40 Years – Two generations, no action to correct the continuing failure of our schools. The failure to correct the downward spiral of the quality of California’s schools is the greatest sin of the Democrat controlled Legislature.

In my talks to the Legislature, when I talked about the “intractable problems” of the state that the Democrats continually failed to address, I would always include the schools, because they have been lost in the wilderness for at least 40 years. Lack of leadership, union control of the processes of management, curriculum, and operation of schools, and lack of accountability have led to at least two generations of the needs of students for a quality education lost to the wants of those who make money off the system and the frustration of parents who are only looking to the school system to help prepare those children for life in the continual complexity of society.

Our education system is a political monopoly. We have amazing teachers who are dominated by union leadership that is more focused on maintaining the flow of cash to their pockets and political power from the tax fed budget than they are about meeting… Read More

Whenever I have lunch or dinner with someone – especially with recent events — I ask a very straightforward question. “In your wildest dreams did you ever believe they would muck things up this bad, this fast?” I use more vivid language, but I am against using such language in a public forum so I will leave it to your imagination. Sit back and think about the question yourself and derive your own answer.

In a little over a year, the Biden Administration has opened our border to an estimated two million illegal aliens who have been spread throughout the country with very little hope of ever tracking them; shut down a significant amount of our home grown energy production by killing a major pipeline deal costing 3,900 full-time equivalent jobs and pausing oil production on all federal government land which is 25% of national production; taken sanctions off Nordstream 2 to continue the flow of Russian gas to Europe; had a radical withdrawal from Afghanistan that is roundly considered a disaster for the United States; engineered policies that lead to inflation levels not seen in over 40 years which caused a severe depression; and has the world involved in a war… Read More

I once attended a seminar regarding the continuing problems of our overburdened transportation system, and how sitting in traffic made people miserable. When I talked about a fix, one of the attendees, who represented an environmental organization, said (and this is an very close to an exact quote) “if we fix the freeways, more people will come to California.” My response was “so the answer to our traffic issues is to make people as miserable as possible, so that no one else will come here and be miserable?

And that is the issue with the environuts in this state. In their minds, people are bad, and the goal is to get rid of as many of them as possible. Don’t let them go to state parks, don’t let them have an affordable place to live, make gasoline as expensive as possible through unreasonable environmental controls on the extraction and production of fuel. If they still buy the fuel and use their cars, make that use a miserable experience, to discourage further use. Make water so expensive to obtain that people don’t buy or use it. Cram people into small living units, into smelly, nasty transportation systems like buses and… Read More

To put this series in perspective, I started with my observations from my time in the Legislature, which, by the way, are now 16 to 29 years old. My speeches would usually start with the observation that, in California, our freeways are overcrowded, our schools are failing our children, our housing costs too much, and we are running out of gasoline, water, and electricity. You would think that, if those who are in charge in Sacramento were serious about solving these problems, they could at least fix one of them in 29 years. Yet…here we are…29 years later, with the exact same problems, the exact same complaints, and the exact same excuses for why the Democrat majority in the Legislature haven’t solved the problems.

And Californians keep electing them, despite their excuses. We do get the government we deserve, and things won’t change until we get rid of the majority, and replace them with those who have a better idea.

So, let’s talk water. California has one rainy season, usually November through March, and then seven months of almost perfect weather (if you live in San Diego, it is absolutely perfect). We just came off of a… Read More

Yesterday, I showed how California Government, currently under the control of Democrats, increases the cost of gasoline through taxes, fees, and regulation, all things that are under the control of the State Government. The majority in the Legislature and the Governor have created the high cost gasoline in California (all the while blaming oil companies for the actions of the politicians).

Today, we’ll talk about the cost of housing. Once again, the increasing cost of housing is created by massive housing shortages throughout the state, and those shortages are caused by government fees and regulations. So what is the majority blaming for the high cost of housing? Once again, they blame the private market, a market they have severely controlled and regulated.

I would like first to make this observation to put the housing issues in a context. The cost of housing plays only a minor role in the homelessness crisis in this state. The major causes of homelessness are mental illness and substance abuse. That is why the Democrats’ solutions to crisis, that is, to build homeless shelters and give the homeless money don’t work. The mentally ill… Read More

I have been out of the Legislature for over 16 years. That is only significant because after 8 years in the Legislatures, I started to notice that my Democrat colleagues in the majority during my time there spent a lot of time passing useless legislation, and ignoring the big problems of the state. My general speech against a bill would start “The freeways of California are too crowded, our schools are failing, our houses cost too much, and we are running out of water, out of gasoline, and out of electricity, yet here we are in the Legislature debating [insert stupid bill here].” I could give that same speech today, and be just as relevant as I was in 2002, 3, 4, 5, or 6. As just one small example, our Arrogant Lazy Authoritarian in Chief (the ALAIC) recently spent his time calling on private companies to attack the Florida Legislature over an education bill that focused on sex education for 5 year olds. ALAIC Newsom should worry about California schools failing California’s children, not Florida’s sex education curriculum. However, that means he would have to take on California’s teacher’s union, and since he is a wholly owned… Read More

Want to see the left wing media and its leftist followers completely bat guano crazy?

Just mention the “independent state legislature” doctrine that is gaining traction around the country.

Do that, and you will hear the left wing media cite a thousand constitutional “scholars” who will call you every kind of negative nickname they have ever assigned to conservatives in this country, and they will end with how dangerous you and anyone who thinks like you is to our Constitution and our Republic.

Simply stated, the independent state legislature doctrine says that the various state legislatures throughout the country are discrete sovereign units with functions specifically reserved to them by the Constitution. There are three main sources of that reservation of state sovereignty: (1) Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution, which reserves to the states the power to determine the “time, place, and manner” of elections; (2) Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution that reserves to the Legislature the power to determine the method of electing the President of the United States, and (3) the 10th Amendment, which reserves to… Read More

David Brooks had a rich pedigree on the conservative side of the ledger. He worked at the National Review, Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Weekly Standard. I ran into Bill Kristol and Brooks in 2003. Kristol crowed about how Brooks had just accepted a position at the New York Times. I congratulated him and stated, “It will be interesting to see whether you change them, or they change you.” We just got final confirmation. Brooks has a lengthy piece in the Atlantic entitled What Happened to American Conservatism? speaking to the history of his political perspective.

The fact this was published in the Atlantic tells one about everything you would expect regarding what he wrote. The publication was founded in 1857 and was originally the Atlantic Monthly. Times change and so has the publication. Current editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg has completed the transformation to a far-left rag that gives authors plenty of space to pontificate on their left-wing theories.

Brooks has authored some enlightened books on our society, but that was before his transformation. He wrote with great clarity then, but this lengthy piece was frequently muddled.… Read More