We just had a big NATO conference in our country. NATO has been a powerful force for peace in the world. As readers of this column might surmise, I am a big supporter of our military. Support for the military is one of the rare things our federal government is constitutionally supposed to be doing. If I see a member of the military in a restaurant, the meal is on me. Yet increasingly I am baffled by the simple question: Where is all that money going? Recently I received a news alert that the House Armed Services Committee had passed an $884 billion defense bill for next year’s budget. There is a lot of good news here. First of all, the House is properly doing its job of passing funding bills (there are supposed to be twelve) in a timely manner so we don’t have these last-minute budget fights. It includes a raise for our military personnel, who are significantly underpaid. It also includes increased funding for military housing. This is a 7.2% increase over the 2024 budget of $825 billion. But recent information caused even someone like me to question where all this money is going. We will ignore the supercilious Leftist arguments that “greedy… Read More

Is there anyone out there who doubts that had the roles been reversed, that had someone tried to assassinate Biden instead of Trump, that criminal charges would have been filed against Trump? A week ago, Biden says “we need to put a bull’s eye on Trump.” Biden calls Trump a “threat to our democracy.” Facist, Nazi, criminal are epithets hurled at Trump every day. Trump absorbs these attacks and responds only with questions about Biden’s competence, a perfectly legitimate argument in a political debate. Had Trump said any of the things that Biden and his supporters have said prior to an assassination attempt on Biden, is there any doubt criminal charges would have been filed against Trump?

Governor Newsom has called Trump like Hitler and his supporters Nazis. He has in fact reveled in the support among Democrats around the country for “confronting” Trump and Republicans, and has called upon Democrat officeholders to increase the attacks on conservatives. Other Democrats in California have fueled the anti-conservative political fires with equally heated rhetoric. Now they all condemn the violence their words have… Read More

Preamble: Our country suffered a traumatic event yesterday. I caution anyone from attributing political motive to this. The people who do these things hate us all, Democrat, Republican or any other American. They hate America regardless of what is dug up that they did or said. The best part of this is that person is no longer with us. The other best part is our wonderful law enforcement at all levels who risk their lives for us every day. God bless them and God bless our country.

Right up there with Dred Scott v. Sanford and Plessy v. Ferguson, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council was among the very worst rulings ever made by the U.S. Supreme Court. It was the law of the land for forty years. It turned the Administrative State with its unelected bureaucrats into our overlords. Loper Bright v. Enterprises came before the current Supreme Court, and they restored the U.S. Constitution to its rightful place as the law of the land. How did Chevron, which was not an earth-shattering decision in 1984, become such a consequential case? It told judges that instead of making their own interpretation of a law they should instead rely on… Read More

There are two things for which Legislators have the only responsibility: (1) ensuring we have an adequate legal structure to protect citizens from those for whom crime is a way of life; and (2) spending the money entrusted to them by the taxpayers in an effective, efficient and responsible manner. California’s Legislative Democrats have failed on both counts. This is my recommendations to California Republicans on how to demonstrate these failures to the voters of the state of California

The last two posts on Prop. 36 have one message – campaign on an anti-crime policy and connect all the Democrats in the Legislature to the current crime spree throughout the state, but particularly in the urban areas of this state. In my time in the Legislature, we used to do this by motions to withdraw from committee, which became such an effective tool of connecting members to their real “pro-crime” agenda that the Democrats changed the rules to make these motions almost impossible. Now the only real argument that can be made is that each Democrat supports the Speaker, who then appointed the chair of the Public Safety Committee, allowing that Chair to… Read More

Proposition 36 makes the very rational argument that criminals should be incarcerated for their crimes. When done timely and right, the arguments in favor of incarceration move even the most uninvolved voter to vote, and, when the arguments are framed correctly, those uninvolved voters turn out and vote Republican. That was the strength of three strikes.

When combined with Proposition 187, the “cut off government benefits to illegal aliens” initiative, the voters of California were faced with two very straight forward and powerful examples of the failures of the left. In 1994, crime was out of control, and the borders were unprotected. Voters had enough of the left’s vision for California, and they reacted, strongly, punishing the ruling Democrats, and delivering a majority to the Republicans in one house of the Legislature for the first time in 24 years.

2024 has the potential for making Republicans relevant again. Crime and illegal immigration are top on the minds of the voters of California. With Proposition 36 on the ballot, and an emphasis on illegal immigration in the legislative districts, Republican candidates have a mix of… Read More

Between 1960 and 1994, California saw a 500% increase in all forms of crime. The root cause of this increase in crime was a systematic decrease in prison sentences, literally cutting the average time a convicted criminal spent in prison by over 50%, then granting a variety of different methods of reducing the time of the sentence, methods like “good time” or “work time” reductions to those sentences. A convicted criminal would often be sentenced to a determinate sentence of 5 years, and end up spending less than half of that in prison.

The left constantly reinforced the attitude that prison sentences don’t deter crime. They have always seen criminals of some sort of modern Jean Valjean, a noble hero, driven by economic circumstance to steal bread to feed his or her family, while those who believe in the rule of law as some puritanical Javert, who care not about the person who broke the law, but only about enforcing the law.

After the passage of three strikes in 1994, the crime rate dropped by 50% in one year, for the first time in over 30 years. The law had a real effect on the criminal class. For the incorrigible felon,… Read More

If you are feeling like you have whiplash, you should. It’s been fascinating to watch how quickly certain elements of the Democrat party, including their in-house press organs called the New York Times, Washington Post, Politico etc., turned on the guy. And there are some major concerns and duplicity central to their reaction. President Biden looked terrible and spoke terribly on June 27th. If you have watched him since then, he looks better and is better able to handle speaking in public. He certainly was much better in his interview with George Stephanopoulos. You would not hear this from the press because once they turned on him, they totally turned on him. It is not because he cannot do the job he was elected to do. We have been questioning that from day one. To them Joe Biden had one use and one use only – defeating the evil Orangeman. If he cannot defeat Trump let’s get him out, facts be damned. First, let us look at the polls. Biden has been slightly behind all year. That is based on the climate in the country. No matter who was running with these policies they would be behind. Americans have been battered by the destructive… Read More

Thankfully, a long time ago I decided to read political press coverage “across the political spectrum.” Had that not been the case, I clearly would have missed reading Nell Scovell’s column in the Daily Beast https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-real-man-jerry-seinfeld-misses-is-guilty-bad-boy-hunter-biden? It is clear from Scovell’s analysis that Seinfeld’s comment about wanting to be “a real man” and his “real man” icons from his youth that he has no understanding of his toxic masculinity and how negative it is for everyone around him. How fortunate that Scovell enlightened Seinfeld that he is validating none other than Hunter Biden as a “real man” at his worst moments. God knows there are plenty of those. Let’s take a look at this analysis. Scovell cites a comment and some behavior Seinfeld mentioned as one of the four people who come to mind as real men. She has no idea what he actually meant by that. She asserts her own conclusions. It is doubtful that he knew the information shared by Scovell about Sean Connery… Read More