Rather than making necessary cuts to out-of-control spending, California legislators instead are desperately trying to squeeze every penny they can out of businesses--even if those businesses are not in California.

That, of course, is unconstitutional under to the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Commerce Clause. That provision in the Constitution grants Congress the privilege of regulating interstate commerce, which implies a so-called Dormant Commerce Clause--that if Congress has this right then states do not.

The framers of the Constitution included the Commerce Clause in that document because they did not want states to engage in trade protectionism with other states in which states would try to put other states' companies at a competitive disadvantage to their own with trade barriers or excessive taxation.

The power to tax is the power to destroy, after all.

Yet that may be what's happening in California. Flanked by California brick-and-mortar companies, Democratic lawmakers recently introduced legislation that would expose online retailers--which are based in other states--to taxation on their transactions within the state.

[continue reading]

Teachers once again face uncertainty due to California's ongoing budget crisis, but it's hard to feel sorry for people who've had it so good for so long. For example, in Conejo Valley Unified, the average full-time teacher's salary was $67,905 in the 2008-2009 ten-month year, according to Pepperdine University's School of Public Policy.

That's a handsome salary, but it's even better than it looks. The key phrase here is "ten-month year", meaning lots of downtime for our state's teachers.

Teachers also don't quite work 40 hours a week during the school year, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics.  It found that full-time teachers worked only about 38.5 hours per week. If we apply that over the ten-month school year, we arrive at 1,540 annual hours, or $44/hour.

That annualizes to $91,520 per year, or more than the average aerospace engineer--that's a lot of money to pay to someone to bore high school students to death with Arthur Miller plays.

Then there's the public employee benefits. While Pepperdine's report doesn't mention specific benefit cost, we can derive the data from other figures the report provides.

Teacher salaries and benefits in Conejo Valley comprised 47.1% of the total operating expenditure, which was $194,799,839 in 2008-2009. That means salaries plus benefits cost taxpayers $91,750,724.

There were 1,009 full-time equivalent teachers making an average salary of $67,905 for an annual total of $68,516,145.  Subtracting salary from the salary plus benefits total leaves us with $23,234,579 in benefits paid to the district's teachers.

The takeaway here is that while I feel sorry for anyone who has their income reduced from cuts, furloughs, or layoffs, our state's budget crisis precludes us from ignoring the realities of how our taxes are spent--and far too little of it is going to help students learn.

I feel a little like Matt Drudge with this post.

The Drudge Report, an Internet mainstay, is a news aggregation site with a design from the Clinton era--an eternity in web-years. Despite its dated appearance, it still drives more traffic to news websites than any other source other than Google.

How does Drudge do it? Sunday's New York Times offered an explanation:

So in a news age when the next big thing changes as often as the weather, how can a guy who broke through on the Web before there was broadband still set the agenda? How can that be?

His durability is, first and foremost, a personal achievement, a testament to the fact that he is, as Gabriel Snyder, who has done Web news for Gawker, Newsweek and now The Atlantic, told me, "the best wire editor on the planet. He can look into a huge stream of news, find the hot story and put an irresistible headline on it."

The irresistible headline is the key. Drudge is not above sensationalizing mundane articles or promoting tabloid stories. But his real value comes in making blaring headlines out of obscure sentences buried in the middle of a story or highlighting an article that was entirely overlooked.

Media outlets are the gatekeepers of information. They set the agenda; they determine what is news and what isn't. Out of the thousands of stories that could potentially be made into national news, CNN, CBS, Fox, etc. choose about a dozen for the day. That gives them immense power.

Drudge's website changes that dynamic--he sets the agenda. Not only does he choose what stories to list, he picks the headline to frame the story in a different way. His success indicates that millions agree with the way he frames his stories compared to the mainstream media.

If Drudge covered Ventura County, he would have read Sunday's Ventura County Star, and written a headline like the one on this post.

That edition contained a story entitled, "Simi Town Center to Get a Major Facelift," which is about changes coming to the failing mall in Simi Valley.

The Star quotes a real estate expert from Pepperdine about macroeconomic causes for the mall's failure (it certainly isn't failing because there's no reason to go there unless you want to shop at one of the 50 women's clothing stores), including commercial real estate vacancy  trends and retail spending trends.

Then, 23 paragraphs down, is the Drudge gold.

Furthermore, he said, he believes hyper inflation will kick in about 2015, shrinking consumers' spendable dollars.

I don't know, as a reader I kind of find the fact that an expert the Star found qualified to comment on economics predicting imminent hyperinflation is more important than the troubles of the Simi Valley mall. That affects my life a little more. I've been harping on it awhile; I'm glad to see that it made its way in some form or another into a mainstream news story.

That's the beauty of the Drudge Report--in between the tabloids and the sensationalism, he is able to digest existing stories and pluck out of them truly important information. 

Osama bin Laden's death breathed new life into the "torture" debate, as evidence now suggests that Bush-era interrogation techniques led to the finding of the Al Qaeda leader. 

The Tribune Washington Bureau reported that an "Al Qaeda suspect who was under harsh interrogation at a secret prison" provided the identity of Osama bin Laden's courier who unwittingly gave away the location of his compound.

Contrast that fact with the statement made by Senator Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a press conference on Tuesday (as reported by Talking Points Memo):

More and more evidence suggests a key piece of intelligence -- the first link in the chain of information that led U.S. intelligence officials to Osama bin Laden -- wasn't tortured out of its source. And, indeed, that torture actually failed to produce it.

"To the best of our knowledge, based on a look, none of it came as a result of harsh interrogation practices," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee in a wide-ranging press conference.

Moreover, Feinstein added, nothing about the sequence of events that culminated in Sunday's raid vindicates the Bush-era techniques, nor their use of black sites -- secret prisons, operated by the CIA.

Secret prisons and harsh interrogation practices didn't lead to the discovery of bin Laden's hideout? Here's what the Tribune Company reported:

An Al Qaeda suspect who was subjected to harsh interrogation techniques at a secret CIA prison in early 2004 provided a clue, the nom de guerre of a mysterious courier, that ultimately proved crucial to finding Osama bin Laden, officials said Wednesday.

Feinstein's statement is the complete reverse of what the parent company of the Los Angeles Times reported. Remember, she chairs the Intelligence Committee, so she's either falling asleep on the job or she lied.

The far left-wing groups that organize illegal immigration protests don't go too far out of their way to hide their radicalism.

A group called Power to the People Collective marched in Oxnard (where else) for "solidarity" with other workers across the world on May Day.

According to the Ventura County Star, May Day was established by the International Socialist Congress in 1889. The Star noted that since then, "most of the world observed May 1 as Labor Day, and it was strongly identified with socialism, communism, anarchism and grim faced old duffers atop Lenin's Tomb reviewing endless columns of Soviet weaponry."

The meaning of the day did not seem to be lost on the protesters, who describe themselves as "members of the collective."

John and Mary Tolian of Oxnard were at the rally and march in support of workers. "I think it's important to come out on May Day," John said. "I wish they did more in the city of Oxnard."

The Power to the People Collective doesn't just have a name that seems sketchy, its mission statement sounds like it was copied and pasted from the New Black Panther Party or the KKK.  The group's mission statement calls for "organizing for the self-defense and empowerment of our community as a response toward the escalation of repressive measures aimed at migrants, families, and workers."

Organizing for self-defense?

There's more--the group's website states that "engagement and communication with those forces that oppress and attack our community are inevitable..."

 What are they going to do when they engage the "attackers?"

The website has a contact email address with the domain riseup.net. Riseup is a self-described revolutionary group that states that its purpose is to "aid the creation of a free society...where power is shared equally. We do this by providing communication and computer resources to allies engaged in struggles against capitalism and other forms of oppression."

Riseup also declares that a society's "means of productions should be placed in the hands of the people," the definition of communism.

The word "liberation" is sprinkled throughout Riseup's website, a theory that is central to the Party of Socialism and Liberation, another revolutionary group that organized on May Day for "workers' rights."

The PSL regularly holds workshops on Marxism and calls itself a "militant" group.

To the casual reader flipping through the newspaper, the Power to the People Collective is merely a coalition of concerned citizens. A few minutes of Googling, however, reveals the group is sympathetic to a revolutionary, militant, Marxist ideology.