I should have gotten there earlier to get a better seat.

I figured starting the day only a mile-and-half away from the National Mall three hours before the event would be good enough to at least get me within naked eyesight of the podium, but I was wrong.

Columns of Beck supporters marched down the wide jogging paths on either side of the grass lawn between the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument, many with lawn chairs slung over their shoulders.

They filed past a small group of Media-Matters-sponsored Beck protesters with a poster of the conservative commentator, labeled "nightmare" juxtaposed against Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "dream."

The official entrance to Beck's Restoring Honor rally, a giant fundraiser for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, appeared on the east side of the Washington Monument, where SOWF volunteers collected donations for the children of fallen soldiers.

The Washington Monument sits at the top of a slope. Facing west, the Capitol Building is directly behind you, the Jefferson Memorial is visible to the left, the White House is visible to the right, and straight ahead, sloping gently downhill is the World War II Memorial, the Reflecting Pool and the Lincoln Memorial, immortalized 47 years earlier by King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

Having toured the site the night before, I walked nearby the stage and examined the large posters--Frederick Douglass, an astronaut, and a chieftain I didn't recognize. Music was playing on the oversized speakers, and small crowds had already formed and dropped their lawn chairs on either side of the Reflecting Pool, 18 hours before the event. The podium stood empty, not on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial as I expected, but several landings below it. I hiked up the steps to see the seated Lincoln Statue--the chamber was already full of people. At Lincoln's feet were about 20 members of the U.S. Navy in white uniforms, who received a thunderous applause from onlookers.

Reverence for the military was a theme at the nonpartisan Restoring Honor rally, headlined by Beck and Sarah Palin, who said she spoke not as a politician, but as the mother of a combat veteran.[continue reading]

In the opening paragraph of the Associated Press's widely distributed wire report on Glenn Beck's massive Restoring Honor rally, it noted the demographical makeup of those that showed up at the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday.

Conservative commentator Glenn Beck and tea party champion Sarah Palin appealed Saturday to a vast, predominantly white crowd on the National Mall to help restore traditional American values and honor Martin Luther King's message.

Although five of the first 12 paragraphs of the article mention Sharpton's much smaller rally, there is no mention that the crowd there was predominantly black.

The AP also didn't mention the degree of tribute Beck's event paid to minorities, while I did.

In fact, Beck was one of the few male, white speakers at the rally. Of the eleven other presenters, only two were white men--St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa and Special Operations Warrior Foundation President Col. John Carney, Jr.

All three of the achievement medals Beck minted were given to minorities (albeit the third medal was accepted on behalf of philanthropist John Huntsman, who is white), in front of a banner of Frederick Douglass.

Naturally, the closing paragraph ends by stating that a person handed out fliers with Obama with a Hitler-style mustache. Possibly three hundred thousand people there with nothing controversial on their person, and the AP--one of the world's premier news agencies--decides to close on a note describing one person with an extreme message.

If Glenn Beck is such a racist, why would Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s niece attend a rally he organized on the anniversary of her uncle's most important speech?

Quite simply, because Alveda King has taken the time to speak to Beck to find out who he really is.

"I am attending this rally to help reclaim America," she told "Good Morning America's" Ron Claiborne today from Capitol Hill. "I'm joining Glenn to talk about faith, hope, charity, honor. Those are things that America needs to reclaim. Our children need to remember to love each other how to honor each other, their parents, God and their neighbors. I agree with Glenn on all of those principles. So that's why I'm here. For me it's principles over politics."

Were he a racist--as many on the Left contend--I doubt very much that King would join him in front of the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday, and she certainly wouldn't have said that her uncle would have attended were he alive.

In fact, Beck was one of the few male, white speakers at the rally. Of the eleven other presenters, only two were white men--St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa and Special Operations Warrior Foundation President Col. John Carney, Jr.

All three of the achievement medals Beck minted were given to minorities (albeit the third medal was accepted on behalf of philanthropist John Huntsman, who is white), in front of a banner of Frederick Douglass.

The crowd didn't boo. They did just the opposite--they gave standing ovations to the King legacy. They sang Amazing Grace after hearing Beck tell the story of the slaveship captain-turned-abolitionist who wrote it.

Beck is following in the footsteps of Martin Luther King, much to the irritation of the "real" heirs to the King legacy--Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the latter of whom held a counter-rally commemorating the anniversary of King's speech.

But Jackson and Sharpton aren't exactly the messengers of peace and dignity. Jackson is a professional shakedown artist that exploits race to extract reparations from corporations. The reverend admitted to having a love child in 2001, and called Jews "hymies." Sharpton, for his part, referred to Jews as "diamond merchants" at a funeral with signs that read, "Hitler didn't do the job." Shortly after, 20 black men murdered a 29-year-old Jewish man.

Does that sound like men carrying on King's tradition? Beck isn't a perfect messenger himself, as he freely admits. A self-proclaimed formerly suicidal alcoholic, Beck said he reformed himself after he found God.

While Jackson and Sharpton demonize Beck, Alveda King is standing by the conservative commentator and taking lumps of her own.

She's now vilified for her pro-life and anti-gay-marriage positions, even though her opinions on those issues coincide with the majority of the black community.

The source of the anger is the Left's failure to get their heads around the fact that Beck is doing a better job of striving toward King's dream than the so-called leaders of the Civil Rights movement. They've bought into their own narrative that any white person who discusses race must automatically be a racist. White people are scared to death of being so branded, so the race-card players are shocked when someone like Beck, who speaks frankly about race, memorializes King's legacy and leads his fans to follow in his footsteps.

This is a bad thing? I suggest the Left opens their eyes as Alveda King has.

The real estate market is the ultimate example of the maladies that government can cause with its intrusion into free markets.

We all know the story by now. The Bush Administration fought off the tech stock bubble collapse by keeping interest rates low. Coupled with lax lending standards and a government desire to increase home ownership among groups that have traditionally been unable to own homes, the real estate bubble was inflated.

Unsustainable markets don't stay hot forever--despite what you heard at the peak of the bubble--and it too popped, nearly took the whole economy with it, and swept Obama into office.

Up to that point, blame Bush, Greenspan, and Bernanke. Obama deserves credit for the events after that.

To keep the real estate market from returning to sanity (because that would cost votes) Obama unveiled tax credits for purchasing houses, kept interest rates obscenely low, and bailed out lenders.

The tax credit was so successful that demand drove housing prices higher than the credit was worth, but that didn't stop many people from buying homes. In Ventura County, your average starter home will run you $400,000, up from the low $300,000's right at the initial collapse.

Now, sales are down 27 percent nationwide and 8 percent in Ventura County as the credits have expired. In the last two years, more people have been suckered into buying homes they soon will be underwater on. [continue reading]

The chief benefit of the press in American society is to keep an eye on the government. While it's nice to know the weather, calendar of events, and crime report, the truly important work that journalists do is keeping public officials honest. The Ventura County Star, in two series of articles, has demonstrated that it is dedicated to the higher purpose of acting as a government watchdog.

Since the Bell public employee compensation scandal erupted, the Star made information requests for salary and benefits information for officials in Ventura County cities, revealing that some individuals cost taxpayers over $300,000 annually, and is doggedly investigating Ojai, which provided a vague response to the request.

The Star made its public records request to each of the 10 cities in the county on Aug. 2. All cities complied for council members, except for Ojai, which provided the $5,700 base pay of the elected officials but just general benefits information with no exact figures. The Star also is reviewing the total compensation packages of the cities' top management.

On Saturday, the Star reported a wide disparity in pay between several cities in the county.

Council members in Thousand Oaks, a city of about 130,000 residents, are paid $21,000 a year but also can receive full health benefits and retirement, pushing their total compensation up to $51,650 annually, city records show.

By contrast, council members in Fillmore, a rural community of about 15,600, can earn up to $2,250 annually in monthly stipends but get no city benefits. And Ventura's City Council members earn less than $10,000 annually for a coastal community of 108,000.

In Oxnard, city leaders are reeling from an FBI raid that closed City Hall ten days ago, having to do with possible misappropriation of funds related to large public works projects. Over the summer, the Star reported on the failure of the public works director, Ken Ortega, to disclose gifts he received from consultants doing business with the city. Two days later, he resigned.

Ortega resigned in June after admitting that he failed to disclose gifts he received from companies doing business with the city, including some working on the water project known as GREAT, the Groundwater Recovery Enhancement and Treatment program. At the time, he said that the disclosure had nothing to do with his resignation, which he attributed to his increasingly difficult relationship with City Manager Ed Sotelo. He argued that he was being singled out for things that other city officials had done or failed to report.

The feds and the DA certainly seem to agree with Ortega's assertion that he's not the only one.

Mirroring the timing of a raid the week before at City Hall, investigators showed up late Friday afternoon with search warrants at Herrera's home and those of City Manager Ed Sotelo and Assistant City Manager Karen Burnham.

There will be plenty more stories on the public employee compensation and city of Oxnard tracks in the weeks and months ahead.

The Star could serve as a model in its role of watchdog that the national media would do well to follow in light of an increasingly out-of-control federal government.

Contradictions don't exist by definition. If a contradiction is reached in any given analysis, one must check the premises that led to that conclusion for in it lay an error.

On Tuesday, the Center for Responsible Lending released a report that "paints a picture of the foreclosure crisis in California, examines the who, the where, and the why of foreclosures in the Golden State and discusses what we should do to prevent as many avoidable foreclosures as possible."

The study was the subject of a subsequent Ventura County Star article entitled "Foreclosure crisis not driven by luxury home purchases." It states:

Largely because they were more likely to receive high-rate loans, the study found that Latino and African-American homeowners were much more likely to incur foreclosures than non-Hispanic whites.

Latinos experienced foreclosure rates 2.3 times that of non-Hispanic whites, the study found, and almost half (48 percent) of all Californians who have lost their homes to foreclosure have been Latinos.

RACIST!

Apologies--that's just a tic I've picked up from my progressive friends whenever someone mentions anything that has to do with race. I have to keep telling myself that it's not racist to report facts.

Half the state's foreclosures were from Latinos. That fits in with the stated government policy to encourage home ownership among minorities, a decision "that contributed to an escalation of subprime lending that is roiling the U.S. economy," according to the Washington Post.

In 2004, as regulators warned that subprime lenders were saddling borrowers with mortgages they could not afford, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development helped fuel more of that risky lending.

Eager to put more low-income and minority families into their own homes, the agency required that two government-chartered mortgage finance firms purchase far more "affordable" loans made to these borrowers.

The Center for Responsible Lending--notice that it's NOT called the Center for Responsible Borrowing, but more on this later--came to this conclusion in its report:

As the nation begins to address a potential restructuring of the entire housing finance system, it is crucial to focus on the need for access to credit for communities of color and lower-income communities.

The Star article ends by noting that the report lauds the new financial reform act signed by President Obama earlier this summer.

And herein lays our contradiction. The Center for Responsible Lending set out to discuss "what we should do prevent as many avoidable foreclosures as possible." Its policy recommendation is to "focus on the need for access to credit for communities of color and lower-income communities."

To quote the Washington Post again, "Eager to put more low-income and minority families into their own homes, the agency required that two government-chartered mortgage finance firms purchase far more 'affordable' loans made to these borrowers."

In short, the Center for Responsible Lending recommended as the solution to the problem the very thing that led to the problem in the first place! How could an objective organization propose such a self-defeating recommendation?  

Don't forget to check your premises.

Who is the Center for Responsible Lending, exactly? The Star article merely identifies it as a nonprofit organization. A reader might assume it's merely a group of concerned people advocating responsible lending--certainly a laudable goal in and of itself.

However, a quick visit to its website reveals that it's funded in part by the Open Society Institute. And who is that you might ask? I'll give you a hint--its website is www.soros.org.

Two clicks! That's all it took to get from this report to George Soros, the Uncle Moneybags of the progressive movement.

This is by no means an isolated incident. It's how progressive opinions are laundered to become fact. A Soros groups funds money to agenda-driven think-tanks. The tanks churn out official-sounding studies. They issue press releases that the mainstream media blindly picks up and reports as hard, scientific fact.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Meanwhile, readers have no idea they're being taken to the cleaners unless journalists make a more concerted effort to put organizations, people, and stories into proper context.

He insults all hard-working municipal employees when he suggests that the corruption of top officials in the city of Bell is even remotely associated with the struggles of public sector union members to maintain livable wages and modest pensions.

But, the salaries and benefits of Ventura employees are already below the labor market, and Andrews knows this.

What is often overlooked in all the political posturing is that the recent increases in pension costs are not the result of benefit increases. They are the fallout of the market crash of 2008-09 from which the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) and other public pension funds are still recovering.

Andrews should be advocating stricter regulations of Wall Street financial institutions that damaged our economy rather than scape-goating public employees, who, like the vast majority of American workers, are struggling to make ends meet.

The councilman is confused. On the one hand, he states that "elected officials have a duty to the taxpayer to assure that what we pay is consistent with the labor market." But, he then proceeds to rail against "the error of leaders who argue that public agencies must offer pay equal to other cities to stay competitive." Which is it?

With a stroke of his pen, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick committed his state to a new way of electing presidents Wednesday.

For over two hundred years, we've elected presidents not by who carries the most individual voters, but by who carries the most states. The distinction is subtle but decisive. For example, Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000 but lost the presidency--the fourth time that's happened in our country's history.

Partly spurred by that decade-old disappointment, activists are urging states to bypass the Constitutionally mandated Electoral College in favor of a more--well, democratic approach. While it sounds good in theory--the man or woman who has the preference of the greatest number of individuals should lead them--it has some far-reaching ramifications if realized.

The movement

National Popular Vote, Inc. is spearheading the effort to convince states like Massachusetts to adopt the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would commit all a state's electoral votes to the presidential candidate that has the most votes nationwide.

Currently, states are assigned a number of electors that equal the quantity of Congressional representatives and senators. In most states, the electors cast their votes for the top-vote-getter in the state. National Popular Vote wants to shift those electors' votes to the national winner--so even if a candidate carries, say California, but his opponent gets more votes in the country overall, all of California's electoral votes would go to the opponent.

Why even bother with Electoral College if we're just going to automatically give the votes to the top national vote getter? It's because of that perpetually pesky document, the Constitution. Article II, Section I mandated the system, and the only way to get rid of it is to pass an amendment, a notoriously difficult process.

Consequently, National Popular Vote, Inc., unable to abolish the system, sought out to bypass it by convincing state legislatures to enact a law to force the hand of its electors. [continue reading]

"The voters voted for him to make this decision, and now he's going to put it back on the voters," she said. "I think it's a waste of taxpayer money."