Hellish economic predictions and concerns over massive social upheaval are usually the things you hear from Tea Party conservatives like Ron Paul or Glenn Beck. The Old Media ignores these prophets of doom and holds them at arms' length as if they were infected with ebola.

I'm curious what journalists think when the exact same dire predictions come out of the mouths of mainstream experts who are frequently cited in their stories.

The Ventura County Star routinely calls upon California Lutheran University's Center for Economic Research and Forecasting for comments on business and economic stories. The center just released a forecast today that said California is on a fast track to a "postindustrial hell."

Did Glenn Beck get a job there or something? No, it's the center's executive director, Bill Watkins, who said the data is "disturbing."

That's the sort of reaction you get from the lead government scientist in when he realizes the giant asteroid might be headed straight for earth.

Watkins even expects the European Union will break up by the end of 2012, leading to another financial crisis.

Can we avoid this fate?

Watkins said the outlook for California is "pretty grim" and likely to get worse unless politicians in Sacramento recognize there is a problem and start doing something about it.

"At the very least, they need to do a comprehensive review of the cost-benefit analysis of the regulatory environment that we have," he said.

Oh, California is on a fast track to hell because of all the Progressive-inspired laws that stifle business. Now where have I heard that before--oh yeah, from every single Republican and conservative in the state.

 I would love it if it weren't up to just me and other conservatives to make this connection, but if we want politicians in Sacramento to "recognize there is a problem and start doing something about it," I think the mainstream media leads the way.

I don't use the word "lie" lightly, but I think it applies here.

First, some background. Ventura County Congressman Elton Gallegly supports E-Verify, which runs social security numbers through a federal database to determine if a worker is authorized to work in this country.

Pro-illegal-immigrant groups are running radios ads on Spanish-language stations criticizing Gallegly and others for advocating this common-sense program. According to the Star:

SEIU and America's Voice Education Fund, which supports comprehensive immigration reform, are the two organizations behind the ad campaign. A similar ad will appear in La Opinion, the nation's largest Spanish-language newspaper.

Immigration supporters and others argue that requiring employers to use E-Verify to check the backgrounds of potential workers would have a huge impact on Latinos in California and across the country.

Before we delve into the lie that America's Voice Education Fund is perpetuating, I can't let this slip by without comment--"immigration supporters" oppose Gallegly? Does that make him anti-immigration? Or is he only anti-illegal-immigration?  Let's not forget there's a difference between those two, people.

I digress. America's Voice Education Fund--what a pleasant name, by the way--"supports comprehensive immigration reform," which is a euphemism for amnesty.  Here's the group's problem with Gallegly:

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, has filed legislation mandating the use of E-Verify, even though a government report last year found errors and other problems with the program. Gallegly is a co-sponsor of the bill, which cleared the Judiciary Committee last week and is now headed to the House floor for a vote.

Gallegly is a co-sponsor of an E-Verify bill, and a government report "found errors and other problems with the program."

What kind of errors, you might ask? America's Voice's website blares, "E-Verify has 50% Failure Rate, Throws Hundreds of Thousands of Legal Workers Out of a Job."

A 50% fail rate, huh? According to the government, it has a 96% success rate. Who's right?

This is where the lie comes in, but it's important to see how tricky America's Voice is.

93.1% of E-Verify's results correctly identified authorized workers as "authorized." Only 0.7% were authorized workers that E-Verify said were not authorized. America's Voice wants you to think that 0.7% is 50%. Pretty brazen, right?

Here's how they got to 50%. E-Verify found that 6.2% of the workers it checked came back as unauthorized. Of that 6.2%, half were illegal immigrants that E-Verify failed to identify. In other words, the 50% error rate only includes illegal immigrants who got away with it, not workers that were authorized to work but came back as unauthorized, as America's Voice would have you believe.

Only the New York Times could bash a Republican candidate for something he didn't say.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was at the Reagan Library in Simi Tuesday night on a GOP fundraising tour. As he's done for the last year, the otherwise blunt politician deflected speculation that he might run for president.

In an article with the awkward headline "Christie Adds Little New, but Fails to Quell the Talk," the New York Times seems to put a lot of effort in making Christie's silence into the worst possible thing the rotund governor could do.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey failed to address intense speculation about his presidential ambitions on Tuesday night as he delivered a foreign policy speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California.

Did he "fail" or did he succeed in doing exactly what he planned? Journalists have subtle ways of setting the tone of their articles and words like "fail" is part of the game.

Consider two headlines about the same hypothetical scenario. A man is arrested and tried for murder and then found not guilty. The journalist can write either of these two headlines:

1.  Man exonerated by jury

2.  Jury fails to convict alleged murderer

The first headline makes the man seem innocent, the second one implies he was guilty and got away with murder. The Times could have easily written:

"Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey succeeded in ignoring intense speculation about his presidential ambitions..."

Their choice of "fail" is telling, but we're just scratching the surface. The next paragraph reads:

With those close to the governor saying he was "reconsidering" whether to mount a bid, Mr. Christie's unwillingness to address his political future at such a high-profile event left some Republicans exasperated and worried that a protracted game of "will-he, won't-he" would be bad for the party's chances of retaking the White House.

As if the New York Times cares if this is bad for the GOP.  But his "unwillingness" to announce his presidency "left some Republicans exasperated?"

We're left with the impression that all these Republicans are freaking out. But what is "some exactly?" Two Republicans? Fifty? Who knows, but it sounds significant, doesn't it?

Wikipedia identifies "some" (and "many") as "weasel words," which are "numerically vague expressions." It's OK for some blog to employ weasel words, but the country's newspaper of record?

But the Times left quality by the wayside a long time ago, reiterating that he's "failing to quiet the clamor to draft him..."

For such a failure, I wonder why so many people want him to be president!

The truth is Christie is succeeding masterfully--he's getting millions of dollars of free advertising just by floating his name as a possible contender (or rather, by letting others float his name). We see this every in every presidential campaign. Jesse Jackson knew he wasn't going to win, but he raised his profile. Ron Paul knows he's not going to win, but he runs to draw attention to libertarianism. Sarah Palin is still teasing the media, and they're still paying attention to her even though they hate her. Donald Trump--the master of personal branding--got to see his name in the papers earlier this year by talking about running for president.

Christie would be stupid not to do exactly what he's doing.

It really is amazing how many pies far-left zillionaire George Soros has his fingers in. He has a passion for funding Astroturf advocacy groups that churn out biased studies and ginned up protests against conservatives.

I like to think I can spot those phony groups a mile away. They always have some name designed to reassure you it's good people against something bad, they always oppose conservatism, and they always get quoted in newspapers without mention of their radical ties.

While reading the Star's coverage of Dick Cheney's speech in Simi Valley this week, I noticed the closing quote was made by an organizer from the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.

Before the talk, about 25 local supporters of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture protested Cheney's visit at the library's entrance on Presidential Drive. The campaign has criticized the arguments Cheney conveys throughout his memoir -- that torturing detainees is a useful and acceptable means of punishing and gathering information from them.

"Torture carried out by the past administration has caused one of the darkest stains on our nation's history," said Virginia Classick of Woodland Hills, who organized the protest.

End of story. Call it my reporter's instinct, but something told me that the National Religious Campaign Against Torture isn't some apolitical group made up from run-of-the mill pastors who are concerned about people getting tortured. The name fit the typical Soros organization--National Religious Campaign Against Torture sounds like some concerned citizens making their voices heard.

Strike 1 against the group.

They were demonstrating against a conservative.

Strike 2.

There was no mention of political affiliations. Strike 3. My radar is up.

Two minutes of Googling yielded that Soros gave the group $210,000 in 2010. Suspicions confirmed.

What is the importance of this overlooked detail? Simply that Cheney may have been protested by people with a political ax to grind rather than clergymen with no agenda.

Newspapers are careful about how they present information to the reader. If something is widely accepted, the paper will print it without citation. If it's contested or is an opinion, journalists will often quote an expert, a politician, an activist, or a scholar.

The problem is that sometimes partisans contest obvious facts and rather than printing those facts as true on their face, journalists will treat it as a controversial idea.

Consider a recent Los Angeles Times article about the fed considering a third round of buying its own debt. The reporter is comfortable stating facts and making conclusions in the opening three paragraphs:

Nervous global investors can't seem to own enough U.S. Treasury debt, yet the Federal Reserve may soon make the bonds even more scarce.

With the U.S. economy struggling, Fed policymakers are expected this week to announce a new bond-buying plan specifically aimed at pulling long-term interest rates lower.

That could help some Americans buy homes or refinance mortgages. But Wall Street doesn't see much hope that the Fed can give a significant boost to the economy.

That's fine. But when it comes to discussing the idea that buying our own debt with printed money leads to inflation, the Times felt the need to demote that fact to a partisan opinion.

The difference this time is that most analysts believe that the Fed won't print new money to fund its purchases. If the central bank merely swaps shorter-term Treasuries for longer-term securities, the net amount of its holdings won't change.

Bernanke thereby might avoid criticism from Republican leaders, including Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who have said the Fed's efforts to pump more money into the economy could eventually stoke inflation.

Could? In the second round of "quantitative easing," $600 billion was printed. That's not definitely going to lead to inflation, L.A. Times? Even the government's owned cooked numbers showed inflation just ticked up.

This is not a knock against this journalist, and not even the Times so much. It's the culture of professional journalism--its weak spot is tying all the facts together for the reader. The truth hurts, and the industry sidesteps important issues to deliver milquetoast generalities. 

A public policy professor of mine would always feign confusion whenever a student complained about "government" doing this or do that, and he would ask, "which government?"

He's right--we toil under several layers of government in our federalist system and it's ambiguous simply refer to a "government." There's the feds, there's the state, there's county and municipal government. We find governments wherever we find a formalized system of authority over the actions of members of the system.

Moving across the spectrum from big and distant federal government to nearby local government, we begin to see even smaller forms government that my professor probably didn't even mean to include. Neighborhood councils, organized community groups, and homeowners associations are some examples of tiny government.

Going even more "local" takes us to the original unit of government--the family. It may seem like an informal arrangement instead of a form of government, but the parents have legal authority over the children, and husband and wife can have legal claims against each other.

At the final step in the direction of local government we find self-government, the ultimate local authority. Like the family, we never think of self-governance as a "government" per se, but we're also formalized legal entities with control over someone's action (ours).

On the opposite end of the spectrum we mentioned federal government, but it gets even bigger than that. There are international systems of governance as well.

Ideologically speaking, we tend to find liberals in favor of shifting power to the larger, more distant governments while conservatives prefer smaller, more local government.

The liberals have been winning for most of the country's history. Power has shifted away from the individual, away from the family, away from local government, and even away from states and is dangerously concentrated at the federal level. There are even progressives--particularly in the current administration--that want the trend to continue into the realm of international government. Individuals are entrusted with less power over their bodies, families lose parental rights to the state, states lose their sovereignty to the feds. There are only a few brief examples where this trend was reversed--the Coolidge Administration and the Reagan Administration come to mind. Of course, the essence of the Tea Party is to shift power back in the direction of local government, but even small-government candidates lose their footing. Rick Perry, for example, is known for fighting to shift power from the feds to the states via the 10^th Amendment, but wasn't it he who used state powers to decide to vaccinate children instead of their parents?

In America, we want our various governments at all levels to represent us. And it's not just something we want on a lark, that idea is the core of our political system. At least it was supposed to be. After all, wasn't "taxation without representation" our primary reason for breaking with England?

If representation in government is all important, it is necessary to ask which layers of government are more representative than others for those layers would be the best places to invest power.

The 17^th Amendment allows for the direct election of senators. That's widely seen as a coup for the people, a real democratic way of representing the will of the voter.

Let's say the question of implementing a new law is put before the Senate. The Senate consists of 100 senators, two from every state.  That means that in every matter put before the Senate that affects your life, 98 senators are not from your state and do not have an interest in your state. How's that for voter representation?

If we put the same matter before the House of Representatives, your odds get a little better. There are 435 House members, and 53 of them come from California, making the Golden State the best-represented state in the country. However, even then, in every vote 382 Congressman care little for the interests of Californians, and 432 of the 435 don't care much about Ventura County. If you're in Moorpark, then 434 of the 435 don't have your best interests at heart, yet--due to the shift in power to the federal government--they have enormous control over your lives.

Your odds improve slightly at the state level, where there are 80 Assemblyman and 40 State Senators. That means 120 Californians are voting on issues affecting Californians which is much better than what we have in Washington, where 98 Senators and 385 Congressmen who don't live in California are voting on issues affecting California.

At the County Supervisor level, there are five supervisors from Ventura County voting on Ventura County issues who are voted into office by Ventura County voters. Ventura County residents, obviously, are very well represented in the Board of Supervisors, and it would be tough for us to complain that they don't know or care much about Ventura County. However, the federal government is constantly creating laws that affect Ventura County even though we send only one lonely Congressman to Washington--one out of 535 total politicians that knows about and cares about our little corner in the world. Yet every day, politicians from New York, Kansas, Florida and Illinois make decisions on our behalf.

It's easily demonstrated, then, that the smaller and closer government gets, the more representative it becomes. Only one of the five Ventura County Supervisors may represent your city, but 100% of the members of your City Council do. There isn't anyone in Congress from Moorpark, but everyone on the Moorpark City Council lives there. Wouldn't you rather have them making decisions for your city than people who have never been to Moorpark? And if a city councilman does something you don't like, you might be able to reach him by phone, or even see him at the grocery store. Good luck trying to get a hold of Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi (or John Boehner). If the city councilman is non-responsive, you can vote for his opponent in the next election, organize a grassroots campaign against him, or run for his seat with only a modest budget.

Nancy Pelosi has a big impact on my life, but I can't vote against her (nor John Boehner). I can't vote against Harry Reid, but he makes decisions that affect me whether I like it or not.

How much poorer would representation be if power was shifted from the feds to international bodies as some would have? I have zero chance to reach them by phone, but by some miracle if I did, I don't know if we would even speak the same language they would be so far removed from me.

In business there is a best practice that decisions should be made at the lowest level where all the information necessary to make the decision is available. In other words, a CEO in one office branch should not be telling receptionists in other branches when to take their lunch breaks. That should be left up to her supervisor who is familiar with call trends, schedules, and who called in sick that day--information the CEO is not likely to have, or care about.

The same principle is true for layers of government. If representation is really what we cared about, we wouldn't allow the federal government to interfere directly in the lives of its citizens--that's for local government to do (or not to do, if they wish)--since that layer has a minimum of representation and a maximum of control. That's precisely why progressives prefer to regulate via Congress (or for even less representation, via executive order or the courts)--it offers ultimate control with a minimum of interference from the rabble.

The U.S. Census Bureau just released statistics that show that more Americans than ever are suffering in poverty, and already they're being used to justify President Obama's plan to redistribute more wealth in the United States. But what does it mean to be poor in the wealthiest country that's ever existed?

The poverty rate jumped up to 15.1%,the highest rate since 1993. Both Republicans and Democrats are using the term "record-breaking" to describe the poverty situation, given that, in terms of raw numbers, more Americans than ever fall below the poverty line. The term "record-breaking" helps Republicans make Obama's economic policies seem as bad as possible, and helps Democrats justify the need for more of Obama's economic policies. As far as the poverty rate is concerned, however, we're still 7 percentage points away from breaking the record. Furthermore, records have only been kept since the 1950s, and the raw number of Americans in any category is more now than then simply because the population has doubled in the last 50 years.

The biggest problem about poverty statistics is what defines a poor person. Images of frail people standing in long bread lines come to our minds. However, I don't see many of those lines, and the biggest health problem facing the poor is obesity, not starvation.

But being poor in America isn't quite the same as being poor elsewhere in the world.

Data from the Department of Energy and other agencies show that the average poor family, as defined by Census officials:

● Lives in a home that is in good repair, not crowded, and equipped with air conditioning, clothes washer and dryer, and cable or satellite TV service.

● Prepares meals in a kitchen with a refrigerator, coffee maker and microwave as well as oven and stove.

● Enjoys two color TVs, a DVD player, VCR and -- if children are there -- an Xbox, PlayStation, or other video game system.

● Had enough money in the past year to meet essential needs, including adequate food and medical care.

And many of them have cell phones, cable TV, and big-screen TVs, to boot.

Additionally, poverty stats rarely address the fact that Americans are constantly moving in and out of "poverty." For example, a college student living on his own is "poor" according to the government, even though he may go on to have a well-paying job beyond college.

What is implied by poverty stats is that the 15.1% of people living below the arbitrary poverty line will stay there. However, buried in its 2010 poverty report, the U.S. Census Bureau figures show that the chronic poverty rate is ridiculously low.

Chronic poverty was relatively uncommon, with 2.2 percent of the population living in poverty all 48 months from 2004 to 2007.

Before we rush to blame Obama for creating long bread lines or we attempt to justify another half-trillion in stimulus money, we should realize that 97.8% of the population is not chronically poor, and that condition is only "poor" by America's high standards.

Mitt Romney's campaign was ecstatic to hear Rick Perry double-down on his criticism of Social Security at Wednesday's GOP debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley.

"You cannot keep the status quo in place and call it anything other than a Ponzi scheme," Perry said at a Republican debate in California. Acknowledging that several have called his remarks controversial, he added, "Maybe it's time to have some provocative language in this country."

Perry called Social Security a Ponzi scheme in his "Fed Up!" book, and his enemies in the Bush camp have zeroed in on the language.

Most recently, Republican strategist Karl Rove said Perry's take on Social Security will prove "toxic" in the 2012 election. Former Vice President Dick Cheney also said recently it was inaccurate to call the program a Ponzi scheme.

In Simi Valley, Perry said that Chenye's characterization was "just a lie," and Rove was "over the top." Romney seized the moment.

"Our nominee has to be someone who isn't committed to abolishing Social Security but to saving Social Security," Romney said.

What are the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme, and who is telling the truth?

According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, a Poniz scheme "is an investment fraud that involves the payment of purported returns to existing investors from funds contributed by new investors."

Score one for Perry.

Basically, early investors are lured by guaranteed returns that are paid mainly through money derived from new investors, not from actual profit. Typically the scheme promises huge profits in a short amount of time, then collapses when money from new investors isn't sufficient to keep the scheme going.

Social Security shares the same basic characteristics as a Ponzi scheme--it requires more and more new workers to pay for the ever-increasing number of retirees.  As the Baby Boomer generation retires, the number of workers that have to contribute to Social Security to pay for them is proving to be insufficient. Economist Arnold Kling said the following:

The government gives people money, which it expects to obtain by taking the money from people in the future. Even the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities, not known as a right-wing organization, sees the U.S. fiscal stance as unsustainable (pointer from Ezra Klein via Tyler Cowen)--in other words, a Ponzi scheme.

Business Week agreed about the fundamental parallels between Social Security and the Ponzi scheme:

Social Security taxes current workers to pay Social Security benefits for current retirees. In other words, the new entrants into the Social Security system, the young workers, pay off the previous entrants, the older workers. And despite the fact you have a Social Security "account", there is no necessary link between what you paid into the system in taxes, and what you receive.

That's very similar to the structure of a Ponzi scheme, where new investors pay off the original investors. As long as enough new 'victims' are brought into the scheme, it keeps growing and growing. But when the new investors runs out, the Ponzi collapses. Analogously, the slowdown in population growth puts pressure on Social Security finances.

Business Week also noted that there is one thing that can keep Social Security from being a Ponzi scheme--technological innovation that leads to increased worker productivity.

If we leave the younger generation a good legacy--a sound scientific and technological base, combined with an innovative and flexible economy and an educated workforce--then Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme. The economy grows, and there's more than enough resources for everyone.

But if instead we--the current generation--invest in homes, flat-screen televisions and SUVs, then we don't leave the next generation with the technological "seed corn" they need. If the technological progress slows, then Social Security does turn out to be Ponzi-like--with unfortunate consequences for everyone.

Guess which path we're headed down. Give another point to Rick Perry.

From the Progressive side of the spectrum, the arguments against Social Security being a Ponzi scheme get laughable. Mother Jones writes that because Social Security is not deliberately fraudulent, it is not fraud. Also, governments can print money and raise taxes to keep the scheme from collapsing, and it's been around for a long time, unlike typical Ponzi schemes.

But none of that changes the fact that it requires an ever-increasing number of new victims to keep it afloat. Even if the government devalues the dollar to meet debt obligations such as Social Security (which it is doing), a large portion of the investors get screwed in the end by being paid in worthless currency.

In the final analysis, Rick Perry is right. Social Security is fundamentally the same as a Ponzi scheme. While it shares some superficial differences from being run by the government, those differences don't change the nature of what it is.

In early August, Standard & Poor's rating agency downgraded the U.S. credit worthiness from AAA to AA+, marking the first time that's happened since the country achieved AAA status in 1917.

A week earlier, the White House and congressional leaders reached a deal on raising the debt limit after a lengthy and high-profile standoff, with the Tea Party largely opposing it because it did not go far enough to cut spending.

That opposition, according to a Ventura County Star editorial on Labor Day, is what caused the national credit downgrade.

That's because the congressional Republicans' intransigent tea party-movement wing, with its reckless rule-or-ruin attack on lifting the debt ceiling, saddled the Republicans with the downgrading of U.S. creditworthiness, introducing uncertainty into the financial system when the markets were craving certainty and dealing a body blow to the fragile recovery of consumer confidence.

It wasn't decades of runaway spending during the administrations of Bush and Obama that culminated in massively expensive stimulus packages, or that the United States effectively resorted to printing money under the  "quantitative easing" program in order to meet its debt obligations that caused S&P to rethink our credit rating. No, no, no, it was those people in the lawn chairs with the flags.

Standard & Poor itself seems to have a different take on why it downgraded United States credit worthiness.

"The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government's medium-term debt dynamics,"

In other words, there's too much debt and the Boehner/Obama deal didn't do anything to address that, which is exactly why the Tea Party opposed it.

To make the point even more clear, the head of sovereign ratings at S&P said, "This is a problem that's been a long time in the making--well over this administration, the prior administration," adding that the debt-to-GDP ratio is central concern to the agency.

Excessive debt was the primary cause of the downgrade. Not the Tea Party. In fact, S&P implicitly validated the Tea Party's opposition to the Boehner/Obama plan. If there's one group of people that shouldn't get any blame for the reduced AA+ rating, it's the Tea Party, yet that's exactly who got assigned the blame in the Star editorial.

The S&P official did say that Congress should not have waited until two days before the deadline to reach an agreement with the White House. However, with all the talk that the Tea Party representatives rejected compromise, the same is true for President Obama and the Democrats. If two parties to a discussion keep rejecting the others' proposals, it seems sort of one-sided to blame only one side for not compromising.

As S&P said, the blame lies with at least two presidential administrations who spent more money than they had. It shouldn't be hung around the necks of the only people who are arguing for any semblance of fiscal sanity.

Earlier this morning, I read in the Star that Rick Perry was undecided if he was going to attend Wednesday's debate in Simi Valley at the Reagan Library due to the historic wildfires in his home state of Texas.

Also this morning, the Ventura County Republican Party announced that Rick Perry would appear at a meet-and-greet at the Camarillo airport immediately following the debate.

Is he going to come to Ventura County or isn't he?

The debate at the Reagan Library would be the first of Perry's presidential candidacy, were he to attend, and the national stage it will be on is very import for his campaign. However, as governor of a state that is experiencing the worst wildfire in its history, Perry does not want to be accused of putting his political ambitions over the welfare of Texans.

On the Early Show Tuesday morning, Perry said his focus was on the fires, but he called the situation "fluid."

However, as of noon, a Perry spokesman said he'll attend the debate after all.

Mark Miner, Perry's spokesman, said in a one-line email to USA Today's Jackie Kucinich Tuesday, that Perry plans to attend the GOP presidential debate. Previously, the Texas governor had said he wasn't sure if he would attend or not because of the raging wildfires plaguing Texas amid a prolonged drought.

 Politically speaking, Perry will attempt to appear in control of the wildfire situation while briefly visiting California. Realistically, there's not much he can't do from here that he could do in Texas--it's not like he's going to be personally hosing down any fires no matter what state he's in. In-state rivals will use the opportunity to ding him a bit, but the payoff of a good performance in the national spotlight at the Simi Valley debate far exceeds any damage he'll incur by being absent.

That means that he'll presumably attend the county GOP meet-and-greet in Camarillo, which is interesting because that's in Romney territory.  Romney campaigned for Tony Strickland in his State Senate campaign and endorsed him in last year's unsuccessful bid to become the state controller. Because Perry is in town doesn't mean that the county party is going to be endorsing him--the official email that went out carried a post-script that the meet-and-greet was not to be construed as an endorsement of any candidate.

The Ventura County Star urged members of the community to act with civility as Simi Valley captures national attention this week due to the Republican presidential debate. Reminding its readers of the universal condemnation of vitriolic rhetoric that took place after Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was nearly assassinated, the Star wrote:

During the debate we expect the candidates to voice their differences; meanwhile, outside the library, some citizens may use this moment in the nation's spotlight to demonstrate their disapproval of a candidate or a cause. All of them, we hope, will heed the adage to "disagree without being disagreeable."

I join the Star in this sentiment. I just wish the national Democratic leadership would follow suit. Sarah Palin was practically accused of shooting Giffords herself after her PAC innocuously put targets on a map of various Congressional districts, including  Giffords', despite no evidence existing that Jared Lee Loughner ever saw it. How could Palin put such violent imagery on her website? Democrats asked themselves, even though campaigns from both sides of the aisle used crosshair symbols regularly.

Monday, Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa practically declared war on the GOP while warming up a crowd for President Obama.

"We got to keep an eye on the battle that we face: The war on workers. And you see it everywhere, it is the Tea Party. And you know, there is only one way to beat and win that war. The one thing about working people is we like a good fight. And you know what? They've got a war, they got a war with us and there's only going to be one winner. It's going to be the workers of Michigan, and America. We're going to win that war," Jimmy Hoffa Jr. said to a heavily union crowd.

"President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Let's take these son of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong," Hoffa added.

During the debt ceiling debate, Joe Biden allegedly called Tea Partiers "terrorists."

Biden was agreeing with a line of argument made by Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) at a two-hour, closed-door Democratic Caucus meeting.

"We have negotiated with terrorists," an angry Doyle said, according to sources in the room. "This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money."

Biden, driven by his Democratic allies' misgivings about the debt-limit deal, responded: "They have acted like terrorists."

Doyle added that the Tea Party wanted to use a "weapon of mass destruction"--the threat of default on U.S. debt obligations. Democratic Rep. Luis Guterrez said, "The arsonists must be stopped."

I have no doubt that any Democratic demonstrators at the Reagan Library will be better behaved than their leaders in Washington.