Many
Californians are not aware of a very serious and looming threat to
recreational fishing. Fish farmers who stock California lakes and
grocery stores are threatened by a legal case quietly moving through the
courts as well as the costly regulations being drafted by the
California Department of Fish and Game.     

As a result of a lawsuit 
several years ago against the State of California’s fish hatcheries,
Department staff working in concert with environmental groups, drafted
an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) including private aquaculture in
its regulations, even though the lawsuit and ruling only applied to state facilities – and not privately held fish hatcheries and stocking ponds.

Given
that California grows some of the healthiest and safest fish in the
world under existing regulations, one can only assume that the State’s
actions were not motivated by a public need, but merely by a political
agenda, one that anglers know has led to significant limitations on
ocean fishing off the coast of California.

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.

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:

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.

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.  

Remember way back five weeks ago when the California budget
was declared balanced because $4 billion in higher revenues was expected in the
treasury? If the $4 billion didn’t appear, an automatic trigger would add additional
budget cuts of $2.5 billion.

Five weeks ago was before the federal debt-ceiling bill
passed with its promise of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending cuts.
Those cuts could mean a loss of billions of dollars for California. George
Skelton has a rundown of the federal money earmarked for California in his L.A.
Times column yesterday.

Five weeks ago there was no referendum circulating against
the Amazon tax measure. If the referendum achieves enough signatures, collection
of the estimated $300 million expected from the tax could be temporarily stopped
or even eliminated if the measure makes the ballot and the voters overturn the
law.

Five weeks ago there was no referendum against the bill to
end redevelopment that added over  $1
billion to state government’s depository.  

California has finally ended its 16-year pursuit of the
white whale of presidential primary relevance.

When Gov. Jerry Brown last week signed the bill to move the
state’s 2012 primary election back to its traditional home in June, it was
recognition that California was never going to be Iowa or New Hampshire.

More than that, though, the choice was a reminder that while
the presidential race gets the flashy headlines, those too-often-ignored state
legislative and congressional races can be even more important to California.

It seemed like such an easy call back in 1996. Since
California’s June election was at the end of the presidential primary season,
moving the primary to March 26 would make the nation’s biggest state a real
player in the race to pick the presidential candidates, bringing in the big
names to actually campaign up and down the state and not just raise money to spend
elsewhere in the country.

It’s not every day a government program becomes less burdensome for small business owners and entrepreneurs, but it can happen.

In my recent op-ed “A Qualified Mess,” I described the many problems plaguing the “Qualified Purchaser Program” — a use tax collection program targeting small business owners. I invited impacted business owners to send me their feedback via a survey on my website, and I shared this feedback with my colleagues and BOE staff.

I also joined small business owners and taxpayer advocates at a press conference urging reforms to this program. This NFIB-sponsored event was well-attended and led to stories by CalWatchDog, Capital Public Radio, The Orange County Register, The Sacramento Business Journal and others.

The energy we use as a society is an interrelated function of technology, availability and price. In essence, we use the most affordable, most abundant and least technologically challenging forms of energy, primarily oil, gas, coal, nuclear and hydroelectric.

However, environmental groups empowered by government mandates and regulatory obfuscation, driven in part by junk science and fear-mongering, have pushed us toward new experimental and alternative forms of energy.

This, despite the fact these alternatives are not altogether cost effective, technologically feasible, or even readily available.

The more technologically difficult energy is to develop, convert and transport or transmit, the higher the price. In an economy based upon free-market competition, it becomes virtually impossible to get consumers to buy much of anything if it costs several times more than something else that works just as well for them.