Imagine if you could get full salary and benefits for a decent paying job and you didn’t have to work to get it. All you had to do was be accused of a crime.

What crime, you ask? How about molesting school kids? That’s what the teachers‘ unions in states like California and New York State are doing: coddling accused criminals — at your expense. And it’s probably going on elsewhere as well.

Believe it or not, New York is a lot tougher on them than California. From the New York Post:

At the beginning of his 32-year career as a math teacher in Queens, Francisco Olivares allegedly im pregnated and married a 16-year-old girl he had met when she was a 13-year-old student at his Corona junior high, IS 61, the Post learned.

He sexually molested two 12-year-old pupils a decade later and another student four years after that, the city Department of Education charged. But none of it kept Olivares, 60, from collecting his $94,154 salary.

He hasn’t set foot in a classroom in seven years since beating criminal and disciplinary charges. Chancellor Joel Klein keeps Olivares in a “rubber room,” a district office where teachers accused of misconduct sit all day with nothing to do. (more…)

California has long had the reputation of being trend-setter to the nation. The Golden State was practicing Obamanomics back when Barack was still called Barry. And now its ways are catching up to it like a hard partier who looks in the mirror one day and sees the portrait of Dorian Gray staring back at him.

Get ready America: California’s unsustainable path is echoed by the federal government. One will crash before the other, giving us all a preview of things to come.

Part of what is slowly destroying California is its move from a land of plenty to a land of locusts. The state taxes and regulates resident companies to such an extreme extent it has driven many of them, and many tax-paying citizens, to other states. For decades California was a place to migrate to. Now it’s suffering an exodus. The fault lies in a political shift from being a conservative, low- tax state to a statist, high-tax nanny state. Californians used to be the freest people in the United States and the world, and now? Not so much. (more…)

A major provision of the “Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002″, aka McCain-Feingold, was largely dismissed by the Supreme Court on January 21, 2010. President Obama’s reaction was swift and almost comically over the top.

With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans. This ruling gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington–while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates. That’s why I am instructing my Administration to get to work immediately with Congress on this issue. We are going to talk with bipartisan Congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision. The public interest requires nothing less.

Uh-oh! Whenever they use the term “bipartisan” you know they’re trying to sucker us. It’s become as transparent as their disingenuous names for bills like the so called “Stimulus” which was supposed to fund “shovel ready jobs” and instead went to non-existent zip codes. Our unemployment rate went up dramatically.

But why is Obama so upset about the decision? He’s upset by unions and special interests donating large sums of money to candidates? This is the president who took $60 million from SEIU members and was visited by its head, Andy Stern, more than any other person last year. Obama’s “outrage” deserves a closer look. (more…)

Many have declared the dubious “Cap and Trade” scheme dead, so Obama went ahead and had the EPA suggest they were going to impose it under their own regulations. The truth is, they’re not likely to do that. They want the “Climate Bill” to pass because it’s designed to gouge the energy and manufacturing sector out of $646 billion in tax dollars over ten years. All to finance his crypto-socialist programs.

The Democrats see the climate bill as a cash cow, but Republicans aren’t buying it. So in his State of the Union address, the president didn’t mention cap and trade. He mentioned the “green jobs” that would be created by the “Climate bill.”

But to create more of these clean-energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.

Doesn’t that sound swell? Except nuclear power plants are already safe and sound in the US and have been for over 50 years. (more…)

Apple has announced its new iPad tablet computer, marking the dawn of a new kind of device that bridges the gap between phone and laptop. Last November I wrote about the possibilities of this device for the print world over at Big Hollywood. In short, the potential is there to revolutionize the way we read print, from newspapers, books, magazines and comics?

The cost of paper, shipping and distribution are a problem for publishers. So is making their products easily available to consumers. Stores only have limited space and money to carry books. The internet has been a great boon in that regard in terms of sales, but reading on a computer screen can be an unappealing prospect to most people. The iPad is designed to change all that: a hand-held, touch-screen device that is high resolution and extremely light (about a pound and 1/2). It’s not only lighter than a book, you can carry hundreds of books and magazines in it and read them anywhere you’d take a book.

The print business is salivating over this device, seeing it as a platform that will do for print that iTunes did for music. Except iTunes has sold a lot of songs, but it has also impacted the music business in ways few could have foreseen. Industry insiders think it destroyed the album as people started buying songs separately.  Moving their content to digital it could have similar effects on publishers and the press, but the fact is, times are changing and print has gotten very expensive. (more…)

When Air America Radio started on March 31, 2004, it featured a line up of amateurs and ideologues with the common goal of bashing the then Bush Administration, Republicans and conservatives in general. Its dubious stars were people like Al Franken, a fading comic, Janeane Garofalo, a sometime actress, comic and activist and left-wing radio personality Randi Rhodes.

After a scandal involving misappropriated funds from black school children it promptly filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy two years later. Franken, Rhodes and Garofalo abandoned ship.

But like most left-wing media ventures it has managed to keep going by being a sink hole for left-wing donors. In 2007 it was bought by Green Family Media, made up of New York real estate investor Stephen L. Green and his brother Mark J. Green for $4.25 million (US). Yesterday, “Air America Media” had to call it quits. (more…)

When John McCain co-authored the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law he probably didn’t envision it helping him lose his run for the presidency in 2008, but such is the law of unintended consequences.  McCain-Feingold restricted large donors from taking out ads in support of candidate and issues. This mainly penalized corporate donors. When Obama reneged on his commitment to participate in federal financing for his general election campaign, McCain was left holding the bag. He was restricted as to how much money he could spend. If his law hadn’t existed, he would have been able to get around that problem and match Obama’s media saturation.

The McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law was unconstitutional on its face, and no true conservative could believe it when President Bush signed it into “law.”  Even though our representatives swear an oath to defend the constitution, they continually pass laws that subvert it. One of the only remedies to this is the courts, and finally today the SCOTUS essentially nullified the law in a 5 to 4 decision. (more…)

Yesterday’s big upset in Massachusetts, placing Republican Scott Brown in Ted Kennedy’s old seat, was a clear message from the voters to the Democrats, especially the president, that even lifelong Dems are balking at the crazed zealotry on display in Washington.

Obama’s response?  Full speed ahead.  “In substance, the mission can’t change.”

To prove he’s determined to stick to his plans, including nationalizing student loans, “card check,” cap and trade and immigration reform are also slated to be pushed by this administration. All are unpopular. The voters are disturbed by the backroom deals to special interests, the disregard for the public’s outrage, the marginalization of dissenters like the tea party movement.

All of this has lead to an anti-incumbent voter rebellion which resulted in yesterday’s Bay State thumping, just as it did in New Jersey and Virginia last November. The Democrats tried to rationalize away those defeats last year. The question is, will they do that again? Many long-term Democrat legislators are feeling the ground shifting beneath their feet as even safe Dems are no longer secure. The leadership of the party is putting on a brave face, saying they plan to plow ahead with Obamacare.  But many of the rank and file who voted for the earlier bills may bail on it now, seeing their political futures in peril. (more…)

On January 3 the usually non-partisan Food Network had its closest brush with politics, with predictable results. Bait and switch, Washington style.

Food Network aired a two hour Iron Chef: America featuring Michelle Obama. Our choleric FLOTUS was there to provide a message about Childhood Obesity and tell the chefs what the secret ingredient for the competition was.  And the ingredient? Why, produce from the celebrated White House garden:

The chefs included White House executive chef Cristeta Comerford and star chefs Bobby Flay, Mario Batali and Emeril Lagasse. Mrs. Obama showed up in an orange dress that looked like it would be very fashionable on runways. The kind planes land on. You half expected her to bust out some flags to wave at some passing aircraft. Then she declared they had to harvest the ingredients from the garden in order to create “five ultimate American dishes.” (more…)

When the news broke yesterday that Sarah Palin had signed on as a Fox News contributor an awful shrinking feeling in the groin must have hit the execs at the network’s competitors. While the old media continues to try to paint her as a crazed redneck, the fact of her ascendancy as a serious power player is now an inescapable fact. Her autobiography, Going Rogue is a publishing phenomenon, having sold 2.7 million copies as of December 1 of 2009.  It’s one of  just four political memoirs to sell more than a million copies.

This from — as the left frames the narrative — a failed vice-presidential candidate who didn’t even finish her first term in office as governor of Alaska.  The old media and its enablers have tried in vain to discredit, demonize and disenfranchise the woman only to make her stronger. Yet still they hammer away at her relentlessly.

In the new book that has evey tongue in Washington wagging, Game Change, by political writers John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, it’s claimed that some McCain staffers who worked directly with Palin began to worry that she could be “mentally unstable.” This claim has been trumpeted by left-wing bloggers and the usual suspects in the press, desperate to keep up the Palin-bashing so they can ignore Obama’s increasingly evident failures. (more…)