Columnist.
The U.S. Supreme Court effectively ordered California on Monday to release 33,000 inmates over two years from an in-state prison population that numbers about 143,000. Kent Scheidegger of the tough-on-crime Criminal Justice Legal Foundation blogged that Californians shouldn't "bother investing much in a car. It will be open season on cars, given that car thieves (nonviolent offenders) will never go to prison no matter how many times they are caught."
In 2004, Maria Shriver told Vanity Fair that many people were surprised that a Kennedy clan member would marry Hollywood bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger. "People at first were like, 'You married the other side of the tracks.'" She said, "They have trouble with the class thing. ... Everyone assumed that I was supposed to marry someone like a John Kerry, some preppy that had gone to Harvard or Yale. I didn't want to marry those boys. I did not like them. I had been around them my whole life. I interrupted the story line."
Before John Ensign resigned as Nevada's junior senator on May 3, the Republican faced a Senate Ethics Committee investigation into a possibly illegal cover-up that followed an affair between Ensign and Cindy Hampton, a campaign aide who was married to the senator's administrative assistant. Last week, the committee released a report on the probe -- and it is ugly. The committee wasn't particularly interested in the nine-month affair. Its focus was on -- you guessed it -- the cover-up. Ensign's parents made a $96,000 "gift" to the Hamptons after the couple stopped working for Ensign. Ensign steered husband Doug Hampton into a lobbying job -- despite a federal law that bans staffers from lobbying the Senate within a year of leaving the Capitol.
As governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin "demonstrated many of the qualities we expect in our best leaders," The Atlantic's Joshua Green reports in a must-read story. "She set aside private concerns for the greater good, forgoing a focus on social issues to confront the great problem plaguing Alaska, its corrupt oil-and-gas politics. She did this in a way that seems wildly out of character today -- by cooperating with Democrats and moderate Republicans to raise taxes on Big Business." After making the case, Green then asks, "What happened to Sarah Palin?"
President Obama addressed an enthusiastic crowd Tuesday when he spoke in El Paso, Texas, about liberalizing federal immigration laws. Audience members exhorted the president to "tear down" the border fence and called immigration hard-liners "racist." Yet Obama acknowledged that his administration has stepped up immigration enforcement. "We are deporting those who are here illegally," he said. "And that's a tough issue. It's a source of controversy."
At the end of his "60 Minutes" interview, President Obama said of Osama bin Laden's death, "Justice was done. And I think that anyone who would question that the perpetrator of mass murder on American soil didn't deserve what he got needs to have their head examined." The longer he serves in office, the more Obama sounds like George W. Bush. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd also has started to sound like Bush. In her Sunday column, "Killing Evil Doesn't Make Us Evil," Dowd writes that when Navy SEALs shot and killed bin Laden, it seemed like "the only civilized and morally sound response."
How small is the California prison population likely to become if Gov. Jerry Brown has his way? In three years, California's prison population would be 20 percent smaller. When we chatted on the phone on the issue last week -- always an experience -- Brown sounded more like his old self, a left-wing talk-show host of the 1990s, than the tough-on-crime Oakland mayor and state attorney general who followed.
San Francisco Sheriff Michael Hennessey explained in The San Francisco Chronicle's Sunday Insight his opposition to Secure Communities, the federal program that automatically passes new arrestees' fingerprints to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The program applies to "everyone booked into a county jail," Hennessey complained -- "even (in) a minor matter, such as having no driver's license in one's possession in a traffic stop." To Hennessey and many other "sanctuary city" supporters, a person can break federal immigration law, then violate state driver's license law, but still should escape the legal consequences.
Nothing succeeds like success. In the years since 9/11, Americans have had to live with the fact that President George W. Bush failed to take Osama bin Laden "dead or alive" -- to use the phrase that the former president came to regret. President Obama didn't have to eat his words. In 2008, candidate Obama declared, "We will kill bin Laden." Now Public Enemy No. 1 is dead at U.S. hands. Thank the intelligence operatives and military analysts who -- as the public settled for neutralizing bin Laden -- considered his demise to be "a moral imperative," says Tom Umberg, an Orange County, Calif., attorney, former state lawmaker and Army Reserve colonel who served in Afghanistan.
On April 25, gay-rights advocates -- led by the Human Rights Campaign -- scored a victory after the HRC applied pressure on a law firm hired to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as a union between a man and woman and denies federal benefits to same-sex partners. The firm fired its client. There are two reasons you should be outraged, no matter what your position is on DOMA. One: Lawyers aren't supposed to dump cases -- it's called abandonment -- especially because of political pressure.
By asking why President Obama had not released his long-form birth certificate on numerous so-called news shows, Trump had even usually sensible people theorizing over lunch as to why the White House had not released the document. Was there something damning about the president's religion? His race? His parentage? My theory was simpler. In 2008, Obama released a certificate of live birth. Why did he wait until Wednesday to release the long-form, which birth deniers demanded? Easy. Who doesn't like watching his political enemies look like complete dolts? Obamaland no doubt felt a warm rush of satisfaction every time some nut job right-winger put forth a contorted theory about the president's 18-year-old mother running off to a Third World delivery room to give birth and then, Manchurian-like, falsifying the paperwork. The debate debased conservative opposition.
It wasn't that long ago when Democratic members of Congress were warning about conservative colleagues trying to insert their religion into politics by trying to cut funding for Planned Parenthood. For issues concerning family planning, the left generally agrees that it is wrong to impose religion on politics. I don't think you'll be hearing the same scolds directed at the Sojourners' crusade against the House GOP budget and its orange bracelets that ask, "What would Jesus cut?"
The first tip-off that Greg Mortenson's memoir "Three Cups of Tea" has some credibility issues comes in the book's introduction. Co-author David Oliver Relin writes that as Mortenson is flying over Pakistan, the helicopter pilot marvels to Mortenson, "I've been flying in northern Pakistan for 40 years. How is it you know the terrain better than me?" The pilot also confides, "Flying with President Musharraf, I've become acquainted with many world leaders, many outstanding gentlemen and ladies. But I think Greg Mortenson is the most remarkable person I've ever met."
PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Last year, when President Obama wanted to convince Americans that his policies were paying off and creating jobs, he visited a solar-panel plant in Fremont, Calif. "The true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra," quoth the president. It was an odd choice. Solyndra was in business with the help of a $535 million federal loan guarantee, had yet to turn a profit and five months later, it shuttered one of its factories to save money.
You know the war on drugs has gone too far when politicians keep ratcheting up restrictions on cold and allergy medications in order to prevent kitchen drug labs from buying pills and converting them into methamphetamine. In 2005, Congress passed a law requiring consumers to show a driver's license or other ID in order to purchase Sudafed and 14 other over-the-counter cold and allergy medications. The buyer must register in a logbook.
President Obama well may have begun another undeclared war -- this time on states that try to enforce their own death penalty laws -- on the dubious grounds that the Food and Drug Administration has not approved drugs intended to kill convicted killers. On March 15, the Drug Enforcement Administration seized Georgia's supply of sodium thiopental, the first drug given under the three-drug lethal injection protocol used in most of the country's 34 death-penalty states. The DEA also asked Kentucky and Tennessee for their sodium thiopental to aid its investigation. Why? The DEA referred me to the Department of Justice, which sent an e-mail declining to comment. News reports indicate that the feds had concerns that the drugs were imported improperly.
Mitt Romney is too much like Barack Obama. I don't see how he'd win the 2012 GOP nod because he's got too much in common with the guy he wants to replace. Both men began a run for the White House during their first term in statewide office. Romney never bothered to run for re-election as Massachusetts governor. He didn't stick around to solve the state's problems. He treated the job like a stepping-stone.
If you think that academia is not the exclusive playground of the academic left, consider the fate of UCLA epidemiologist James Enstrom. In 2008, Enstrom thought that a report on the health effects of diesel emissions presented by the California Air Resources Board was faulty. As it turns out, CARB's nitrous oxide emission estimates were overstated by 340 percent. Enstrom and others had trouble believing that a Ph.D. statistician would make up some of CARB's findings. They dug around and found that CARB researcher Hien Tran had falsely claimed to have a doctorate in statistics from UC Davis. In fact, Tran had a master's degree from UC Davis, but his doctorate came from an unaccredited school.
President Obama has dedicated his time in office to soaking up applause and shifting blame. Last year, when Democrats owned the White House, the House and the Senate, Congress didn't even bother passing a budget. Obama didn't seem to mind. But when Republicans put together a stopgap measure to fund the military and prevent a government shutdown, Obama promised to veto it. Obama called the measure "a distraction from the real work that would bring us closer to a reasonable compromise for funding the remainder of fiscal year 2011." There must have been a lot of distractions last year.
The New York Times reported last month that General Electric earned $14.2 billion in international profits, including, $5.1 billion in the United States. Yet GE did not pay a dime in federal income taxes last year. Oddly, President Obama chose GE Chairman and chief executive Jeffrey Immelt to head his President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. According to the Associated Press, Immelt's compensation package doubled to $15.2 million last year, while this year, GE is seeking major concessions from the unions that represent its shrinking American workforce. That makes Immelt the wrong guy for the job of jobs czar.
