxing your way back to fiscal solvency? Capitol Commentary visits Illinois to see just how that is working out for them.

Plus this from Christine Romer, former Obama economic advisor:

In short, tax increases appear to have a very large, sustained, and highly significant negative impact on output.

She wrote this in 2010... when she was still working for the administration.

So, why doesn't Obama listen to one of his top economic advisors? The class warfare narrative is the only arrow in his quiver. It's all he's got. Are you hearing anything else besides some small bore issues like student loans and gay rights?








They drive down wages and kill Mom and Pops but we bet you didn't know they were racist as well...


Secular Apostate demonstrates the mechanics by which a "social scientist" engineers the means by which to shakedown WalMart. Seriously hilarious and good stuff, here.







So, the government in Greece gets out of the way and allows the free exchange of money for food. You think the big message would be the "free market" wouldn't you? Nope. It's all about "activists" and the "internet".

KT has the goods here.

Don't get us wrong. Activism and the emerging social media platforms are important but they are worthless without the underlying understanding of the free market.







President Obama and gay marriage: a sudden new-found respect for the 10th amendment:

So what really happened this week? It appears by all accounts that gay activists, who have been urging the nation to give them their “civil rights,” have traded in that fight for mere acceptance by a sitting president. How medieval. It is though King Barack looked out among his gay peons and said, “Yes, I love you now.”

Finally, the most stunning part of Obama’s interview with Robin Roberts was his sudden conversion to a 10th Amendment supporter. “Leave it up to the states,” he said. Well, that’s not what gay activists have been saying since Clinton signed DOMA. They’ve had to fight at the state level, but they’ve been pushing for a federal civil rights solution. Obama cut them off at the knees for the sake of his gay campaign fundraising bundlers. I guess civil rights do have a price after all.

Unfortunately, he evolved before he shoved ObamaCare down the nation's throat.




Plus this:

Once Gay Americans are through celebrating President Barack Obama's "personal" support of Gay marriage equality, they will learn that Obama's "evolution" changes nothing. Obama's new position is a bullshit cop-out.

This comes on the heels of an cynical Obama campaign pirouette where Team Obama trotted out first Secretary of State Hillary Clinton then Vice President "Crazy" Joe Biden to say they support gay marriage and imply that the President would too--after the election.

Now, incredibly, Obama says Gay marriage is a state issue. That's what they used to say about abortion and before that, slavery. Now Obama tells us that gay couples should be able to marry but he doesn't believe they have a right to do so. Obama would leave the question to the states--in other words -the status quo. This is like saying that public schools ought to be integrated but if the people of Mississippi disagree, well he says, "let the states decide".

Liberals distraught over the Citizens United decision and all that money being pumped into politics still pumping quite a bit of money into politics.

After months on the sidelines, major liberal donors including the financier George Soros are preparing to inject up to $100 million into independent groups to aid Democrats' chances this fall. But instead of going head to head with the conservative "super PACs" and outside groups that have flooded the presidential and Congressional campaigns with negative advertising, the donors are focusing on grass-roots organizing, voter registration and Democratic turnout.

The departure from the conservatives' approach, which helped Republicans wrest control of the House in 2010, partly reflects liberal donors' objections to the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which paved the way for super PACs and unbridled campaign spending.

But in interviews, donors and strategists involved in the effort said they also did not believe they could match advertising spending by leading conservative groups like American Crossroads and Americans for Prosperity, and instead wanted to exploit what they see as the Democrats' advantage in grass-roots organizing.

They can spin this any ol' way they want, but green is still green and money is still beiing spent in order to influence political outcomes be it via advertising or voter registration drives.









And finally... it's come to this...

No, really. Newsweek is running with that for thier edition this week.

Where do you go after that? Where can you go? Let's just call this the May surpise. It's all been played out. A good 5 months still before the presidential election and they've emptied the arsenal. They've got nothing left. Creepy attempts by the legacy media to deify and to confer messianic status upon Barack Obama have now thankfully reached their logical conclusion. And the legacy media in aiding and abetting a cult of personality at the top of a post-constitutional republic have, once again, demonstrated how useless and counterproductive they have become in their role as watchdogs of democracy.

Now, what about those jobs?





OK, that's it for now, gang.

Fast and Furious update

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Back in 2009, Rahm Emanuel, Team O's first chief of staff was quoted famously as saying that you "never let a crisis go to waste." However, in the case of Fast and Furious, if there is no crisis, you create one.

The latest chapter in the unfolding travesty that is Fast and Furious regards a DOJ budget that the President has threatened to veto because House Republican have stripped funding for a reporting mechanism for gun shops in the four southern border states - a reporting mechanism that came about as a result of Fast and Furious.

President Barack Obama has threatened to veto a Department of Justice appropriations bill House Republicans passed because, among other things, it includes a provision that blocks a gun control law his administration used Operation Fast and Furious to pass.

The Obama administration’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives wrote, and began implementing, a new rule that would require gun dealers in the four U.S. states that border Mexico to report sales of multiple semi-automatic rifles to the ATF.

In the 2013 fiscal year budget for the Department of Justice and related agencies, House Republicans inserted a rider, or condition, that would force the ATF to not implement that rule.

In a statement the White House released upon receiving the House appropriations bill, the administration threatened it would veto the legislation because of that ATF rider, among other things.

In the statement, the White House called that rider blocking the ATF rule’s implementation one of the few it “strongly opposes” because the Obama administration thinks it represents “problematic policy and language riders that have no place in funding legislation.”

Several House Republicans have charged that the Obama administration had an anti-gun agenda when it carried out Fast and Furious, and are particularly wary of Attorney General Eric Holder, who once expressed the need to “brainwash” the American people into disliking firearm ownership.

They cite emails CBS News acquired in December, in which lead Fast and Furious Agent Bill Newell and ATF Field Operations Assistant Director Mark Chait discussed how to use the scandal’s aftermath to promote the long-gun reporting requirement for multiple sales.

“ATF officials didn’t intend to publicly disclose their own role in letting Mexican cartels obtain the weapons, but emails show they discussed using the sales, including sales encouraged by ATF, to justify a new gun regulation called ‘Demand Letter 3,’” CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson reported in December. “That would require some U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or ‘long guns.’ Demand Letter 3 was so-named because it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information.”

(italics, ours)

We will again point out that CBS News and the L.A. Times have been the only legacy media outlets that have been consistent in their coverage of Fast and Furious.

The italicized portion of the linked article says it all: ATF and the Justice Department knowingly let guns walk across the border with zero intention of tracking them all to establish a narrative of an unchecked flow of weapons into the hands of Mexican drug cartel.

Mission accomplished.


So, you think that there would be some backtracking or some shame exhibited regarding Fast and Furious. You don't know politics and specifically Washington politics very well, do you?

Democratic politicians have also invoked Fast and Furious when pushing for stricter gun control laws. During an early November 2011 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein tried to leverage the crisis to push for anti-gun regulations.

“My concern, Mr. Chairman, is there’s been a lot said about Fast and Furious, and perhaps mistakes were made, but I think this hunt for blame doesn’t really speak about the problem,” Feinstein said during a Nov. 1 hearing. “And the problem is, anybody can walk in and buy anything: .50-caliber weapons, sniper weapons, buy them in large amounts and send them down to Mexico. So, the question really becomes, what do we do about this?”

“I’ve been here 18 years,” Feinstein continued. “I’ve watched the BATF get beaten up at every turn on the road. And, candidly, it’s just not right.”

During that hearing, Feinstein advocated for using Operation Fast and Furious as a springboard from which to advocate for strict gun control laws, including national databases and government-controlled firearms registration. She argued that new laws could prevent future programs like Fast and Furious from reaching maturity.

So, let's get this straight: we need stricter gun laws to prevent the government from running guns across the border. That is what Feinstein is saying, right?

We need stricter gun control laws to prevent Border Patrol and ICE agents as well as hundreds if not thousands of Mexican officials and citizens from getting killed as a direct result of actions taken by the U.S. government.

What we need is a complete turnover of the failed, power-hungry, cynical and decadent political establishment in Washington. Feinstein's statements make that irrefutable fact.

Radio KBwD is on the Air

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We haven't played anything from these guys in a while so let's get right to it.

But first...

This story as told by writer Bill Flanagan in the liner notes of their compilation album All For Nothing pretty much sums up the character of these rag-a-muffin ne'er-do-wells of the punk/alt-rock scene of the 80s.

My favorite Replacements story is that when compact discs started replacing records the band were appalled that Twin/Tone, their first label, was going to release their early albums on CD. So, they had a few drinks and stewed about it and had a few more drinks and then went over to Twin/Tone. They gave the receptionist some line about working on remixes, grabbed as many of the master tapes as they could and threw them into the Mississippi. When the Replacements told me this story, they expressed the hopes that Prince, who lived in a big purple house downriver, would see the tapes floating by like Baby Moses, retrieve them and reconsider his musical approach.

I don't know how much of that is true (maybe more than you would expect). I didn't choose to investigate too closely; it was the sort of story that you wanted to believe about the Replacements. They certainly stood for a cockeyed, Huck Finn integrity, even if they were sometimes taking aim at their own feet.

Ladies and Gentlemen, from Minneapolis, Minnesota, it's the Replacements playing "I'll Buy".

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Photo image of the day

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Only in America?


A skateboard-ridin', banjo-playin', 21 year-old black kid, tearing it up a few nights ago in downtown La Mesa.

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You just never know.

Just a few thoughts on the "evolving"

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We suppose we can thank the Veep for having the courage of his convictions and speaking truth to power on Sunday for being the tipping point and bringing the President's long, winding, evolutionary road to an end when he spoke out in support of gay marriage, yesterday.

As it is, this will merely serve to be yet another distraction to the President's failed policies and, in parallel, will allow the legacy media a chance to regain that thrill up their leg.


But how much of an evolutionary process was it? Here he is with Robin Givens of ABC News last night discussing the topic.

I had already made a decision that we were going probably take this position before the election and before the convention. He probably got out a little bit over his skis, but out of generosity of spirit.

Out: Evolving.

In: I made up my mind a long-ass time ago, y'all.


And this is the thing that always puzzled us about this whole sorry affair. He's a statist Democrat from a deep blue city in a deep blue state. What flank was he possibly trying to protect for being opposed to gay marriage... if he truly was ever personally opposed to gay marriage in the first place? We scarcely think one of the most socially conservative blocs in the Democratic/liberal tent, blacks, would turn away from him if he spoke more truthfully and forthrightly before this.


See... we're being distracted by this self-inflicted navel-gazing.


Back to the business at hand and a reminder courtesy B-Daddy at The Liberator Today of what will be more on voters minds than gay marriage come November:






In closing, we were asked by a liberal friend and Obama supporter (and by Obama supporter, we mean that back in 2007 waterboarding was a grave civil rights violation and that in 2012 wacking U.S. citizens overseas in drone strikes is an acceptable anti-terrorism measure) earlier what we felt of of the President's announcement. We responded that we expected nothing less than a completely politically-calculated stunt from the most shamelessly cynical pol we have ever seen. To hope for any real principled leadership from this guy is to be spitting into the wind.

Deleted scenes from American politics?

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Another gotcha moment for the administration in a week that has been full of them.

A healthcare advocacy group run by physicians is preparing to file a petition calling on President Obama to stop eating hamburgers, hot dogs and other unhealthy foods before cameras.

"As role model to millions of Americans, the president has a responsibility to watch what he eats in public," said Susan Levin, nutrition education director with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM).

Obama's occasional stops at Washington, D.C.-area burger joints always receive press attention.
He famously treated staff to lunch at Good Stuff Eatery on Capitol Hill in August 2011.
A year before that, he and then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev grabbed food at Ray's Hell Burger in Arlington, Va.

And in March, during a visit to Ohio with British Prime Minister David Cameron, he ate hot dogs while watching college basketball.

Levin said in a statement that processed meats like hot dogs "kill more Americans every year than tobacco does, and they cost taxpayers billions of dollars in healthcare."

She cited increasing rates of obesity in the United States. A study out this week projects that 42 percent of Americans will be obese by 2030.

"The White House would never set up a photo op showing the president buying cigarettes, so why is it OK to show him eating a hot dog?" she added.

Obama, an ex-smoker, kicked the habit in 2010, the first lady has said.

Despite Obama's taste for unhealthy foods, some media outlets have reported that the president appears to have lost weight since beginning his term.

(italics ours)

Before we get to our narrative, allow us to state that the last paragraph there is simply idiotic as the stress of being the Commander-in-Chief will have far more to do with any weight loss/gain than the occasional burger run.

But putting aside any dietary deficiencies, what's better for the mind and soul than a cheese burger and an ice cold beer? Nothing.

We don't begrudge the President one bit for what we see as highly petty if necessarily life-affirming indulgences but we will note that the motivation behind this petition is the result of a nanny state mentality of which the President is both a product and a proponent.

If the federal government is going to shoe-horn us all into a one-size-fits-all healthcare scheme, then the man responsible for it should not chafe against some well-intended nagging from people whom, obviously, know better than us.

After all, it's for his/all our own good.



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We'll have some thoughts on the President's (r)evolution regarding gay-marriage later.

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Photo image of the day

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This was the scene last week on Harbor Dr. here in San Diego and it was a symbol of the efficacy of green/alternative energy in its current state.


(please click to enlarge... the camera-in-phone did not cooperate on the first take)

This is a wind turbine blade on Harbor Drive here in San Diego. Transported on a big ol' flat bed towed by a big ol' diesel and escorted by a couple of chase vehicles. They do have a tendency to tie-up things on Harbor as they are matriculating their way down the street. Problem is - it's heading the wrong way. Instead of heading out to the desert or east county where the bird-wacking turbine farms are, it's heading back towards the 10th St. terminal from whence it came. Whatever the problem is, it's a pretty costly mistake. Not that the wind and solar industries probably care - they're the chosen ones. Check out the subsidies granted to these two sectors as compared to other engergy sectors:

Not too shabby, huh? Maybe when the government decides to stop conferring 1% status on not-yet-market-ready technologies and stops depending upon places like China with their deplorable environmental policies for the lithium needed for wind and solar, perhaps we can avoid scenes like the above.


Time's short... we'll have an update later.

Buxom opponent of gay marriage, once again, under scrutiny

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Her again..?


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No, no, no... We're talking about this guy.

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After Joey "Choo-choo" Biden spoke truth to power in support of gay marriage over the weekend, it left his boss and his evolving crystal clear evolving shamelessly cynical view on gay marriage open to renewed criticism.

Here's ABC's Jack Tapper grilling White House spokesperson, Jay Carney, on the matter:

(skip ad after 5 seconds and apologies for the crappy visuals)

And here's Dana Milbank of the WaPo chiming in:

If Vice President Biden continues to make public appearances during this campaign, White House press secretary Jay Carney should be offered a membership in the janitors’ union.

As things stand, the spokesman does not have the supplies necessary to clean up the mess Biden made in his appearance Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Biden gave his full support to same-sex marriage — a position conspicuously at odds with the public stance of his boss, President Obama, who is widely assumed to share Biden’s views but who says that his own thinking is “evolving.”

The vice president said he is “absolutely comfortable” with same-sex marriage, committing the classic Washington gaffe of accidentally speaking the truth. This bit of straight talk made Obama’s position — neither for nor against such unions but in an evolutionary state, not unlike the Galapagos finch — all the more untenable. On Monday, Biden took off for a campaign event in Tennessee, leaving Carney on cleanup duty. But the more Carney swabbed the mess, the more it spread.

CNN’s Jessica Yellin asked whether Obama was trying to “have it both ways before an election” and whether he should “stop dancing around the issue.”

ABC’s Jake Tapper said that “it seems cynical to hide this prior to the election” and that “I don’t want to hear the same talking points 15 times in a row.”

NBC’s Chuck Todd said with a grin, “So help me out here. He opposes bans on gay marriage, but he doesn’t yet support gay marriage?”

You can read the full article at the link.


Disengenuous or just political reality? Not that the two are mutually exclusive of one another. Afterall, there are only so many progressive causes one can push in a single term, or even half term. The 2010 midterm elections bore that out.

Still, the President has been remarkably teflon-coated when it has come to this issue and it is nice to see the press, for once, doing their job in calling out the administration on apparent contradicting agendas/views of gay marriage.

Alinsky's rule for making your opponent live up to their standards at work here, again.

Gotcha of the day

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Wasn't one of Saul Alinsky's rules for radicals making your opponent live up to its own standards? Live by racial and gender quotas, fail by racial and gender quotas.

Civil rights lawyers told The Daily Caller that President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign managers may have violated employment law by hiring an overwhelmingly white office staff for his campaign headquarters in Chicago.

That skewed workforce is starkly visible in an April photo released by Obama’s Chicago office, which shows roughly 100 of the office’s staff.

Only two of the people in the photo, far in the back, are clearly African-American, far below their 13 percent of the national population, and their 33-percent representation in Chicago.

“Were I the general counsel of an employer in Chicago with the workforce in the picture … I would be concerned,” said Charles Shanor, a law professor at Emory University and the former general counsel at the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission.

“The workforce is overwhelmingly made up of young white males [and is] a demographic profile that could raise red flags under both Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act,” he told TheDC.

If asked by managers, “‘Do we run a risk of legal liability?’ I would say ‘Sure,’” if a company’s picture showed only two African-Americans in a staff of 100, said Northeastern University’s Roger Abrams, a left-of-center law professor and former dean of the Rutgers School of Law.

Let the record show we personally care not a lick just how absolutely white bread Obama's campaign staff is but for cryin' out loud, wouldn't a few more blacks or Hispanics pop up just by accident if we're talking statistical averages, here? That campaign staff is whiter than a dry erase board.

And people said the tea party lacked diversity. Cripes, Team O in Chicago makes a Charlie Daniels concert look like an EEO convention.


Oh, well. As we said, we don't care but we just wished some people would practice what they so smugly and condescendingly preach all the time.

Video image of the day

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Saturday night and several thousand folks saw the christening and launch of the USNS CESAR CHAVEZ (T-AKE 14), the newest of the Navy's multi-use general purpose cargo ships.

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We weren't able to be there for it but it looks like she was a little reluctant to dip into the waters of San Diego Harbor. We'll check in with our peeps to see what the deal was.