Fox and Hounds Daily Says Goodbye
With this article, we end publication of Fox and Hounds Daily. It has been a satisfying 12½ year run. When we opened in May 2008, our site was designed to offer an opportunity to those who wished to engage in public debate on many issues, especially in politics and business, but found it difficult to get placed in newspaper op-ed pages.
Co-publishers Tom Ross, Bryan Merica and I have kept F&H going over this time investing our own time, funding, and staff help. Last year at this time we considered closing the site, however with an election on the horizon we decided to keep F&H going through the election year. With the election come and gone, and with no sense of additional resources, we have decided to close the site down.
Fox and Hounds will live on, at least, with my articles collected in the California State Library.
On a personal note, I have spent over 40 years in California policy and politics. There have been some incredible high moments and some difficult low points. It pains me that politics too often is a blood sport, frequently demonizing the motives of opponents and using the legal system as a weapon in public discourse. At Fox & Hounds, we tried to adhere to the practice of giving all a voice in the debate, yet keep the commentaries civil and avoided personal attacks.
F&H offered the opportunity to publish different perspectives (even ones that criticized my writings!). We had success as indicated by the Washington Post twice citing Fox and Hounds Daily one of the best California political websites and many other positive affirmations and comments received over the years.
Tom, Bryan and I want to thank our many readers and writers for being part of our journey. The publishers of Fox and Hounds Daily believe that we added value to California and its people. We hope you agree.
Good Legislators Make the Tough Decisions
No one can be a good legislator unless he is willing to give up the job.
If hanging on to that seat in Sacramento or Washington, D.C., — or on any city council or county board in the state, for that matter — is the focus of a political career, that officeholder is a hack, not a legislator.
Unless a legislator is willing to take a stand on what she believes is best for the state or the country, regardless of how it plays at home in the district, she’s not doing the job she’s paid to do.
Obamacare By Any Other Name
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is President Barack Obama’s landmark legislative achievement. The White House decision to embrace the term Obamacare may be one of his worst political stumbles.
To be fair, it was the President’s opposition that coined “Obamacare” and started using it as a pejorative. Somewhere during the campaign season, the Obama folks decided they might as well accept the terminology and try to sell Obamacare as a good thing. The trouble is, that made sure the term would stick and it gave license to the media to use “Obamacare’ as shorthand for the Affordable Care Act.
Orange County Pensions At Risk – Unions Just Call Critics “Extremists”
“Just as the overseer of Detroit lied to the public about Detroit’s unfunded pension liability, these extremists are likewise lying to the taxpayers of Orange County, and they’re following his playbook.”
– Jennifer Muir, Communications Director, Orange County Employees Association
We’re not lying, Jennifer. We’re not even stretching the truth.
What government union spokesperson Muir is referring to is an analysis released last week by the California Public Policy Center entitled “Are Annual Contributions Into Orange County’s Employee Pension Plan Adequate?”
Thinking Outside the Rails on Transit
To many in the transit business – that is, people who seek to profit from the development and growth of buses, trains and streetcars – Southern California is often seen as a paradise lost, a former bastion of streetcar lines that crossed the region and sparked much of its early development. Today, billions are being spent to revive the region’s transit legacy.
Like many old ideas that attract fashionable support, this idea, on its surface, is appealing. Yet, in reality, the focus on mass transit, however fashionable, represents part of an expensive, largely misguided and likely doomed attempt to re-engineer the region away from its long-established dispersed, multipolar and auto-dependent form.
The FPPC’s New Role: The Internet Cop
Last week, as a parting gift to its chairwoman, Ann Ravel (who is slated to be confirmed to the Federal Election Commission), the California Fair Political Practices Commission enacted a sweeping proposal to regulate online political communication. The move makes California the first state to attempt to require the disclosure of online communication by someone paid by a campaign to engage in social media.
The reason for this pioneering regulation, insist FPPC officials, is that voters deserve to know if someone expressing their free speech rights is getting a paycheck to do so. On the face of it, that makes some sense.
But here’s the reality: self-policing by the online community, as well as current reporting requirements, has made paid non-reported blogging almost nonexistent in our state. Most blogs typically require that authors disclose their affiliation with any campaign.
Bob Hope’s House is Up for Sale: Thanks for the Memories
The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that Bob Hope’s principal home in Toluca Lake in the San Fernando Valley is up for sale. That brought back memories — not of the silver dollars they use to give out at the house at Halloween making it a must stop location for even outside the neighborhood kids — but for a couple of political dinners I attended there.
Hope, who famously kidded presidents from both political parties and was warmly greeted by all of them from Franklin Roosevelt on, did have some favorites in the political world.
One, of course, was his late son, Tony, who made an unsuccessful run for Congress in 1986. I was on hand at an event the old man put on for his boy. There was plenty of room in the backyard. The famous golf addict, who sponsored his own golf tournament and famously carried a golf club on stage in many of his USO performances entertaining the troops around the world, had a full-length par 3 golf hole and green in the back yard.