Cindy Sheehan, Jodie Evans, Hugo Chavez and Medea Benjamin

The Great Melanie Morgan is putting together a protest for tomorrow and according to Variety’s Wilshire & Washington, it looks as though the protest will also be an opportunity to do a little star-gazing:

Jerry Brown will be at the Venice home of Jodie Evans for a $500-per-person event on Saturday, with a host list that includes Frank Gehry, Sally Kellerman, Bill Press, Stanley Sheinbaum, Hope Warschaw and Gail Zappa.

That’s Pritzker Prize winning architect Frank Gehry…
Oscar-nominee and “M*A*S*H” star Sally Kellerman…
Left-wing columnist and talk radio host Bill Press…
Funder of left-wing causes Stanley Sheinbaum…
Someone named Hope Warschaw…
and Frank Zappa’s second wife, Gail…

Hey, so what if Jodie Evans and her Code Pinksters likes to partner up with Hamas to donate $600,000 in “humanitarian aid” to the same terrorists out on a rampage to kill our military in Iraq? These prominent Hollywoodists and their moneyed ilk are just trying to be open-minded and tolerant. It’s not like she’s Sarah Palin.

Melanie Morgan and her fellow patriots will be at Evans’ home before the event which begins at 4 p.m.Saturday at 757 Palms Blvd., Venice, Calif.

For more information go to www.moveamericaforward.com.

I’ll be getting into that in detail in another series of articles, but we’re here to talk about Hollywood. Hollywood was once a conservative town run by immigrants who believed in the American way. Many of the stars fought in WWII and acted in patriotic movies. But there was a labor struggle in Hollywood starting with the unions, which began to get infiltrated by communists and socialists in the 1930s. They made more and more demands of the studios that they didn’t like. In 1947, the studio bosses decided to take advantage of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), with which Senator Joseph McCarthy had no direct involvement despite misinformation to the contrary. The Hollywood studio bosses wanted to bust up the unions and the method they used was the HUAC investigations and the blacklist.

Instead of solving their problem, it created a backlash which fills many members of Hollywood with bitterness to this day. It created a whole mythology and a flawed rationale for some to reject all things conservative, even though conservative politics was not really the issue at all. A sort of ideological purge began to take hold in Hollywood. Those with conservative leanings were made to feel so unwelcome that to this day many of them keep their politics to themselves. As Charlton Heston often said, “There are more conservatives in the closet in Hollywood than gays.”

Former MCA/Universal chief Lew Wasserman was famous for his politics. Like many in Hollywood, he picked the Democrats as the party to favor in the hopes that they would favor his company. Like lemmings, the industry followed his example.

Small wonder Wasserman felt a natural affinity for Lyndon Johnson. Facing a relentless Justice Department investigation in the early 1960s, Wasserman discovered the river of power that flowed from channeling Hollywood money to Democratic candidates. LBJ’s 1964 campaign marked his elevation into the top ranks of Democratic fund-raisers. In The Power and the Glitter, his 1990 book on Hollywood and politics, Ronald Brownstein writes, “Wasserman, Hollywood’s toughest operator, eased into this rugged environment as if he were born to it.”

But Wasserman, unlike the left-wing Malibu Democrats, was never an ideologue, as evidenced by his 1968 support for Hubert Humphrey. From Johnson to Clinton, his cause was making sure that the film industry had a pipeline to a Democratic White House. In his equation of politics with business, in his understanding that money buys access, Wasserman was no different than the conservative Texas oilmen who bankrolled the rise of LBJ.

Wasserman was known for punishing those in town didn’t support the Democrats. When studio heads set such examples, the minions often follow suit. So many Hollywood people started supporting Democrats, not just in Washington but the state of California. They funneled millions into the campaigns of people like Jerry Brown, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, etc. The state became bluer over time. When Hollywood darling President Bill Clinton closed a lot of military bases in California, it helped to push the state more into the Democrat column. And lax immigration policies favored by Democrats, who see illegal aliens as their future voters, hurt Republicans in the state even more. Especially when the Republicans tried to fight back against the huge costs illegal aliens placed on the state budget.

Progressives believe in the nanny state. They’ve ushered in a quasi-Victorian age where more and more things become banned. Where your every action is dictated to by the state. California keeps creating laws to micro-manage its citizens’ every move. And all of that bureaucracy costs money. As a result, the government has become increasingly voracious when it comes to taxes and fines. They fine people for anything they can think of and tax them when they’re not fining them.

This makes the cost of living in California too much for the working class and the poor, not to mention the rich who are tired of being soaked. Business and talent are flocking away from the state. Hollywood productions are forced to relocate to more affordable climes. Which means the city of Los Angeles, which has largely depended on the Hollywood cash cow for most of the last 80 years, is starting to feel the pain. Hollywood is a vast industry that employs thousands of people. It helps fund many more ancillary businesses from the restaurants to the gardeners to the baristas at the coffee shops. When the money in Hollywood dries up so do a lot of the businesses that employ people, like out of work actors and writers. And when that happens, things gets ugly.

The end result is the state of California is on a collision course with bankruptcy. Hollywood helped bring about the end of its own glory. America was once looked on by the world as a savior. It rescued millions from the oppression of the Nazis and Communism. But Hollywood started cranking out movies starting in the late 60s that “deconstructed” the American myths. More and more films portrayed the government as evil, the military as butchers, America as oppressors. Not surprisingly, anti-Americanism started to spread around the world.

The irony of progressives is they attack the very government they created. The oppressive government which spies on our every movie in Hollywood films is less the product of the cold war conservatives and more the product of big government-loving statists. And that’s a progressive ideology. Not a conservative one.

The cost of running a government the progressive way is too expensive to take care of anyone well. It only exploits and robs revenues the citizens as much as inhumanly possible. The people are given inferior benefits as a bribe for their acceptance. They’re bribed with their own money or the money of those who could have given them a good job, if the state wasn’t bilking them first.

If Hollywood wants to return to its former success, it needs to stop deluding itself and start supporting those who would make the business climate good for them again.The leaders in California that the progressives support are not helping little guy. They are making them destitute. And if Hollywood doesn’t get smarter fast, they will meet them on the way down.

When you factor in that Barack Obama is my president, Joe Biden is my vice-president, Nancy Pelosi is next in line, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer are my senators, Brad Sherman is my congressman, Antonio Villaraigosa is my mayor and Jerry Brown is lurking in the wings to be my governor, do you really think I’ll be turning my pen into a plowshare anytime soon?    

But at least now you might have a better handle on why I look back so fondly on what I have come to regard as the good old days when an American’s major complaint was that he had taxation without representation. 

On top of everything else, I live in Los Angeles and have spent most of my adult life laboring in Hollywood, a place that some people regard as less an actual location than a state of mind.  I agree it is a state of mind in the same sense that paranoia and schizophrenia are states of mind. 

After working in the field of entertainment for about 40 years, I swear to you that there are a fair number of normal, decent human beings who work in the industry.  But truth compels me to say that the lower you go in the pecking order, the likelier you are to find them.  That’s not to say that every producer, actor, director and writer, is an arrogant, leftwing, coke-snorting, bottom-feeding egomaniac, but that’s certainly the way to bet. 

Sometimes, when I’m daydreaming about what Hell must be like, I envision a place where every day you wake up and have to go work for someone like Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, nasty sourpusses who think that their every whim should be immediately pandered to and who regard themselves as God, but with a bigger expense account, a larger staff and a better pension plan. 

In short, Pelosi, Frank and Reid and their congressional cronies, could find true happiness working at a TV network, a movie studio or a theatrical agency.  Perhaps you think I’m making this up, but I’m not.  Liberal politicians are doing their best to shove Obamacare down our throats, pretending it’s manna from Heaven, but you may have noticed that they haven’t the slightest intention of leaving their own medical care up to a lottery system.  And can you really blame them?  Do you think Pelosi wants a bunch of strangers deciding if she can get another dozen face lifts?  You think Robert Byrd wants to leave it up to a death panel to determine if it’s time to put the old Ku Kluxer on an ice floe? 

You could call them hypocrites, but I call them Hollywood hopefuls.  They’d fit right in.  This is the town, after all, where people are still whining over the fact that a handful of mediocre actors and hack writers were blacklisted 60 years ago because they were, for the most part, unrepentant Communists whose allegiance was to the evil Soviet Union.  But these same people think nothing of blacklisting writers and directors who have done nothing worse than made the fatal mistake of turning 50. 

Many years ago, radio wit Fred Allen observed that “You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, stick it in the navel of a flea, and still have room left over for two caraway seeds and an agent’s heart.”  I say he was being too kind.  Although I regard myself as basically a loyal person, I’ve had about two dozen agents in my life.  What’s more, in what was a moderately successful TV writing career, by getting my own jobs, I made money for all of them, except the last one.  Which was just as well because she’s the one who went to the slammer for stealing her clients’ money.

 The reason, by the way, I kept leaving agents wasn’t simply because none of them ever earned his or her 10%, but because eventually they all lied to me about what they would do for me or, worse yet, what they had already done. 

In my experience, agents are people who like to have lunch, shmooze with other agents and con young women into having sex with them.  Those are the male agents, of course.  Female agents, on the other hand, like to have lunch, shmooze with other agents and con young women into having sex with them. 

In other words, if a genie somehow managed to switch everyone in Hollywood with everyone in Congress, you would barely notice it.  In fact, aside from the fact that the paparazzi would all have to pack up and move east and that “Henry Waxman: The Musical!” would finally be green-lighted at Universal, life would go on as usual.

Last week in San Francisco, Obama headlined a three million dollar fundraiser at the Westin St. Francis Hotel. The San Francisco Chronicle reports about 160 people paid $30,400 or more per couple for a private dinner with Obama followed by a reception costing $500 to $1000 that drew over 900 attendees. Among those at the dinner was the leftist, so-called antiwar group Code Pink co-founder, Jodie Evans.

The Chronicle reports Jodie Evans had a several minutes long conversation with Obama at the fundraiser.

Why does Jodie Evans merit such face time with the president even though she acts as an agent of influence for the anti-American governments of Iran, Cuba and Venezuela, as well as Middle Eastern terrorists?

Over the life of the campaign, Jodie Evans became one of Obama’s top donors, giving the maximum $2300 to his respective primary and general election funds and tens of thousands of dollars more to the Obama Victory Fund, a joint Obama-Democratic National Committee fund.

(more…)

“I don’t care what the tabloids and the Wall Street Journal say,” said a weeping Illinois. “I still love you, Cali!”

The 640-mile long funeral parade route was lined with flowers, candles, teddy bears, and IOUs from millions of mourners and debtors who made the somber journey to watch the passing of the state that had once ruled the box office and industrial charts. Among them were current chart-toppers who cited California as a key influence.

“If it wasn’t for California, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” said Arizona of Westside 3, the popular Sunbelt trio who recently benefited from the late state’s generous gift of fleeing taxpayers and businesses. As a tribute to their mentor, Arizona vowed the group would start spending money “like crack-addled hip hop stars.”

“California’s financial and musical legacy will never die,” said band mates Nevada and Oregon.

At the official funeral service at the LA Coliseum, a grief stricken Washington, who teamed with California on several hit software and wine projects, had to be physically restrained from climbing into the deceased’s gold plated casket.

Similar emotional outpourings were the rule of the day. Stories – apocryphal or not – of the late state’s bizarre self-destructive behavior and fondness for molesting children did little to dampen the flood of tributes from fans who preferred to remember California as America’s Sweetheart.

From a humble beginning as a water-poor remote Spanish mission outpost, California proved to be a precocious and talented child performer. It struck gold with ‘Sutter’s Mill’ in 1849, earning accolades and attracting millions of crusty bearded prospectors. Black gold soon followed with ‘Arizona.’ Unlike many child acts, California made a smooth transition to adolescence, scoring a major hit with ‘Agriculture’ in 1891.

Even a frightening bout with tremors did not stop the flow of hits. The 1915 megasmash ‘Hollywood’ broke all records, as did the wartime favorite ‘Aerospace.’ More recently, California topped the charts with ‘Tourism,’ ‘High Tech,’ and ‘Coastal Pretension.’

For a time it seemed as if the superstar could do no wrong, but behind the glittering facade of Disneyland Manor troubling signs of mental instability began to emerge. The state developed a well-publicized drug problem during filming of 1967’s ‘Summer of Love,’ and briefly dabbled in strange religious cults. Under the influence of spiritual guru Jerry Brown, it began wholesale experimentation in exotic spending programs, eventual resulting in a traumatic 1979 stay at the Prop 13 Rehab Center.

During the 80’s and 90’s California enjoyed a brief career renaissance with hits like ‘Olympics,’ ‘Real Estate’ and ‘Dot Com Boom,’ but personal problems plagued the reclusive star once again. During the recording of the ‘OJ’ and ‘Rodney King’ albums, friends and visitors expressed concern over its recurring tremors and penchant for self-mutilation.

“California used to be so happy and beautiful,” said a horrified Ohio. “I hardly recognize it any more.”

During that period, camp insiders say the increasingly psychotic state began driving away its long time professional management team and support crew. In its place, it assembled an entourage of con men and embezzlers, some of who stoked California’s increasingly bizarre environmental paranoia. It was seldom seen in public without a breathing mask to ward off imagined pollutants.

Worse, the hits began drying up; the huge 2001 flop ‘Dot Com Bust’ put a huge crimp into California’s once unlimited cash flow. Despite the setback, insiders say the superstar was unwilling to change its lavish lifestyle, and retreated once again into spending abuse. Personal expenses skyrocketed, propelled in part by California’s eight million adopted foster children. During the 90’s sensationalistic accounts of child abuse began surfacing. Eyewitnesses reported California cruising local neighborhoods in school buses, luring unsuspecting kid for sessions of ‘public education.’ By some estimates hundreds of thousands were left traumatized and severely brain damaged.

The charges were vigorously denied by California camp spokestate Vermont.

“California loves children,” said Vermont. “California loves children, because deep inside California is a also a child — full of innocent wonder, and the belief that any budget wish can come true as long as you just wish hard enough.”

True or not, the charges alienated many longtime fans, leaving California in an ever-worsening financial position. In 2003 the state rejected suggestions that it was facing bankruptcy, saying that “I can’t be out of money, I still have checks left.” Amid the maelstrom, though, it fired tour manager Grey Davis who many blamed for California’s financial woes. In his place, California hired Arnold Schwarzenegger to help engineer a career-saving comeback tour.

Under the management of the flamboyant Austrian body builder / therapist, California began a rapid descent that ultimately ended in death. Some faulted Schwarzenegger’s unconventional therapeutic methods and prescription spending pills, including state pension steroids that some say were powerful enough to kill a Scandinavian industrial power. Schwarzenegger denied culpability, saying that his spending pills “help build de upper financial torso and lats, and deese other sings and so on.”

Despite the last minute financial maneuvers analysts say the state died penniless, owing creditors as much as $100 billion. Amid the swirling recriminations between California camp factions, fans chose to mark it’s passing quietly. Longtime California fan club president Iowa said that despite being the constant butt of the Golden State’s insults and jokes, it will remember the late superstar fondly.

“Let’s not remember California as a bloated, rotting freakshow corpse hanging above a filthy public pension toilet,” it said. “Let’s remember the good times. Like my six-day bender at the ‘91 Rose Bowl.”

“California’s pain is finally over, and I like to think that the whole state is going to a better place,” Iowa added. “Just look at all those U-Hauls headed to Oklahoma.”

I quit being a liberal because I didn’t believe that members of particular minority groups deserved advantages denied to others; that illegal aliens weren’t entitled to anything but a swift kick to the backside; that being a devout Christian didn’t make you a bad person; and that capitalism was a system that worked, while socialism not only didn’t work, but, wherever it was tried, turned into a tyranny.

I honestly don’t know why there are so many liberals today and I certainly can’t imagine why they have such a lousy agenda.  I have come up with a theory, however.  Here in California, roughly 30 years ago, because of budget cuts, a great many people were released from insane asylums.  They wound up living in the streets, which explains the large number of homeless people, even though Democrats would have you believe that those are normal people who simply lost their jobs along the way.

Even after the state became more solvent, it became almost impossible to get these poor souls back into institutions where they could be fed, clothed and given their meds, because the ACLU lawyers fought for their inalienable right to starve, freeze and use the sidewalks of your city as their combination bedroom, living room and bathroom.

Inevitably, they also got to vote.  As a result, the likes of Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Gray Davis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Antonio Villaraigosa, Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown, wound up winning all the major elections.  I mean, the truth is, you’d have to be crazy to vote for those people.

I have to suspect that a similar scenario took place all over the country.  How else to explain that two-thirds of Americans actually believe that Barack Obama’s policies will save our economy?  I’m not even a Christian, but I find it bizarre that people who pooh-pooh the idea that Christ raised the dead or walked on water are totally convinced that a guy who’s tossing trillions of dollars into the air is a financial miracle worker.  Talk about blind faith!

It makes me wonder if these same people, were they facing personal bankruptcy, would think that the answer to their own financial difficulties would be to give their wife an American Express card and drop her off at Tiffany’s.

If liberals aren’t simply insane, they surely must be hypocrites.  Why else would they insist that spending eight years bashing President Bush and comparing him, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, to the Nazi High Command was patriotic, but merely questioning President Obama’s qualifications, judgment and policies, makes one a racist?

Also, how is it that when, between 2000 and 2006, when the GOP had control of the Oval Office, the House and the Senate, on those rare occasions they didn’t do the bidding of Ted Kennedy, John Murtha or Charles Schumer, they were condemned as divisive?  However, when Obama and his left-wing cronies rushed through a trillion dollar stimulus package and a pork-filled budget over Republican objections, nobody in their crowd cried “Foul!” or insisted on reaching across the aisle for a group hug and a few choruses of “Kumbaya”?

Before anyone bothers sending an e-mail reminding me that three Republican senators voted with the Democrats on the stimulus bill, I haven’t forgotten.  But, let’s face it — the two ladies from Maine are merely the east coast version of Boxer and Feinstein.  As for Arlen Specter, I suspect that along the way, he’ll switch to the Extraterrestial Party if, as he inches closer to being a hundred years old, he decides that’s his best chance of winning an election.

I know that people such as Sen. Specter and Sen. Jeffords would have us believe that they switched parties because of their principles, but I would prefer it if they only said such silly things in the hope of making me laugh.  That’s because I love to laugh, but I hate being taken for a fool.  I mean, really, Jim Jeffords wakes up one day when he’s 67 years old and Specter opens his eyes at the age of 79 and suddenly decide that the GOP isn’t as conservative as they’d like, so the solution is to link left arms with the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank?

Something else that makes me wonder if, in a nicer, kinder world, liberals wouldn’t be housed in a warm place where they’d be kept safely away from sharp objects and voting booths, is their notion of what constitutes torture.  In my world, cutting off Daniel Pearl’s head, throwing Anne Frank in an oven or having to listen to Chris Matthews, is torture.  But by no means is it playing loud music, keeping people awake, making them share space with a caterpillar or even dousing them with water, in order to get them to cough up information that might prevent another 9/11 or keep American soldiers from being ambushed.

Only a liberal could confuse actual torture with college hazing.  I suspect there are members of fraternities who could share more harrowing tales than the Islamics with their Korans, their three squares and their personal prayer mats at Gitmo.

Another difference that seems to escape liberals is that it’s torture when the only purpose is to cause pain, not when it’s done in order to pry important information from terrorists.

It’s bad enough that any number of self-righteous academics kept military recruiters off college campuses, pretending that their objection stemmed from the army’s don’t ask/don’t tell policy, and not simply because left-wingers hate anything and everything that smacks of patriotism.

In much the same way, those on the Left have led a crusade against the Boy Scouts of America because, so they say, they oppose the policy of not allowing gay men to be Scout leaders and take young boys into the woods on camping trips.  Sensible people regard that as a sensible policy.  It’s not to suggest that every gay man is a pedophile, but simply recognizing that most pedophiles are gay men.  Just as every Muslim is not a terrorist, just about every terrorist these days is a Muslim.  So, why should parents take any unnecessary chances with their most precious possessions just so no one’s feelings get hurt?

Liberals don’t really care about homosexuals, by the way, unless they themselves happen to be gay.  The truth is liberals rarely serve in the military now that service is voluntary and they don’t usually let their kids join the Boy Scouts, not because they’re offended by the aforementioned policy, but because the group fosters faith-based and patriotic ideals.

If you want a perfect example of liberal hypocrisy, consider the recent beauty pageant when someone who calls himself, in homage to Paris Hilton, Perez Hilton (born Mario Lavenderia), who had no business even being on stage, got to ask Miss California, Carrie Prejean, how she felt about same-sex marriages.  Her honest answer probably cost her the victory, while earning her the respect of most fair and decent Americans.

What I find so telling about the incident was that in California, the reason that the same-sex marriage measure was defeated on the November ballot was because 70% of blacks voted that way.  But gay activists only demonstrated outside Catholic and Mormon churches and businesses.  Furthermore, I guarantee that if Miss Prejean had been black, instead of a blue-eyed blonde, Mr. Hilton wouldn’t have dared open his ugly little yap.

It’s also worth noting that President Obama gave the exact same answer to the exact same question during the campaign, and yet the gays voted overwhelmingly for him.  Which certainly suggests that, thanks to the insane asylums being relatively empty these days, honesty can cost you a tiara, but not the presidency.

At a time when reckless, lightweight, non-achieving ideologues are all the rage in American politics; when nary a meaningful accomplishment is needed to move up the political ladder; when substance takes a backseat to teleprompters and pedestrian, car salesman charms; Newsom is trying to parlay his overly-bleached smile, expensive suits and camera-ready prop wife (not pictured below) into the most visible governorship in the United States.  

The early conventional wisdom on Newsom─when first elected─was that despite the vapid pretty boy image, insiders knew he was he was going to be the next JFK, if not better.  Five years later the reviews are in: even the insiders realize that on his best day, he’s an embarrassment to vapid pretty boys everywhere. 

To date, Newsom’s greatest achievement as Mayor of San Francisco was getting re-elected in a landslide despite having repeated sex with his best friend’s/campaign manager’s wife (of course, he had to go through the motions of rehab following a Pat O’Brien style booza culpa).  Other notable accomplishments include arriving drunk to the vigil of a dying police officer; declaring a city-wide “Colt Studio Day” to honor a San Francisco-based gay porn company (there’s no such thing as too much pandering to the gay community in San Francisco politics); fellaciating a news reporter’s microphone on camera (admittedly, he may have been drunk or high on coke at the time); unilaterally ordering city agencies to issue marriage licenses to gay couples without any legal authorization to do so (he was ignoring the US Constitution before Obama made it cool to do so); offering no-questions-asked city ID cards and bank accounts to illegal aliens to help them launder save their money; appearing in the contact list of Paris Hilton’s hacked cell phone; increasing city funding of alternative lifestyle street festivals; dating a 19-year-old girl in between wives (though he honorably forced her to change her age on MySpace to 26 in anticipation of cameras catching them drinking together); and violating federal law in the name of sanctuary by failing to report illegal aliens negotiating their way through the city’s criminal justice system.  

Newsom’s reign over San Francisco reflects the tradition of City Hall legends Kwame Kilpatrick, Marion “Bitch Set Me Up” Barry, John Street and Ray Nagin─combining bad judgment, bad policies, incompetence, arrogance and corruption in creative, new ways.  The city is in disarray: bankrupt; filthy; ubiquitously potholed and cracked; and festering with drugs, homeless and illegals.  Its sanctuary-city status, touchy-feely approach to crime, and maniacal spending on social services have encouraged all matter of societal debris to migrate there in mass.  When it doesn’t smell like over-ripe trash, it smells like stale urine.  Not really what Tony Bennett had in mind.

Law and order is (sort of) maintained by an inept police department emasculated by Newsom’s fondness for illegal aliens and affirmative action.  His bizarre choice of police commissioner, Asian-American female Heather Fong (think of her as San Francisco’s version of Janet Napolitano but wimpier, less qualified and more stupid), helped him with the city’s considerable Asian and “progressive” votes, but didn’t help much with the crime rate in general or the homicide rate in particular, which reached a 13-year high under her watch.  Fong is best known for forgetting to take a required gun re-certification test and inspiring department-wide contempt and disorganization.

The SFPD recently found its way into national headlines when it was learned that a hapless undocumented worker with multiple felony convictions and at least four timeouts in San Francisco prisons had no trouble getting out and killing a man along with his two sons.  Per Newsom’s policy of progressive tolerance ─ multiple felony convictions notwithstanding ─ this unfortunate fellow was never reported to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation.  

However, luckily for the SFPD, thanks to the existence of the San Francisco Municipal Transit Organization, the SFPD is not the city’s least organized and most dysfunctional agency.  Seemingly, the only thing killing more people in San Francisco than illegal aliens and common criminals is Muni busses.  But in all fairness, Newsom did ban all bottled water from city government offices to help the environment.

In a peculiar juxtaposition, while Newsom wants to capitalize on the Obama Inertia and ride his hallowed Burberry coattails into the California Governor’s Mansion, the broke, wretched San Francisco he leaves behind may well be a microcosm of the America Obama leaves behind once all of his hope/change jibber jabber has been realized. Both men stand for the same idiocy; they’re just operating at different points on their respective disaster timelines.

If there’s an upside to Gavin Newsom it’s the latest Mrs. Newsom.  This is not your father’s first lady.  Yes, she’s pretty; she knows how to smile; and she knows how to dress (putting her at least three legs up on another first lady I know).  She even comes complete with a Stanford pedigree.  But more importantly, she’s starring in a movie released last month where she engages in a three-way sex act with a Sasquatch and an alien (space, not illegal).  If there’s someone out there who’s put a Stanford MBA to better use, I’m not aware of it. Take that, Shriver!

One of Newsom’s Democratic competitors in 2010 will probably be another unaccomplished, philandering, dead-behind-the-eyes big-city mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa of Tijuana by the Sea Los Angeles.  Villaraigosa’s credentials include past membership in a Mexican street gang and changing his name mid-way through life to something more exotic (a la Barry Sotero)—the lovably ethnic Villaraigosa used to be Tony Villar, Jr. Other likely Democratic candidates include former Governor Moonbeam himself, Jerry Brown, and one-third of Capitol Hill’s NorCal half-wit trifecta, Diane Feinstein.  Clearly, not the best options… kind of like the sides menu at a county fair fish-on-a-stick stand.

At the rate Barry is debasing the Office of President of the United States, the empty suit movement should be debunked by 2010.  But as the 2008 presidential election demonstrated, the naiveté of the electorate can never be under-estimated.  If a dopey community organizer can be elected President of the United States, why couldn’t an aging, wannabe frat boy be elected Governor of California?

It should come as no surprise that in 2009, an era when the L.A. Basin’s air quality bureaucracy, the SCAQMD, wants to ban dark cars because they need more air conditioning in the summer, that the California Energy Commissariate is drafting an order to outlaw TVs.  (Perhaps if our TVs had one state-approved channel they would relent.) 

Why is the California Energy Commission (CEC), a Gov. Jerry Brown creation, wanting to ban television sets?  Well, it seems that a honking 48-inch plasma screen, that bright symbol of the bygone days of conspicuous consumption and purveyor of drooling vacuity, uses too much electricity, and electricity production makes too much greenhouse gas emissions (at least in America, where half of our electricity comes from coal – in France, a plasma screen would emit nary a CO2 molecule as the TVs there are nuclear powered). 

The CEC plan, contained in a dry-sounding reported entitled, “December 2008 Draft Efficiency Standards for Televisions” proposes to ban about 200 television models.  This regulatory diktat would conservatively result in 4,600 more lost jobs in the California retail industry as consumers switch to smuggling 50-inch plasmas into the state via the Internet, resulting in another $50 million in lost tax revenue (does anyone see the irony in Al Gore’s invention being used to pump up carbon emissions?). 

Of course, television sets, just as with dishwashers and refrigerators, are getting more efficient all the time, a process that the free marker excels at on its own – at least it used to, before the age of AIG, bailouts, and executive compensation caps.  TV manufacturers pour millions of dollars into innovation yearly and are making sets that automatically use less energy in a darkened room and switch off standby mode after a period of disuse.  

But, rather than let nature and consumer choice take its course, the CEC must be seen as acting.  For bureaucracies that don’t act are soon acted upon by politicians. 

Greens grumble that old-TVs (many of which are still in service – when I was a kid, we had one black and white TV in the apartment – how quaint) only produce 220 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per year.  Larger plasma screens produce 880 pounds though.  Hence, they must be banned.  Unsaid is the fact that, if anything decent were being produced for television, emissions would skyrocket.  On this basis NBC should make out like a bandit with a carbon cap-and-trade program since their sole show in the prime-time top-20 Nielsen ratings is rated an energy-saving #20, translating weak viewership into an Earth-friendly virtue, and a few million tons of valuable carbon credits.  

Another sure way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from plasma TVs is to reduce the electricity driving them from coal or natural gas, which powers 60 percent of California’s grid, and use instead, nuclear power, which has 55 times less emissions than coal and 30 times less than natural gas.  Thus, a nuclear-powered plasma screen would emit an environmentally-conscious 18 pounds of CO2 per year – far less than a coal-fired black and white vacuum tube set.   

Few Californians know that the Golden State is the most electrically efficient in America.  The CEC would be proud to tell us that.  What they don’t want us to know is that half of our per capita energy consumption savings over the past 30 years has come from the evisceration of California’s manufacturing base – it seems that not making stuff saves energy (ignoring the fact that we still consume stuff that we now just import from coal-fired China).  No wonder California’s North Coast is now meeting the 30 percent greenhouse gas emission reduction target set by 2006’s landmark AB 32 – unemployed people don’t emit much CO2 (unless they’re at home watching a banned TV).  

Assemblyman Chuck DeVore (R-Irvine) is a candidate for U.S. Senate in 2010 and a retired Army National Guard lieutenant colonel.