Showing posts with label Los Angeles Times. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Los Angeles Times. Show all posts

Friday, July 31, 2015

[EDITORIAL] Republicans are embracing many versions of Reaganism

The Republican Party has a bigger problem than Donald Trump: It hasn’t figured out what it wants to be.
GOP candidates still worship the legacy of Ronald Reagan, and cast themselves as Reagan’s heirs; there’s hardly a GOP stump speech in Iowa or New Hampshire that doesn’t invoke the 40th president’s name. “Every Republican likes to think he or she is the next Ronald Reagan,” Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul noted last year.
But there’s little consensus among conservatives about what Reaganism means in 2015 beyond the basic principles of small government and lower taxes.
When Reagan arrived in the White House 34 years ago, the top federal tax rate was 70 percent and the economy was crippled by inflation and recession. Now the top tax rate is below 40 percent and the main economic problem is stagnant middle class incomes.
What Would Ronnie Do? The candidates can’t agree.
“The core of the Republican debate is over what Reaganism means today,” said Henry Olsen, a conservative scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “And the major candidates are giving quite different answers.”
Confusingly, each of the leading candidates can claim to represent at least one facet of their favorite modern president.
Jeb Bush is campaigning as Reagan the conciliator, an optimistic conservative who reached out to nonbelievers. But his measured tone — and his last name — have reduced his appeal to the right-wing base.
“There’s an element of anger among many conservatives that wasn’t present 15 years ago, but Bush seems to find it incomprehensible,” Olsen said.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is campaigning as Reagan the innovator; he’s done more than any other candidate to roll out new proposals, including a tax reform plan (co-written with Sen. Mike Lee of Utah) that would lower taxes for families with children. But that’s landed him in trouble with those who think the Gipper would have wanted to cut tax rates deeply instead; the Wall Street Journal editorial page condemned Rubio’s idea as “redistribution.”
Wisconsin’s Scott Walker is campaigning as Reagan the combative governor, an outsider who made his state government smaller. He’s likened his fight with public employee unions to Reagan’s decision to break the federal air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981.
And Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is campaigning as Reagan the ideologue, a conservative who — unlike the real Reagan — disdains the idea of compromise even in his own party. (He’s proposed a flat tax, which would lower rates on the affluent but raise them on lower-income taxpayers.) “Nobody quotes Reagan more and understands him less,” Olsen jibed.
There are more candidates — from the relatively moderate Ohio Gov. John Kasich to the libertarian Paul to the social conservative Rick Santorum — who also consider themselves Reaganites. And they might all be right. Reagan’s White House included conservatives of many different stripes, from the pugnacious Patrick J. Buchanan to the pragmatic James A. Baker III.
So when Republicans vote in primaries and caucuses next year, they’ll be choosing one version of Reaganism over another, but that may not be the most important choice they make.
Equally important will be the temperament of the candidate they pick, especially his or her ability to reknit a fractious party back together.
There’s nothing wrong with vigorous intra-party debate, of course. But today’s GOP is fragmented into at least five factions: libertarians, social conservatives, tea party conservatives, establishment conservatives and moderate conservatives. And that could make the process of unifying the party around a nominee longer and more difficult than it has been in the past.
When Reagan ran in 1980, there were only seven candidates in the race; this year there are 16. And many of them have access to seemingly endless supplies of money, which means they won’t feel much pressure to drop out even if they fare badly.
If Republicans are lucky, the winner will be a candidate who not only updates Reagan’s message, but also shares his ability to unify his party and broaden its appeal. That, too — not just the ability to communicate a conservative ideology — was Reagan’s political genius.
Editorial by The Los Angeles Times

Thursday, July 30, 2015

Los Angeles Bans Possession of Magazines That Hold More Than 10 Rounds

Handguns / AP
Handguns / AP
The ban goes beyond California state law, which bans the manufacture or sale of those magazines. Instead, within the city of Los Angeles, it will now be a misdemeanor to possess a magazine capable of holding more than 10 rounds. Once the ordinance goes into effect, gun owners who currently have a magazine capable of holding more than 10 rounds will have 60 days to get rid of them before they are in violation of the law.
“People who want to defend their families don’t need a 100-round drum magazine and an automatic weapon to do it,” Councilman Paul Krekorian (D.) told the Los Angeles Times. “Imagine what a gunman on this sidewalk could do with that kind of firepower with a crowd like this.”
National Rifle Association (NRA) attorney Anna Barvir decried the ban in a statement to the paper and said the magazines in question “are in common use for self defense and they are overwhelmingly chosen for that purpose. Indeed, millions are in the hands of good American citizens.”
“As such, they are fully protected by the Constitution.”
The NRA has already threatened legal action over the ban but Krekorian and other gun-control supporters remain defiant.
“If the NRA wants to sue us over this, bring it on,” he told the Times.

Monday, July 27, 2015

Judge orders Obama administration to release illegal immigrants from 'deplorable' facilities

A federal judge in California has ruled that hundreds of illegal immigrant women and children in U.S. holding facilities should be released, another apparent setback for President Obama’s immigration policy, according to The Los Angeles Times.
U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee said Friday that the conditions in which the detainees are being held are “deplorable” and violate parts of an 18-year-old court settlement that put restrictions on the detention of migrant children.
The ruling also raises questions about what the administration will do with the estimated 1,700 parents and children at three detention facilities, two in Texas and one in Pennsylvania.
Last year, tens of thousands of women and unaccompanied minors from Central America arrived at the Southwest border, with many believing a rumor that unaccompanied children and single parents with at least one child would be allowed to stay.
More than 68,000 of them were apprehended and detained while officials decided whether they had a right to stay.
Many were being released and told to appear at immigration offices until the administration eventually opened new detention centers.
Gee said in her ruling that children in the two Texas facilities had been held in substandard conditions and gave the administration until Aug. 3 to respond.
“We are disappointed with the court's decision and are reviewing it in consultation with the Department of Justice,” Marsha Catron, press secretary for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said in a prepared statement given to The Times.
Many of the Central Americans who crossed the Southwest border illegally last summer said they were fleeing poverty and escalating gang violence.
The Texas facilities are run by private companies, while the one in Pennsylvania is run by a county government.
In February, a federal judge blocked Obama's 2012 executive action to protect millions of undocumented immigrants from being deported.
And a federal appeals court in New Orleans refused three months later to allow the program to go forward, denying an administration request to lift the lower court decision.
Gee’s decision is also seen as a victory for the immigrant rights lawyers who brought the case.
The ruling upholds a tentative decision Gee made in April and comes a week after the two sides told her that they failed to reach a new settlement agreement as she had requested.
The 1997 settlement bars immigrant children from being held in unlicensed, secure facilities. Gee found that settlement covered all children in the custody of federal immigration officials, even those being held with a parent.
The Justice Department had argued it was necessary to modify the settlement and use detention to try to deter more immigrants from coming to the border after last year's surge. The department also said it was an important way to keep families together while their immigration cases were being reviewed, but the judge rejected that argument in her decision.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Thursday, July 9, 2015

S.F. Shooting Reveals Gaps in Immigration Enforcement

A slaying in San Francisco has sparked a national furor over its status as a so-called “sanctuary city” for unlawfully present immigrants. In an area popular with tourists, a five-time deportee named Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez shot Kathryn Steinle as she walked the waterfront with her father.
In addition to his five deportations, Lopez-Sanchez had racked up seven felony convictions since 1991, according to the Washington Post. “San Francisco authorities released him from custody in April after drug charges against him were dropped, despite an urgent request from the Department of Homeland Security that he be deported a sixth time to his native Mexico,” the Post reported.
Laying blame squarely at the feet of the city, federal officials have helped return California to the center of the immigration debate roiling the U.S. amidst the early stages of a presidential election season.

Municipal crisis

Caught flat-footed, city officials have scrambled to respond to the ballooning criticism. Donald Trump, who has made immigration enforcement a divisive wedge issue defining his maverick run for the presidency, recently seized upon the shooting as evidence justifying his proposed crackdown. City officials emphasized that their actions were in accordance with municipal law, as the Los Angeles Times noted:
“San Francisco’s ordinance made Sanchez ineligible for a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement hold because he did not have ‘a violent felony conviction within the last seven years, or a probable cause for holding issued by a magistrate or judge on a current violent felony,’ said Freya Horne, an attorney for the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department. ‘Nothing in his background showed anything like that.’”
Lopez-Sanchez fell under the purview of a 2013 law adopted by San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors. “Since then,” added the Times, “dozens of cities and counties across the country have stopped complying with immigration “detainer” requests after a federal judge ruled that an Oregon county violated one woman’s 4th Amendment rights by holding her for immigration authorities without probable cause.”
Lopez-Sanchez has now been charged by city prosecutors in connection with Steinle’s killing, according to Fox News.

Friday, July 3, 2015

CALIFORNIA: Will Union Members Stay if Friedrichs Wins Case against CTA?

The United States Supreme Court announcement that it will consider the Friedrichs vs. California Teachers Association case next fall produced handwringing and dire predictions that this could result in the end of public unions. Those who make those statements must think that the public unions are not offering representation that their members want. If the court sides with teacher Rebecca Friedrichs who opposes mandatory union dues, mandatory dues would end but voluntary union dues can continue. If the union does what the members want they will continue to get support.
David Savage’s article in the Los Angeles Times, which covers the circumstances around the case well, quotes Friedrichs, “I don’t have a voice or vote in the union, and I’m opposed to forced fees and forced unionism.”
Friedrichs and other teachers involved in the lawsuit do not approve of positions the union takes and object to their dues paid into the CTA treasury for positions with which they disagree. While teachers can opt out of dues directed to the union for political purposes, many have argued that the line is blurred between the union’s political activities and work-related representation.
Not wanting to pay money for issues with which one disagrees is a reasonable position. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions, which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical.”
While this bit of wisdom appeared in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom the sentiment can clearly apply to the protesting teachers situation.
If the case is successful – something that is far from certain – there is no telling how many union members will call it quits. CTA is certainly concerned with the outcome. Last year, CTA prepared a working paper titled, “Not if, but when: Living in a World without Fair Share.” The document predicted loss of revenue and membership if the system titled “Fair Share” requiring mandatory dues was overturned by a court.
In such a circumstance, members would have a choice on whether to support the union. Then the union will have to prove its worth to members.

THE VIRTUE OF MANDATORY VACCINATION: Celebrities are not medical experts, not even Jim Carrey Almighty.

On Tuesday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a law that makes California the third state to eliminate “personal belief” exemptions from vaccine requirements for children to attend schools, either public or private.

Starting with the 2016 school year (and with one important exception noted below), all children except those with medical circumstances that would render vaccination unsafe must be vaccinated against ten specific illnesses in order to enroll in a California school. Those who insist on not vaccinating must home-school or find other “independent study” methods of education. The requirement applies to public and private schools, child day care centers (including homes that provide family day care services), and nursery schools. According to the Los Angeles Times, “the new law could affect more than 80,000 California students who annually claim personal belief exemptions.”

Actor/comedian Jim Carrey isn’t happy about the new law, about which more in a moment. Note to Jim: Jenny McCarthy is married; you’re not going to be able to sleep with her again (though I don’t blame you for thinking about it). So please, stop pandering to Jenny’s insanity by buying into her claim, which is not just ignorant but extremely harmful, that vaccinating children is dangerous. (McCarthy believes that a vaccine caused her son’s autism, from which he has largely recovered. Some have questioned whether he was ever autistic, a suggestion the former Playboy Playmate of the Year aggressively rejects.)

Despite trying to revise her own history, McCarthy has — in part thanks to being promoted by Oprah Winfrey — for nearly a decade been the face (and body?) of the anti-vaccine movement. In 2007, she told CNN that “moms and pregnant women” were asking her advice on vaccinating children. Her response: “I don’t know what to tell them, because I am surely not going to tell anyone to vaccinate. But if I had another child, there’s no way in hell.”
The number of unvaccinated children has been rising rapidly in recent years, particularly among upper-middle class white suburbanites. Although several conservative religious communities avoid vaccines, bastions of liberalism such as Boulder, Colorado (the nearest city to my home), have some of the nation’s lowest vaccination rates. In fact, Colorado has the lowest kindergarten vaccine rate in the country (82 percent for MMR as compared to a 95 percent national average); Mississippi has the highest rate.


Via: The Spectator


Continue Reading....

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

The Green Behind California’s Greens

A handful of superrich donors have created the illusion of a grassroots environmental movement.

GIPHOTOSTOCK/CORBIS
In the fall of 2010, an army of California groups—including blue-collar unions, small businesses, manufacturers, and big energy companies—tried to persuade voters to suspend the state’s rigorous anti-global-warming law, which mandates a rollback of greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels. The advocates for delaying the law argued that, with an unemployment rate of 12.4 percent, California needed to focus on creating jobs and couldn’t afford costly new measures to slash carbon emissions, such as requiring utilities to generate power from renewable sources. But what proponents of the jobs measure, known as Proposition 23, didn’t count on was the financial might of California’s environmentalists. In just months, greens raised three times as much money as the initiative’s supporters. As the Los Angeles Times put it, the environmentalists then “steamrolled” their foes with a $30 million campaign that deployed television ads featuring Hollywood celebrities, millions of mailings, and hundreds of thousands of robo-calls and text messages. One environmentalist described the coalition that crushed Prop. 23—comprising entertainers, hedge-fund honchos, technology billionaires, and the many organizations that they back—as “the new face of the environmental movement.” It wasn’t the face of the movement, though, but its pocketbook that won the battle.
Californians have long had a green reputation. But for many years, interest in the environment expressed itself in modest programs of nature conservation, or in efforts to mitigate pollution problems such as the smog that once choked the state’s cities. Even as they gained political power over the last 15 years or so, however, California greens have moved steadily leftward—touting, for example, zero-growth initiatives that make it crazily expensive to create jobs, housing, and infrastructure. Credit, or blame, for this development should go to a small circle of superrich Californians, who made their fortunes chiefly in so-called clean industries like technology and finance, and who have poured vast sums of money into the green cause. These wealthy individuals bankroll hundreds of environmental organizations and spend massively to pass green ballot initiatives and elect green-friendly pols. So influential are these West Coast players that a recent report from Columbia University’s Journalism School—otherwise sympathetic to environmentalism—described the concentration of green power as “troubling.” Even more disconcerting, these true believers also seem intent on promoting their aggressive form of environmentalism around the country. Call it the Californication of the green movement.



Monday, December 23, 2013

Warmist fundamentalists ban dissent

First the Los Angeles Times, and now the popular website Reddit have banned critical comments on global warming orthodoxy in responses to their articles. Giuseppe Macri of The Daily Caller reports:
A content editor on Reddit's science forum wrote Monday that the site has banned climate-change skeptics, and asks why more news outlets haven't done the same.
"About a year ago, we moderators became increasingly stringent with deniers," Reddit content editor Nathan Allenwrote in grist. "When a potentially controversial submission was posted, a warning would be issued stating the rules for comments (most importantly that your comment isn't a conspiracy theory) and advising that further violations of the rules could result in the commenter being banned from the forum."
Allen explained further:
When 97 percent of climate scientists agree that man is changing the climate, we would hope the comments would at least acknowledge if not reflect such widespread consensus. Since that was not the case, we needed more than just an ad hoc approach to correct the situation.
Oddly enough, real science is based on questioning of data and conclusions, not on consensus.
This is a clear sign of panic.

Via: American Thinker


Continue Reading...

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Video: 19 Times Obama Promised to Lower Annual Insurance Premiums By $2500

In California alone, The Los Angeles Times reports that the average middle class family will see a premium increase of 30%, which is in line with what we are seeing all over the country. But on at least 19 occasions, President Obama promised the American people that if you already have insurance, his plan would reduce your premiums to $2500 per year. 

Note: Obama did not say that his plan would save  $2500 based on what insurance might cost in 2014. In no way did he qualify or caveat this promise:
--

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Homeland Insecurity Alert: Dry Ice and Dry Runs By Michelle Malkin

Michelle MalkinTesting, 1, 2, 3, testing. Jihadists never go on furlough. While shutdown theater preoccupies Washington, terror plotters remain on the clock. The question is: Will America keep hitting the post-9/11 snooze button?
At Los Angeles International Airport, two dry ice bombs exploded this week, and two others were found in a restricted area of the airport. According to the Los Angeles Times, the devices "appeared to be outside the terminal near planes where employees such as baggage handlers and others work on the aircraft and its cargo."
That reminds me: It's been more than a year since watchdogs warned Capitol Hill that our massive homeland security bureaucracy was neglecting these very areas of our nation's airports. Grandmas, babies and war heroes are routinely groped, manhandled and humiliated in the name of transportation safety. But untold numbers of ground personnel still have easy, breezy access to airplanes and luggage.
In August, seven baggage handlers at Kennedy Airport were arrested after being videotaped stealing jewelry, cash, watches and computers from passenger luggage. In June, a baggage handler at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport was arrested after using his credentials to bypass airport security and carry backpacks containing what he believed were drugs and guns onto commercial flights. It's almost as if any bumbling bimbo can connive his or her way into supposedly secure territory.

Monday, September 9, 2013

Picture this: Time for officials to pay for their own portraits, lawmaker says

A Louisiana Republican has introduced a bill to put an end to taxpayers footing the bill for official, commissioned portraits of Washington’s movers and shakers.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Rep. Bill Cassidy introduced the legislation – called the EGO Act, or Eliminating Government-funded Oil Painting – after reports

"Lisa Jackson can borrow my camera for free," he suggested as an alternative, the paper reported.
"Lisa Jackson can borrow my camera for free."- Rep. Bill Cassidy, R-La.

"At a time of trillion-dollar deficits, it is not appropriate to spend thousands of dollars on official paintings," Cassidy wrote to the House Appropriations Committee.

"If agency administrators, Cabinet secretaries or members of Congress feel it necessary to commission portraits, they should be responsible for paying for them."

But it could turn out to be a hard tradition to end, as the capital is full of portraits of government officials. And in the case of Elliot Richardson, there are four oil paintings – one for each department he headed in the 1970s, the Los Angeles Times reported

Via: Fox News Politics


Continue Reading....

Friday, August 30, 2013

L.A. Times Mangles History: Democrats 'Led the Passage of Civil Rights Legislation' in the Sixties?

Memo to the Corrections Department at the Los Angeles Times: The following sentence is utterly unhistorical. “Since Democrats led the passage of civil rights legislation that marchers pushed for in 1963, Republicans have struggled to recover with black voters”.

Civil rights legislation of the 1960s was favored more by Republicans than by Democrats, so how did Democrats “lead the passage”? With three reporters contributing to the story – Kathleen Hennessey, Richard Simon, and Alexei Koseff – none of them could locate the actual Sixties voting record as they labored to make the GOP look bad for the Democratic unanimity of the event:
Republican politicians invited to the event passed on the high-profile platform to promote their vision of the civil rights landscape and their effort to reach out to black voters. House Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio chose to speak at a congressional ceremony last month instead, spokesman Brendan Buck said. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia had previously scheduled events in North Dakota and Ohio, an aide said.

Former presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush could not attend for health reasons, their spokesmen said...

The absence of even a gesture of bipartisanship was a reminder of the enduring political legacy of the civil rights battles. Since Democrats led the passage of civil rights legislation that marchers pushed for in 1963, Republicans have struggled to recover with black voters, leaving a stark racial divide in American politics.
Unlike theThursday Washington Post piece, the Times trio said nothing about Republican complaints that the only black Senator, Republican Tim Scott, was not invited.

Meanwhile, the usual gauzy bows to Obama came throughout. “President Obama on Wednesday described half a century of uneven progress toward colorblind justice,” as if that’s what Al Sharpton & Co are seeking, “colorblind justice.” To hear the crowds, they still want the whites to pay reparations.
Via: Newsbusters

Continue Reading....

Popular Posts