Joel B. Pollak - Page 291

California’s pension funds moved one step closer to divesting from coal on Wednesday, with an Assembly committee approving SB 185 bill by a 5-1 vote. The bill, which has passed the state Senate, moves to the floor for a vote. It is likely to pass, and Gov.Jerry Brown is likely to sign it into law, though he has opposed measures to ban fracking for oil in the state.

California lawyers are complaining after Gov. Jerry Brown announced the appointment of yet another young Yale Law School graduate with little more than Obama administration experience to the state’s appellate bench. “Baker is only 37 years old and has no judicial experience. So, he would be a typical Brown appointee to the appellate bench,” wrote legal columnist Roger M. Grace in the Metropolitan News-Enterprise in December 2014–an opinion he has since reiterated.

The Confederate flag was once cheered by thousands of freed slaves. It happened in 1863, when the CSS Alabama caught a Union ship off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. The spectacle was so thrilling to the locals, particularly the Malay and

Former Secretary of State George Shultz told CBS Sacramento on Monday that Republicans could learn from President Ronald Reagan’s example on immigration and border security. “I think people understand we have to do a lot of work on immigration policy,

Haley left a door ajar that the left intends to prop wide open, from now until Election Day and beyond. Emboldened by South Carolina’s quick shift—on an issue that was tangential to the horrific atrocity in Charleston—the left is eager to mount a continued campaign against the Confederacy and its symbols.

The dead are not yet buried in Charleston, yet the South Carolina legislature is to meet in special session Tuesday to debate the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the Capitol grounds, reportedly at the behest of Gov. Nikki Haley. Whether the flag belongs there or not–and I would argue that it does not–the flag had nothing to do with the nine murders in a church last week. To tear it down in such haste is to dishonor the dead–and to accept a collective guilt that knows no end.

You may have heard it through the grapevine: the California raisin farmers who challenged the federal government’s power to seize a substantial portion of each year’s crop as part of a New Deal price-floor scheme had a very strong case under

On Thursday, President Barack Obama pledged: “I am committed to taking bold actions at home and abroad to cut carbon pollution.” On Friday, the President told a gathering of the nation’s mayors in San Francisco that they had to prepare for climate change. On Saturday, he flew on Air Force One to Palm Springs, where on Sunday he is playing golf at Sunnylands.

New Yorker editor David Remnick has penned a column in which he suggests that President Barack Obama’s political opponents are to blame for the nine brutal murders at the AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina on Wednesday.

On Friday evening, July 2, 1999, a crazed young man drove through my Chicago neighborhood looking for Jews to kill. He had already shot half a dozen in a neighboring area (all of whom survived). He saw a black man walking with his family and decided that was good enough. He shot him–and Ricky Byrdsong, former Northwestern University basketball coach, died. The killer led an interstate manhunt, during which he killed a Korean man and attacked a church before shooting himself.

“Millennials” are suddenly realizing that government is something other than “the name we give to the things we choose to do together,” as former U.S. Rep. Barney Frank said. On the contrary, government is often the name we give to what one group of people does to another group by force of law.

President Barack Obama reacted to Wednesday’s horrific massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina by calling for gun control and criticizing the United States for the frequency of mass shooting events. “We don’t have all the facts, but we do know that, once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun,” Obama said, adding: “At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declined to criticize a new memoir by his former ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, who accuses President Barack Obama of deliberately souring the U.S.-Israel relationship. The book, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli

Craig Lally, the head of the L.A. police union, angered a public meeting Tuesday evening by referring to Ezell Ford, who was shot by police last year, as a “known gang member.”

One year ago, thousands of illegal alien children flooded the southern border, creating an acute political crisis for President Barack Obama, and a humanitarian crisis for border states. Now, Democrats in California have struck a new budget deal that will cover the health care of hundreds of thousands of illegal alien children in California, costing $130 million per year.

The most explosive passage in Michael Oren’s new book on the frayed U.S.-Israel relationship is not about President Barack Obama’s repeated fights with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Rather, it is about Obama himself.

A roadside construction sign in the posh Los Angeles neighborhood of Brentwood flashed anti-Obama and anti-Hillary messages on Monday, as a local crew trimmed lush coral trees on the median of San Vicente Boulevard nearby.

Outgoing Anti-Defamation League chief Abe Foxman has reportedly panicked over what he calls declining U.S. support for Israel, and blamed Israel for taking Americans, and American Jews, for granted. Foxman’s claims contradict polls showing that American support for Israel is near an all-time high. The real reason for his freakout: liberals support Israel less, which means that American Jews support Israel less, because of President Barack Obama’s confrontational policy toward Israel.

The California flag, beloved by millions, proudly adorning t-shirts up and down the coast and hung on the dorm room walls of homesick Californian students nationwide, has to go.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a crowd of supporters on Saturday: “I’ve stood up to adversaries like Putin and reinforced allies like Israel.”

The Obama administration has caved on demands that Iran disclose the details of its past nuclear work, without which verification of its compliance with a future deal is impossible.

Obama goes through the motions when it comes to his fundamental responsibilities as the leader of the free world, so that he can focus his energy instead on the three “R’s”–redistribution, race, and recreation.

The debate over providing “fast track” authority for President Barack Obama to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and other trade deals has touched on constitutional, economic, and political arguments. Yet the most important question is whether Obama should be allowed to negotiate anything at all after a dismal track record. When Obama is negotiating with anyone other than congressional Republicans, who fold easily, he makes one bad deal after another.

Former Israeli ambassador Michael Oren is set to release a new memoir June 23: Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide. The book tells the story of Oren’s four years (2009-13) as Israel’s representative in Washington–and reveals just how hostile the Obama administration is towards Israel. Though he argues Obama is not anti-Israel, Oren notes that his administration did all it could to bully Israel into compliance with its hopelessly naïve new agenda in the Middle East.

Eric Casebolt, the police officer who was filmed tackling a teenage girl at a McKinney, Texas pool party and drawing his weapon on bystanders, has resigned. That may protect him from disciplinary action, and perhaps keep his personnel file clean enough to apply

A new United Nations report suggests that the Obama administration and other western governments may be covering up Iran’s violations of international sanctions of ahead of the upcoming June 30 deadline for a final nuclear deal to be agreed.

Israeli defense minister Moshe ‘Bogey’ Ya’alon told a conference Tuesday that there will be no Palestinian state in his lifetime, given the refusal of Palestinian leaders to make a deal. The best-case scenario, he said, would be to manage the conflict in its present form–not to force drastic concessions towards “impossible goals that could cause instability.”

As a candidate for President of the United States, Barack Obama promised to restore balance to the Constitution, after what many argued was a period of executive overreach, infringing on civil liberties and the balance of powers. When he launched his campaign, he even referred to his past career as a “civil rights lawyer,” and a constitutional law teacher. Once in office, however, Obama expanded executive powers even further, and led a 6-year assault on judicial independence.

Chris Gunness, spokesperson for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which deals uniquely with Palestinian refugees, denied last week that UNRWA had handed weapons to Hamas during last summer’s Gaza war–and blocked critics on Twitter who had questioned his denial. Gunness also responded to critics by tweeting a graphic photograph of a maimed Palestinian child, and by accusing UN human rights critic Anne Bayefsky of “racism” for her criticism.

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday in the case of Zivotofksy v. Kerry that the Constitution does not permit Congress to force the president to allow a U.S. citizen born in Jerusalem to list his birthplace as “Israel” in his American passport.

California Gov. Jerry Brown is attempting to implement the state’s first-ever mandatory water cutbacks, among voluntary measures, and he is leading by example: “I didn’t take a shower this morning,” he told reporters in San Jose last week.

A water plant in northeast Bakersfield in California’s Central Valley may shut down by the fall due to lack of available water for filtration, according to local ABC News affiliate KERO-23. The Kern River, which flows from the Sierra Nevada

On Thursday, Hillary Clinton accused Republicans of trying to suppress the vote through voter identification laws, strongly implying that they were doing so out of racist motives. Voter photo ID is standard throughout the world, as Clinton well knows, including

President Barack Obama’s foreign policy in the Middle East is  a failure, but he is responsible for at least one accidental success: bringing Israel and Saudi Arabia, once implacable foes, together in opposition to his agenda. On Thursday, Israel’s Dore Gold, the incoming director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, appeared in Washington, DC at the Council on Foreign Relations alongisde Anwar Majed Eshki, a former adviser to the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., and revealed secret Israeli-Saudi talks on Iran.

Former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee announced his campaign for the Democratic Party nomination for president this past week. One of his top priorities is to convert the United States to the metric system. Doing so, presumably, will make us more “international.” It sounds silly, yet here in California, the most recent Democratic Party Platform officially backs ideas that are just as bad. It can do so, because the opposition is so weak. Here, in non-metric style, are the top 17 worst ideas.

State Department spokesperson Marie Harf and White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes have launched an unprecedented effort to discredit, discount and deny the Times story that reports that “Tehran’s stockpile of nuclear fuel increased about 20 percent over the last 18 months of negotiations.”