Lawrence Rosenthal: The Tea Party’s feeling that something theirs was being taken away and given to others was precisely the feeling that Robert Bork was translating into a judicial philosophy.
Billionaire Dispatches from the Convention: Day 2
By
Clifford “Felonious Ax” Tasner: So what if a few citizens with funny-sounding names are getting purged from the voter rolls? I’ll bet a lot of the countries these people came from didn’t even have voting.
What European Elections Should Teach Obama
By
Randy Shaw: Europe’s lesson is that Obama should far more aggressively promote public investment, job creation, and other economically populist – and popular – measures.
Cut The Death Penalty From California’s Budget Woes
By
Andy Love: As California cuts critically important funds, the state continues to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into one government program that is expensive, arbitrary and ineffectual: the death penalty.
SB 490: Let the Voters Make an Informed Death Penalty Decision
By
James Clark: No one is surprised to learn that California’s death penalty is a broken and dysfunctional system. After all, you don’t have to go far in California to find any government bureaucracy that’s broken or dysfunctional – it’s finding a functional government program that might take a while.
Across-the-Board Cuts Needed to Avoid Fiscal Armageddon
By
Ivan Eland: To keep with the bipartisan spirit after the Gabrielle Giffords’ assassination attempt and also to avoid partisan fighting over spending priorities, which will bog down and probably eventually kill any significant budget cuts, all government programs should be cut by 15 percent from last year’s budget level, including heretofore sacred defense and entitlement programs.
Dear Terminator, Lay Off Our Executioners
By
David Holtzman: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger can help. In what very little time he has left in office, he can give his legacy a considerable boost by commuting the state’s hundreds of pending death sentences to life in prison without possibility of release. As a Los Angeles resident on the world’s stage, he should be sensitive to his image at home and abroad.
Government, Cafeteria Style
By
Ron Wolff: Not only would cafeteria-style government be a logistical nightmare if it were attempted, but nearly every important function of an organized society would be under-funded, because a significant portion of the population would opt out.
Stop Wasting Money on the Death Penalty!
By
Natasha Minsker: let’s consider something the governor can actually do right now to make a serious dent in the corrections budget: convert all 700 death sentences in California to permanent imprisonment saving the state $1 billion over the next five years.
Hope for Health Reform Fading
By
The White House showed a white flag last weekend, discarding its commitment to a “public option” that would compete with private health insurance. Since then, despite efforts to backtrack, the signal keeps flashing: Obama won’t go to the mat for a public option after all.
Democrats Try to Regain Ground in the Language Battle
By
The latest failure to communicate on the part of Democrats is in using the term “health care reform.” What does that term mean to the public? Why it means that the government will diddle with our great medical care!
PCL offers monthly Open House Events on the 2nd Saturday at 2pm and 3rd Thursday at 6pm. Click here to learn more.
Europe Ponders U.S. Election Results
Steven Hill: Europeans are puzzled by the success of the populist Tea Party movement, which seemingly wants to roll back the last two years and return to how things were at the end of the Bush-Cheney years.