Back to Basics

So Obama got Zuckerberg to put on a monkey suit. Gosh, how cool… Yet, I have faith in Zuckerberg. I have to. I hope that ultimately, his conscious yearns for, responds to and thrives on wisdom over being “in” with the “in” crowd. After all it shouldn’t be hard for Mark to see these powerful “friends” are no different than all the other fools he’s already encountered. The question of grave importance to the world, is what captures Mark’s devotion for what purpose will he use his genius?

(I posted a comment at the bottom of this article written by John Wildermuth at Fox & Hound.)

President Barack Obama’s Wednesday afternoon visit to Facebook, the grandfather of the social networking biz, showed that his team has grasped political truism that has eluded many California campaigns: Bucks ain’t ballots.

Now it’s true the president reportedly plans to raise a breathtaking $1 billion for his effort to win four more years in the White House and yes, that’s billion with a “b.”

And since no one in the campaign business has ever suggested that “Big Daddy” Jesse Unruh’s observation that “money is the mother’s milk of politics” is any less valid now than when the former Assembly speaker made it in 1966, the $35,800-a-napkin dinner he had with 60 of his closest friends Wednesday night in San Francisco was a pleasant reminder of why it’s good to be the president.

But as Meg Whitman ($178 million for her governor’s race) and PG&E ($46 million for last June’s Prop. 16) discovered, all the cash in the world won’t help a campaign that can’t rally the troops. Which is why the Facebook stop was likely the most important event on a presidential trip this week that’s expected to shake the California money tree for $7 million in contributions.

There weren’t any surprises in what the president said: Click here to read more of the article.

 

Comment by Martha Montelongo:
So Zuckerberg doesn’t think Obama has much to account for? He’s cool with the President’s acts of rounding up immigrants into detention centers thousands of miles from where they are apprehended, without access to legal representation or accountability for mistakes in false charges, mistaken status reports or identity, acting as a dictator and taking us into yet another war, in Libya, for “humanitarian” reasons, without even pretending to seek approval from the Congress? Is Zuckerberg OK with Obama spending us into the utter decimation of the U.S. Dollar, ushering in a constant double digit unemployment level, continuing our war in Afghanistan, continuing and expanding our war on drugs and using it to expand the power of border security to move their check points further and further inland, casting a net that violates everyone…’s civil liberties, and ensnares all of us, in the name of protecting us, expanding the government’s access to our privacy in the name of Homeland Security, punishing and constricting the middle class with creeping taxes that devalue real wages, neutering us, vilifying us, and hoping the poor will accept him as their savior, the compassionate one who will deliver, eventually, when his own administration has successfully gutted our economy to the brink of ruin.

In the future, historians may likely mark the 2010 midterm elections as the end of the California era and the beginning of the Texas one. In one stunning stroke, amid a national conservative tide, California voters essentially ratified a political and regulatory regime that has left much of the state unemployed and many others looking for the exits.

California has drifted far away from the place that John Gunther described in 1946 as “the most spectacular and most diversified American state … so ripe, golden.”  Instead of a role model, California  has become a cautionary tale of mismanagement of what by all rights should be the country’s most prosperous big state. Its poverty rate is at least two points above the national average; its unemployment rate nearly three points above the national average.  On Friday Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was forced yet again to call an emergency session in order to deal with the state’s enormous budget problems.

This state of crisis is likely to become the norm for the Golden State. In contrast to other hard-hit states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Nevada, which all opted for pro-business, fiscally responsible candidates, California voters decisively handed virtually total power to a motley coalition of Democratic-machine politicians, public employee unions, green activists and rent-seeking special interests.

In the new year, the once and again Gov. Jerry Brown, who has some conservative fiscal instincts, will be hard-pressed to convince Democratic legislators who get much of their funding from public-sector unions to trim spending. Perhaps more troubling, Brown’s own extremism on climate change policy–backed by rent-seeking Silicon Valley investors with big bets on renewable fuels–virtually assures a further tightening of a regulatory regime that will slow an economic recovery in every industry from manufacturing and agriculture to home-building.

Texas’ trajectory, however, looks quite the opposite. California was recently ranked by Chief Executive magazine as having the worst business climate in the nation, while Texas’ was considered the best. Both Democrats and Republicans in the Lone State State generally embrace the gospel of economic growth and limited public sector expenditure. The defeated Democratic candidate for governor, the brainy former Houston Mayor Bill White, enjoyed robust business support and was widely considered more competent than the easily re-elected incumbent Rick Perry, who sometimes sounds more like a neo-Confederate crank than a serious leader.

To be sure, Texas has its problems: a growing budget deficit, the need to expand infrastructure to service its rapid population growth and the presence of a large contingent of undereducated and uninsured poor people. But even conceding these problems, the growing chasm between the two megastates is evident in the economic and demographic numbers. Over the past decade nearly 1.5 million more people left California than stayed; only New York State lost more.

Just don’t call me Ma’am or suggest we need honest, accurate climate science
Who can forget California Democrat Senator Barbara Boxer’s put-down of Brigadier General Michael Walsh, during a June 2009 committee hearing? When he addressed her as “Ma’am,” in answering a question about the New Orleans levee system, she petulantly interrupted:  “Could you say Senator, instead of Ma’am?  I worked so hard to get that title, so I’d appreciate it.”

“Ma’am” is a term of respect given by military personnel to superior female officers. So she’s right. She didn’t deserve it. Her behavior was once again disrespectful, arrogant, condescending – and a disgrace to a Congress whose public esteem is deservedly at a record low.

As Californians head to the polls November 2, they should ponder very carefully whether they really want, and can really afford, another six years of Barbara Boxer.

The Golden State’s junior senator has long been dismissive of anyone who dares to disagree with her, no matter what experience, expertise or evidence they might bring to a Senate proceeding. She epitomizes the overbearing attitude of the power elite, the ruling class that thinks it knows more than we do, is better than us, and is in Washington not to serve or represent us, but to rule us.

In 2005, the late Dr. Michael Crichton testified before the same Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, stressing the need for sound science and above-reproach analysis in making laws and public policies. He offered not his well-deserved reputation as an author and filmmaker – but his expertise as a Harvard-educated physician and medical researcher.

Dr. Crichton expressed his growing concern that science is being politicized, misused and abused to advance an unproven global warming hypothesis, and justify policies that will adversely affect our energy supplies, jobs, living standards and liberties. Those policies will also give Washington politicians and bureaucrats unprecedented power and control over our lives.

Science, he emphasized, relies on “independent verification.” A scientific hypothesis or assertion “is valid and merits acceptance only if it can be independently verified.” The Food and Drug Administration, he noted, has strict rules governing the conduct of drug research, to ensure honesty and integrity, and protect the public’s health and welfare. The gold standard is randomized double-blind studies that involve four separate teams:  one plans the study, another administers the drug to patients, an third assesses its effects, and a fourth analyzes the results.

“The teams do not know each other, he observed, “and are prohibited from personal contact of any sort, on peril of contaminating the results.” Deviate from those rules, and your $100-million study will be declared null and void. But in climate “research,” every one of these rules is routinely and deliberately violated, to further an agenda that will affect, not just a company or small group of patients, but every single American business, citizen and community.

In climate science, Dr. Crichton pointed out, “it is permissible for raw data to be modified by many hands.  Gaps in temperature and proxy records are filled in.