I said this a bit ago, and it bears repeating. It’s important that all of you—each of us—go vote regardless of which candidates or party you favor.
It’s not only our individual civic duty. Keep in mind that not voting at all leaves a vote for the other side unanswered.
Go vote.
In his WSJ piece about the mayoral race in Los Angeles between a hard core Progressive-Democratic Party incumbent and a dual member of the Democratic Socialists of America and the Progressive-Democratic Party upstart, Karen Bass and Nithya Raman, respectively, the news writer wrote about the broken condition of the city and each candidate’s hopes and dreams (my characterization) for fixing it.
It took an average of seven days to fix a pothole in the fiscal year that ended June 30, up from 0.9 days in 2021-22. Also, the average response time to repair a streetlight outage rose to 224 working days from 31 over the same period, amid a spate of copper-wire theft.
A week to fix a pothole and nearly a year for a streetlight. It’s ridiculous even for those repairs to take the earlier 21 hours and an entire month. If the pothole takes more than a couple of hours to fill with asphalt for a sound repair, it’s only because the city had let the hole fester for so long that a far more extensive repair became necessary. It’s even worse for the streetlight. A month!?
Big government regulation, at the core of those delays and which has so severely damaged the city over the last 25 years of Progressive-Democratic rule, is unlikely to be reduced—indeed, quite the opposite—whether the city is ruled by another Progressive-Democrat or by a socialist running as a Progressive-Democrat.
Regarding the potholes and streetlights in particular, it should be as simple as, channeling Major John “Mac” McGillis, see the hole, fix the hole; see the light, fix the light.
Fat chance under LA’s new old regime.
Holman Jenkins had this bit in his Friday WSJ op-ed:
Until he [President Donald Trump (R)] threw down a regime-survival gauntlet before Iran’s leadership personnel, under no other circumstance did it make sense for them to close the Strait of Hormuz.
Jenkins is breathtakingly, dangerously naive, and a little bit arrogant in this claim.
The rest of his piece is just more of the same. In no way does the IRGC’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz have to make sense to his august news commentator self. The closure needs only make sense to the IRGC leadership. In this regard, earlier Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s remarks regarding the utility and outcome of a nuclear exchange with Israel applies just as dispositively here in this less nuclear confrontation.
The Pacific Maritime Association is planning to strike the two largest West Coast ports, Los Angeles and Long Beach. Talks haven’t gone as favorably toward the union as it wishes, so….
The union laid bare its attitude toward port management and toward us average Americans generally.
A timely agreement matters not only to the parties at the table, but to the entire Southern California supply chain and to the local, state, and national economies that depend on it.
That’s just naked extortion, and it’s putting those not anywhere close to the negotiations under union threat, using them as hostages. Not only is this union threatening the ports’ ability to function and earn the income needed to pay up, it’s also threatening all of the hostages it’s taken, us average Americans who make up those local, state, and national economies.
Yet another union is demonstrating why it should be decertified.
Further, in any other milieu than union “negotiations,” contracts signed under duress would be held invalid. If unions aren’t going to be decertified, then at the least, contracts signed while a strike, or a lockout, is in progress or within some serious time period after the end of a strike or lockout should be held invalid, having been signed under duress.
In his WSJ op-ed regarding Effective Altruism and media bias, Andy Kessler had this remark:
Mr Stewart says he isn’t a journalist, but he and others like him helped kill media’s credibility.
Not at all. Journalists—the “media”—killed their own credibility, beginning as far back in my lifetime with Cronkite’s manufactured anger embedded in his “What’s going on here?” in the early stages of the Tet offensive, when he knew full well that what was going on was the utter destruction of the Viet Cong as a political and military entity in that war. From the end of Tet on, that side of the war was fought exclusively by the North Vietnamese Army.
Nor was it Stewart and others like him, or comedians generally, who printed on the NYT front page that tabloid’s decision to take sides in its news “reporting;” they would no longer print news objectively.
Nor was it anyone else that prompted CBS‘ Bob Simon infamously to declare that there not two sides to every story. Some had only one side, and he and his fellow “journalists” were the sole determiners of when and where that would be determined.
Nor was it Stewart, et al., who caused the “media” to spike the Hunter Biden laptop story. “Journalists” did that all by themselves.
Nor was it comedians who censored viewpoints on social media. That was social media managers doing that all by themselves, even as they cowered behind the fig leaf of government “pressure.”
The list is pretty extensive, and this is just politics.
The list extends into “climate” hyping. For instance, the Los Angeles Times print “news” outlet announced that it would no longer print letters to the editor that rebutted global warming arguments, since the science was settled and there could be no rebuttal.
Kessler needs to get out more.