Chris Reed, as in "America's Finest Blog" Chris Reed, is leading the right wing shill campaign against Karen Bass. We were both on a conference call with Bass yesterday, and Reed wasted no time going after pre-school kids as his suggestion for budget cuts followed by an attempt at a gotcha on taxes. For the life of me I don't understand why he is coddled, he's nothing but a right wing shill and Sacramento press types could learn a lot from the national movement to no longer legitimize Fox News and other partisan propaganda outlets. You'll be shocked, simply shocked to see Chris Reed's write-up:
I think Bass' personal story is admirable and she seems smart and good-natured. But I have a bad feeling about her. With Nunez and Perata, I never really got the feeling that they were dyed-in-the-wool hard-left liberals who were eager to expand government whatever the cost. Instead, I often got the feeling that they posed as ideologues of the left to please their powerful union and trial lawyer allies and because they could never be elected to run the Assembly or Senate unless they were perceived as ideologues of the left.
I think with Bass it's not a posture at all. She just might be an unreconstructed 1960s-style ideologue of the left, someone who is absolutely unworried about how government actions hurt the economy and someone who has zero sympathy for business -- in other words, someone whose politics are more like former Senate President John Burton's than Nunez's or Perata's.
Which suggests we won't see an Arnold-orchestrated grand deal in which Dems agree to constitutional spending controls in return for GOP approval of some tax hikes. Instead, Bass wants the whole enchilada -- tax hikes, no restraint on spending, and new rules allowing the Legislature to hike taxes and approve budgets on simple majority votes.
Quite a honeymoon for the first African-American female Speaker in America.
As the smoke begins to clear in San Diego, the stories and reactions to the fire will start competing with the recovery effort atop the fold. First on the minds of many in government seems, not surprisingly, to be response time and firefighting capacity. Unforunately, Republicans are again demonstrating that they make up in bluster what they lack in remote semblance of coherence. Southern California Republican Congressmen such as Duncan Hunter, Brian Bilbray, Darrell Issa, Jerry Lewis, Elton Gallegly and Dana Rohrabacher have been lining up for every available reporter to knock Governor Schwarzenegger and the state's CalFire bureaucracy for supposedly impeding firefighting efforts throughout the region last week. They've flown so dramatically off the handle in fact that even Chris Reed has it right on their craziness- or at least part of it:
The congressmen who are doing such a good job exposing the state's bureaucratic tomfoolery in its wildfire response have some explaining to do themselves. Couldn't they have spared an earmark to cover the cost of outfitting the California Air National Guard's C-130 with a fire-retardant tank, something that was promised to happen after the 2003 wildfires but never did?
Instead, Duncan Hunter funneled $63 million into the DP-2 Vectored Thrust Aircraft boondoggle. And Dana Rohrabacher worried more about buying expensive planes the military didn't want than about helping California's wildfire-fighting capacity. This is from a May story in the Washington Post:
... Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) has made one of the biggest earmark requests in the new Congress, seeking $2.4 billion to build 10 more C-17 planes -- which the Pentagon has said it does not need.
These gentlemen have ended up discussing almost every issue in the country, all in the context of the fire. And they've managed to be completely wrong every time. So without further ado, an "oh the humanity" sampling from the past week.
Last week, we got some good news regarding the pension fund for our state's teachers. In 2004, the long-term deficit was projected to be $24.2 billion. Today, the long-term deficit is projected to be $19.6 billion. It's not quite as good as we want it, but it's getting better.
Condoleeza Rice visited Camp Pendleton today. Unfortunately, it's the same day that the body discovered by Iraqi police in the Euphrates River was identified as Pfc. Joseph Anzack Jr. of Torrance, CA.
And on the subject of people who miss the point, the ever popular Chris Reed is nonplussed. Apparently reprimanding John Murtha over threats of personal retribution means Democrats love earmarks. In a related (fictional, but would you be able to tell?) story, saying that kids should eat less candy is the same as advocating for adolescent anorexia.
Stretching your musical limits tonight, but only because I believe in you. You personally. Battles - Atlas
A couple of one offs because I'm just not feeling particularly brilliant tonight.
Chris Reed, shockingly, is still stupid. The only way to react to growing traffic is to build more roads. Not create new transportation mechanisms. Not to reconsider growth patterns. Nope. Build roads. He likens this to taking medicine even if a condition is chronic. I liken it to eating candy after being diagnosed with diabetes. Hell, it makes you feel good and it's easier right?
A judge ruled today that California can start shipping inmates out of state again. Clearly, this will solve the problem. This is why, when I get an assignment at work that I don't like, I just stuff it in a drawer.
Incredibly, even that is too much effort for some on the radical left who refuse to acknowledge that these people broke the law and need to make restitution, and that step one is acknowledging the wrongdoing. For many Americans, though, this is all they want -- some humility and remorse by those who wiped their feet on our laws on their way in the door and then demanded rights once inside.
Presumably, those asshole slaves that kept escaping should have had to apologize for breaking the law before the 13th Amendment as well.
Thousands of Iraqis are being held in detention camps off the record.. Get angry with stop action. Metric - Succexy.
Driving on Interstate 5 from San Diego to L.A. is completely maddening. Sometimes it's only a minor ordeal. Sometimes it's a gigantic ordeal. But especially on the south Orange County stretch of the 5, traffic is ridiculous. So any effort to lessen traffic in that area would be wonderful news for the millions of us in Socal who like to go back and forth between L.A./O.C. and San Diego.
But guess who doesn't care: Rep. Susan Davis, D-San Diego. She may pretend she's just interested in proper procedure, but her congressional maneuvering dealing with the planned extension of the 241 toll road in Orange County to the 5 near Camp Pendleton is clearly meant to kill the project.
So the next time you're sitting stuck on the 5, save a few of your expletives for Susan Davis. She's earned them.
Oh no, Chris Reed! I'm savin' all my love for you. Follow me after the flip as I have to explain to Chris Reed why he's missing the point on extending the 241 to Trestles...
So last week, Chris Reed responded to my earlier piece in reaction to his complaints about the supposedly dishonest exaggeration of the health-care crisis in this country. Atdleft has already made his voice heard on this, but I think there are a few other points that need to be made.
Chris Reed has a post up [...] on his UT blog discussing the continuing "media error-a-thon" in regards to classifying those without health care in the United States. His complaint is that there are not 47 million Americans without health insurance. Rather, there are 47 million people in America without health insurance. His gripe so much as I understand it is that immigrants, legal or otherwise, shouldn't be part of the health care discussion in the first place and that including them improperly legitimizes these people as Americans and artificially inflates the health care problems faced in this country.
In a shining example of the heights to which fair and balanced journalism aspires, Chris Reed yesterday reacted to the Libby Verdict by reminding us Libby may be a convicted felon, but that doesn't make Joe Wilson a hero. He does at least have the decency not to "blame administration critics for crowing over Libby's trial at all." He just feels as though lost in the midst of lying to federal investigators, perjury, obstructing justice, the premeditated release of secret government information, the falsification of intelligence reports to justify an optional war, torture scandals, thousands of dead American soldiers and marines, tens of thousands of dead Iraqis, increased terrorist activity and Middle Eastern instability, and the complete collapse of American credibility around the world, is the fact that Joe Wilson is, in fact, not a candidate for sainthood. Once again, Chris Reed has missed the point.
Chris Reed has a post up this afternoon on his UT blog discussing the continuing "media error-a-thon" in regards to classifying those without health care in the United States. His complaint is that there are not 47 million Americans without health insurance. Rather, there are 47 million people in America without health insurance. His gripe so much as I understand it is that immigrants, legal or otherwise, shouldn't be part of the health care discussion in the first place and that including them improperly legitimizes these people as Americans and artificially inflates the health care problems faced in this country.
The problem of course, is that this completely misses both the moral and practical point. I'll dig into both of those on the flip, but let's make sure not to miss Reed's implicit point: Calm down, there are only 35 million people each year without health insurance. No sweat. I'd like to presume that Chris Reed knows better than all that, although the posts of his that I've read wouldn't suggest so.
