Here's something I ran across while perusing news on CNN's website.

I bet they do! But I'm sure it has nothing to do with polls that indicate Fox is one of America's most trusted news sources.

Remember the days when the media understood that its role was to act as a watchdog of government? When Woodward and Bernstein exposed the corruption in the Nixon Administration and helped bring it down? The Enemies List?

Grizzled, chain-smoking newspaper editors viewed themselves as the only people protecting America against totalitarianism, acting as the country's ombudsmen. White House Press Corps veterans are supposed to report on the President's policies with a healthy skepticism, taking pride in adopting a contrarian stance to act as a counterbalance against that powerful office.

You would think, then, that news organizations would have a sense of kinship with each other, and if the President tried to freeze one of them out for asking too many questions, the others would protest--not join in on eliminating their competition.

A brand-new poll shows that 81 percent of Americans get their election information from cable news sources, with Fox News Channel blowing away the competition. Millions of people tune into FNC, which is the only major news source that has adopted the contrarian stance with the President that the other news organizations used to do with other presidents.

Consequently, FNC is killing CNN and MSNBC in the ratings, and the damage they are doing has resulted in President Obama singling them out for attack.

He's so outraged at their coverage of his presidency that he told Rolling Stone that FNC is "destructive" to U.S. growth.

They scrutinize his policies and that's bad? That's their job, and frankly the rest of the media isn't picking up the slack.

It's a bit disturbing to anyone who knows what the Commerce Clause is to hear him say they are a threat to the economy.

But aside from that, shouldn't the other members of the press sort of speak up in the name of Freedom of the Press, like they did earlier this year when Obama tried to exclude Fox from the White House Press Corps?

Instead, they are silent because Obama is helping to wound a competitor of theirs. Some journalists they are, siding with the people they are supposed to watch to help kill a news organization that dared to ask too many questions.

If Obama succeeds in diminishing Fox, who's next? Anybody else who questions the administration, I suppose.

With the announcement of the elimination of 500,000 State jobs in Cuba, there are major developments taking place in Cuba's socialist economy. It is essential for progressives and revolutionaries to study these developments through a Marxist lens and draw the appropriate conclusions, as the bourgeois press and the White House pounces on the opportunity to discredit Cuba's revolutionary course.

By now, you think elected officials would think twice before telling Carla Bonney that they won't answer her questions.

Yet that's what happened at Monday's Ventura City Council meeting, with just a handful of people in attendance to listen to the council discuss a ban on plastic bags.

Before the end of the week, Bonney was speaking to millions, as the firebrand Tea Party organizer took her fight against the ban onto national airwaves.

At Monday's meeting, Ventura City Councilmen Brian Brennan and Carl Morehouse attempted to ban single-use plastic bags, citing their danger to the environment. Instead, they succeeded only in persuading the council to vote 4-3 to have city staff work with agencies to find ways to reduce the amount of plastic bags in the community.

Councilmen Neal Andrews, Mike Tracy, and Jim Monahan voted against the resolution.  Andrews said a ban risked an unknown economic impact, household inconvenience and potentially even litigation.

"I heard a lot of the same rhetoric coming out of Sacramento from the folks that were donated to by the chemical lobby," said Brennan, prompting Andrews to later say that he's never accepted such donations.

At that point Bonney entered the chambers to address the council.

"You're overreaching," Bonney said. "And the whole point of the Tea Party is that our government is overreaching in every area of our lives."

Mayor Bill Fulton interrupted Bonney to explain that the public is prevented from asking any questions or engaging in dialog with the city officials.

Unfortunately, this is a pretty limited forum," Fulton curtly said.

Not one to keep quiet, Bonney found a forum that wasn't so limited Thursday afternoon when she called talk radio heavyweight Mark Levin to complain about the council's actions.

"We have to pay attention to our city councils because they're sneaking these things through," Bonney told Levin, whose voice reaches 8.5 million listeners a week.

"Where the hell did they get this power from?" Levin asked.

Levin is tied for the fourth largest talk radio audience, behind Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, according to Talkers magazine. He is also a bestselling author.

Bonney is most likely the first person to take the proceedings of a Ventura council meeting to millions of people across the country.

Maybe now Mayor Fulton might pay her a little more attention.

The best thing about the Tea Party, in my opinion, is that they give a voice to the forgotten, middle class person--the family man or woman that pays his taxes, obeys the law, and treats his family and neighbors right. He or she has common sense and a high degree of self-government. These disenfranchised people are not part of any interest groups or a political class--they have jobs outside of politics and public policy.

So given that the Tea Party movement empowers the average Joe, can anyone explain to me why Christine O'Donnell is a good representative for it?

Unlike your average Joe, O'Donnell spent her entire adult life in activism. While you or I are working at factories, in the service industry, or in an office, she was working for the RNC, Washington-based anti-pornography groups, and anti-abortion groups.

While working for those groups is commendable, they aren't exactly what you would call average. How many people do you know that work for advocacy groups in DC? If you're an average Joe, probably zero.

How many of you have been sued by your college for unpaid tuition? Do you even know anybody who has?

Have any of you dabbled in "witchcraft" as a teenager?

Has the IRS filed a lien on you for back taxes and penalties?

If you answered in the negative to these questions, you might be a normal person. O'Donnell is accused of all of those things. In addition, her house was foreclosed on, proving that she can't manage her own finances let alone the nation's.

While O'Donnell may be good on her policies, the Tea Party movement needs to be careful with the character of the people they send to Washington.

Choose people that represent you--people that think like you and will do what you would do if you were in their shoes.

O'Donnell's life up to this point is nothing like mine or yours--she's a career insider with a sketchy past.  Not that Castle is any better. But don't support her wholeheartedly just because she holds the Tea Party banner. Instead, hold the people on your side to an even higher standard.

As we approach the election in November, I'll be posting interviews with candidates in local races.

While many of my questions will be pertinent to the position being sought, I think it is important to uncover the broader worldview that candidates have. All too often, we get lost in the back-and-forth debate of a particular issue and lose sight of the big, important things that matter more. Are they good people? Do they have common sense? Are they qualified for the position?

In addition to who the candidate is, what's also important to me is not so much what a candidate thinks--it's how they think. Voters won't be on hand to approve or disapprove of the myriad unanticipated issues that will face the people they send into office. What's more revealing is what they think about general topics such as political philosophy, foreign affairs, history, macroeconomics, and religion.

If a candidate's outlook on life matches a reader's, that candidate is probably a good choice for that reader to send to public office to represent him. It all boils down to the overlooked fact that voters want to know that they are electing people who would make the same decision they would given the same information.

It may seem unfitting to ask a candidate for city council what he thinks about our nation's foreign policy since he won't face that issue in office. But I argue that the broader the issue, the higher the chance that the voter's experience about the issue matches the candidate's, permitting the voter to more accurately test how the candidate processes information. It's crucial to be working with the same dataset. The narrower the issue, the least likely the candidate and voter's information will be the same. It's difficult to determine how someone thinks by analyzing their conclusion without the information they looked at to reach that conclusion.

For example, a candidate for minor, local office will possess approximately the same knowledge about the decision to invade Iraq than have I. It is reasonable to assume we both heard the same arguments for and against it. Do our conclusions differ? If so, why did we process that information differently?

Similarly, a very specific issue about approving a charter school facing a member on the county board of education is likely to show that the board member and the voter have different sets of information. A board member and the voter may both be fully supportive of the general idea of charter schools. However, the board member may vote against a charter school because its financial documents are out of order. Often, the voter is not privy to that information or is ignorant of it. Is it reasonable for the voter to conclude that the board member is against charter schools? Of course not--he voted against it because he has a different set of information and the voter might have even done the same had he been presented with the same information.

But on a broad subject like illegal immigration, the school board member and the voter have very similar sets of information, and so the better way to pick a representative that represents you is by examining how they feel about those general issues--not on a particular vote or a particular campaign issue.

Even when a race is nonpartisan, it's important to find out what a candidate thinks about issues on which parties have taken strong stances. For parties exist because people naturally unite themselves on the broader issues. Party affiliation is a shortcut for the voter to determine how a person thinks, which is why so few Republicans vote for Democrats and vice-versa. They pretty much know how they think on broad issues, and they disagree with each other, and it works--in the end people pretty much choose which of the two candidates thinks like them more.

To wrap this up, as I'm conducting these interviews I will ask the expected questions on  policy minutia involving decisions based on information that only a few people are privy to, but I will balance it with questions about overarching topics that may seem out of the scope of the race at hand, but are invaluable in determining the best representative for you.

At Tuesday night's Ventura County Community College District board meeting, the chancellor requested more time to study a proposal to use the free E-Verify system for district employees.

The proposal was made last week by Bob Huber, who is running for mayor in Simi Valley. Incidentally, that city recently voted to use the controversial program, which is operated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to determine if employees are valid to work in the United States.

It's controversial because of what it does, not how accurate it is. False positives happen only 0.7 percent of the time, and it has been shown to catch 46 percent of illegal immigrants whose information is fed into the system.

The remaining 54 percent that get away do so because they are using stolen (and valid) birth dates and social security names.

Overall, the system is accurate 96 percent of the time, according to a research company commissioned by the government.

There's the research--now can we get this thing moving?

Not only did Tea Partiers rally on Sunday in commemoration of the national unity felt the day after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, but they also vowed to "remember in November" when they head to the polls on Election Day.

September 12^th has become the third regular Tea Party protest date, alongside April 15^th and July 4^th. There are two major undercurrents that sweep people to these rallies: a strong concern over the increase in size of government and a patriotic love of country. 9/12 reminds people of the love they felt for the United States and its history--on that day people were driving around with American flags strapped to their cars. We were united as one people headed in one direction.

Nine years later, not so much.

Tea Partiers now recognize an internal threat--the rapidly expanding federal government, instigated by Congressional Democrats and President Obama (and in too many cases, Congressional Republicans).

In Ventura, demonstrators gathered at the Ventura County Government Center to wave flags at passing cars, then marched to nearby Montalvo Hill Park to listen to a series of conservative speakers and candidates.

The candidates included Ventura City Councilman Neal Andrews, candidate for Congress Tom Watson, and State Assembly candidate Mike Stoker.

Conservative speakers included Steve Frank, a Simi Valley-based blogger who made some news recently for some controversial remarks in support of his city's decision to use E-Verify, and Terry Paulson, a speaker who also has a column in the Ventura County Star.

Rep. Lois Capps wants to boost enrollment in school lunch programs. Ironically, we might just all end up on food stamps thanks to misguided Democratic economic policy on the recession, which Capps says is "lingering" (wasn't this Recovery Summer?).

Concerned over a possible rollback in food stamp benefits, advocates and dignitaries gathered Thursday to urge that nutrition programs be protected.

"Everybody now has been pushed so hard by the recession that just keeps lingering," Rep. Lois Capps, D-Santa Barbara, told the group of 50 people meeting at FOOD Share, the county's regional food bank in Oxnard. "We have to give everyone the confidence that the basics can be there."

One key issue is legislation authorizing a variety of early childhood and school nutrition programs.

 Ahem, "dignitaries" might be going a little too far, if it refers to this person.

In her remarks Thursday, Capps applauded the goals of the House nutrition bill, saying it would boost enrollment in school lunch programs, plus improve food quality and safety.

So Capps is in Oxnard saying we need more people on school lunch programs. Now that reminds me of something...

Oh yes, I just remembered! The Star just reported that Oxnard fraudulently billed the state for millions dollars worth of school lunches it never served!

Great timing, Lois!

On the heels of Simi Valley's decision to approve a pilot E-Verify for city workers, VC  Community College District President Bob Huber proposed that county colleges follow suit.

Huber is also running for mayor, and has made a campaign issue out of E-Verify, which is a free government program that analyzes employee information to evaluate whether they are eligible to work in this country. It has a 96 percent accuracy rate, which pretty much makes its adoption a no-brainer.

However, a fellow board member wondered how much time it would take to scan each employee's documents, estimating five minutes per person at a minimum.

"I want to find out how much time our employees would be taking on it," the Star quoted the board member as saying. "We're not overloaded with classified employees now. Time is money."

If that's a concern, let me volunteer to do it. I'll find time to use the free online utility. Let's get this thing done and stop quibbling.

When Simi Valley's City Council, which includes Huber's opponent Steve Sojka, voted to adopt E-Verify in "an emotionally charged" meeting, it became the first city in Ventura County to do so.

Opponents contend that E-Verify isn't accurate. However, a study commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security shows that E-Verify catches 46 percent of illegal aliens it comes across. Not a home run, but if every company adopted E-Verify and we were able to catch half of all the illegal aliens working in those companies we'd be doing pretty good, because right now that number is ZERO percent. I'd guess that the reason that E-Verify doesn't catch the other half is because the illegals are using real, stolen identification information.

Certainly we don't want to be saying people are illegal when they are really legal. E-Verify avoids false positives 99.3 percent of the time. That's just about as close to perfect as you can get.

So the program sounds like it works pretty darn well. So my offer is out there--if cost is an issue for the college district, I will volunteer my time, and I'm sure others would do the same, to work on this program for you.

I've longed believed that Democrats--at least since in the last century (and Republicans in the last two decades)--figured out that you can buy political power by codifying the transfer of wealth from people that don't vote for you to people that do vote for you.

This amounts to a systematic and institutionalized method of good ol' vote-buying seen on a scale a thousand times grander than Boss Tweed, except in this case, the politicians are bribing people to vote for them using taxpayer dollars.

So imagine my reaction to Assembly Speaker Pro Tem Fiona Ma's statement at the Labor Day picnic thrown by the Working Blue Democratic Club of Ventura County Park in Camarillo.

"History has taught us you can't buy people's votes," she said.

If that were the case, she would still be a CPA--and maybe not even that, given that that profession would be largely unnecessary because much of the tax code's complexity is due to politicians pandering to special interests.

Bailouts, welfare, unemployment, healthcare, retirement, are all gifts to the public made by politicians who wanted to be elected to office by the public.

Perhaps I'm being cynical--maybe the Democrats are simply looking out for the well-being of the working man and woman and it's just a coincidence that at the end of the day, they are putting money into the pockets of people that vote for them. Not indirectly, mind you, via an improved economy or lower taxes, but directly--in the form of checks delivered right to your door and signed by Uncle Sam.

Of course, one might argue that Republicans do essentially the same thing by voting for tax decreases for their constituents. But there is one, not insignificant, difference. Republicans are giving people their own money back to them. In the case of the Democrats (and progressive Republicans) they are transferring money from people that don't vote for them to people that do.

Apart from being an odious policy just on the face of it, this vote-buying addiction is corrosive to our system of government as a whole. Who among us has not heard that a democracy cannot exist in perpetuity, for this very reason? As Ronald Reagan said:

It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury. From that moment on the majority...always vote for the candidate promising the most benefits from the treasury with the result that democracy always collpases over a loose fiscal policy, always to be followed by a dictatorship.

Summer is just about over--kids are back in school, and Labor Day is approaching, the unofficial start of fall. That also means that it's campaign season, with the November general election only two months away.

Tonight, much of the local politicos will be glued to their TV's watching Carly Fiorina debate Barbara Boxer in the campaign for the U.S. Senate  as the incumbent struggles for her political life against her toughest challenger yet.

In Alaska, a sitting senator was just defeated by a no-name Tea Party candidate.

Closer to home, the Ventura County GOP made endorsements in the treasurer-tax collector and Simi Valley mayoral races, choosing Steven Hintz and Bob Huber, respectively.

In the 37^th Assembly District, where Republican Jeff Gorell is running against Democrat Ferial Masry, a new poll shows that Gorell's opened up a 13-point lead over his opponent, including leaners. More bad news for Masry:  Democrats don't seem to be all that energized by their nominee; the poll indicates that Republicans are about 25 percent more likely to support Gorell than Democrats are willing to support Masry.

The poll was commissioned by the Gorell campaign and conducted August 23-25.

One thought about the poll: 80 percent of likely voters said California is moving in the wrong direction. Why isn't that number closer to 99.999 percent? Who in their right mind doesn't think California is headed in the wrong direction?