I reprint a statement from Harry Sidhu announcing his re-election bid for City Council. Harry is a good guy, even though he should not have run for state Senate.

ANAHEIM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER HARRY SIDHU FORMALLY ANNOUNCES HIS CANDIDACY FOR RE-ELECTION TO SECOND TERM IN OFFICE

July 23, 2008

Anaheim, CA – Anaheim City Council Member Harry Sidhu today formally announced his candidacy for re-election to a second term on the Anaheim City Council. As an Anaheim City Council Member and most recently as a Republican candidate for the 33rd State Senate District, Councilman Sidhu has garnered prominent local, county and state elected official support and strong fundraising assistance for his common sense leadership.

He has a proven record of protecting the taxpayers and property rights. As a successful businessman, Councilman Sidhu also brings real world experience to the halls of government. He is an experienced, trusted Republican leader who seeks to continue to serve and give back to his community through ongoing public service in Anaheim. The general election will take place November 4, 2008.

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Today’s global warming quote of the day comes from a guy who actually understands climate science, as opposed to, say, a guy who won an Oscar for a PowerPoint presentation:

“In conclusion, I am predicting today that the theory that mankind is mostly responsible for global warming will slowly fade away in the coming years, as will the warming itself, and I trust you would agree, Madam Chair, that such a result deserves to be greeted with relief.” - Dr. Roy Spencer, climatologist and scientist, formerly with NASA, now at University of Alabama at Huntsville, testifying before Senator Barbara Boxer’s committee on climate change research.

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We’re a bit puzzled by the tax codes. After all there are how many pages to the IRS’ bible? 44,000?

We sort of understand the principle of graduated tax rates. Sorta. We think it’s intended to hurt people (those with more money) who are most unlike the people who write the codes, although a lot of those Democrat tax-lovers are awfully wealthy themselves. It’s a complicated world.

But this is our real difficulty with the tax code. How come it’s OK at one time for the maximum tax rate to be 91 percent (yeah, you read it right) but another time for the maximum tax rate to be only 7 percent (yeah, you read that one right too).

That’s some disparity, huh? All we can figure is that the people who want to hurt other people imagine fluctuating thresholds of pain.

If you get that one figured out, work on this one for us, will you? The 10 percent richest Americans (well, the 10 percent top earners anyway) paid 71 percent of all federal income tax in 2006. That doesn’t leave much to pay for the 90 percent of folks who are left, does it?

If you wonder about that one, get a load of this: 97 percent of all income tax was paid by the top 50 percent of wage earners. That means an equal number of wage earners paid only 3 percent of the tax.

We remember reading in a good book where 10 percent was a reasonable amount of money to give for causes even more important than government work. And we don’t recall any mention that if you earned more you should not just pay more, but pay a bigger portion of what you earn.

Why’s that a good idea? And where’s that written?

Oh yeah, in those 44,000 pages.

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Maybe if they weren’t so two-faced, they wouldn’t have such a huge carbon footprint. We report. You decide.

Al Gore arrived last week to deliver a “major” speech calling on his countrymen to abandon all fossil fuels within 10 years because if we don’t, well life will be next to ruined it’ll be so globally warm. (There’s another of those deadlines you want to be sure to put on your calendar to check the accuracy this prophet of doom.)

The thing is, Mr. Gore showed up at his speech with an entourage of two Lincoln Town Cars and a full-sized SUV, which incidentally sat idling with air conditioners humming away while Gore was inside talking (presumably in air conditioned comfort as well).

We weren’t there (we’re trying to minimize our carbon feet prints), but we’re fairly certain Mr. Gore didn’t share this alarming yet-unwarming factoid:

“Greenland isn’t melting,” Lorne Gunter reports. “And while Artic sea ice may have thinned in the past three decades by about 3 percent per decade, according to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Date Center, Antartic ice (which is about 20 times as voluminous as the Artic kind) has grown by 12 percent per decade.”

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Global warming alarmists in recent years have applauded Europeans for fighting the warming boogey man the way Americans so far have been hesitant to.

Before Americans buy into the European way, they might check how things are developing across the pond where the fight against so-called global warming has been waged longer, and stronger - with (gee here’s a surprise) unintended consequences. (Emphases ours)

“Labour’s foolhardy policies are shaped by the conviction that, in the words of David Miliband, tackling climate change is ‘the mass mobilizing movement of our age.’ The principles of fairness and equality used to stand at the heart of centre-left governments. Protecting the interests of poor and disadvantaged members of society was essential to the popular appeal of left and labour parties. Those parties have substituted these ideals with an environmental program in which saving the planet for the generations of the future has taken priority over the principle of liberating the underprivileged and disadvantaged from poverty and restitution today. Britain’s Labour government may believe that its climate policies are saving the planet. But in the process they are destroying the foundations of the party.” - Benny Peiser, Financial Post, 27 May 2008

Why does Peiser say this? Here’s just one reason:

“Gordon Brown is facing a fresh tax rebellion as Labour MPs demand the repeal of a £200 increase in vehicle excise duty on environmentally unfriendly cars purchased in the past seven years. As lorry drivers prepare to stage a slow-moving protest through London today against rising fuel duties, a ministerial aide broke ranks to brand the levy an unacceptable retrospective tax that would discredit green taxes. More than 30 Labour MPs have signed a Commons early day motion demanding repeal of the £200 increase in duty, due to be introduced next year.” –Nicholas Watt, The Guardian, 27 May 2008

It’s a pretty common theme these days…

“Mr. Brown had joined other European leaders two years ago in placing targeted taxes on large vehicles, fuel, plastic bags and air travel with the goal of reducing carbon emissions by 60 per cent by 2050, in accordance with the Kyoto agreement. Experts had said that even with these policies, that target would be difficult to meet. But European voters have begun to rebel against these measures.” -Doug Saunders, Globe and Mail, 28 May 2008

Common indeed:

“After hundreds of angry drivers shut down highways in England Tuesday in protest against green automobile taxes, and drivers and fishermen in France and Spain paralyzed their ports and roads in a fuel-tax protest, politicians began to signal Europe’s ambitious emission-control policies may soon have to be abandoned. While Europe has led the way in using tax incentives to encourage people to buy low-emission cars and to build carbon-neutral houses in order to meet Kyoto targets, it has become increasingly apparent that inflation-battered voters are no longer willing to go along. Political leaders in Britain and France are seeking the reversal of tax policies designed to make polluting vehicles more expensive, with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and some British ministers calling on their own governments and the European Union to relax ecologically friendly taxes in order to give relief to citizens suffering from fast-rising food and fuel prices?” –Doug Saunders, Globe and Mail, 28 May 2008

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Here’s a press statement from the California Alliance to Protect Private Property Rights:

Prop. 99 Proves to be a ShamCities Seek to Exploit New Law’s Purported Home Protections

Sacramento, CA – Last night, at a meeting of the City of Baldwin Park’s Project Area Committee, the city announced that it would begin the formal process of seizing approximately 100 homes by eminent domain to benefit a politically connected developer.

During the June election, proponents of Prop. 99 dismissed charges by critics that the measure included several loopholes that would allow government to continue seizing private property from unwilling sellers to give to a private developer.

“The Prop. 99 campaign told us that their ballot measure protected our homes from eminent domain abuse,” said Cruz Baca Sembello, a Baldwin Park homeowner. “So, how come I am losing my home to a developer’s bulldozer?”

Read the rest of this entry »

One would think that Huell Howser, the renowned TV host of California Gold, would be an advocate for preserving the state’s historic treasures. Unfortunately, in agreeing to do a 14-part PR series for government redevelopment agencies, Howser is supporting those who actively bulldoze California’s history. Check out downtown Anaheim. That’s a trick question. There really isn’t much of a downtown Anaheim after the city’s redevelopment agency bulldozed in in the 1970s. Go to that joke of a “downtown” called Brea, where the city bulldozed the old downtown to make way for a ridiculous outdoor shopping mall funded by hundreds of millions of dollars of redevelopment debt. Go to Santa Ana, where the city’s redevelopment agency wants to replace historic single-family neighborhoods and cool old buildings with cookie-cutter condos and chain stores. Go to Placentia, where the city has tried to destroy its old downtown. Fullerton has a nice historic downtown because the redevelopment agency had a hands-off approach. In Yorba Linda, the city tried to destroy its Old Town and hand development rights to an LA developer. It’s still there because the city was stopped in its plans.

Urban author Jane Jacobs wrote that “new ideas need old buildings.” But redevelopment agencies — in their zeal for more tax dollars to fund bigger city bureaucracies — are so quick to knock down anything old that such ideas never get going. Yet Howser will be touring the urban renewal sites and telling the public how wonderful these government-subsidized projects are. If Howser really cares about the average Californian or about the state’s precious architectural history, he needs to talk to victims of redevelopment and show pictures of the state’s lost history … not do PR for those who use government power to destroy things and subsidize politically well-connected developers.

I’ve always admired public TV host Huell Howser for his ability to capture the aw-shucks wonder of this beautiful state as he takes viewers on tours of backwater spots in his California Gold series. He doesn’t seem to have an agenda, and Howser takes on a certain “little guy” approach to the world. But now Howser has agreed to host a 14-part series that is nothing short of hard-core propaganda for one of the most nefarious organizations in the state — the California Redevelopment Association.

According to a CRA statement, “The series presents an opportunity for us to tell the redevelopment story in a compelling and intimate way. Huell and his crew will be visiting redevelopment projects in cities and counties throughout California that demonstrate inspiring, positive elements of redevelopment efforts.”

How outrageous, especially since this will be on taxpayer-funded TV and the program is funded by a group that gets its funds from government agencies.

CRA is the state’s biggest proponent of eminent-domain abuse and regulatory takings, and its agencies actively drive people off their property so that the land can be handed over for pennies on the dollar to big developers. Howser will be shilling for these corporate-welfare projects but will ignore the people whose lives have been disrupted or even destroyed by them.

Howser will be doing PR for those who drive poor, minorities, small business owners and others out of their homes and businesses at the behest of government bureaucracies working in tandem with Armani-suit-wearing developers who like the freebies.

What’s next now that Howser is in the PR business for bad guys?

Howser is a fraud.

A California appeals court ruling that essentially outlawed homeschooling in California has been called into question after the family court case that sparked the ruling was dismissed. Here is the Times’ report on the latest events. I summarized the case in this Freeman article, which summarizes the decision and what it means for California homeschoolers. Basically, the decision is a bad one, but state officials are not about to enforce it. Homeschooling is still OK, but it’s important to get this decision resolved. We know that liberal Democrats tend to be hostile to homeschooling (it makes the public schools look bad!), but the judges in this horrendous decision were mostly Republican!

North county cities are getting into the big-government act. La Habra has joined Brea in moving forward with a ballot measure to raise the sales tax in the city. These cities spend enormous amounts of money on nonsense and have amazingly high administrative salaries, but rather than tighten their belts they try to pick the taxpayers’ pockets. A handful of points: a) City council members believe they can evade personal responsibility for tax-raising by leaving it up to voters; b) many businesses always come out and support the tax (hey, it’s paid mostly by residents); c) cities rarely tighten their belts.

Stay tuned for a follow-up. We’ll take a look at the salaries paid to government workers in both cities.

Here’s the latest in the odd “In God We Trust” political movement. An Ocean View school district trustee took out an ad in the PennySaver calling on his fellow trustees to place the motto in the district’s board room. Various city councils in Orange County and elsewhere have been pushing to do the same thing in their respective chambers. Supporters argue that this is NOT religious, but rather a tribute to a national motto. Are these supporters being dishonest or disrespectful to their faith? Clearly, this is religious. Why else would they want this rather than another motto? If it’s simply a matter of honoring the nation’s heritage, as supporters say, then that merely uses God as a tool to advance a political or cultural agenda.

I can’t stand this movement (but believe the Pharisees would have loved it!) because it trivializes religion, advances the idea that government recognition is the heart of faith, and is about superficialities. Why not behave like Christians rather than try to plaster mottos on government offices? I suspect the latter is much easier than the former.

Irvine Councilman Larry Agran has a commissar’s approach to governance (he knows best, and you should shut up if you don’t like it). My favorite Agran proposal was the one that would have exempt  Great Park board members from conflict of interest laws, but that was changed after the media exposed Agran’s efforts. At tonight’s Irvine City Council meeting, King Agran is behind an assault on the open records laws. As the Register reported on measures before the council tonight, “The second proposed measure would tighten the city’s control over personal information, with the recent release of thousands of e-mail addresses leading some to worry that the information could fall into the wrong hands. While the e-mail data provided the impetus behind the debate, the proposed measure refers only to ‘individuals’ public information.’ The measure would allow the city to decide on a case-by-case basis whether to disclose information that was given to the city for a ‘limited specific purpose’ and which the city has promised to keep confidential.”

Here’s a link to the indispensible Irvine Tattler, with its story on Agran’s secrecy ordinance.

The good news: This will surely be taken to court by open-government advocates and Irvine surely will lose. It will make a nice test case.

Given that the religious right is about using religion to advance a cultural/political agenda, it’s no surprise that these folks have decided that John McCain is God’s candidate. Christian libertarian writer Doug Bandow has a great column on this topic for antiwar.com, in which he points out:

“It is fine to think of the unborn. But how about the born? Shouldn’t conservatives who claim to be Christians care about the human impact of the foreign policy advanced by the presidential candidates? James Dobson declared that “What terrifies me is the thought that” Obama might end up as military commander-in-chief. But, in truth, the really terrifying thought is of John McCain at the ready to invade, bomb, coerce, and threaten other nations as his heart, or temper, moves him.”

I’ve been giving Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, a leading Republican hopeful for the 2010 governor’s race, a hard time for his anti-business tilt at commissioner. Here is my column from Sunday detailing how Poizner has advanced the left-wing consumer activist agenda. Yet this should be no surprise. Here is a blog from Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Weintraub, written before the 2006 election:

“Individual and interest-group endorsements for candidates don’t get a lot of play in this space. But today, Harvey Rosenfield, the author of Proposition 103, which ushered in regulation of the insurance industry in California, is endorsing Republican Steve Poizner for insurance commissioner. That’s definitely a man-bites-dog endorsement, and one worth noting. Rosenfield says he’s for Poizner because Poizner has promised to vigorously enforce 103 and won’t take insurance industry money for his campaigns.”

There are three things that are pretty certain: death, taxes and that politicians will pander.

This will kill ya. Ernest S. Christian and Gary A. Robbins recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that: “Washington can be counted on to create a crisis — usually by sheer incompetence. Then it rushes to the rescue, often doing more harm than good.”

Of course, our benevolent lawmakers don’t purposely set out to do harm, but they are oblivious to the unintended consequences of spending your taxes on their non-solution “solutions” to problems they can’t fix to begin with.

What they usually can do - and do - is make things worse. What’s most offensive is that when they ignore the unintended bad consequences of what they have done and arrogantly declare they will do more of it. All for your own good, of course.

Today’s exhibit is the billions of dollars in so-called “Economic Stimulus Payments” rushed through Congress late last year to allegedly stimulate the economy. Of course, what happened was the polar opposite effect. No surprise to us, but apparently not even noticed by them.

Coupled with similar other government “solutions,” the effect has been to increase “inflation and caused families to restrict purchases, especially in the case of higher-priced consumer durables. Overall, compared to last year, the quantity of consumer durables purchased has declined by 1.5%. Retail sales are sluggish.”

Whereas the well-intentioned but utterly clueless Nancy Pelosi confidently predicted the stimulus checks would create 500,000 new jobs, instead “the economy has shed 460,000 jobs since December,” Christian and Robbins write.

Here’s the most offensive part: Pelosi is proposing another $50 billion “stimulus” package. If we give her the benefit of the doubt, she’s just not very bright about the economic fallout of government meddling. Otherwise we would have to conclude she wants to “posture and pose, and send out to voters untold millions of press releases and mailings extolling” herself. Or both.

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We couldn’t resist pitching in our two-bits worth, even though colleague Steve Greenhut already poked insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner about his anti-business populism.

Poizner says he cuts insurance rates for Allstate by applying “the same rules…” as he applies to other insurance companies.

What rules would those be? According to Poizner they are rules “to determine whether a proposed insurance rate is appropriate.” Whoa! Appropriate?

The government determines what is appropriate for a private company to charge for its services?

We’ve come to the place and the time when such an outlandish, socialistic comment flows like sap from a maple tree with nary a notice, let alone a complaint. If we don’t complain about the assumption behind government being the appropriate determiner of what prices should be charged in a free market, we’re the saps.

To show how disjointed the thinking has become, Poizner, ostensibly a Republican, says he shares our view “that competition is a better market mechanism than government regulation.”

How on earth does this jibe with his comment that “Allstate proposed a rate that was too high…”?

What happen to the market making that determination? Nah, Poizner would rather government do it. His ultimate excuse, of course, will be that voters approved this egregious government interference by passing a ballot proposition. What kind of perverse socialistic, market-corrupting ballot initiative would be too much for Poizner to enforce?

Apparently not one that dictates that the government will the one to determine the correct price to charge in a “free” market.

Poizner has climbed about that faux conservative bandwagon that Gov. Schwarzenegger’s been riding for some time. The governor, you may recall, is all for imposing socialistic controls on health care and to “fight” global warming. He does this with Poizner-like double-talk that such things are “market mechanisms.”

Poizner and Schwarzenegger’s claims should be challenged as the frauds they are. Such heavy-handed government intrusions are not market anything. They are economy-by-government. Pure and simple.

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Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, the liberal Republican who is expected to run for governor in 2010, sent the Register a letter in response to our editorial criticizing his anti-business populism. The letter will run in the newspaper Monday, and here is a link to the editorial, in which we write: “Mr. Poizner is using his vast powers as a means to burnish his credentials as a consumer activist who will take on demonized insurance companies. In his press statement, he even referred to himself ‘as the state’s leading consumer advocate.’”

In his letter, Mr. Poizner argues that “Allstate’s rates were not cut to give consumers more money to spend; their rates were reduced because I applied the same rules to them that I do to every other company.” [boldface added]

Here’s what the insurance commissar said on his own Web site (as of 1 pm, Friday July 18): “In today’s sputtering economic environment people need all the help they can get just to pay the bills. That’s why I am pleased to order this tremendous rate cut today … .” [bold face added]

So the insurance commissioner says he did not cut rates to help consumers, but he says in his statement that it is exactly why he cut rates. I love it when unprincipled politicians try to justify their actions with explanations that defy their own words.

Andrew Sullivan reports on the Field Poll showing Prop. 8 failing right now. It’s hard for me to understand why anyone would care enough about what other people do (i.e., gay people “marrying” each other) to go to the trouble of passing a statewide ban on it. The world won’t end if gay marriage is legal in California. The best solution is to remove the state from marriage and leave it up to individual churches to make these values decisions.

Former Clinton Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Larry Summers, interviewed on NPR today about the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac situation, raised the crucial problem with these public/private partnerships: They privatize profit but socialize risk. In other words, these banks are not true market players that rise or fall based on their business choices. These banks are politically well-connected. Thanks to their close congressional connections, these banks were able to carry much lower capital reserves than normal banks. This made them more profitable. Private players benefited from the risk, but when the system collapses, the public picks up the tab. That’s the classic story of private/public entities.

We so much enjoy the unintended consequences of so much of what the global warming crowd advocates. There’s so much of it.

Did no one foresee food shortages and ravaged crop land when they proposed to subsidize ethanol? Did no one think that hills alive with wind-blown propellers would generate about as many dead birds as kilowatt hours?

Well, here’s another one coming up to foresee and think of. Cap and trade (that faux market mechanism to give value to things that don’t even exist) is supposed to reduce greenhouse gases. The idea is those who emit greenhouse gases will bump up against their limit and either stop emitting (hold your breath for that one) or buy the right to keep emitting from those who haven’t bumped up against their limit.

Will this reduce greenhouse gas emissions?

Perhaps not, says the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Justin Danhof. How come? Glad you asked. It’s because being able to buy excess emissions is just the kind of excuse people want in order to justify, you guessed it, emitting excess emissions.

By the government magically turning carbon emissions into commodities that can be bought and sold, cap-and-trade policies could remove the stigma the government wants you to feel for producing such emissions.

Israeli researchers found that day-care center parents who arrived late to pick up their kids prompted the bright idea to reduce tardiness by fining late parents. Won’t negative consequences reduce the bad behavior?

Not exactly. In fact, no. Instead, late arrivals increased. In fact, the percentage of parents late more than doubled.

“Prior to the imposition of the fine, parents – recognizing it is wrong to make a teacher stay past normal hours with their children – experienced feelings of guilt and shame when they were late,” they reported. “In other words, some parents were motivated to arrive on time by the stigma attached to arriving late. Imposing the fine reduced the stigma. The fine created a good, and a market where none previously existed. Parents were no longer ‘arriving late,’ but rather, purchasing extra child-care hours.”

Know any cap and trade examples of this?

“This phenomenon is already seen on an individual level. Al Gore says the risk of catastrophic global warming is so great that Americans should act immediately to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet his home uses 20 times more energy than the average American home, according to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research. That’s OK, the former vice president assures us, because he purchases offsets to ensure that he lives a carbon-neutral lifestyle.”

There’s more here than privileged freedom to emit (for those who pay enough). According to the researchers, there’s also the likelihood that the behavior that cap-and-trade seeks to curb will instead increase, as did the incidents of late parents. Cap and trade can create MORE greenhouse gases, not fewer.

Talk about your unintended consequences. Well, maybe unintended. Somebody’s counting on collecting those payments for excess emissions.

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