Fox and Hounds Daily Says Goodbye
With this article, we end publication of Fox and Hounds Daily. It has been a satisfying 12½ year run. When we opened in May 2008, our site was designed to offer an opportunity to those who wished to engage in public debate on many issues, especially in politics and business, but found it difficult to get placed in newspaper op-ed pages.
Co-publishers Tom Ross, Bryan Merica and I have kept F&H going over this time investing our own time, funding, and staff help. Last year at this time we considered closing the site, however with an election on the horizon we decided to keep F&H going through the election year. With the election come and gone, and with no sense of additional resources, we have decided to close the site down.
Fox and Hounds will live on, at least, with my articles collected in the California State Library.
On a personal note, I have spent over 40 years in California policy and politics. There have been some incredible high moments and some difficult low points. It pains me that politics too often is a blood sport, frequently demonizing the motives of opponents and using the legal system as a weapon in public discourse. At Fox & Hounds, we tried to adhere to the practice of giving all a voice in the debate, yet keep the commentaries civil and avoided personal attacks.
F&H offered the opportunity to publish different perspectives (even ones that criticized my writings!). We had success as indicated by the Washington Post twice citing Fox and Hounds Daily one of the best California political websites and many other positive affirmations and comments received over the years.
Tom, Bryan and I want to thank our many readers and writers for being part of our journey. The publishers of Fox and Hounds Daily believe that we added value to California and its people. We hope you agree.
California Welfare Overpayments Enough To Fund 13,000 Cases Annually
California Common Sense released a brief report called “California Welfare Overpayments: Fraud, Internal Errors, and Limited Investigation.” The report finds $848 million in outstanding CalWORKs overpayments to beneficiaries, half of all identified overpayments recovered, and administrative error costs on the rise.
The California Work Opportunities and Responsibility to Kids (CalWORKs) provides temporary cash assistance, welfare-to-work, and other services to eligible low-income families with children. This analysis examines the program’s benefit overpayment trends to determine how frequently beneficiaries and the program’s administration cause errors, as well as how costly those errors are.
While individual errors may seem insignificant, taken together, they prove costly to the system, taxpayers, and the thousands of additional cases they could have funded instead. (more…)
SB 270 Taxes the Poor and Exempts the Rich from Paper Bag Fee
It must be nice to be rich. After all, it affords the wealthy in our state a chance to be part of a rich irony that features liberal coastal Democrats pushing for a paper bag tax bill that will exempt the wealthiest communities from that very same bag tax.
This is about as hypocritical as it gets folks.
Today, members of the California State Assembly are expected to vote on legislation Senate Bill 270 (Padilla) that seeks to ban plastic bag and impose a minimum 10-cent fee on all paper bags. Yet it grandfathers in existing local ordinances banning plastic bags and exempt paper bags from a tax.
Today’s vote on SB 270 will be especially interesting for many in the Latino and African Caucus, considering that the bill language states that all local ordinances would remain intact while the new, much higher fees would be paid by some of our more economically distressed communities. (more…)
Low Voter Turnouts: Voter Apathy or Voter Disgust?
The California Target Book, which I publish, just mailed out to subscribers its updated analyses of the key congressional and state legislative races in California this year.
What stands out is that even in the most competitive races, the overwhelming majority of voters decided to not vote.
Early this year, Congressman Henry Waxman announced that he would not seek reelection, opening up a Congressional seat for the first time in 40 years.
Waxman’s CD33 includes some of the wealthiest communities in the country, stretching from the Palos Verdes Peninsula north to Malibu. It also includes Beverly Hills and the surrounding Los Angeles neighborhoods of Bel Air and the Pacific Palisades. (more…)
Bag Ban Worse Than an Inconvenience; Massive Hidden Tax Increase Stays in Grocery Stores’ Pockets
New information reveals that the “plastic island the size of Texas” in the middle of the Pacific Ocean would be better described with an imaginary place name to describe its size, (say “Middle Earth Sized”). This is because recently when researchers went to go find this mythical plastic place so often cited as the reason for yet another government intrusion in what choices we make at the market, (this time literally, at the market, as in the grocery store) they couldn’t find it.
That’s right. There was no concentration of plastics as we’ve so often heard. No floating grocery bags with sea turtles mistaking them for delicious jellyfish. No floating mass of all those empty water bottles you tossed away instead of recycling. (You know you did!) No Wal-Mart bag from that time you snuck in and bought the three boxes of double stuffed Oreos and then tried to hide the bag outside in the trash and it ended up blowing away. Nothing. So you can stop feeling guilty.
But, of course this hasn’t stopped the folks in Sacramento from trying to ban those bags that cause, or caused, well; might-have-caused-if-what-we-originally-said-was-even-remotely-true, environmental damage.
Fast Tracking $3 million for Border Crossing Unaccompanied Minors is Irresponsible
Any and all costs associated with Illegal immigration are a federal responsibility. The state has already failed to reimburse local jurisdictions for unfunded mandates. The legislature should be pressing our federal representatives to reimburse for ALL costs associated with their failed immigration laws. The reckless policy of providing legal representation to unaccompanied illegal alien minors who have crossed the border is a flagrant abuse of state funds – especially when you consider the unmet needs of our own foster children and emancipated youth.
Additionally, the legislative created this allocation by using the budget trailer bill process to enact urgency legislation, thus eliminating the need for Republican input. This eleventh hour ‘end run’ by the state legislature is irresponsible. If the Governor and legislative leadership believe this is an important policy discussion, then the legislature should follow its own rules instead of using parliamentary gimmicks.
AG Blocks Real Initiative Reform
Just last month, this column noted that the professional political class harbors great hostility toward the tools of direct democracy — the powers of initiative, referendum and recall. These are effective tools to control an indolent or corrupt legislature.
From the perspective of politicians, direct democracy allows the great unwashed and unsophisticated to deal with matters such as taxation, victims’ rights, insurance and, most importantly, political reform. These are issues over which politicians strongly desire to exercise a legislative monopoly.
The column was written in the context of Assembly Constitutional Amendment 6, a particularly pernicious proposal that would make it much harder for grassroots groups to use direct democracy by requiring a higher vote threshold at the ballot box for changes in the California Constitution proposed by citizens. ACA 6 reflects the epitome of hypocrisy because constitutional amendments proposed from the Legislature would not be subject to the higher standard. (more…)