Vida Wright and Cheryl Bly-Chester, two minority owned, small business owners, bid a contract with Caltrans to administer the education and mentoring program for the Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program. They complied with the rules of the process, spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars preparing their Request For Proposal, and they qualify as a DBE. But they lost the contract by tenths of a point after Caltrans employees changed the documents of the incumbent contractor, as well as the scoring on the incumbent contractor bid, so Caltrans could award it to the incumbent.

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Last week, Gov. Jerry Brown said California has an overpopulation problem. He said the ongoing drought is a sure sign that the explosion of population in California has reached the limit of what Nature can provide.

“We are altering this planet with this incredible power of science, technology and economic advance,” Brown said during a discussion with Austin Beutner, publisher and chief executive of the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune.“If California is going to have 50 million people, they’re not going to live the same way the native people lived, much less the way people do today.… You have to find a more elegant way of relating to material things. You have to use… Read More

Despite a recent legal victory, thousands of California farm workers await another legal decision on the fate of their votes, by the state agency they petitioned to hold the election.

The Agricultural Labor Relations Board is mandated to protect the rights of California farm workers. However, the ALRB instead waged a systematic campaign against thousands of farm workers in 2013 to prevent them from voting to de-certify the United Farm Workers union at Gerawan Farming, one of the nation’s largest family-owned fruit producers.

Court documents, legal testimony, and sworn statements demonstrate a pattern of voter intimidation, harassment, last-minute rule changing, and other tactics to disenfranchise the Latino farm workers of Gerawan. Legal documents show that the ALRB general counsel and the Visalia-based regional director orchestrated a concerted effort to manipulate the votes of thousands of laborers at Gerawan Farming.

ALRB Lawyer Orchestrated Intimidation, Segregation

ALRB General Counsel Sylvia Torres-Guillén led the agency’s effort to… Read More

As Gov. Jerry Brown prepares to sign another climate change agreementwith “government leaders from around the world,” as his office announced, remember the recent agreement Brown got into with the scandalized Oregon Gov. Kitzhaber. “In October 2013,California Gov. Jerry Brown, together with the Governors of Oregon and Washington and the British Columbia Premier,signedthePacific Coast Action Plan on Climate and Energy, “to align climate change policies and promote clean energy,’” I wrote in February.

The Pacific Coast Collaborative links with theWest Coast Infrastructure Exchange(WCX), a compact betweenCalifornia, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia, formed in 2013 to promote “the type of new thinking necessary to solve the West Coast’s infrastructure crisis.” And the WCX is linked to… Read More

Hillary “Scandal” Clinton’s latest dust up with the law, no matter how egregious or illegal, will not cause her mind-numbingly stupid followers to disavow her. If she were a Republican, she’d be tossed to the curb like a snotty Kleenex.

We normal folks, the real people who work for a living and pay our own bills, keep asking ourselves “what’s it going to take?” Which scandal will take Hillary and Bill down? When will Barack Obama and his Executive Pen have gone too far? And what America-loathing racist statement will finally earn Michelle Obama the middle finger from Democrats?

These political freeloaders, and the many more like them, hide behind a façade of “public service.” However, they really are elitist Marxists, enjoying a lifestyle paid for by the public.

Badly Behaving Politicians

This sick fascination with badly behaving politicians is not limited to the Clintons and Obamas. Remember William Jefferson, the Louisiana congressman under investigation for bribery when the FBI found $90,000 in cash stashed in his freezer? He was reelected.

How about former New York Attorney General and Governor Eliot… Read More

‘Transparency’ is probably the most overused word in political speech, while at the same time, the most underutilized in practice.In a free society, transparency in government means openness, accountability, and honesty. It is the obligation of government to share information with citizens, yet is increasingly difficult to access – even in California, home to Silicon Valley.

Without transparency, citizens are unable to hold public officials accountable. And that’s the problem –government is responsible for making itself available to be accountable. It’s unnatural. While the true statesman values principle above popularity, today’s era of politics in California doesn’t breed an abundance of statesmen.

However, one of the good guys – a real statesman – former State Sen. Sam Blakeslee, has tackled the problem of transparency in politics. The Institute for Advanced Technology and Public Policy, under the leadership of Blakeslee, officially launched the Digital Democracy Project, to provide a searchable database of all legislative hearings. “This package… Read More

California once built dams to store water from the wet years so there would be plenty in dry years. But radical environmental laws have squandered our existing water supply, and obstructed the construction of any major dams, while the population has nearly doubled.

Gov. Jerry Brown and President Barack Obama have the authority under the existing Endangered Species Act to convene a process to suspend environmental laws during the drought. Governor Brown also has the authority to request the president to act. Despite repeated calls to do so, neither has responded to requests from Congressman Tom McClintock.

McClintock told me in an… Read More

While Gov. Jerry Brown has issued record-breaking drought emergency executive orders to California residents to stop watering our “little green lawns,” and take shorter showers or face a $500 fine, other government agencies are draining the state’s reservoirs and sending millions of gallons of precious water to the Pacific Ocean.

Last week, a federal fisheries agency ordered the California branch of the Bureau of Reclamation to release 15,000 acre feet of water (4,800,000 gallons) from the New Melones Dam so 23 fish could swim to the Pacific Ocean. This order came right in the middle of California’s record-breaking drought, as people and farmers are threatened with fines… Read More