By Rob Nikolewski
As featured in The Santa Fe New Mexican

Last September, conservative radio host Laura Ingraham said of the national Republican leadership, “If you can’t beat Barack Obama with this record, then shut down the party. Shut it down, start new, with new people because this is a give-me election, or at least it should be.”

But Obama beat Mitt Romney 52 percent to 47 percent, and in the wake of that defeat, the GOP is doing plenty of soul-searching, which was in evidence two weeks ago when the chairman of the Republican National Committee spoke to the New Mexico GOP at its annual Lincoln Day dinner in Albuquerque.

Reince Priebus told the crowd of 300 that the party’s problem is not necessarily its message but how the message is delivered.

“We have to be a full-time, year-round party,” Priebus said. “You can’t compete if you’re running a five-month operation when the other party is running a five-year operation. … Republicans had 80 employees in 2011. The Obama campaign had 800 in Florida.”

Well, sort of.

Read the full story here at SantaFeNewMexican.com.

By Steven Greenhut
As featured in City-Journal.org

California public-sector unions, the City of Stockton, and the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) gloated Monday after U.S. bankruptcy judge Christopher Klein ruled that the beleaguered city could proceed with its bankruptcy plan. For the unions, the judge’s decision was nothing less than a triumph of public workers over the hated 1 percent who rule from Wall Street. Responding to the decision, California School Employees Association spokesman Dave Low served up a red herring: “This ruling once again shows that greed is driving the large Wall Street corporations who in this case sought to further slash retirement security for police and other public employees to better their bottom lines.” Stockton officials have long blamed greedy bondholders—the same bondholders who bailed out the city in 2007 by providing pension-obligation bonds—for demanding drastic cutbacks in city services. A carefully worded statement from CalPERS mostly recapitulated the gist of Judge Klein’s ruling: that Stockton’s bondholders hadn’t negotiated with the city in good faith and, therefore, the city could proceed with its workout plan.

It’s clear why the unions are thrilled with Klein’s ruling. At least for now, the judge has prevented the scenario described by bankruptcy attorney Michael Sweet: “The fear is that there is going to be a run on the bank. Everyone is going to be cutting CalPERS payments if Stockton is allowed to do it.” Stockton owes CalPERS $900 million. As more California cities face fiscal crises and even bankruptcy, they could unload their CalPERS debt. The world of six-figure, “3 percent at 50” pensions could collapse into a cascade of bankruptcies.

For California’s taxpayers, meanwhile, the Stockton bankruptcy fight is really about the efforts of city officials, CalPERS, and unions to protect the lush pension deals that government workers have won in recent years, even as city finances hit the wall.

Read the full story here at City-Journal.org.

By Steven Greenhut
As featured in UT San Diego

SACRAMENTO – Ever since California’s voters approved the Prop. 30 sales- and income-tax increase on the November ballot, liberal commentators have been gloating about the resurgence of the Golden State after many years of predicted doom and gloom. Their evidence: Higher taxes seem to have cleared up the state’s budget deficits.

As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote recently, “California isn’t a state in which liberals have run wild; it’s a state where a liberal majority has been effectively hamstrung by a fanatical conservative minority that, thanks to supermajority rules, has been able to block effective policy-making.”

Krugman blames the “radical right-wing” for California’s problems, claims that the school system – which captures 40 percent of the state’s general fund plus local bond initiatives – is insufficiently funded and believes that all is well now that “Mr. Brown [is] free to push an agenda of tax hikes and infrastructure spending.”

Has California been saved? Are higher taxes, more regulations and massive debt spending on public works the answer for the rest of the country?

Read the full story here at UTSanDiego.com.

By Steven Greenhut
As featured in HumanEvents.com

SACRAMENTO – Ever since California’s voters approved the Prop. 30 sales- and income-tax increase on the November ballot, liberal commentators have been gloating about the resurgence of the Golden State after many years of predicted doom and gloom. Their evidence: Higher taxes seem to have cleared up the state’s budget deficits.

As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote recently, “California isn’t a state in which liberals have run wild; it’s a state where a liberal majority has been effectively hamstrung by a fanatical conservative minority that, thanks to supermajority rules, has been able to block effective policy-making.”

Krugman blames the “radical right-wing” for California’s problems, claims that the school system – which captures 40 percent of the state’s general fund plus local bond initiatives – is insufficiently funded (thanks to those evil right-wingers again) and believes that all is well now that “Mr. Brown [is] free to push an agenda of tax hikes and infrastructure spending … .”

It’s odd to blame Republicans in a state where they have had only miniscule power for at least a decade and even weirder to suggest that California’s milquetoast GOP is beholden to the radical right. The real questions: Has California been saved? Are higher taxes, more regulations and massive debt spending on public works the answer for the rest of the country?

Read the full story here at HumanEvents.com.

By Steven Greenhut
As featured in Reason.com

Ever since California’s voters approved the Prop. 30 sales- and income-tax increase on the November ballot, liberal commentators have been gloating about the Golden State after many years of predicted doom and gloom. Their evidence: higher taxes seemed to have cleared up the state’s budget deficits.

Read the full story here at Reason.com.

By Steven Greenhut
As featured in Reason.com

Few non-local people pay much attention to the goings-on in Stockton, a hard-pressed Gold-Rush-era industrial city of 300,000 that sits in the agriculturally rich San Joaquin Valley at the eastern edge of the California Delta. But bond-holders, taxpayers and government officials throughout the country will be listening to U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Klein’s expected ruling on Monday as he decides whether the city may remain in bankruptcy and pursue a plan that stiffs its bond-holders.

If Klein sides with the city, then municipalities will face a disturbingly low bar for pursuing bankruptcy. They will be emboldened to choose Stockton’s course—i.e., using bankruptcy as a strategic policy tool to offload debts without having to confront the main reasons that they went bankrupt in the first place, such as lush pensions. Bankruptcy will no longer be a policy of last resort. This should have an impact on bond markets.

If the city wins the case, argued March 25-27 in the Sacramento federal courthouse, then the public-sector unions and the scandal-plagued California Public Employees Retirement System are right. No matter what problems befall a city, public services and taxpayers suffer first while union members and public retirement systems are protected.

Read the full story here at Reason.com.

By Steven Greenhut, VP of Journalism
As featured in Bloomberg

California’s political leaders believe that their efforts to reduce greenhouse gases will slowclimate change around the globe. Now they want to tackle a Herculean environmental task in their own backyard.

In March, Governor Jerry Brown and state water officials released the first four chapters of an emerging plan that promises not only to resolve California’s traditional water- supply conflicts, but to restore the largest estuary on the West Coast, changing the flow of the huge Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and reviving 57 endangered wildlife species.

“It may be the most ambitious habitat restoration project ever conceived in the United States,”said the Sacramento Bee. The director of fish and wildlife boasted that the project is “potentially observable from space.”

The Delta, in Northern California, is where most of the state’s water flows out of the mountain ranges before heading to sea. The area is home to 1,000 miles of waterways, 70 islands and more than 1,000 square miles of land sitting below a system of aging levees. It is known for its old steel drawbridges, Victorian-era estates, vast orchards, marinas and historical towns, including Locke, a village built in 1915 and settled by descendants of Chinese workers who built the levees.

Aside from its charm, the Delta is ground zero in California’s endless battle over scarce water resources — a crucial source of water for 3 million acres of farmland in the San Joaquin Valley and for more than 20 million people in Southern California metropolises.

Click here to read the full article on Bloomberg.com.

Steven Greenhut | March 22, 2013

Not many of my friends or neighbors are sitting on pins and needles, worrying that the world as we know it will end as the federal government “slashes” spending as part of the automatic sequester cuts mandated by a previous budget bill.

And not many people have been thinking, “Geesh, there’s nothing we need more than higher California taxes and additional directives from state legislators to help us live our lives in a better and healthier manner!”

Read more here: http://reason.com/archives/2013/03/22/politicians-prefer-scare-tactics-to-sens