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Presidnt’s Message
January 2011

Turning the Page

Fast away the old year passes,
Fa la la la la, la la la la.
Hail the new, ye lads and lasses,
Fa la la la la, la la la la.

Thus the traditional carol reads before those with trembling chins have rendered it stupid. Which is to say, would you believe “Don we now our bright apparel”? But I digress.

What should we hail in this New Year that lies before us, those 52 weeks that stretch from now to the year when we hope to see a Mitch Daniels-like figure elected to the highest office in the land? As a dealer in Vegas might say, open a new pack of Bicycles with those 52 cards and let’s see what we get. The political landscape is a target-rich environment, and since we’ve got to start somewhere let’s start here at home in California.

The editorial in our Contra Costa Times, shortly after last November’s election, tartly opined that “Californians are every bit as dysfunctional as their representatives in Sacramento. Perhaps that’s why they re-elected so many.” But then it has been suggested that it may have been a good thing for Meg Whitman to have lost to Jerry Brown.

Let’s journey to Fantasyland and consider that maybe our electorate isn’t so dysfunctional after all. Maybe they saw justice in sending Jerry Brown back to Sacramento to clean up the mess he helped create. It would have been unkind, and probably counter-productive, to have sent Meg to that abattoir only to get torn apart and chewed up by the public employee unions and entrenched, leftwing special interests.

Then imagine Brother Jerry in the twilight of his political career deciding that his tarnished legacy needs some polishing. Maybe, just maybe, he wants to leave the Golden State better off than when he found it at the beginning of 2011. Of course even a small gain toward fiscal sanity would ensure that. But maybe, just maybe, he wants to cut the restraints that keep us from being golden once again.
Start with the unfunded public employee pensions and health benefits. And we can get some help on this because California is not alone in having this problem. When I say help, I don’t mean a bailout. Why should the sober people of Indiana send money to California to save us from our profligacy? Our new Republican House of Representatives certainly won’t midwife that kind of deal. But Indiana can send sound advice and that is what we need in Sacramento most of all.
Then we need to get a handle on public employee unions themselves for they have become the tail that wags the dog. Mr. Obama’s egregious stimulus package was designed to pay off the unions for their help in getting him elected. Notice that much of the money going to states was earmarked for public employees: teachers, police and fire fighters. Then recall Obama’s recent admission that there were no “shovel ready” projects awaiting the stimulus money. Well maybe the Fourth Bore.

Once we get California’s public employees to focus on the fact that they are “public servants,” perhaps they can also focus on the fact that maybe they should give back a little---even retirees---to save the jobs of their brethren who face layoffs because states, counties and municipalities can no longer afford them.
Next we should work to damp down the rhetoric about how “the rich” must pay. Boy oh boy is this tiresome. Democrats are particularly skilled at employing this twaddle as they heat up the atmosphere for class envy and class warfare. You get the picture; the rich are rich because they somehow cheated those of us who are not rich out of our rightful inheritance. For Democrats, wealth creation is a zero-sum game, which is to say your gain is someone else’s loss. That’s cruel and abysmally ignorant, and a few Democrats are smart enough to know this, which makes them dishonest as well.

So the next time you hear rabble-rousing, know-nothings calling for the confiscation of other people’s money---Obama refers to it as sharing the wealth---call their attention to the Korean immigrant family that runs the cleaning establishment next to our Safeway. The whole family works long, hard hours in order to educate their children so that they all can realize the American dream. Democrats want to raise their taxes because they earn too much.
Tell these mountebanks to look at their own dentists, for example, who incurred education debts, deferred gratification, developed their practices and created jobs for dental hygienists and office staff. Democrats think they earn too much.
Look at Meg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Carly Fiorina. They earned what they have through hard work and wise choices. They have created well-paying jobs for many and, although they owe the rest of us nothing, generously give back to our community and nation. Robber barons? Well hardly. Then why do Democrats loathe them?

So that’s a start for 2011. It promises to be a very interesting year.