Gov. Brown Calls Legislators Girlie-Men by Another Name
He might just as well have called them Girlie-Men.
Gov. Jerry
Brown has been giving interviews recently in which he seems bent on confirming
a theory, offered tongue-in-cheek in
this space, that he really is just an avatar inhabited by Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger.
Brown used
one of Schwarzenegger’s favorite – and least effective – techniques:
challenging the manhood of legislators of both parties who won’t go along with
him. Brown told the LA Times that lawmakers lack courage and "cojones" – that’s
Spanish slang for balls. That’s calling them Girlie-Men by another name.
You might
ask what’s wrong with that, given that legislators aren’t exactly courageous.
First, it reminds people that Brown himself isn’t exactly courageous.
(Remember, this is "Mister I Won’t Raise Taxes Without a Vote of the People").
Second, it’s counter-productive.
Costa’s Pension Initiative: Devil is in the Details
Initiative
gadfly Ted Costa is trying to get a Pension Solvency Act initiative on
the ballot he claims would deal with pension spiking and create a
secure, state-run pension plan for private sector workers. But onerous
as pension spiking is, it is a problem that Costa himself admits affects
only a tiny minority of public retiree pensions and one that is already
well on its way to elimination at the state and local level via
collective bargaining. And the Legislature has already killed as perhaps
desirable but impossibly unworkable a proposal to create a
CalPERS-managed private pension scheme almost identical to the one Costa
wants.
Even Wylie Coyote and Rube Goldberg would be awed by the convolutions
and outright gobbledygook of Costa’s initiative, which at 8,100 words
plus three appendices is a gargantuan mess that would:
Welcome Back to School, Please Don’t Sue Us!
An article the other day in the San Diego Union-Tribune highlighted
an issue that all taxpayers should be concerned with: school districts
and legal fees. The article showed how Sweetwater Union
High School District spends approximately three times what its peer school
districts pay for legal fees.
Sweetwater has an
enrollment of roughly 42,000 students. The school district is paying an
astonishing $1.4 million a year for legal counsel. Compared to the five peer
districts, Sweetwater’s legal costs are almost three times higher!
Unsurprisingly, legal costs also represented a greater portion of
Sweetwater’s budget than the peer districts.
Sweetwater is just one
example of a district facing out-of-control legal costs. We have more than
1,000 school districts in this state, and sadly, Sweetwater’s situation is far
from unique. In 2010, CALA published a report titled Lessons in Lawsuits,
which examined the legal costs of 12 school districts in California. Those 12
districts spent close to $100 million over three years.
DOWNGRADED! – Are we being punished for hanging out our ‘dirty laundry’ for the world to see?
Last week
ended on a note never played before . . . the US’ credit rating was
downgraded from AAA to AA+ for the first time in our history by S&P
last Friday. Is Standard & Poors punishing the US for our intensive
media coverage of the Debt Ceiling Furor? Or, does this mean something
more?
First, let us be mindful that major ratings agencies, like S&P, were
all too willing to give AAA ratings to those flim flam, mortgage-backed
syndications, containing tranches upon tranches (may that word, tranche, disappear back into the lexicon with all deliberate speed!) of
Lord Only Knows what NINJA (no income; no jobs; no assets) fraudulent
loans they could cram into offerings that the world financial world
became addicted to, and gobbled up in the first decade of the 21stC.
Estimates of how much in market value of these stinking time bombs are
still held worldwide by financial institutions and others, vary into the
10’s and even hundreds of Trillions; yes, dwarfing even our healthy
14-something Trillion of debt – amounts that the whole world’s GDP could
never pay back are involved.