So what is still going on at Duke can reasonably be extrapolated to at least the Humanities departments of America’s universities and colleges. And that is not pretty.

One of the Lacrosse players who was NOT accused by the pathetic Crystal Gail Mangum was nonetheless caught up in the blast and suspended by the university at roughly the same time as the other players. He is now suing. As you can read here, Ryan McFadyen is arguably the person who behaved with greatest honor in the whole affair. He certainly behaved with greater honor than prosecutor Nifong or Durham police — who tried to suborn him into giving false evidence. There is another glimpse of his character here.

And when McFadyen refused to be intimidated into giving false evidence, Nifong and the police must have realized that he had put them into a dangerous position. Fabricating evidence is a crime with severe penalties. So they immediately went all-out to blacken his name. And that blackening still shows up today in that he has become something of a hate figure to many.

So he is now suing over that defamation and the illegal and improper behaviour of all concerned in the matter.

The trial has however produced some document disclosures that reveal the full depth of the moral depravity of senior Duke U officials. The documents contain bombshell emails from Duke President Brodhead and others suggesting that Duke’s primary concern was to protect its PR, even if that meant sacrificing innocent students.

In documents submitted February 3 by Plaintiffs’ lawyers, President Brodhead is quoted in an email sent very early in the case to other Duke staff:

“Friends: a difficult question is, how can we support our lacrosse players at a devastatingly hard time without seeming to lend aid and comfort to their version of the story? We can’t do anything to side with them, or even, if they are exonerated, to imply that they behaved with honor. The central admin can’t, nor can Athletics.”

And Joe Alleva, then of the Duke Athletic Dept., also testified during his deposition on January 20, 2012, that he made positive and truthful statements about Plaintiffs and their teammates’ character at the University’s press conference on March 28, 2006.

Mr. Alleva testified that he was “crucified” immediately afterwards for making those statements by President Brodhead himself and in front of the Crisis Management Team, all of whom knew how “off-message” Mr. Alleva’s truthful, positive statements about plaintiffs were.

Alleva was the one who later told Duke lacrosse coach Pressler that “it’s not about the truth” any longer; that the case was about the interest groups and the integrity (reputation) of the university. (Hence the title of coach Pressler’s book, “It’s not about the truth”).

Or as Robert K. Steel (then chairman of Duke’s Board of Trustees) said in explaining why Duke would not be defending its falsely-accused students: “Sometimes people have to suffer for the good of the organization”. More details here

You would think that all the exposure of their moral depravity might have created some caution among Duke faculty about race-related matters. It does not appear to have done so. Just a few days ago I ran a large excerpt (scroll down) from an article which summarized the Arcidiacono affair. I will simply refer readers to there for a treatment of that little explosion of rage and hate. See HERE for the full article. Having their warped view of America threatened is intolerable to Duke’s Leftist Mafia.

No Leftist will admit it of course but I cannot see why Duke should be regarded as atypical. I don’t think there is anything especially poisonous in the air at North Carolina. I think we have seen coming to the surface at Duke what is smouldering away beneath the surface at most of America’s universities and colleges. They are true heirs of Stalin and the ghastly Soviet Union. They are a nest of vipers.

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

A Lincoln County, West Virginia Sheriff and Clerk are to plead guilty to charges of vote fraud in the 2010 Democrat primary after the pair were arrested during an election fraud investigation conducted by state and federal authorities.

Sheriff Jerry Bowman and Clerk Donald Whitten were caught in a scheme to file fraudulent absentee ballots in an effort to get Whitten elected Circuit Clerk. Whitten will also plead guilty to lying to an FBI agent hired by WV Secretary of State Natalie Tennant to investigate the false absentee ballots.

Sheriff Bowman, who is at the tail end of a second term and is term-limited from running again, conspired with Whitten and a thus far unidentified candidate for county commissioner to help Whitten win a close election with the fraudulent absentee ballot scheme.

“The Candidates further agreed that they would complete absentee ballot applications for voters,” the agreement documents said. “The Candidates also agreed that on those applications they would state certain reasons that voters were legally eligible to vote absentee, regardless of whether those reasons were true.”

In 2004 several Lincoln and Logan County officials were convicted of vote fraud in a federal vote-buying case. Convicted included Lincoln County Circuit Clerk Greg Stowers and county Assessor Jerry Weaver. Amazingly, Weaver is now running for county sheriff.

But, remember… left-wingers and Democrats say there is no vote fraud in the USA.

Said story: Activists Fight Green Projects, Seeing U.N. Plot

Across the country, activists with ties to the Tea Party are railing against all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy. They brand government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities.

They are showing up at planning meetings to denounce bike lanes on public streets and smart meters on home appliances — efforts they equate to a big-government blueprint against individual rights. (snip)

The protests date to 1992 when the United Nations passed a sweeping, but nonbinding, 100-plus-page resolution called Agenda 21 that was designed to encourage nations to use fewer resources and conserve open land by steering development to already dense areas. They have gained momentum in the past two years because of the emergence of the Tea Party movement, harnessing its suspicion about government power and belief that man-made global warming is a hoax.

Some may in fact see it as a UN plot, but, then, the UN has been pushing junk science and all sorts of initiatives, most recently “biodiversity” and “sustainability”, as a means to put more control into the hands of government, as well as people’s hard earned money. As Tom Nelson points out

Is Revkin really sure that Tea Party activisits don’t just see their hard-earned cash being blown on idiotic left-wing bad-weather-preventing projects?

Let me tell you a little tale. Behind my home is a greenway that follows the Neuse River. The stretch in my area, which extends a few miles from the Highway 264 bridge north, is mostly dirt and gravel. Over the last few months they have been paving it. And cutting down trees. Wait, cutting down trees on a greenway? And by “months” they have literally been slapping down a mile or two of pavement perhaps 5 feet wide. I hear their machines every weekday for months. Not quite sure what they are doing, but, I’m pretty sure it’s expensive. Now, I have no problem with the greenway. In fact, I think it’ll be great to rollerblade on (there are no good places in my area to ‘blade). Of course, not many people used it before: most folks either walked the sidewalks or the golf car paths. I’d go for a walk down it beforehand (it’s been closed for about 5 months now) and see no one else. A $13 million bond was voted in back in 2007. Perhaps, in this economy, it isn’t the time to spend the money on a greenway that will barely be used. Total cost for all the greenways is $30 million. Rather expensive, eh? And wasteful. Should have put convicts out there building it.

Similarely, TEA Party activists are tired of the government wasting enormous amounts of money, usually overspending at high levels, on “green” projects that will rarely be used. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes nature projects for the sake of nature are good. But, be responsible with the money. And don’t cut trees down on greenways, for goodness sakes.

(The Hill) The White House and Democrats have seized on legislation barring lawmakers from making insider stock trades as a political weapon to use against House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and his GOP colleagues.

The Senate voted 93-2 on Monday evening to advance the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, which prohibits lawmakers from using non-public information for financial advantage.

The overwhelming vote came after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) charged behind-the-scenes GOP opposition was holding up the debate. A senior GOP aide denied the allegation.

This raises the issue that it was done for purely partisan political purposes, not for any notion that it is wrong and distasteful for elected officials and government workers to engage in stock trades based on non-public information.

Because the House has yet to schedule a vote on a similar bill, Democrats in the Senate hope their quick action will suggest Republicans are resistant to the popular bill, which gained national attention after a November report on “60 Minutes.”

The Dems are crowing that the STOCK act was removed from markup last fall, but, um, wait a second

The STOCK Act was originally introduced in the 109th session of the House of Representatives on Mar. 28, 2006 by Brian Baird (D-WA) and Louise Slaughter (D-NY) where it died in committee. It was reintroduced in the 110th (May 16, 2007) and 111th (Jan. 26, 2009) House sessions where it also died in committee.

On Mar. 17, 2011, Tim Walz (D-MN) introduced the STOCK Act into the 112th House session where it gained one co-sponsor and was referred to various committees. Eight more co-sponsors joined by Nov. 4, 2011.

So, it died multiple times while Democrats controlled the House? And couldn’t get more than a few co-sponsors in 2011? And Dingy Harry never bothered with it previously, despite the legislation being out there? And that this looks more like a political stunt? Though, this stunt does have real teeth. S.2038 does say, in Sec. 605

A Member of Congress or an employee of Congress who violates the prohibition under section 602 shall be subject to appropriate punitive, disciplinary, and other remedial action in accordance with any applicable laws, resolutions, rules, or regulations.

At least until the Senate quietly passes legislation that invalidates that section, or the whole bill. Of course, in order for most criminal penalties to be assessed, a member of Congress has to be kicked out, and we’ve seen how well that has worked with tax cheats like Charlie Rangle.

That said, the GOP needs to get off their butts in the House and pass this. They also need to proactively pass legislation extending the payroll tax break for at least one year. Perhaps pushing a 2 year extension, put Democrats on the defensive.

(BBC News) Growing inequality, environmental decline and “teetering” economies mean the world must change the way it does business, a UN report concludes.

Health and education must improve, it says. Subsidies on fossil fuels should end, and governments must look beyond the standard economic indicator of GDP.

The High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability was established in 2010 by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

It was launched because fewer and fewer people where buying into the anthropogenic global warming guano.

It is being launched in Addis Ababa by its two co-chairs, Finnish President Tarja Halonen and her South African counterpart Jacob Zuma.

“With the possibility of the world slipping further into recession, policymakers are hungry for ideas that can help them to navigate these difficult times,” said Mr Zuma.

“Our report makes clear that sustainable development is more important than ever given the multiple crises now enveloping the world.”

See? It’s so simple, we’ll simply do away with GDP, redistribute wealth, and all sit around on farms reminiscent of the 5th century digging in the mud while our lords and masters sit in their castles deciding what is best for us.

Sustainable development is simply another version of the Left’s call for fascism, same as the climate change hoax is. I suppose we can also think about it in terms of Soviet style communism, where there was an all powerful central government full of the elites dictating everything, right down to whether you are allowed to have salt and trans-fats, how you can run your business, and how much bread will be available. People are docile when they are standing in food lines for hours. This is the kind of idiocy that creates worthless products like the Chevy Volt, which limits our ability to move around to a small area. These people are true “watermelons”: green on the outside, red on the inside

The report – Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing – includes 56 recommendations that would, if implemented in full, have profound implications for societies, governments, and businesses.

Governments would build the true environmental costs of products into the prices that people pay to purchase them, leading to an economic system that protects natural resources.

Goods would be labelled with information on their environmental impact, enabling consumers to make more informed purchasing decisions.

And even more based on “environmentalism”, natch, climate change controls. They’d do away with all subsidies for fossil fuels, because they are eeeeeevil, and, magically, real world prices would stay low, but, hey, even if they rise exponentially, it’s for our own good. They Know Better.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

(NPR) For the first time, the Justice Department has made public a series of sensitive messages that passed to the highest levels of the agency within hours of an ambush that killed a U.S. border patrol agent along the Southwest border in December 2010, igniting a national scandal over a gun trafficking investigation gone wrong.

Justice officials sent the documents to Congress late Friday evening, only a few days before Attorney General Eric Holder is set to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The email messages show the former top federal prosecutor in Arizona, Dennis Burke, notifying an aide to Holder via email on Dec. 15, 2010 that agent Brian Terry had been wounded and died. “Tragic,” responds the aide, Monty Wilkinson. “I’ve alerted the AG, the acting Deputy Attorney General…”

Only a few minutes later, Wilkinson emailed again, saying, “Please provide any additional details as they become available to you.”

Burke then delivered another piece of bad news: “The guns found in the desert near the murder [sic] … officer connect back to the investigation we were going to talk about — they were AK-47s purchased at a Phoenix gun store.”

Eric Holder has maintained that he first heard about Fast and Furious a few weeks before he testified on May 3rd, 2012. Remember, Issa had this to say back in October

“His chief of staff had intimate details; we have notes in his handwriting that shows that the number two and Eric Holder’s right hand had intimate details for long time,” Issa told CBS’ Bob Schieffer. “One of the questions is, why wouldn’t you tell your boss about a program that had gotten so out-of-control that it had all kinds of people scurrying to try to stop it?”

The aforementioned emails show Holder’s deputy chief of staff Monty Wilkinson discussing the issue. Are we to believe that Wilkinson didn’t pass the information up to Holder? It strains credibility, veracity, reality. Especially when we see this in the emails, as mentioned above

He’s “alerted the AG.” Care to change your testimony, Mr. Holder? At 7:22pm on the same day Burke emailed Wilkinson about the guns. Are we to believe that Wilkinson failed to alert Holder 9 hours later? Are we to believe that Holder was not interested in what was going on in regards to the murder of a US Border Agent?

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

The Chicago Sun Times has received your message loud and clear, dear readers. As much as admitting that they are biased and they know it, the long-time Windy City staple has decided that hence forth it will no longer endorse candidates for political office.

In a Sunday editorial, the 71-year-old paper announced its new policy amusingly touting the Old Media’s party line that it engages in “unbiased news coverage” and that newspapers today wish to “appeal to the widest possible readership.”

“They want to inform you, not spin you,” the editorial avers. Yet, the editorial goes on to admit that it has heard from readers who seriously doubt that dedication to unbiased news coverage. And when you note that over the last several decades few national news papers have endorsed a Republican for President — most especially the left-leaning Chicago Sun-Times — it is easy to doubt that purported dedication to just-the-facts reporting.

The Sun-Times is so dedicated to helping Democrats get elected, it even endorsed disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich for reelection. Yes, even after his troubles were well known by even the most uninformed Illinois voter. After reelection Governor Blagojevich ended up being convicted on several counts of fraud and influence peddling when he tried to sell the Senate seat that Obama gave up to become president. Blago will begin serving a 14-year sentence in a federal prison this February.

Yet, even before Blago’s convictions for selling the Senate seat he was involved in numerous scandals and still the Times endorsed him any way saying. “There’s no denying the cloud of scandal over his administration,” the Times then wrote. Going on, the Times said, “We’ve chosen to give him the benefit of the doubt and endorse him for a number of reasons.”

It is a bit hard to escape the feeling that the “number of reasons” the Times endorsed the corrupt Blago was spelled D-E-M-O-C-R-A-T!

One has to doubt the commitment to vetting candidates, anyway. All too often the editorial board’s entire decision rests solely on the candidate questionnaires as opposed to any deeper study of candidate’s records or campaigns. Worse, when it comes to judges the Sun-Times most especially would just rely on the left-wing endorsements of the Chicago Bar Association, a horribly biased source for information on judges.

The Times did make an interesting point in its announcement, but only by accident, it appears.

… many American newspapers were unabashedly partisan, and not necessarily only on the editorial page. Not unlike news shops on cable TV and the Web today, they catered to a core of readers who thought very much like them.

This is a good point to make, though it is doubtful that the Times gets it as thoroughly as one might expect. You see, in the salad days of local newspaper wars, each city had two, four, or even more newspapers and each paper was well known for its support of a party or candidate. Readers could scan these papers and get all sides of the endorsement game in order to make their own decision. But these days few newspapers take anything other than the left-wing line on endorsements and the reading public can no longer get both sides of the issue.

The fact is, endorsements are meaningless if every reader can predict based along partisan lines which candidate the paper will pick far in advance of a paper’s “carefully considered” endorsement!

Certainly we can applaud the Sun-Times’ decision to dispense with these predictable endorsements that surprise no one. Perhaps this is the beginning of a sea change in the newspaper industry, led by the Times? If so it would be a welcome change, indeed.

Anyhow, The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza called the speech a “confrontation wrapped in kumbaya”

At first listen, President Obama’s State of the Union address had all the hallmarks of the sort of bipartisan, let’s-do-the-right-thing-for-America tone that characterized his 2008 presidential campaign.

Probably because it was a campaign speech, in which Obama has proved further that he is only interested in being president of some Americans, and not others.

But, listen closer and a more hard-edged, challenging tone reveals itself— a preview of what the incumbent will likely sound like as he seeks a second term this November.

“We’ve come too far to turn back now,” said Obama at one point. “As long as I’m President, I will work with anyone in this chamber to build on this momentum. But I intend to fight obstruction with action, and I will oppose any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on this economic crisis in the first place.”

First, those policies were primarily Democrat ones, and who was in charge of Congress when the economy went south? Yup, Democrats. Second, if we do not turn back now, we’ll end up going over the falls like Greece, Italy, and other European countries.

Later, he offered an even more blunt challenge: “With or without this Congress, I will keep taking actions that help the economy grow.” He also repeatedly urged Congress to “send me a bill”, making clear that the ball, legislatively and politically, was in their court.

Well, gee wiz, Barry, the House GOP has passed over 30 economic bills which are languishing in the Democrat controlled Senate. Perhaps you should have a talk with Harry Reid, ya think? But, I guess it is easier for Obama to mimic Hugo Chavez then Bill Clinton, who mostly played well with others and realized that the game is about leadership and compromise, rather than abusing one’s political opponents and becoming a tin pot dictator.

Obama even had the temerity to whine at the Republicans for not immediately passing the payroll extension for a whopping two months, and he wants a long term extension, which is what Republicans wanted in the first place.

Anyhow, over at Speaker Boehner’s website, we find a few things Obama didn’t say during his 7,000 word campaign speech

“My policies are hurting families and small businesses, and making the economy worse.” Since President Obama took office, 1.7 million fewer Americans have jobs, gas prices have doubled, and families have endured nearly three years of an 8 percent or higher jobless rate.

“I’m to blame for the failure of my policies to create jobs and strengthen our economy.” President Obama has resorted to the politics of division, blaming everything and everyone from Congress to his predecessors to the American people to ATMs for his poor economic record.

“I have listened to the American people and will approve the Keystone XL energy pipeline.” The Keystone project, which would create at least 20,000 new jobs in manufacturing and construction, is supported by lawmakers in both parties, labor unions, governors, and editorial boards across the country. And US News reports most Americans want the pipeline built too.

“My own hand-picked jobs council has urged me to embrace the Republican approach to job creation – and I’m going to take their advice.” Not only does the president’s jobs council report align with the Republican approach to creating new private-sector jobs, it reflects legislation already passed by the House and awaiting action in the Democratic-controlled Senate. See here.

Along with a few more. Oh, and apparently Obama didn’t take the time discuss his signature legislation, Obamacare. He ignored it. I wonder why?

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

If there was a single unifying argument that defined Obamaism from his earliest days in politics to his Presidential campaign, it was the idea of post-partisanship. He was proposing himself as a transformative figure, the man who would spring the lock. In an essay published in The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan, a self-proclaimed conservative, reflected on Obama’s heady appeal: “Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us.”

First, if you’re quoting Andrew Sullivan as an actual conservative, get out the chest high hip waders. Second, Obama was always good at talking the talk, but, could never walk the walk, because he himself was intensely partisan to the far end of the progressive spectrum. There is nothing wrong with that, people have their own set of beliefs. It’s when one acts on beliefs, forcing them on people, that the problems start. And James Pethokoukis at The American Enterprise finds 11 stunning revelations from a confidential Larry Summers memo to Obama in December 2008 that was a key source for the New Yorker article. Here are a few of them (the bold is James’ writing, the italic is Larry Summers own writing

The stimulus was about implementing the Obama agenda. The short-run economic imperative was to identify as many campaign promises or high priority items that would spend out quickly and be inherently temporary. … The stimulus package is a key tool for advancing clean energy goals and fulfilling a number of campaign commitments.

Team Obama knows these deficits are dangerous (although it has offered no long-term plan to deal with them). Closing the gap between what the campaign proposed and the estimates of the campaign offsets would require scaling back proposals by about $100 billion annually or adding new offsets totaling the same. Even this, however, would leave an average deficit over the next decade that would be worse than any post-World War II decade. This would be entirely unsustainable and could cause serious economic problems in the both the short run and the long run.

The financial crisis wasn’t just Wall Street’s fault. A significant cause of the current crisis lies in the failure of regulators to exercise vigorously the authority they already have.

The first one is the most significant, which highlights what we all inherently know, that the point of the stimulus was to give payback to campaign contributors and elected Democrats, as well as pushing Obama’s far left progressive agenda without regard for realities. Solyndra is the perfect example.

Oh, and then we see the “death panels” crop up even back then

IPAB was there at the very beginning. There are two possibilities for making tough decisions on the long-run budget, which could be done either separately or together: creating an executive-branch “health board” (which focuses on one part of the issue) and a Congressionally chartered commission (which could focus more broadly).

From the beginning, Team Obama wanted to implement the panel of 15 unelected and unresponsive bureaucrats to make decisions on our personal health care.

Doug Ross writes “The revelations in this document alone should be enough to bring down the Obama administration. The level of dishonesty laced throughout the Obama White House is both shocking and repellent.” Let’s add some fuel to that fire, looking at the very first paragraph in the Larry Summers memo

In the absence of fiscal stimulus the economy is projected to lose 3 to 4 million jobs in 2009. Together with the jobs we have already lost and population growth, we will be 7 million jobs short of full employment. The unemployment rate is projected to rise above 9 percent and not projected to start falling until 2011.

That is Summers saying what would happen without the Stimulus, which is mostly what happened with the Stimulus. Except, with the Stimulus, jobs loss was greater, and the unemployment rate didn’t start to fall until late in 2011, partly due to people dropping out of the job market, essentially giving up.

Summers also concluded that a core package more than $300 billion was not “feasible to design sensible proposals along these
lines that go much beyond this total size.” And then they go on to propose hundreds of billions more.

There are all sorts of interesting tidbits in both Pethokoukis’ article along with the Summers meme, which provided a blueprint for spending obscene amounts of taxpayer money for political payback and pushing Obama’s extremist political agenda, which wasn’t even in the same landmass as his supposed “post-partisan” coming together speeches. Read them both.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

The left-wing idea that it’s good for government to always wildly increase spending is dying a quick death these days. But this good sense has not made it to every state in the union yet — two disastrous states in particular; California and Illinois.

These two states have not learned the lesson about the ruinous government spending that is causing the country to teeter on the brink of bankruptcy.

Apparently, Illinois and California are vying for worst-state status. Moody’s Investment service, for instance, has rated Illinois the worst, but Standard & Poor’s says it’s California. But California has one thing that makes its fragile economic situation worse than Illinois. California’s penchant for economically ruinous ballot measures that create boondoggle programs that the taxpayers are forced to pay for is not rivaled by the common corruption endured by the citizens of Illinois.

The worst boondoggle currently forced on the people of California is the high-speed rail project that is already running billions over initial cost estimates even before the first foot of track is laid.

A damning new report from an independent panel assigned to monitor progress of California’s high-speed rail system shows just how bad this project has become. Moving forward with the project, they said, “represents an immense financial risk to the state of California.”

This report follows on the heels of recent revelations that the program’s projected costs have doubled to nearly $100 billion in just three short years since taxpayers were duped into approving the project.

A congressional oversight hearing was even held upon concerns surrounding the high-speed rail project and the news wasn’t good.

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearings revealed that some of the key funding plans expected to help the California High-Speed Rail Authority to complete the project aren’t likely to pass in Congress leaving the whole financial underpinnings of the project in doubt.

At least taxpayers can take solace in the fact that there is an independent panel to provide some external oversight of the spending on the massive high-speed rail project. This means that at least taxpayers have access to information that isn’t tainted by insider conflicts and the sort of self-interested, double-dealing that we’ve seen in so many other supposedly beneficial measures.

The same cannot be said for another ballot measure boondoggle — the so-called California Cancer Research Act — slated for the June ballot. This deeply flawed measure raises taxes on Californians by nearly $1 billion per year, creating huge new bureaucracies that are supposed to last in perpetuity without any real oversight. Californians are simply asked to place their trust in a panel of six political appointees that are supposed to administer the funds. Worse, this panel’s spending decisions are completely untouchable by the Legislature, the Governor and the State Auditor for 15 years, meaning California taxpayers have no recourse at all to prevent the exact kind of reckless spending that has crippled the state in other areas.

On top of all these flaws, this measure doesn’t even contain any guarantees that the money for the research will be spent in the state! That means Californians could be digging deeper into their pockets for spending that goes to firms and institutes outside their state.

Just like a family that’s gotten in over its head in a mortgage, California needs to stop spending and dramatically reduce expenditures. Saying no to boondoggles like high-speed rail and the California Cancer Research Act are good places to start.