Tag Archives: california

Politics

Mmmmm . . (Affirmative Action) Bake Sale

4 Comments

Affirmative action is like nepotism: You end up with more unqualified people, and the qualified employees have to live 24 x 7 x 365 with people — including themselves — wondering if they are really there on their merits.  I feel sorry for the qualified minorities hired under Affirmative Action programs.  They can’t just enjoy what they do, they have live with everyone wondering if they really deserved the job.

Then there is the injustice to the more qualified candidates that don’t get hired.  And the customers and citizens subjected to substandard service or even unsafe conditions (in the cases of emergency responders).  Everyone loses.  Affirmative Action may have had a benefit at a point in time, but it has long outlived its usefulness.

In a free market, the bigots will lose.  You want to be stupid and not hire great employees just because they are black, or female, or whatever?  Great!  I’ll hire them and kick your company’s butt because I’ll have the best and brightest on my side.  Just look at the history of how college football became integrated.  The more schools like Alabama got whipped by teams with great black players, the less racist their recruiting practices got.  Go figure. And the athletes didn’t have to wonder if they were selected on their merits.  Blacks compete very well in athletics and entertainment, two of the most brutally competitive fields.  Don’t insult them and other minorities by saying they can’t compete in education and business.

See Berkeley College Republicans hold affirmative action bake sale.

A controversy over cupcakes is heating up at UC Berkeley in California, where campus Republicans are planning to hold an affirmative action bake sale on Tuesday.

At the sale, white men will be charged $2 for a baked good, Asians will pay $1.50, Latinos $1, African-Americans 75 cents and 25 cents for Native Americans, KGO-TV reported.

Women will get a 25 cent discount.

“The pricing structure is there to bring attention, to cause people to get a little upset,” Campus Republican president Shawn Lewis told the TV station. “But it’s really there to cause people to think more critically about what this kind of policy would do in university admissions.”

The Campus Democrats immediately slammed the sale, which Lewis said is meant to take a stand against an affirmative action-like bill for the University of California system that is awaiting Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature.

On Friday, the student newspaper reported that the student government could vote to defund the Republican group over the bake sale. A hearing is scheduled for Sunday on the fiery issue.

What a shocker: The majority Left can’t take the sting of satire so they have to use their power to oppress free speech.

Christian worldview, Intelligent Design

Didn’t colleges used to encourage independent thought?

9 Comments

Apparently that was only for Liberal ideas. See Stomping out independent thought, Campus USA.

The IDEA club organizers at some universities complain that their activities are severely discouraged by those in authority, presumably so no student even has a chance of being “infected” with such subversive ideas. One leader, at a uiversity in California told me, “Within a year the cimate became very hostile to ID. The trouble started when a professor complained to administrators about our meetings. At the time the resistance from administration started, I was arranging for pro-ID scholars to present at our campus. After monies were already allocated for speakers and travel costs, our IDEA Club was told by administrators that we were not allowed to publicize our events where pro-ID speakers would be presenting. Pressure from administrators suffocated the IDEA Club within the same academic year … Any given professor that ignorantly speaks against ID may be the one who will give me a shot at an internship or research project. Starting an IDEA Club on any campus would be academic and professional suicide.”

Darwinists sure are thin-skinned. It makes you wonder if they lack confidence in their views and are just a bunch of bullies.

As a Christian, I realize that all other worldviews are false. But I don’t do anything to suppress their speech. I welcome examination of the facts. Too bad the allegedly pro-science types don’t do the same.

Politics, Sexuality

Since California solved all their other problems, they had time for this

11 Comments

See California passes bill mandating pro-gay teaching in schools, no parent opt-out | LifeSiteNews.com. What a freak state.  The Democrats have run that state into the ground, and now this.  Just another reason to vote Republican.

A bill requiring public schools to teach the “historical contributions” of homosexual Americans was approved by the California legislature on Tuesday, July 5. The bill also prohibits any school material or instruction that reflects adversely on homosexuality, bisexuality or transgenderism, and prohibits parents from removing children from classes over offensive material.

Bill SB 48 was sponsored by openly homosexual state senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) and passed in the Democrat-controlled Assembly by 49-25, with all Democrats voting for the bill and Republicans opposing it. The legislation passed the state Senate in April.

If signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown, schools would have to introduce the homosexual curriculum after the bill becomes law in January.

“This bill will require California schools to present a more accurate and nuanced view of American history in our social science curriculum by recognizing the accomplishments of groups that are not often recognized,” said Assembly Speaker John Perez, the first openly homosexual speaker of the California Assembly.

Republican critics of the bill observed, however, that the measure has less to do with education than with homosexual indoctrination of school children.

Christian worldview, Politics

Free speech and video games

6 Comments

Stan got me thinking about recent Supreme Court case about free speech and video games in his post about Free Speech.  For the record, I’m certainly opposed to these violent video games.

Briefly, the story is that the Supreme Court has struck down a California law that made it a crime to sell violent video games to children. It wasn’t even a close vote. The court ruled 7:2. The court made a stunning decision: Make parents responsible for their children. Is there any doubt that our court system (and the nation that supports it) has lost its mind?

This comment will probably reveal that I’m not a lawyer, but doesn’t the 1st Amendment specifically say that “Congress shall make no law . . .” and not “the States . . .?'”  Also, wouldn’t this get in the way of the 10th Amendment?

More importantly, I couldn’t help but laugh at some of the headlines noting that the responsibility to regulate this would now fall on parents.  That’s one of the major problems of people looking to government to solve all their problems.  The government solutions are usually counterproductive, but like drinking salt water the people just look to the government to solve even more problems.

This is just another example of the slippery slope of government intervention.  Countless parents have come to expect the government to feed their kids multiple meals per day, even if it means wildly wasteful programs.  But what could be a more basic responsibility of parents than to feed their kids?

Even though I thought the court’s view of this as a 1st Amendment issue was an overreach, I’m glad to see them err on that side.  It may mean we’ll have just a little more time before any criticism of the LGBTQX agenda is considered illegal.

Miscellaneous

Shocking!

3 Comments

See OJ Simpson Finally Confesses to Murder.

“‘He told the producer: “Tell Oprah that yes, I did it. I killed Nicole, but it was in self-defence. She pulled a knife on me and I had to defend myself”,’ the insider was quoted as saying.”

. . .

Is there anyone except the 12 morons who were on the original jury that is surprised by this revelation?

Of course it was self-defense! That’s why he went to his “attacker’s” home wearing gloves and carrying a big knife. He had to defend himself!

One of the more egregious side issues of the OJ case was how groups like NOW, the National Organization of (unaborted) Women, rushed to OJ’s defense.  Uh, what about that pesky domestic abuse issue, folks?  That so disturbed Tammy Bruce that she quit NOW (I think she was head of the California chapter at the time) and began to oppose them.

 

Economics, Politics

Why “soaking the rich” doesn’t work

1 Comment

They are remarkably waterproof.  Game the rules all you like and they will find ways around them, or just move their capital to an environment that isn’t so hostile to it.  Politicians endlessly create and exploit loopholes but arrogantly assume that no one else is as clever as they are and will do the same.

Driven by a combination of bad planning, a lack of understanding of  basic economics and plain old coveting*, California is now doomed to fail.

See Californians flee to red states at Haemet.

In the five-year period from 2005 to 2009, 870,000 people left California.  Most of them went to red states, like Arizona and Texas, wherein jobs are more plentiful, taxes are lower, and housing prices are lower.

Problematically for California, the type of people who leave a failing state are the ones that a state most needs.  The educated, the wealthy, and the ambitious are the ones who will pack up and move, taking their human capital, their assets, and their earning capacity to other states.  Most of the people who stay are the ones who need the strong and able to carry them.  California is on its way to a death spiral, wherein everything it will need to do will only exacerbate its problems.

This why we need simplified tax structures.  Yes, some will take advantage of them, but they always will.  Having a tax code multiple times the size of the Bible is doomed to fail.  It just increases bureaucracy and wastes money.  We also need to get rid of public-sector unions and radically cut back the welfare state.

* Remember that one?  It made the top 10 list.

Christian worldview, Politics, Sexuality

From the “I am not making this up category” . . .

7 Comments

I really wish I was making this up.  Public schools in California (yeah, it is a freak state, but many of these things spread to the rest of the country) are teaching children as young as 5 about how “normal” transgenderism is.  This is state sanctioned, taxpayer-funded child abuse.  I know this goes on, but it is always extra-creepy to see it on video.  To state the obvious, this is one more reason to seriously consider home-schooling.

From Coming to a Public School Near YOU?

Fox News covered a class full of kindergartners in California being taught that you can feel like a girl, feel like a boy, feel like both, or feel like neither.

. . .

The group brought in to teach children these lessons (allegedly to prevent bullying) is called Gender Spectrum.

“People can be girls, feel like girls, they can feel like boys, they can feel like both, and they can even feel, like I said, kinda like neither.”

Hey theological Liberals and wimpy orthodox Christians who caved to the political correctness of the gay lobby pressure instead of standing up for the truth: Congratulations, this is what you’ve enabled.   As predicted many times, this is a logical consequence of supporting civil rights for sexual preferences.

Remember, you don’t need to poison the minds of kids to teach them not to bully.  All you need is a simple and thoroughly enforced anti-bullying policy: If you physically or verbally harass other students on or off school grounds you will have swift and serious consequences. It doesn’t matter if you are bullying because they are gay/straight/fat/thin/smart/dumb/pretty/ugly/etc., or if it is just because you are a mean jerk. Lesson over.

Hat tip: Glenn

Politics

Dear California, Thanks for the jobs! Love, Texas

2 Comments

Via Growing jobs big in Texas « Hot Air.

A month ago, California legislators trekked to Texas to visit all the new jobs that didn’t land in their own state to figure out what went wrong.

I could have saved them a trip: Stop being a wildly liberal state!  Get real conservative, real fast, and businesses will come back.  Become a Right to Work state, reduce taxes and regulatory burdens, etc.  Pretty basic stuff.

But that will never happen.  Good for Texas, bad for California.  The differences are enormous, especially considering that Texas and California share some significant problems — such as vast numbers of  illegal aliens.

According to BizJournals, a few dozen other states might want to make the same trip.  Over the last ten years, Texas has added more than 732,000 jobs net as the state withstood the worst recession in decades.  The next best state, Arizona, didn’t even make it into six figures:

. . .

Of course, Washington DC ended up 7th on the job-growth list — thanks to the federal government’s expansion at the expense of the states.

Which state did worse?  Why, California, of course.  They even managed to outstrip Michigan, where the downturn in the auto industry and collapse of GM and Chrysler threw tens of thousands out of work.

. . .

What do Texas, Utah, and Arizona all have in common?  They are all right-to-work states.  Among the top five states, only Washington does not have right-to-work laws allowing employees free choice whether to join unions.  Seven of the top ten job-growth states are right-to-work.

. . .

A new report from South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint’s office shows that right-to-work states, or states which prohibit forced unionization and dues payments, are economically outperforming states without the worker protection.

According to DeMint’s study, right-to-work states enjoy more new residents, more new businesses, more new jobs, and faster income growth.

The study shows that more Americans are moving to right-to-work states, causing states that force unionization to lose seats in Congress.

Texas has also worked hard over the decade to lower regulatory burdens and taxes on job creators.  Rick Perry has made this one of his signature achievements, and he has repeatedly challenged other states to start competing with Texas on job creation.  They have a long way to go before they can dethrone the champion, it appears, and most of them haven’t yet started to take the Texas approach seriously — which is nowhere more true than in Washington DC and the Obama administration.

Politics

Green lobby plan to destroy jobs & farmland, raise food prices and save a fish is partially successful

5 Comments

And by partially I mean that it did destroy the jobs & farmland and raised food prices.  But it didn’t help the fish. This was a stupid plan even if it would have helped the fish, but it is crime-of-the-decade stupid for causing nothing but destruction.  When will we learn not to trust the Greens?

The green lobby assured everyone it knew what it was doing when it got a judge to cut water to Central Valley farmers to save the delta smelt. But while the Valley economy is now ruined, it hasn’t helped the smelt.

Some day, environmental radicals will be held accountable for crimes against the ecosystem — the human ecosystem.

Back in 2007, they convinced federal Judge Oliver Wanger to rule that the Endangered Species Act gave the federal government the right to cut water to thousands of farmers in California’s Central Valley to protect a 3-inch baitfish called the delta smelt.

That ruling turned many of the Valley’s prized vineyards and almond groves into wastelands. Jobs were lost, family farms were shut, fields went fallow and food prices rose.

But there’s been just one problem with this overreaching of the law: Cutting off water didn’t save the smelt.

A draft of a new study from the Delta Stewardship Council shows the water cutoffs had no effect on the smelt. The smelt remains endangered even as farmers have been punished with a policy that cut off as much as 90% of their water.

Federal Judge Proven to Be Wrong « Timothy Matters.

Politics

Feminism unmasked

6 Comments

If the feminist movement was authentic, there would be many things you’d expect to see that don’t happen.

  • When a Jerry Brown staffer called Meg Whitman a whore, you’d expect NOW — the National Organization of (unaborted) Women – to back Whitman, not Brown.  But even though Whitman is pro-abortion, she has the audacity to oppose partial-birth abortion (aka infanticide) and supports parental notification laws (so your public schools can’t take your daughter to have your grandchild destroyed without your knowledge).  Therefore, Whitman is unsupportable by NOW, even when a male on her male opponent’s team calls her a whore.
  • They should be rejoicing about all the Republican women running for office.  But alas, they aren’t pro-abortion so NOW hates them the way they hate Sarah Palin.

The list goes on, but you get the idea.  Feminism isn’t about helping women, it is about abortion and the destruction of the family.