TRAINS, TOBACCO, and TAXES

Governor Jerry Brown recently announced, to the surprise of no rational observer, that California still faces a 16 billion dollar deficit. It’s what inevitably happens when a state is largely run for the benefit of public employee unions, business-averse interest groups, and large voting blocs that support lax border enforcement and demand ever more goodies from Sacramento.

In view of this annual fiscal crisis, one might think the state’s deep-blue politicians would consider pulling the plug on a multi-billion dollar high-speed rail project whose cost estimates have increased as dramatically as questions about its utility. That decision, however, would represent a rational approach, and rationality doesn’t count for much when it comes to legislators enamored with Tinseltown fantasies.

Accordingly, the California Assembly turned down Diane Harkey’s proposed “Lemon Law,” AB 1455, that would have terminated the flow of funds to a super fast choo-choo that’s currently estimated to cost around 100 billion dollars. Instead, the governor’s approach to our fiscal train wreck is higher taxes and a gun-to-head threat of cuts in “essential” services if voters fail to pass the proposed tax increases that will appear on November’s ballot.

Note that it’s always public safety, parks, and education that are tentatively placed on the budgetary chopping block—not an unpopular rail boondoggle or any of the redundant bureaucratic agencies that infect Sacramento and the state’s bloated university system. (Does UCSD really need, as Heather MacDonald noted in a City Journal article last year, a handsomely-compensated vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion—in addition to a massive diversity apparatus that includes more than a dozen different positions and various councils or centers all devoted to this PC obsession?)

In line with Sacramento’s bureaucratic mentality, Proposition 29 not only adds to the existing taxes on tobacco, it also sets up yet another committee with its (doubtless well paid) officials to distribute money for cancer research and anti-smoking education programs. Never mind that the state already funds a plethora of anti-smoking ads.

I suspect the most tangible beneficiaries from passage of this proposition will be those folks who oversee distribution of the estimated $735 million that will be raised from its dollar-a-pack tax. (According to the proposed law, approximately two percent of the funds raised, or about 14.5 million dollars, can go to administrative costs.)

This initiative would have greater appeal to non-smokers like me if all the funds from the new tax were applied to the state’s yawning budget deficit and not to the creation of yet another government commission whose designated pot of gold is exempt from rational budgetary review.

MAY DAY PROTESTS FIZZLE

"Overall, officials said most of the thousands of protesters were nonviolent."

Can you imagine such a forgiving comment being employed by the mainstream media when they covered Tea Party rallies--events where even a few less-than-tasteful signs were evidence enough for reporters to resurrect the "angry (and potentially dangerous) white male" motif that they used to explain the GOP sweep of Congress in 1994?

As the aforementioned LA Times quote suggests, major media outlets (alongside Democrats like Nancy Pelosi) have bent over backward to give the Occupy Wall Street movement better coverage and more significance than it deserves--the exact opposite of the stance they took toward Tea Partiers whom then House Speaker Pelosi dismissed as an "astroturf" concoction. Concerning the OWS movement, ABC's Diane Sawyer breathlessly and cluelessly announced last fall that it had "spread to thousands" of the world's (196) countries.

The mish-mash of government employees, greenies, labor unions, open border advocates, and jobless liberal arts majors that comprise the OWS movement was supposed to spring back to life with a gaggle of worldwide events on May first--piggybacking on the traditional "workers" demonstrations that were also employed with great fanfare in the Soviet Union. Unfortunately for these leftists without a coherent cause, even the largest events in cities like New York and Los Angeles were comparable in size with or smaller than the April 15, 2009 Tea Party rally in Oceanside.

Some protests reduced sympathetic reporters to using terms like "hundreds" or even "dozens" to describe the paltry gatherings that presumed to speak for 99% of the American citizenry.

Given the overhyped nature of these May Day events, it isn't surprising that little has been said about their size and ineffectiveness--or about the violence that accompanied demonstrations like the one in Seattle where a few protesters confused mindless vandalism with meaningful reform.

Imagine the heyday the Democrat media would have had if Tea Partiers had engaged in the disruptions and law-breaking that was hastily reported by network bigs on May second. Indeed, more sustained attention was given to a single alleged spitting incident among Tea Partiers in 2010 than to the numerous acts of violence perpetrated by OWS protesters on May 1.

I'm pleased that there were no reports of violence by OWS Temecula-Menifee--a group that rejects lawbreaking and whose numbers occasionally reach double-digits. I'm also gratified to note that most Oakland Raider fans (like their bay city OWS counterparts) are only irritating and obnoxious, not criminal.

It would be swell if I could also report that OWS now understands the greatest component of corrupt government is precisely its gargantuan size and scope.

LEARNING VERSUS ACTIVISM

“A Crisis of Competence” is the 81-page document produced by the California Association of Scholars that was recently presented to the California Board of Regents.

While the study illustrates, as I noted in my prior column, the utter dominance of leftist beliefs in higher education, its focus is not on political opinions per se, but rather on “the associated question of competence and quality of education.” Moreover, the report doesn’t claim that “most” educators are derelict in their duties but rather that politicization is widespread, unprofessional, and mostly ignored by administrators.

Put succinctly, the document asserts that the one-sided leftist tilt of colleges and universities undermines quality education, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Below are some UC-centered observations:

On most UC campuses courses in Western Civilization aren’t offered at all. Similarly, at UC San Diego a literature major need not take a course on Shakespeare but must complete a survey course in Chicano, African-American, or Asian-American literature.

“At UC Davis a history major can avoid American history entirely, and the same is true of the Santa Cruz, Irvine, and San Diego campuses,” the report notes.

By contrast, at UC Santa Cruz (where Communist Party Vice-Presidential candidate Angela Davis was a professor from 1991 to 2008) courses on Marx are offered in five separate departments. (According to a national study by Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, almost 20 percent of professors in the social sciences self-identify as Marxist.)

Several anecdotes in the CAS report illustrate the corrupting influence of political activism on specific courses:

A student in a writing program at UC San Diego’s Warren College, for example, reported that she composed an essay that called for legal abortion, but with restrictions. She was informed that in order to pass the course she needed to revise her essay “to support abortion in all circumstances.”

Even a computer science class at Berkeley included regular course-irrelevant harangues directed at George W. Bush and California’s “Nazi” Gov. Schwarzenegger.

The study also provides data indicating that the politicizing of higher education is getting worse—as younger faculty are more explicitly committed to leftist activism than older faculty. In addition, the report cites a study that links poor primary and secondary education with “the political preoccupations that now drive teacher training in the nation’s colleges.”

In calling for enforcement of the academic standards in the Regent’s own charter (and in California’s constitution) the CAS report sides with the view of John Stuart Mill that students must be able to hear arguments “from people who actually believe them” and that “he who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”

LEFTISTS CORRUPT ACADEMIA--and the UC SYSTEM

Most college-bound seniors have now received their letters of acceptance from admissions offices around the country. A lengthy document submitted last week by the California Association of Scholars (CAS) to the California Board of Regents offers compelling evidence that these incoming freshmen will be paying more money for a lower quality education that’s heavily corrupted by leftist activism.

The report notes that “the amount families pay for college has skyrocketed 439 percent since 1982” while “an astounding proportion of students” are completing their studies “without measurable gains in general skills.”

Case in point: According to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, 80% of seniors from fifty-five of the country’s most prestigious colleges and universities (including Berkeley and UCLA) received a D or F when asked basic questions about American history like identifying the Gettysburg Address or recognizing fundamental constitutional principles.

The CAS report views the politicization of higher education as a major factor that’s fostered this state of affairs. After all, instructors besotted with ideology focus on indoctrination—not on dispensing a balanced portrait of complex issues and developing a student’s ability to critically evaluate competing perspectives.

In the words of the CAS study: “political activists tend to have a very different attitude to alternatives to their own convictions.” In their view competing beliefs “do not deserve sympathetic consideration, for they are at best wrong, at worst evil.”

Those who believe that the academy has always been structured as it is today should consider the difference between the political makeup of schools in 1969 (when, according to a Carnegie Commission report, there was a 45-27-28 percent liberal-moderate-conservative split) with the 5:1 liberal dominance observed by Stanley Rothman in 1999. Since that time the imbalance has gotten much worse—especially in the Humanities.

At UC San Diego the CAS report shows a clean 27-0 leftist sweep in Politics and a 26:1 split in History—ratios typical within the UC system. The report also provides examples of the way ideology permeates instruction and affects the hiring of new faculty—where there’s significant bias against hiring Republicans but no measurable prejudice against self-identified Marxists.

Even non-political courses are often used as platforms for leftist indoctrination—as Luann Wright (founder of the website noindoctrination.org) discovered when she investigated a UCSD writing course that ignored composition and instead became a “sociopolitical soapbox.” Wright was amazed that administrators were aware of but tolerated such malpractice.

The aforementioned CAS report is designed to get Regents to take seriously Article IX, Section 9 of the state constitution at their May 15 meeting: “The university shall be entirely independent of all political and sectarian influence…”

FAST AND FURIOUS COVER UP

Imagine you are an Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agent working on a clandestine operation designed to snag members of Mexico’s gun-smuggling drug cartels—especially Mr. A. The program involves tracking weapons that have been knowingly and illegally sold to persons associated with those cartels.

Now imagine you’ve caught Mr. A red-handed at an Arizona border town while he’s attempting to drive a BMW brimming with hidden ammunition into Mexico. What do you do? Here are your options:

A. Arrest Mr. A. and declare your operation a success.
B. Take Mr. A into custody and begin plea-bargain negotiations in hopes of securing more valuable information.
C. Talk with Mr. A about his connections, confiscate his ammo, give him your phone number jotted on a ten-dollar bill, then release the trafficker based on a promise of further cooperation.

If you answered C, you may have a future with ATF. That seems to be the route chosen by Hope MacAllister when, according to recently revealed documents, she interrogated a major gun-runner named Manuel Celis-Acosta on May 29, 2010.

Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, Acosta chose to continue his smuggling enterprise instead of keeping in touch with Special Agent MacAllister.

Perhaps Acosta mistakenly used MacAllister’s bill to buy some cigarettes and couldn’t remember the initials of the agency that stopped him on the border with an "AK type, high capacity drum magazine loaded with 74 rounds of 7.62 ammunition” hidden beneath his spare tire.

Or maybe Acosta just had a good laugh at the expense of government gringos who apparently released a prime target based on little more than hopes of landing bigger fish.

In the following months Acosta continued his gun-smuggling activities and ATF continued its gun-selling operation. The agency, however, lost track of about 1700 guns, many of which were discovered at crime scenes in Mexico and two of which were linked to the death of U.S. Border Agent Brian Terry near Tucson in December of 2010.

It’s hardly a shock that ATF documents related to the botched release of Acosta weren’t provided by Attorney General Eric Holder to Congressman Darrell Issa’s House Oversight Committee—despite a subpoena covering documents related to this “Fast and Furious” operation.

Apparently what was touted as “the most transparent administration” in the nation’s history is only transparently interested in covering its tracks—as it was when it kept information about Solyndra’s moribund financial situation under wraps until after the 2010 elections.

Acosta was eventually captured in El Paso in February of 2011—but only after distributing hundreds of government-tagged guns to folks like the ones who murdered Agent Terry.

BREAKING US TO THE SADDLE OF THE STATE

It would have been nice if George Will had worn flashing-light glasses with Elton John flair when, a month ago, he made this statement on ABC’s “This Week”:

“This is what liberalism looks like. This is what the progressive state does. It tries to break all the institutions of civil society, all the institutions that mediate between the individual and the state. They have to break them to the saddle of the state.”

Put simply, Will’s comment means that the “progressive state” increasingly tells both individuals and institutions what they may or may not do and say—imposing mandates that extend even to the type of light-bulbs folks buy.

One legal rationalization for this huge expansion of government power was Hugo Black’s 1947 Supreme Court opinion that claims the Constitution erects a “wall of separation” between church and state—a phrase subsequently used to eradicate vestiges of common religious belief and practice (like the Mt. Soledad cross) from the public square.

Consequently, a Constitutional amendment designed to protect the “free-exercise” of religion from federal coercion is now employed to prevent invocations at high school graduations. Similarly, because the Boy Scouts’ beliefs conflict with progressive ideology, they are denied municipal concessions for Balboa Park facilities that would be available to “non-religious” groups.

Novel renderings of “equal protection” laws are also utilized by progressives to break individuals and institutions to the saddle of the state.

Thus, a medical group in North County that refused to provide artificial insemination for a lesbian—based on the respectable belief that children shouldn’t be intentionally deprived of both a father and a mother—was told by the California Supreme Court in 2008 that its religious convictions violated state law when applied to professional services.

Similarly, Catholic Charities in Massachusetts gave up their longstanding work in the adoption field when that state required the organization to place adopted children in same-sex households.

With the expansion of federal power into insurance mandates, the potential for eroding liberty is almost limitless. A government that can require individuals to purchase health insurance is a government that can also require religious institutions (and insurance companies) to provide policies that cover abortions or other procedures that might violate their consciences. Such was the case with directives recently inserted into the massive Obamacare legislation.

Put succinctly, the vastly expanded government of a largely religious people is now expected to be rigorously secular and to reflect the condom-dispensing, abortion-ready convictions of secular elites.

Moreover, for progressives, religious liberty is largely restricted to the walls of a church. Soon, it may be confined to the space between the ears of their serfs.

JOHN BORUFF: MOVING MOUNT FEINSTEIN

Laurie Boruff enthusiastically describes her husband of thirty-three years as a “tenacious” worker who can “move mountains.” John Boruff now has an opportunity to display those qualities in his bid to become the Republican candidate for Senate against Dianne Feinstein.

I chatted with John and Laurie last week in Escondido and asked the North County businessman what motivated him to undertake what many pundits believe is an impossible task—unseating California’s twenty-year incumbent Democratic senator. John responded as follows:

First, he has personally experienced the onerous burdens that governments at all levels place on business. He also knows first-hand that laws aimed at huge corporations are preventing businesses from expanding due to the additional regulations that typically kick in when an enterprise reaches the dreaded fifty-employee level.

Put succinctly, Boruff said he has more real-world business experience than all his Republican competitors—and certainly more than Dianne Feinstein.

Secondly, Boruff is convinced there are enough dissatisfied independent voters in California to make possible a GOP Senate victory in November. Moreover, he didn’t want to sit idly by while Feinstein was given a free pass for another six-year term—as was the case in 2006. The GOP, Boruff contends, needs a candidate who will do more than mail in a campaign—someone who can passionately articulate a set of policies that will, first and foremost, stimulate the state’s economy.

Neither Laurie nor John expressed reservations about the possibility of dirt being dredged up as a result of entering a senatorial campaign. The father of three said that his personal life has been quite regular. (An impartial observer, noting John’s civic involvement, his work as a Scoutmaster, and his stint as a Reserve Police Officer in Carlsbad, might employ the term “exemplary.”)

The fact that an individual whom Boruff once fired recently volunteered to work in his campaign suggests the kind of loyalty he inspires, even when John (as that former employee now confesses) is the bearer of deserved bad news.

Beyond reducing burdens on business, Boruff voiced support for expanded but sensible energy exploration, for second amendment rights, and especially for restricting the federal government’s intrusion into matters that are constitutionally reserved to the states and people.

Concerning immigration, Boruff stressed the need for both border enforcement and work visas. He also rejects forms of amnesty that put illegals in front of legal immigrants.

If Boruff succeeds in getting out his carefully-considered limited-government message, Californians may actually have an opportunity to vote for a genuine citizen legislator and to send packing one of the professional politicians so many folks claim to despise.

That would certainly be a mountain-moving political event.