(Mod: As troubling as recent events here in Sierra Madre
might be for some of us, the rest of the world does move on. And today I
thought we'd take the opportunity to catch up with it, if only a
little. Most of us have the day off, so why should we not want to take a
bit of our time and see what's shaking in the real world? Not that the
world here behind the Michillinda Curtain isn't any less real,
mind you. If anything it could be even more so. But it is good to get
out every once in a while, no matter how hot it might be. So let's do
that, shall we? Just don't forget the tanning butter.)
Even violent and sex offenders released early by L.A. County Jail - Budget and overcrowding problems cause many inmates to serve as little as 40% of the time they were meant to spend in jail. (
Los Angeles Times link): More jail inmates in
Los Angeles County
are being set free after serving only a fraction of their sentences
because of budget problems and a space crunch caused by an influx of
offenders now serving their terms in county jails rather than state
prisons.
The releases are benefiting even inmates sentenced to jail for violence
and sex crimes, with those offenders released after serving as little as
40% of the time they were meant to spend behind bars, according to
Sheriff's Department records obtained by The Times under the California Public Records Act.
Other criminals are serving even shorter stints. Under the department's
current policy, jailers immediately release male inmates sentenced to
less than 90 days and female offenders sentenced to less than 240 days.
So far this year, the Sheriff's Department has released more than 23,000
inmates before their jail terms were up, a sharp increase over recent
years. During all of 2012, the county released 26,000 inmates early,
according to department records. In 2011, the number was about 15,700.
The early releases have raised concerns among some on the Board of Supervisors.
Supervisor Gloria Molina accused
Sheriff Lee Baca
of cutting the time inmates serve "willy-nilly" and of failing to
explain his rationale to the board. In an interview Friday, Molina said
the early releases do a disservice to the victims of crime.
"Everybody wants to make sure their neighborhood is safe," she said. "I
don't think people in the general public have any idea that [criminals]
are not serving as much time as possible."
(Mod: Public safety seems to be less of a priority these days.
Apparently government here is owned by special interests, and the public
isn't particularly special. The again, look at who the public elects.
We could be talking about a karmic reward here.)
The Indebted States of America - States and localities owe far, far more than their citizens know. (
City Journal link):
Maria Pappas, the treasurer of
Cook County,
Illinois, got tired of being asked why local taxes kept rising. Betting
that the answer involved the debt that state and local governments were
accumulating, she began a quest to figure out how much county residents
owed. It wasn’t easy. In some jurisdictions, officials said that they
didn’t know; in others, they stonewalled. Pappas’s first report, issued
in 2010, estimated the total state and local debt at $56 billion for the
county’s 5.6 million residents. Two years later, after further
investigation, the figure had risen to a frightening $140 billion,
shocking residents and officials alike. “Nobody knew the numbers because
local governments don’t like to show how badly they are doing,” Pappas
observed.
Since Pappas began her project to tally Cook County’s hidden debt, she
has found lots of company. Across America, elected officials, taxpayer
groups, and other researchers have launched a forensic accounting of
state and municipal debt, and their fact-finding mission is rewriting
the country’s balance sheet. Just a few years ago, most experts
estimated that state and local governments owed about $2.5 trillion,
mostly in the form of municipal bonds and other debt securities. But
late last year, the
States Project, a joint venture of
Harvard’s Institute of Politics and the
University of Pennsylvania’s Fels Institute of Government,
projected that if you also count promises made to retired government
workers and money borrowed without taxpayer approval, the figure might
be higher than $7 trillion.
Most states have restrictions on debt and prohibitions against running
deficits. But these rules have been no match for state and local
governments, which have exploited loopholes and employed deceptive
accounting standards in order to keep running up debt. The jaw-dropping
costs of these evasions have already started to weigh on budgets; as the
burden grows heavier, taxpayers may decide that it’s time for a new
fiscal revolt.
(Mod: Yes, and can we please start today?)
Plan Bay Area: Telling People What To Do (
New Geography link): The San Francisco area’s recently adopted Plan Bay Area may set a new standard for urban planning excess.
Plan Bay Area,
which covers nearly all of the San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Rosa,
Vallejo and Napa metropolitan areas, was recently adopted by the
Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) and the
Association of Bay Area Governments
(ABAG). This article summarizes the difficulties with Plan Bay Area,
which are described more fully in my policy report prepared for the
Pacific Research Institute (Evaluation of Plan Bay Area).
Plan Bay Area would produce only modest greenhouse gas emissions
reductions, while imposing substantial economic costs and intruding in
an unprecedented manner into the lives of residents. The Plan would
require more than three quarters of new residences and one third of net
additional employment to be located in confined "priority development
areas." These measures have been referred to as “pack and stack” by
critics. The net effect would be to virtually ban development on the
urban fringe, where the organic expansion of cities has occurred since
the beginning of time.
(Mod: Pretty great Wendell Cox article. Should you check out
the rest of this one I think you'd find it to be pretty eye opening.
Remember, the state central planning and development apparatus is doing
this one region at a time. We are next.)
If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person (
Slate link): You
are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad
like murderer bad—but bad like
ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid
bad. So, pretty bad.
I am not an education policy wonk: I’m just judgmental. But it seems to
me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school,
public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It
could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get
mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the
eventual common good. (Yes, rich people might cluster. But rich people
will always find a way to game the system: That shouldn’t be an argument
against an all-in approach to public education any more than it is a
case against single-payer health care.)
So, how would this work exactly? It’s simple! Everyone needs to be
invested in our public schools in order for them to get better. Not just
lip-service investment, or property tax investment, but real
flesh-and-blood-offspring investment. Your local school stinks but you
don’t send your child there? Then its badness is just something you
deplore in the abstract. Your local school stinks and you do send your
child there? I bet you are going to do everything within your power to
make it better.
And parents have a lot of power. In many underresourced schools, it’s the aggressive
PTAs
that raise the money for enrichment programs and willful parents who
get in the administration’s face when a teacher is falling down on the
job. Everyone, all in. (By the way: Banning private schools isn’t the
answer. We need a moral adjustment, not a legislative one.)
There are a lot of reasons why bad people send their kids to private
school. Yes, some do it for prestige or out of loyalty to a
long-standing family tradition or because they want their children to
eventually work at
Slate. But many others go private for
religious reasons, or because their kids have behavioral or learning
issues, or simply because the public school in their district is not so
hot. None of these are compelling reasons. Or, rather, the compelling
ones (behavioral or learning issues, wanting a not-subpar school for
your child) are exactly why we should all opt in, not out.
(Mod: Great idea. Your kids first. And thanks!)
Protesters take to downtown L.A. streets to denounce Obama’s Syria strike plan (
Los Angeles Daily News link): Hundreds
of protesters marched through downtown Los Angeles streets Saturday
afternoon to denounce proposed military action in Syria.
The group condemned
President Barack Obama’s decision to ask Congress to approve strikes in the Middle Eastern country, and many argued any action against the regime of
Bashar al Assad would lead to a long-term war that wasn’t in the best interests of the United States.
“Why doesn’t he feed the women and children at home before he goes to hurt women and children in Syria?”
Deva Fletcher
asked. “And this would hurt the Syrian people, not help them. In a war
the women and children would be the most affected and I can’t support
it.”
Fletcher also said there hasn’t been enough evidence given to the
American people that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons
against its citizens, despite the first hand accounts from United
Nations inspectors.
“We need to see the canisters of what was sprayed,” she said, and called
into question the reliability of the U.N. inspectors. “We need an
independent investigation. They’re not independent. We need information
from someone that isn’t backed by any government.”
Other protesters echoed her sentiments about the veracity of the reports
coming out about the war-torn country and the cost to the U.S.
(Mod: Back in the day I changed my voter registration from Republican
to Democrat when George W. Bush launched his completely useless vanity
war in Iraq. Not that all but one Congressional Democrat didn't go along
with Junior, but I had to do something to express my annoyance.
Unfortunately this time I cannot change my voter registration from
Democrat to "Decline to State" because I've already done that. Which has
also presented me with a kind of dilemma. How can you protest the
actions of a completely amok national government by changing your
registration from "Decline to State?" I seem to have backed myself into a
corner.)
Now Rolling Stone worships Jerry (
Cal Watchdog.com link): The East Coast media, ever ignorant of California, keep worshiping
Gov. Jerry Brown and his supposed “rescue” of California. The latest is from
Rolling Stone magazine, which started out in San Francisco but moved to New York City 35 years ago.
Tom Dickinson writes:
"As wind turbines spin like massive, inverted egg-beater blades against
the bluest California sky, Jerry Brown steps into the sun. Since he took
office in 2011, Brown’s hawklike brow has been cemented in a scowl as
he battled to stave off bankruptcy for the Golden State. But as he
high-steps to the microphone today, the 75-year-old governor is loose
and smiling. Soon he’s riffing about his first stint in Sacramento in
the 1970s as '
Governor Moonbeam,' joking of the nickname, 'I earned it with a lot of hard work!'"
Brown has come to a warehouse district just south of Oakland to cut the ribbon on the
Zero Net Energy Center –
the first large-scale commercial building in the nation to be retrofit
to consume no more energy than it produces. With function following
form, the building will house a green-energy training program, where
apprentice electricians will earn union wages while learning to install
things like solar-power inverters and electric-car charging stations.
Dickinson might have wandered over to Oakland’s less savory areas; something fabled RS reporter
Hunter S. Thompson certainly would have done. But then, he might have been mugged, because Oakland’s high crime rate has been soaring.
The Chronicle reported in June:
“With nearly 12 robberies a day and murders, rapes and assaults all on
the rise, Oakland is the Bay Area’s crime hot spot – but new
FBI statistics show that the city is far from alone in confronting rising mayhem.”
(Mod: Look at it this way, if we elect him again by the time
his second term is over Jerry will be 80. At which time he will be able
to reinvent himself one more time. Probably as Yoda.)
That is it for today. I hope I haven't cheered you up too much. It's not good for you.
