California: Attack on Prop 13 Faces Long Odds

The original Proposition 13 was four paragraphs long fitting on one side of a piece of paper. SCA 5, the measure to change Proposition 13 introduced by Senators Loni Hancock and Holly Mitchell yesterday intended to increase taxes on business property is 30 pages long. Without going into the details of the proposed changes, suffice it to say the groups behind the proposal, liberal organizations and public employee unions, want more tax dollars to spend. That is despite the fact that the state treasury is enjoying a big boost in revenue.

The rhetoric of “fairness” spoken by supporters at the press conference announcing the bill does not match the impact of what the proposed law intends to do. Sen. Mitchell said at the press conference, “What we are looking to do is to take those few that are benefitting from under-assessment and bring them in line with everyone else.” 

The measure would not raise taxes on a “few” but re-assess all business property annually so that they can pay the highest property tax possible.

Most of the news reports following the press conference that announced the filing of the bill spoke of “long odds” and “high hurdles” to get the bill through the legislature. Since the proposal is a constitutional amendment, it requires a two thirds vote to be placed on the ballot. Many news articles noted that there are no Republican votes for the measure.

A more interesting question is how many Democratic legislators will vote for SCA 5? I can imagine right now there are a number of political consultants drawing up campaign mailers that say: Candidate X voted to change Proposition 13.

While there seems little expectation that this proposal will get through the legislature, it is anticipated that a split roll could become an initiative measure.

The recent PPIC poll question on a split roll found only 50-percent of the voters support the idea. That mark was recorded against a simple question asking if commercial property should pay taxes based on full market value. There were no arguments offered to the respondents about possible consequences such as thousands of lost jobs, a stifling of economic growth, and devaluation of commercial property when new property taxes are capitalized into the value of the property.

A multi-million dollar campaign pointing out the negative consequences of a split roll is sure to take shape if the split roll makes the ballot.

Via: California Political Review

Continue Reading....

IS CLIMATE CHANGE HYSTERIA THE NEW ‘POPULATION BOMB’?

A recent article in the New York Times revisits the generalized pandemonium in the 1970s over fears of a global population explosion, due in large part to Paul R. Ehrlich’s 1968 doomsday bestseller: The Population Bomb. The article inadvertently ties Ehrlich’s apocalyptic thesis—and the widespread willingness to believe it—to the current climate change hysteria that has swept a large part of the planet.

Ehrlich sold the world the idea that mankind stood on the brink of Armageddon because there was simply no way to feed the exponentially increasing world population. The opening line set the tone for the whole book: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.”

Being a well-credentialed scientist—as a biologist lecturing at Stanford University—Ehrlich’s trumpet call of the end times struck many as the plausible theory of an “expert.”

In the book, Ehrlich laid out the devastating future of the planet. He predicted that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s (and that 65 million of them would be Americans), that already-overpopulated India was doomed, and that odds were fair that “England will not exist in the year 2000.”

Ehrlich concludes that “sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,” meaning “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”

It is fascinating to compare Ehrlich’s hyperbolic forecasts with those of the recent climate workshop sponsored by the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Science.

Via: Breitbart

Continue Reading....

Hillary Campaign Launch Features Staffer That Said ‘F U Republicans’

A top Hillary Clinton campaign official addressed potential volunteers at Clinton’s Roosevelt Island campaign launch event Saturday, despite his verifiable hatred of Republicans and membership in an anti-GOP “mafia.”

Marlon Marshall, director of political engagement for the Clinton campaign, spoke at the rally where he discussed volunteer sign up numbers and pro-Hillary house parties underway in key early states. Marshall previously served as President Obama’s deputy director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, a baldly political agency overseen by senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett.

Despite Marshall’s prominent role in the Clinton campaign, his history makes clear his angry, partisan sentiments.

“F U Republicans. Mafia till I die,” Marshall wrote in an email on a private listserv for “The Mook Mafia,” a group of Clinton-world operatives led by 2008 Clinton staffer Robby Mook, who was gunning to be campaign manager for Hillary’s 2016 bid. Mook, a close friend of Marshall, still got the campaign manager gig after his secret emails were leaked. And Marshall’s “F U” to Republicans didn’t stop him from finding employment with Hillary 2016.

Former figure skater and Clinton supporter Michelle Kwan tweeted out a photo of Marshall’s kickoff speech at Clinton’s Roosevelt Island rally.

The Clinton campaign seems to be operating in line with Marshall’s feelings already. Three Republican National Committee staffers were followed and nearly ejected from the Roosevelt Island event until they switched their anti-Hillary T-shirts inside out.

Via: Daily Caller

Continue Reading....

Extreme secrecy eroding support for Obama's trade pact

If you want to hear the details of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal the Obama administration is hoping to pass, you’ve got to be a member of Congress, and you’ve got to go to classified briefings and leave your staff and cellphone at the door.

If you’re a member who wants to read the text, you’ve got to go to a room in the basement of the Capitol Visitor Center and be handed it one section at a time, watched over as you read, and forced to hand over any notes you make before leaving.

And no matter what, you can’t discuss the details of what you’ve read.

“It’s like being in kindergarten,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who’s become the leader of the opposition to President Barack Obama’s trade agenda. “You give back the toys at the end.”

For those out to sink Obama’s free trade push, highlighting the lack of public information is becoming central to their opposition strategy: The White House isn’t even telling Congress what it’s asking for, they say, or what it’s already promised foreign governments.

The White House has been coordinating an administration-wide lobbying effort that’s included phone calls and briefings from Secretary of State John Kerry, Labor Secretary Tom Perez, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker and others. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz has been working members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro has been talking to members of his home state Texas delegation.

Officials from the White House and the United States trade representative’s office say they’ve gone farther than ever before to provide Congress the information it needs and that the transparency complaints are just the latest excuse for people who were never going to vote for a new trade deal anyway.

“We’ve worked closely with congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle to balance unprecedented access to classified documents with the appropriate level of discretion that’s needed to ensure Americans get the best deal possible in an ongoing, high-stakes international negotiation,” said USTR spokesman Matt McAlvanah.

Via: Politico

Continue Reading....

Al Sharpton Blames Parents for Calling Out Race-Changing NAACP Official

Al Sharpton on Saturday slammed the parents of Spokane NAACP President Rachel Dolezal, saying he has to wonder what their motives were for revealing her to be a white woman, not an African-American, as she claims.

"On one level, you've got to say to her, you're misleading us, but on another level, mom and dad, come on," he told TMZ. "Are we gonna have this dysfunctional family stuff play out and distract us from real key civil rights causes. Be the adults here. You just now noticed she was in the NAACP?"


But still, Sharpton pointed out that the real issue is not race, as there are whites "in all of our organizations," and who died fighting for civil rights.

"It's not about whether she is white or black, but are you going to be honest?" he said. "Don't be misleading... if you're fighting for the rights of people, don't deny who you are."

However, Sharpton wondered why Dolezal's parents, Lawrence and Ruthanne Dolezal, waited until Friday to appear on television to discuss her. 

Instead, he said, they waited until she became more prominent before making their statements, Sharpton said. 

“You’ve got to ask the question, ‘what are Mom and Dad’s motives here… where’ve you been?” he replied.

Her parents, Lawrence and Ruthanne Dolezal told CNN Friday that their daughter has been claiming to be black for years, but they were never asked about her until recently. The couple has four adopted children, three of whom are African-American and one from Haiti, in addition to Dolezal, who is their biological daughter.

They also shared a photo of her, taken while she was younger and showing her with blonde hair, and a birth certificate that lists themselves as Dolezal's parents. 

Her mother told CNN that Dolezal cut ties with them several years ago, as "she doesn't want to be seen with us because that ruins her image."

Via: NewsMax

Continue Reading....

Congress tries to figure out how to pay for highways

PUT ALL THE LAZY "POS" THAT DON'T WANT TO WORK EARN THEIR FREE THINGS AND MAKE THEM BUILD THE HIGHWAYS OR THEY GET NOTHING!!!!! (OH WAIT, THE UNIONS WILL GET PISSED OFF)

Congress will try next week to stave off the exhaustion of the national fund that pays for roads and bridges.

Both chambers are set to hold hearings on the highway trust fund, which would run out of money by the end of July if Congress doesn't find more funding for it.

The hearings called by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., in the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means committees likely will focus on examining long-term solutions to the problem of funding highway infrastructure.

The trust fund, financed by the gasoline tax, has required numerous bailouts from general revenues in recent years, as inflation has chipped into the value of the 18.4-cents-a-gallon tax and Americans have turned to more fuel-efficient cars.

Top lawmakers have said that closing the long-term funding mismatch is a priority. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi hinted on Friday, after scuttling a trade bill sought by President Obama, that a "robust highway bill" would be the price of her support.

A short-term patch, intended to buy a few more months for the trust fund, is the more likely outcome.

"I think we'll probably kick the can down the road again," Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said Wednesday.

At this point, a short-term reauthorization, possibly funded through some form of budget gimmickry, is most likely because there is little time left for a broader measure before the end of July.

But there is hope among lawmakers that later in the year there could be an agreement on a longer-term patch, if not an outright solution.

Some lawmakers have suggested plans that would eliminate recurring shortfalls.

VIA: Washington Examiner

Continue Reading.....

Declassified CIA memo shows Bill Clinton crippled anti-terrorism efforts in lead-up to 9/11

In a classic Friday-afternoon document dump, a CIA memo written by then-agency head George Tenet in 2005 has been released, incriminating the Bill Clinton administration in crippling anti-terror efforts.  Stephen Dinan of the Washington Times writes:

The Clinton administration had bankrupted the intelligence community and refused to let the CIA prioritize anti-terrorism over other major priorities in the late 1990s, leaving the agency stretched too thin in the days ahead of the 2001 terrorist attacks, former Director George J. Tenet said in a 2005 document declassified Friday. 

Mr. Tenet, who was head of the agency at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks and has taken severe criticism for not anticipating and heading them off, said in the document that he took the threat of Osama bin Laden very seriously, and put major effort into trying to penetrate al-Qaeda, beginning as far back as 1998.

Clearly, Tenet is covering his posterior.  But:

“Even though senior policy makers were intimately familiar with the threat posed by terrorism, particularly those in the previous administration who had responded to major attacks, they never provided us the luxury of either downgrading other high priority requirements we were expected to perform against, or the resource base to build counterterrorism programs with the consistency that we needed before September 11,” Mr. Tenet wrote.

Via: American Thinker

Continue Reading....

Why The Left Needs Climate Change

Try this out as a thought experiment: what would happen if, tomorrow morning, we had definitive proof that catastrophic climate change was impossible, wasn’t happening, and would never happen. Would Al Gore breathe a big sigh of relief and say—“Well good; now we can go back to worrying about smoking, or bad inner city schools, or other persistent, immediate problems.”

Of course not. The general reaction from environmentalists and the left would be a combination of outrage and despair. The need to believe in oneself as part of the agency of human salvation runs deep for leftists and environmentalists who have made their obsessions a secular religion. And humanity doesn’t need salvation if there is no sin in the first place. Hence human must be sinners—somehow—in need of redemption from the left.

I got to thinking about this when reading a short passage from an old book by Canadian philosopher George Grant,Philosophy in the Mass Age:

“During the excitement over Sputnik, it was suggested that the Americans were deeply depressed by Russian success. I thought this was a wrong interpretation. Rather, there was a great sigh of relief from the American elites, for now there was an immediate practical objective to be achieved, a new frontier to be conquered—outer space.”

This tracks closely with Kenneth Minogue’s diagnosis of liberalism in his classic The Liberal Mind.  Minogue compared liberals to medieval dragon hunters, who sought after dragons to slay even after it was clear they didn’t exist. The liberal, like the dragon hunter, “needed his dragons. He could only live by fighting for causes—the people, the poor, the exploited, the colonially oppressed, the underprivileged and the underdeveloped. As an ageing warrior, he grew breathless in pursuit of smaller and smaller dragons—for the big dragons were now harder to come by.”

Via: Forbes

Continue Reading....

‘TAA’, ‘TAA’, America!

The TAA (Trade Adjustment Assistance) vote coming Tuesday is the Final Act of the hideous Fundamental Transformation of America.  It brings forward an America that will exist in name only in a Barack Obama-styled Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that holds ultimate power over 40 percent of the world’s total economy. It’s the original camel as a horse designed by a committee; a European Union called the Trans-Pacific Partnership that is really the North American Union; a partnership this time without Mexico, whose population already uses the U.S. as its primary escape hatch.

That no one knows what’s in the TPP is the one big lie that keeps the masses from realizing that the TPP, packaged in the one-party politics that is now the United States of America,  is spinning non-stop toward an inevitable fait accompli.

That Nancy Pelosi and the Dems have turned on their master Obama is merely a Machiavellian ploy at work.

Watch the video (below) of Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi’s broad-grinned, cat-that-swallowed-the-canary joint entry into a meeting on the Hill yesterday.  Do they look like natural foes to you?

What about TPP coordinator, Paul Ryan as Obama’s latest Go-to Guy for getting the job done?

Window dressing that should be filed under ‘o’ for ‘obfuscation’.

Via: Canada Free Press

Continue Reading....

Former Top Counterintel Official: Hack 'Tells the Chinese the Identities of Almost Everybody Who Has Got a U.S. Security Clearance'

FILE - In this June 5, 2015, file photo, a gate leading to the Homeland Security Department headquarters in northwest Washington. Hackers stole personnel data and Social Security numbers for every federal employee, a government worker union said Thursday, June 11, 2015, charging that the cyberattack on U.S. employee data is far worse than the Obama administration has acknowledged. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Deeply personal information submitted by U.S. intelligence and military personnel for security clearances — mental illnesses, drug and alcohol use, past arrests, bankruptcies and more — is in the hands of hackers linked to China, officials say.

In describing a cyberbreach of federal records dramatically worse than first acknowledged, authorities point to Standard Form 86, which applicants are required to complete. Applicants also must list contacts and relatives, potentially exposing any foreign relatives of U.S. intelligence employees to coercion. Both the applicant's Social Security number and that of his or her cohabitant are required.

In a statement, the White House said that on June 8, investigators concluded there was "a high degree of confidence that ... systems containing information related to the background investigations of current, former and prospective federal government employees, and those for whom a federal background investigation was conducted, may have been exfiltrated."

"This tells the Chinese the identities of almost everybody who has got a United States security clearance," said Joel Brenner, a former top U.S. counterintelligence official. "That makes it very hard for any of those people to function as an intelligence officer. The database also tells the Chinese an enormous amount of information about almost everyone with a security clearance. That's a gold mine. It helps you approach and recruit spies."

The Office of Personnel Management, which was the target of the hack, did not respond to requests for comment. OPM spokesman Samuel Schumach and Jackie Koszczuk, the director of communications, have consistently said there was no evidence that security clearance information had been compromised.

Via: CNS News

Continue Reading....

[OPINION[ The Fantasy That ObamaCare 'Is Working'

[ObamaCare] is working…We haven’t had a lot of conversation about the horrors of Obamacare because none of them have come to pass. You got 16 million people who’ve gotten health insurance.

It hasn’t had an adverse effect on people who already had health insurance. The overwhelming majority of them are satisfied with the health insurance…

The costs have come in substantially lower than even our estimates about how much it would cost. Health care inflation overall has continued to be at some of the lowest levels in 50 years. None of the predictions about how this wouldn’t work have come to pass.

Barack Obama, June 8, 2015

Sometimes it seems President Obama lives in a parallel universe where facts are floating around to be plucked out of suspended animation. Never more so than on the effects of the Affordable Care Act.

So let’s see whether anything he says on the new law, including that it “is working,” comports with the facts:

● No “adverse effect on people who already had health insurance.”

In 2013, as Obamacare’s policies were phasing in, nearly 5 million policyholders across 31 states and the District of Columbia were notified that their current coverage was being discontinued. This doesn’t include nearly 20 states that weren’t tracking these numbers so the total could have been several million more. In California alone, 1.1 million policies were canceled.

In March, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that Obamacare will result in a total of 1 million fewer people enrolled in employment-based coverage in 2015, increasing to 8 million fewer enrolled in employment-based covered by 2018. That’s a lot of people who haven’t been able to keep the health insurance that they like.

Recommended by Forbes

MOST POPULAR

Photos: The Highest-Paid Athletes: 25 And Under

MOST POPULAR

How Malala Found Her Strength

MOST POPULAR

Photos: The World's Highest-Paid Athletes 2015

Billionaire Bunkers: Exclusive Look Inside the World's Largest Planned Doomsday Escape

MOST POPULAR

Photos: The Highest-Paid Athletes: 25 And Under

MOST POPULAR

How Malala Found Her Strength

MOST POPULAR

Photos: The World's Highest-Paid Athletes 2015

Billionaire Bunkers: Exclusive Look Inside the World's Largest Planned Doomsday Escape

● “The overwhelming majority of people are satisfied” with the new law.

Real Clear Politics has reviewed the major polling results on ObamaCare over the last two months. It finds that the average result is that 43% of Americans support the law and 53% oppose it. A May Gallup poll found more than twice as many respondents (24%) say the law has hurt their families than say it has helped them (10%). Most say it has made no difference. This sounds a lot more like dissatisfaction with the new law.

Via: Forbes

Continue Reading...