Cross-posted at California Political Review.

The “Misery Index” economic indicator that Jimmy Carter used to defeat Gerald Ford for the Presidency was at an all-time high of 13.57% in the summer of 1976. But it’s 14.68% now in California, and rising. While Carter successfully campaigned that “no man responsible for giving a country a misery index that high had a right to even ask to be President,” thereby targeting a weak Republican president instead of the policies of the entrenched 40-year long Democrat controlled Congress of the era, perhaps Democrats here in California will also get away with their terrible performance on the economy by blaming someone else.

That’s because the main stream media doesn’t seem very interested in holding Democrats to task for California’s (or America’s) economic woes, even given the Democrats almost perpetual control of our State Legislature, a Democratic Governor, a Democratic President, and a Congress only one-half, and narrowly at that, controlled by Republicans. And public opinion is still pretty good for Governor Jerry Brown, at 48% positive. Yet the MSM seems full of stories about George W. Bush-era failings as the root of all economic evils in America, and can’t seem to write much anything about the utter failure of Obama-era spending programs, or California’s dysfunctional big spending Legislative Democrats. While Obama hands out the shovelware, and our State Legislature debates variations of shear constitutional lunacy, our financial markets are blowing up at the seams. Piers Morgan devotes hours on CNN to talk about a defeated Delaware 2010 GOP U.S. Senate candidate’s position on gay marriage. It all reminds one of that story about Emperor Nero fiddling while Rome burned down. Is anybody in a responsible position anywhere paying attention to our economy???

It would seem a conservative firebrand from a generation ago and the public defender of the state’s most liberal city would have little in common. However, on political strategy, at least, Howard Jarvis, the prime mover behind Proposition 13 and Jeff Adachi, San Francisco Public Defender and newly minted mayoral candidate, made similar political moves with like motivations in mind.

With 40 minutes to spare before the deadline to register as a candidate for mayor, Adachi filed his papers for the office bringing to 16 the number of candidates who seek to be San Francisco’s mayor.

Likewise, Howard Jarvis ran for mayor of Los Angeles in 1977. Both men took on the mayoral runs with a similar purpose in mind – not necessarily to be elected mayor but to use the candidate spotlight to pound the bully pulpit for governance changes each thought was essential. Adachi wants to reform the public pension system. Jarvis’s goal was to change the state property tax formula.

Let’s pause a moment to put the ugly debt ceiling debate into perspective. If there’s one thing voters learned over the past few weeks, it is that our leaders will do almost anything to avoid an honest discussion about our country’s problems. A responsible discussion about cutting public sector costs would surely have included legal reforms, yet I did not hear that issue raised once throughout the debate.

Legal reforms are a common sense, no cost solution that would help our local, state and federal governments address the cost drivers that greatly contribute to the public sector debt. These drivers include and are not limited to health care costs and the cost of legal services to public entities.

The U.S. tort system costs every man, woman and child in the U.S. a yearly “tort tax” of $808. That is $3,232 for a family of four, a huge cost for many families that are struggling to make ends meet these days. Add into the equation the impact of lawsuits on schools and cities and counties and you it’s obvious that legal reforms would have a hugely beneficial impact for our nation.

Cross-posted at NewGeography.

California’s high-speed rail project is setting speed records, not on tracks, but rather in cost escalation. Last week, the California High Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) announced that the Bakersfield to Merced section, part of which will comprise the first part of the system to be built, will cost between $10.0 and $13.9 billion. This is an increase of approximately 40 percent to 100 percent over the previous estimate of $7.1 billion, an estimate itself less than two years old.

This "flatter than Kansas" section should be the least expensive part of the system. It can only be imagined how much costs might rise where construction is more challenging, such as tunneling through the Tehachapi Mountains and for the route across the environmentally sensitive Pacheco Pass that leads to the Silicon Valley. CHSRA officials admit that the present $43 billion cost estimate to complete the Los Angeles (Anaheim) to San Francisco first phase will rise substantially. This estimate was also less than two years old.

The long
nightmare in Libya may have begun it’s final round Sunday night.  Ragtag Rebels in mismatched uniforms, racing
across the desert in pickup trucks mounted with rocket launchers and
anti-aircraft guns, stormed Tripoli, taking over Green Square (their
revolutionary Ground Zero) and re-naming it Martyr’s Square. Gadhafi’s son Saif has been arrested and may be
on his way to the Hague to face an international war crimes court – an
unconfirmed report says both sons have been captured.  And, tinhorn, two-bit dictators the world
over will sleep less well tonight, if they sleep at all.

The Astonishing
Arab Spring has claimed another brutal, resource-plundering, dictatorship . . .
if Libya can fall, can Syria be far behind? 
Is Iran as solid as it may appear?

There are time
periods in history when the world itself seems to be in upheaval – the late
1960’s is one that many still alive can relate to; another is just shy of the
mid-century mark of the 19thC when the barricades were manned in cities all across
Europe.  The WWI and post WWI era was
another, as was the post WWII time period, when the Marshall Plan saved Europe
from starvation, and/or communism, and McArthur and his military government
re-made the former empire of Japan into the constitutional democracy and US ally
that it is today.  But, the Arab Spring
this year came out of absolutely nowhere, like the desert Sirocco, the
Mediterranean wind blowing with the force of a hurricane that comes out of the
Sahara.  And the Arab world and Middle
East will never be the same again.

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.

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.

"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 solution

Cause 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.

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."