Is Cellular Service a New Right?
Did the Founding Fathers really believe that we have the
unalienable right to life, liberty and uninterrupted underground cell phone
service?
You’d think so if you’ve been reading the various screeds
that have come out since officials of the Bay Area Rapid Transit District
turned off cell phone service in some of their subway stations for three hours
last week in an effort to keep protesters from shutting down the system.
The shutoff "was a shameful attack on free speech," raged
the Electronic Frontier Foundation, comparing it to the actions of dictators in
Egypt and Syria cutting phone service to peaceful anti-government
demonstrators.
The ACLU called it a clear violation of the First Amendment.
The international hacker group Anonymous warned that the group "will attempt to
show those engaging in the censorship what it feels like to be silenced." That
was followed by electronic attacks on a pair of BART websites, with personal
information of the system’s riders and police officers grabbed and posted
on-line.
Positive Movement on the Jobs/Business Front or Window Dressing?
The powers that be in Sacramento are focusing on the job
dilemma in California with pronouncements this week from both Governor Jerry
Brown and Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg. This follows the focus
put on economic policy by Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom a couple of weeks ago.
Attention is being put where it belongs to help California
reduce its staggering unemployment rate and stifling business climate.
The question is: Will there be follow through to make
positive changes?
While some wonder if there is anything state government can
do while the country is in the grips of a national recession, other states have
managed to keep unemployment away from the sky-high figures with which California
suffers. Positive steps can be taken at the state level.
The governor appointed former Bank of America executive
Michael Rossi as a jobs czar. His mission is to advise the governor on ways to
make job creation less difficult through regulatory reform or legislative
actions. He will also try to create a cooperative atmosphere between business
and labor working toward the goal of increased business and job creation.
Fighting in the Streets
"Ev’rywhere I hear the sound of marching,
charging feet, boy
Cause summers here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy . . .Hey! think the time is right for a palace
revolution
But where I live the game to play is compromise solutionCause in sleepy london town
There’s just no place for a street fighting man."Rolling
Stones, "Street Fighting Man" (1968) (reacting to unrest in the
streets of the US and Europe)
Nobody really
wants to be a prophet – not of bad news these days, anyway. But, a disturbing pattern may be
emerging. What do: 1) the Arab Spring
Uprisings; 2) the London (and formerly, Paris) Riots, and, 3) the newly
emerging phenomenon of Flash Mobs, all have in common? You guessed right, the use of Social Media in
ways not previously envisioned. Second
question: what is the first thing that governments turn off when fighting in
the streets begins? That’s right: the Internet
and Social Media.
Even a Dead Cat Bounces – What Mitch McConnell said in Silicon Valley
A "dead cat bounce" is a Wall Street term that refers to a
small but brief recovery in the price of declining stock. Look at the graphs of this week’s "bounce"
and you might find yourself more productive buying a cat than trying to create
a job in California.
On Thursday, U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell
met with business leaders and friends in Silicon Valley to discuss the economy,
the debt ceiling, and what it would take to get California’s – and the nation’s
economy – back on track.
Southerners have an amazing way to turn a phrase and say it
in plain talk.
The Senate Leader talked about how some Silicon Valley folks
he has met with indicated they don’t mind paying a little bit more in taxes if
we can just "fix things". He didn’t seem
to think that more taxes were necessary, stating, "the reason revenue is down
is the economy is down. Let’s fix that
and then have a discussion."
California Assembly Budgets Understate Spending by at Least $17.1 million
Conflict recently arose in the California assembly when Assembly
Member Anthony Portantino accused Speaker John Perez of cutting his office’s
budget for voting against party lines on a recent measure. Perez maintains that the cuts were made
because Portantino’s office spent in excess of its allotted budget by nearly
$70,000. Their disagreement is
difficult to evaluate because the Assembly Rules Committee has not released the
relevant data on Assembly Members’ Offices’ spending.
Realizing this difficulty, the California Common Sense (CACS) research
team has looked into the data that the Rules Committee has made public. We found two important data sources: the
annual budgets for Assembly Member offices, published by the Rules Committee
for 2009-2010, and information on Assembly Members’ staffers’ annual salaries,
published on the Assembly website and last updated on May 3, 2011. We compared the information from these
sources to judge how complete an image of Assembly Members Offices’ spending
they provide.