NC Media Watch

Regional Response to Governor Brown’s Speech(updated)

Russ Steele

The Sac Bee has some quick responses by political leaders across the state here on Governor Brown short but imporant presentation on the budget.  
 

Sen. Doug LaMalfa, R-Richvale:

• "There are areas where I agree with Governor Brown, such as reducing the size and scope of government, but I believe he fundamentally misunderstood the will of the people if he expects them to increase taxes. I am committed to work with the governor to find real reforms in the way the state does business and expand opportunities for private industry to take over, at a cost savings, some of government's traditional activities."

Update 02-01-11, 13:15)  As I premised here is a Press Release from Assemblyman Dan Logue's  office:

Logue Responds to Governor’s 2011 State of the State Address

SACRAMENTO – North State Assemblyman Dan Logue (R-Linda) has released the following statement in response to Governor Brown’s 2011 State of the State Address:

“I appreciate Governor Brown’s intent to get our financial house in order. California’s budget crisis is real and unprecedented, and we can no longer afford to kick the can down the road. The time for action is now, and I propose that we take a hard look at all spending and find ways to tighten our belts like so many Californians have had to do during these tough times.”

When asked about alternative solutions to the budget crisis, Logue stated, “45 billion dollars in taxes are not the solution to our problems. Job creation needs to remain our top priority this year. As Governor Brown mentioned, California must strive to once again become a leader in innovation and prosperity. The best way for us to accomplish this is by supporting job growth right here in our state. I look forward to working with the Governor on achieving our common goals”.

Assemblyman Logue represents the 3rd Assembly District in the California Legislature, which includes the communities of Butte, Lassen, Nevada, Placer, Plumas, Sierra and Yuba.

 

My response to the speech -- NO More Taxes! I did not find any compelling arguments for more taxes in his speech, it was just more of classic Jerry Brown, he just sounded less like Gov Moonbeam.

Who shoulders the highest tax burden - the rich?

Russ Steele

In the comment section of the local blogs the left is aways complaining about the extension of the  “Bush ax cuts for the rich.”  I found these interesting facts on the Power LIne Blog.  Who shoulders the largest tax burden? Read on! 

President Obama in his State of the Union address:

“If we truly care about our deficit, we simply cannot afford a permanent extension of the tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans."

Those greedy "wealthiest 2 percent" must be fleecing the rest of us, right? Well, not exactly. Heck, forget the wealthiest two percent--the top one percent are pretty much pulling the wagon, as the Blogprof shows with this chart. The top one percent pay more income taxes than the bottom 95 percent. Click to enlarge:

We are rapidly reaching the point where a large majority of Americans are free riders. Whether democracy can survive under that condition is a wide-open question.

Exit Question: Will these facts quiet our local left, I have serious doubts?

PR: Congressman Tom McClintock to Address ERC Board

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
 
Congressman Tom McClintock to Address Business Community at
Thursday’s Economic Resource Council Board Meeting
 
Grass Valley, CA. U.S.Congressman Tom McClintock will address questions and concerns of the business community at the Nevada County Economic Resource Council’s Board meeting on Thursday, February 3, 2011. The meeting will begin at 7:30 A.M. and will be held at the Nevada County Association of Realtors building, Esterly Hall, 336 Crown Point Circle, Grass Valley.

 New ERC CEO, Ron Moser, who assumed his responsibilities on February 1, will also be introduced at the meeting, which is open to the public.

Over the e-mail transom: A Tale of Coyote Economics

Russ Steele

Everyday e-mail can be pain, filled with spam, but some time a jewel arrives worth sharing. Here is one of those jewels:

California:

The Governor is jogging with his dog along a nature trail.  A coyote jumps out and attacks the Governor's dog,  then bites the Governor.                   

1.  The Governor starts to intervene, but reflects upon the movie "Bambi" and
then realizes he should stop because the coyote is only doing what is natural.

2.  He calls animal control.  Animal Control captures the coyote and bills the
State $200 testing it for diseases and $500 for relocating it.

3.  He calls a veterinarian.  The vet collects the dead dog and bills the State
$200 testing it for diseases.

4.  The Governor goes to hospital and spends $3,500 getting checked for diseases
from the coyote and on getting his bite wound bandaged.

5.  The running trail gets shut down for 6 months while Fish & Game conducts a
$100,000 survey to make sure the area is now free of dangerous animals.

6.  The Governor spends $50,000 in state funds implementing a "coyote awareness
program" for residents of the area.

7.  The State Legislature spends $2 million to study how to better treat rabies
and how to permanently eradicate the disease throughout the world.

8.  The Governor's security agent is fired for not stopping the attack.  The
State spends $150,000 to hire and train a new agent with additional special
training re:  the nature of coyotes.

9. PETA protests the coyote's relocation and files a $5 million suit against the
State.
 
Montana :

The Governor is jogging with his dog along a nature trail.  A Coyote
jumps out and attacks his dog.

1. The Governor shoots the coyote with his State-issued pistol and keeps
jogging. The Governor has spent $0.50 on a .45 ACP hollow point cartridge.

2. The Buzzards eat the dead coyote.

And that, my friends, is why California is broke and Montana is not.

H/T to regular reader of this blog!

The local left continues to bash the Tea Party Patriots - Why?

Russ Steele

At regular intervals, on slow blogging days or when his readership is falling again, a local blogger takes a swipe at the local Tea Party Patriots.  His claim it that the Tea Party is only a marginal fringe group of conservative lunatics. There is a lot of support for his views in the comments from the lefty fringe who populate his blog. 

One has to wonder in light of the latest Gallop survey who is being marginalized?  The latest Gallup survey shows that almost three out of every four adults say it’s important for the GOP to account for Tea Party ideas in their policies — including a majority of Democrats:

About 7 in 10 national adults, including 88% of Republicans, say it is important that Republican leaders in Congress take the Tea Party movement’s positions and objectives into account as they address the nation’s problems. Among Republicans, 53% rate this “very important.”

…

Although few Democrats (6%) are supporters of the Tea Party or even have a favorable view of it (11%), more than half say it is important that the Republican Party take the Tea Party’s positions into account. Why this is the case is unclear, although Democrats may simply feel that the opposing party should pay attention to all of its constituencies.

Perhaps underscoring the same principle, Republicans overwhelming feel their leaders should take the Tea Party’s positions into account, even though barely half are self-identified as Tea Party supporters.

More details at Hot Air --  Gallup: 71% say GOP should listen to the Tea Party

Exit Question: Should our local political leaders listen to the local Tea Party Patriots?

Should President Obama have an Internet Kill Switch?

Russ Steele

As Egypt's government attempts to crackdown on street protests by shutting down internet and mobile phone services, the US is preparing to reintroduce a bill that could be used to shut down the internet.
Wired.com is reporting that the Senate will re-introduce legislation which would grant US President powers to seize control of and even shut down the internet.  Is this a power we want the President to have in the US?

Senator Susan Collins, a co-sponsor of the bill that last year that expired before any action, said that unlike in Egypt, where the government was using its powers to quell dissent by shutting down the internet, the US would not do that. Really? Do you believe that?

OK, then why does the President Need an Internet Kill Switch if he is not going to use it? 

Wired suggest that if the Kill Switch legislation is approved, you might want to find your old dialup modem and keep it handy.  It will be hard to shut down the whole telephone system. Before the Internet, we used dial up message forwarding systems to communicate, they would soon pop back up should the internet be shut down.

There is open source software available on the Internet that will enable local communities to create WiFi mesh net works that are independent of the Internet.  If it looks like this Kill Switch legislation will pass, we need to down load the mesh net software and start setting up and testing our own backup networks.

Ham radio user also have the capability to form digital networks using  currently available technology.  If you are concerned about the loss of connectivity, think about joining the amateur radio community.

If you would like more posts on alternative communication technologies, please post a comment.

Cost of CARB: Will $4.00 gas have an impact on summer tourism?(Updated)

Russ Steele

According to the latest Rasmussen Reports gas prices are headed for $4.00 a gallon.

Nearly nine-out-of-10 Americans say they are paying more for gas than they were last summer and expect to pay even more six months from now. Most say $4-a-gallon gas is likely by July 1.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 87% of Adults say they are paying more for gas than they were six months ago. At the end of August, just 40% said the same.  Only one percent (1%) say they are paying less for gas now, while nine percent (9%) say they're spending about the same amount.

Here are the latest Nevada County gas prices(click for larger image).

 

Update: (01-31-11, 06:30)  Comments on another local blog have been critical of this effort, pointing out that no other media have attributes increasing gas prices to CARB. That is true, CARB has not yet implemented the the low carbon fuel standard. What we are doing now, which perhaps has escaped my critics, is to establish a base line upon which we can measure CARB's impact in the future.

It is true that most of the change in current fuel prices is being driven by the increased oil prices, which is approaching $100.00 a barrel. Once it reaches that level, then we should see $4.00 a gallon gas and $4.50 a gallon diesel.

Combined with the rising cost of food due to grain, soybean, and corn shortages, increases in fuel cost will strain family budget even more and they will reduce their recreational travel, which will have an impact on local tourism.  In addition to food shortages cause by climate, the US is now converting almost half of the US corn production to bio-fuels, mainly ethanol. So we really have two factors impacting food, rising energy costs built into food production and the shortage of base material due to colder wet climate in the Canada and America's bread basket for the last three years.  These factors are squeezing family budgets, forceing them to spend less on recreational transportation. These changes will impact our local tourism economy.  If you think I am wrong, please state your case in the comments.

There is usually two sides to blogging numbers, here is one example

Russ Steele

BACKGROUND
At the end of every month most bloggers like to check their traffic stats to see how they are doing. Are the blogging audiences growing or declining?  One our local bloggers likes to crow at the end of the month that he is the top dog in town. He published this graphic on his blog today.  I have cropped the original to just show his traffic and mine, because I will only be providing some perspective on those two cases.



ANALYSIS
Below is a similar Quantcast graphic, only instead of page views I have chosen the number of people visiting the sites for the comparison.  While page views are an interesting statistic, it is possible for a individual blogger to drive up his pages views by logging in and keep reading the pages, over and over again thus driving up his page view count. [I am not saying this is the case here, only that it is possible.] On the other hand it is harder to fake the number of people visiting a specific blog.


As you can see more people are visited this blog than the crowing blogger's site. It all depends on the chosen metric.

Checking the stats on Alexia another site that keeps track of traffic, we find these interesting tidbits. In this analysis the close to one (1) as in “number one”  is the best possible score.  The farther from (1) you are the ranking decreases. For the site to be compared graphically the rank must be <100,000.  As you can see our bragging blogger did not make the cut.

• There are 1,294,545 sites with a better three-month global Alexa traffic rank than Jeffpelline.wordpress.com. We estimate that 59% of this site's visitors are in the US, where it has attained a traffic rank of 362,252. It is relatively popular among users in the city of Sacramento (where it is ranked #6,632). Visitors to Jeffpelline.wordpress.com spend about two minutes per visit to the site and two minutes per pageview. Approximately 44% of visits to the site are referred by search engines.

Where as this blog has a US Rank of 88,323 which is under the <100,000 bench mark.   

• Ncwatch.typepad.com has a three-month global Alexa traffic rank of 332,940. Visitors to it view 1.7 unique pages each day on average. The site is relatively popular among users in the city of Sacramento (where it is ranked #4,589). Visitors to the site spend approximately four minutes per visit to the site and two minutes per pageview.

Both of the blogs are part of the Sac Bee Connect program, which generates Sacramento Traffic. So far, this site ranked higher in attracting more Sac Bee Readers than the bragging blogger.  However, these are just estimates and can change rather rapidly. 

I write about subjects that are of interest to me, and I hope my readers. If I just wanted to drive up my traffic numbers for the sake of having high numbers,  I would be posting more Tea Party YouTube videos with patriotic music.  When I posted one such YouTube videos in November, the daily visitors peaked 15,000 a day, just prior to the 2010 election.

Now you know more about the numbers game. It all depends on what numbers are most important. Here are some fun tools your can play with to see how your favorite site's traffic is holding up:

Alexa: http://www.alexa.com

Quantcast: http://www.quantcast.com/

Compete: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/

Over the e-mail ransom: Cost of AtPac lawsuit grows

Russ Steele

A regular blog reader sent this e-mail, as I have written about this growing issue in County Clerk Recorder Gregory Diaz office before.  Barry Pruett, who ran against Greg Diaz, has some details on the AtPac law suit here.

I thought you all might find it interesting to know that at the 1/25/11 BOS mtg, the County Sups voted unanimously to increase the contract budget for legal services to $25O,000.  This follows their decision 6 weeks earlier (12/7/10) setting the contract budget to $150,000.  So it seems the anticipated legal expenses increased by $100,000 in the past 6 weeks.
 
This action was  item 27 on the agenda.
 
The agenda and the streaming video is found at http://MyNevadaCounty.com/BOSvideo/index.cfm?ccs=1715  (Fast forward to 1:24:06.   This item concludes at 1:26:34)

Jeff Pelline takes great pride in his real time news collection for posting in his blog, scooping the Union and his fellow bloggers.  As a Diaz supporter, Jeff may have over looked this news.

Prop 23 Update: Europe Pulling The Plug On Green Energy Subsidies

Russ Steele

We have written about this before and will have to again and again as California continues down a road where Europe is executing U Turns and returning to fiscal sanity. In California CARB mired in the ditch of an environmental fantasy and are not not paying attention to the U turns on the road above.

• The Spanish and Germans are doing it. So are the French. The British might have to do it. Austerity-whacked Europe is rolling back subsidies for renewable energy as economic sanity makes a tentative comeback. Green energy is becoming unaffordable and may cost as many jobs as it creates. But the real victims are the investors who bought into the dream of endless, clean energy financed by the taxpayer. They forgot that governments often change their minds. -- Eric Reguly, The Globe and Mail, 27 January 2011

• The European commission's emergency suspension last week of trading in carbon allowances to put a halt to rampant theft of credits by hackers has been extended indefinitely until countries can prove their systems are protected from further fraud. --Leight Phillips, The Guardian, 27 January 2011

Republican's are trying to provide some fiscal sanity in the United States,  but the President is not listening.

• As President Obama encourages the nation to spend heavily on creating a new, green-energy economy, he faces stiff resistance from lawmakers worried about deficits and what the administration's restrictions on existing power sources could do to the already rising cost of energy. --Doug McKelway, Fox News, 27 January 2011

President Obama is not giving up his quest for "clean energy" regardless of the cost, as is California Air Resources Board, who are providing moral support for his clean energy standard, hoping he will adopt CARB's job killing standard.

• Listen carefully to Mr. Obama's speech and you realize he spent plenty of it on carbon controls. He just used a different vocabulary. If the president can't get carbon restrictions via cap and trade, he'll get them instead with his new proposal for a "clean energy" standard. Mr. Obama has no intention of letting go of his carbon-free world. He instead went to plan B. It's cap and trade by another name.—Kimberley Strassel, The Wall Street Journal, 27 January 2011 (Account required)

Here is the big question, what will be the economic impact when Obama and CARB's house of carbon credit cards, built on a squishy foundation of climate science fraud, collapses?

• What happens to renewable energy when alarmist climate science collapses? And even if the ideological rearguard action drags on for years, what about the fact that shale gas is about to make renewables look even more ridiculous in terms of both economics and emissions? –Peter Foster, National Post, 21 January 2011

H/T to Dr Benny  Peiser at the The Climate Policy Network