There’s an old adage that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. When it comes to politics, it nearly always is.

Say for instance a politician told you he could lower the cost of sending your kids to college by 2/3rds. You’d probably respond, “Great. What’s the catch?”

Your caution would be warranted. If a recent proposal by Speaker John Pérez becomes law, you might get some help with those soaring college fees, but don’t count on your kids finding jobs once they get that diploma.

Crossposted on New Majority

President Obama’s San Francisco   fundraiser with the tech elites today, along with the upcoming IPO for   Facebook, marks the emergence of a new, potentially dominant political   force well on its way to surpassing Hollywood and even Wall Street as the business bulwark of the Obama Democratic Party.

In 2008 the industry gave Obama more than $9 million, three times what it raised for any other politician; it was the first time the digerati outspent Hollywood. The numbers will surely go up this   year.

If you relied on the mainstream media, you would conclude that Arizona is anti-immigrant, while California is pro-immigrant. You would conclude that Republican Arizona Governor Jan Brewer must hate immigrants. After all, she signed SB-1070, which requires police to refer illegal immigrants to Immigration if they are arrested for other crimes. The law was passed after illegals committed a series of crimes, culminating in the murder of well-known rancher Robert Krentz, a man who went out of his way to help others.

But Democratic California Governor Jerry Brown would never sign such a law, and the Democratic California legislature would never pass it. Besides, many Arizonans agitate for better border enforcement by the federal government, while fewer Californians seem concerned with this problem.

Public employee unions are turning up their offensive to prevent changes to public sector retirement programs. In the wake of proposed state initiatives pulled back by proponents because they say the Attorney General’s title and summary did not fairly reflect the measure, a proposed San Diego initiative to reform the city’s pension system has suddenly been threatened with a lawsuit to keep it off the ballot.

The state’s Public Employment Relations Board is expected to ask a Superior Court judge to put the initiative aside while it examines if an unfair labor practice occurred. That charge came in a complaint from the Municipal Employees Association, which opposes the initiative that would create a 401(k) system for new city workers and freeze pay used to calculate pensions for five years.

The talk about the three competing tax initiatives is all about Gov. Brown. Can he convince/force the other two measures – one from the California Federation of Teachers and the Courage Campaign (the millionaire’s tax) and the other from civil rights lawyer Molly Munger and the state PTA – to stand down, delay, or join forces with him?

But Brown faces an uphill battle, and a compromise seems unlikely between him and the initiative sponsors.

Recently, we’ve asked what Californians have lost to lawsuits. While we heard many answers from our supporters, one thing we didn’t hear was having fun at the beach. Well, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors took a step toward adding that to the list when it added a few amendments to its beach ordinance at the end of December. In passing the 37-page ordinance, the Board sought to clarify acceptable beach-going activities and the responsibilities of law enforcement and other public agencies. Whatever the Supervisors’ intentions, I think they created a firestorm.

Just to give you a sampling, it is now against the law to “cast, toss, throw, kick or roll” any “ball, tube or light object” over 10 inches anywhere at any time. Some of the activities that could get you a hefty fine or time in the slammer include:

Unless one is wearing Brown colored glasses, it is easy to see that California is a mess. We rank second in unemployment and millions of Californians have fled the state since the millennium — most as economic refugees seeking to carve out a better life for themselves where taxes are lower and job opportunities are better.

Most taxpayers see as their biggest obstacle to an improved life those elected officials who work against their interests, while bowing and scraping before those who provide millions of dollars in campaign cash. What it comes down to is that the Sacramento politicians are making war against regular folks, while assisting narrow, well-heeled, special interests to prosper.

Governor Jerry Brown is taking knocks for not yet clearing competing tax proposals proposed for the November ballot to the point where Scott Lay in his Nooner report asked the question whether Brown would be the one to dump his measure and back another.

Joe Mathews in his weekly rankings of the ballot measures on Fox & Hounds labels the Brown measure: “The Mitt Romney of initiatives– it’s the frontrunner, it feels inevitable, but no one likes it.”

You might say the day after Valentine’s Day, Brown’s tax plan is looking for love.

Chaos.

That’s the overlooked and underreported consequence of the “Our Children, Our Future” measure, also known as the Munger initiative.

Sponsored by philanthropist Molly Munger, the initiative would increase income taxes by more than $10 billion a year. It adds surcharges onto every tax bracket except the very lowest, and creates new high-income brackets, where most of the tax increases will fall.

In George Eliot’s 1874 novel Middlemarch, the young doctor Tertius Lydgate establishes his practice in the fictional Midlands town of Middlemarch. Though he lives far away from London, the center of medical research, he seeks to use his local efforts to contribute to the stock of medical knowledge.

“He did not simply aim at a more genuine kind of practice than was common” writes Eliot. “He was ambitious of a wider effect, he was fired with the possibility that he might work out the proof of an anatomical conception and make a link in the chain of discovery.”  Eliot adds, “Does it seem incongruous to you that a Middlemarch surgeon should dream of himself as a discoverer.”