No more time for California dreamin'

A very interesting post from http://www.hughhewitt.com/  about the California races. This follows this previous post about California and this article about  the recent news about ending the ban on offshore drilling which would encourage American energy independence This is a key issue to prevent money from going to hostile countries such as Iran  and Venezuela. For more that you can do to get involved click HERE!






Hugh Hewitt: No more time for California dreamin'

By: Hugh Hewitt

Examiner Columnist

November 7, 2010 This was going to be the year that California put its political and fiscal houses in order. In Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, the state GOP had nominated two well-qualified candidates who were also well-funded and disciplined. The national political climate was favorable, and the state is teetering on the brink of a fiscal collapse.



Fiorina lost by more than 9 percent and Whitman by close to 12 percent to Barbara Boxer and Jerry Brown, respectively.



Explanations are more plentiful than roses on Jan. 1, but the short answer is that California's public employee unions play to win -- and they do. The secular tithe extracted from the paychecks of the state's more than 350,000 government employees is expertly banked and deployed against any enemy, real or perceived, of the state's public-sector bosses.



Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's now famous glass jaw was revealed when, after the drubbing the unions gave him in a special election over crucial ballot reforms in November 2005, he rolled up into a big green ball and spent the balance of his tenure in office extolling the virtues of deindustrialization under the moniker "green jobs." At the time of his beat-down, Arnold complained that no one could win a ballot race in the face of $160 million in negative advertising.



He was right, of course, and even though Whitman dug deep into her own fortune to try to match the unions, their infrastructure and ever plentiful treasury overwhelmed even that effort. Fiorina went down under the same avalanche of negative ads. A blue state went deep blue even as the rest of the country went decisively red.



Redistricting reform will fundamentally change the congressional politics of California in 2012 and beyond, but only the looming bankruptcy of the state may change the statewide lock of the unions. There just isn't any more money, and state voters on Tuesday shut the door on destructive tax hikes by installing a two-thirds approval requirement in the legislature on any new tax or fee increase. The state has a shortfall of hundreds of millions in the pension fund and already state vendors are long overdue routine payments. The state's bond rating is already downgraded from the glory years, with plenty of opportunity to fall further. Businesses and high income-earning individuals are fleeing -- and that exodus will increase.



The new Congress will hear pleas for help, but why will representatives of states with responsible governments approve a bailout for California and other profligate, government-employee dominated states like New York and Maryland? The U.S. isn't the EU, and Texas won't play Germany to California's Greece.



The one tool the new GOP majority in the House ought to propose to the Democrats in the Senate is a state version of bankruptcy: power to void the impossible-to-meet contracts with the public employee unions and other state undertakings made to special interests. This ought not to be a jam-down of a solution, but a proffer of an approach.



And there is a small chance -- a very, very small chance -- that Jerry Brown, at the end of his career and recognizing his legacy is on the line in the next 12 months, will pull a Nixon-to-China and force the unions that elected him to yield for the state's long-term good -- and their own.



That's a fantasy of course, and a happy ending for which there is no evidence.



But it is California. The state is full of dreamers. They voted their dreams on Tuesday, but the rent and the car payment are due now.



Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at http://www.hughhewitt.com/.







Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/No-more-time-for-California-dreamin_-1489040-106854733.html#ixzz14pNHKPVw

Closing in California

 

A very interesting post from http://www.hughhewitt.com/ about the California races. This follows this post about the likelihood of the GOP taking the Senate!  This follows this post about New York's House races and this articleabout the recent news about ending the ban on offshore drilling which would encourage American energy independence This is a key issue to prevent money from going to hostile countries such asIran  and Venezuela. For more that you can do to get involved click HERE!

Closing in California


 When the Los Angeles Times published its last poll for the races between Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown for governor and between Carly Fiorina and Barbara Boxer for U.S. Senate, veteran Times' watchers laughed out loud.



Like clockwork the Times had hired pollsters that found the Democrats with much larger leads than any other major polling form.



This is a ritual every two years (and sometimes more often when a recall of a failed Democratic governor requires an extra trip to the ballot box.) The Times opines on the dynamics of a political race between left and right in a decidedly upbeat fashion for the left, that result gets splashed across the Times front page and then mixed into punditry for the next two weeks. The inevitable blown call gets forgotten or explained away when the result comes in with the Republican winning or losing by a far closer margin than the Times had confidently predicted.



When the Times had real readership, this dance-of-the-lefty pollsters used to matter much more than it does today when the paper has dropped into the state's second tier of media outlets. It has been years since the Times could make a mark on a campaign, though this hasn't stopped the stable of remaining leftists embedded on Spring Street from trying. Only the Minneapolis Star Tribune has been wrong more often and in more spectacular ways than the Times, and like the Strib, the Times exists more as a memory than as a force.



The embarrassment about the gap in projection and result could be particularly acute this year, as poll after poll shows a neck-and-neck race between Fiorina and Boxer and with Whitman buoyed by late numbers which --if the Times was remotely correct-- suggest enormous momentum behind her. Whitman has built a formidable get-out-the-vote effort which dwarfs the gigged-up Brown effort that is relying on a union workforce, but one that this year doesn't have the heart it once had as the collapse of the state's finances looms ever closer and closer to reneging on the pumped-up pensions promised in years past. A Democratic governor will almost certainly lead the state into default and the loss of those retirement dreams, and even the most loyal union foot soldier knows that a Republican in the statehouse is preferable to a broken contract.



Whitman was indeed wounded among Latino voters by the Gloria Allred drive-by, but not fatally, and her powerful closing arguments in ads and earned media are resonating even as Jerry Brown has gone to ground in an effort to prevent more embarrassing gaffs in the closing 96 hours of the campaign.



Fiorina is also surging, assisted by a $3 million ad buy from the National Republican Senatorial Committee and even more by the deeply offensive visage of Barbara Boxer, forced to campaign openly for the first time in years, which makes every appearance into a reminder of her infamous "Please don't call me ma'am" meltdown. Fiorina's brief hospitalization for infection related to her reconstructive surgery last year following breast cancer did not lead to a halt in her momentum and may have even reminded a large swath of the electorate what a fighter she is, and what fighter California could use in the years ahead.



Helping morale in both Whitman and Fiorina camps are a series of polls from Congressional campaigns in deep blue districts: GOP nominee Van Tran is ahead of the always slightly ditzy Loretta Sanchez in Orange County; in the Fresno area, farmer Andy Vidak is ahead of incumbent Democrat Jim Costa who sided with Nancy Pelosi on Obamacare and didn't get the water to the central valley, cut-off because of the "endangered" Delta smelt, flowing again; and David Harmer is ahead in the burbs of San Francisco, pushing past Pelosi-clone Jerry McNerny. If one or more of these Republican challengers win, much less all three, it is hard to imagine Boxer or Brown surviving the red tide that appears to be flowing.



Many a pollster is warning that they have never seen anything like the enthusiasm gap showing up in their data, and their "likely voter screens" may be deeply warped by nature of the most unusual year we are experiencing. The returns from the early states will also no doubt establish a mood for the final four hours of voting in California.



So cut and paste that Times poll for future reference. There is no shaming the NPR west that is the dwindling band of hyper-partisans at the once-significant paper, but it is still worth a few laughs to remind everyone of the paper's "commitment to objectivity and the highest standards of journalism."

Hugh Hewitt

Hugh Hewitt is host of a nationally syndicated radio talk show. Hugh Hewitt's new book is The War On The West.