As we have noted many times, the new eastern span of the San Francisco Bay Bridge came in 10 years late and a whopping $5 billion over budget, but all that time and money could not guarantee safety for the public. In 2007, fissures some 10 feet long cut through a steel bar 20…
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Volkswagen grabbed headlines with its diesel fakery but the German auto giant is not the only car company that deserves attention these days. As Breitbart notes, Tesla Motors “issued a voluntary worldwide recall to inspect every one of the 90,000 Model S cars the company has ever built.” This is the vehicle that, as…
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The World War II generation has reason to associate the U.S. Department of State with treason in the form of Stalinist spy Alger Hiss. Baby Boomers and beyond have come to associate State Department briefings with “Saturday Night Live” in the form of spokesperson Marie Harf, who shows a keen sense for the absurd….
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As we observed in “Financial Crisis and Leviathan,” in its first 14 months the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a new federal agency, did little besides expanding an already bloated and wasteful government. The CFPB duplicates the work of existing regulators and worsens a crisis government played a major role in causing through programs such…
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The police are much in the news of late and some activists contend the cops are too severe when dealing with minorities. On the other hand, as Brad Brannan writes in the Sacramento Bee, the California Highway Patrol might be too lenient when they deal with privileged members of the ruling class. On November…
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The California Coastal Commission (CCC) is an unelected body that overrides the elected governments of coastal counties and cities on issues of land use and property rights. As we recently noted, the powerful CCC is moving into animal management, trying to leverage SeaWorld into killing off its orca shows. As Dan Walters of the…
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California governor Jerry Brown casts himself as a visionary leader in climate change and likes to demonize the oil and gas industry. When it comes to his own property and his own interests, the governor sings a different tune. As Ellen Knickmeyer of the Associated Press noted, according to state records, “Gov. Jerry Brown…
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The California State Controller, the state’s chief fiscal officer, has a mandate to “make sure the state’s $100 billion budget is spent properly.” In that cause, the Controller’s Office recently asked the state’s school districts to provide data on salaries. As Loretta Kalb notes in the Sacramento Bee, “about 70 percent of the public…
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We have been keeping track of California’s bullet train boondoggle, or as some call it, a “Browndoggle” after governor Jerry Brown. He backs the train and wants to dig two massive tunnels under the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta at an estimated cost of $25 billion. Now taxpayers learn that the bullet train also has…
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In 1999, Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee notes in a recent column, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, “abetted one of the most irresponsible political acts in state history – a massive increase in public pension benefits.” CalPERS did this by telling legislators, “the benefit increase state worker unions were seeking could be…
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