The make or break aspect of maturity. The post The only two directions musicians go in as they age, according to Steve Vai first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

SACRAMENTO — Am I wrong to notice that Gavin Newsom doesn’t seem particularly interested in the nuts-and-bolts of governing the nation’s most-populous state but instead prefers gallivanting around the country and globe giving lectures about “transformative” political ideas? Political travel laced with gauzy rhetoric isn’t unusual for an ambitious governor, but it is fairly atypical to do so much of it — especially when major crises dominate the news cycle at home. READ MORE from Steven Greenhut: Biden’s Skeptics Will Halt the Next Transportation Revolution In March, Newsom toured the Mexican border and urged “spineless Republicans in Congress to do their job” and pass a comprehensive immigration proposal. In January, he visited South Carolina and touted Joe Biden’s reelection bid. Last year, the governor formed the Campaign for Democracy and then toured the American South, where he warned about “authoritarian leaders” in America who are “hell-bent on gaining power and keeping it by whatever means necessary.” This month — as the state faced a budget deficit estimated at between $45 billion and $73 billion — Newsom and his wife traveled to Italy to visit the American Academy in Rome. As the academy’s publication noted, the Newsoms took a tour, lunched with the community, and even had an audience with Pope Francis. The first couple also toured the Rome Sustainable Food Project’s garden, where they “learned about the kitchen’s work promoting farm-to-table, seasonal eating, and slow food.” It sounds like a delightful trip by any standard. A nonprofit foundation paid the bill for the travels and for Newsom’s other two international junkets: to El Salvador in 2019 and to Israel and China last year. Newsom’s Central American jaunt was designed to find the root causes of migration to the United States. He stopped in Israel to weigh in about the conflict with Hamas — and then headed to China to participate in climate-related talks. This is standard for rising-star politicians from both parties. Few have anything genuinely interesting to say, but it’s part of the process. At least taxpayers were spared the expense. The problem is that Newsom doesn’t seem to have mastery over the day-to-day stuff. Gov. Jerry Brown took overseas trips to Europe and Asia, mostly to speak about climate change. But we never got the sense that Rome — or, at least, Sacramento — was burning while he was gone. Before he left, Newsom did in fact release his May budget revise — the updated budget that reflects that latest revenue numbers. If I were advising him, I would have suggested spending the month hunkered down in his government office, meeting with lawmakers and financial gurus rather than taking selfies with international students and learning about artisanal delicacies. The governor takes a reasonable stab at the deficit in his proposal, but there’s a lot more work to do before the June budget deadline. Until now, Newsom has been content to employ budget gimmicks (delays in payments, shifting funds around, accounting tricks, fantastical projections) to delay having to seriously deal with the state’s plummeting tax revenues. He and the Legislature apparently figured the economy would come roaring back and the matter largely solve itself, but instead the budget hole keeps getting deeper. The size of the deficit is even more spectacular when one realizes that just two years ago California enjoyed a budget surplus of $97.5 billion. Newsom and his Democratic allies were almost giddy, as they got to spend most of the money on their liberal social-service and healthcare priorities. Former Gov. Brown had always warned lawmakers to sock more money away and avoid spending surpluses on permanent programs, but Newsom took a somewhat different tack. The state’s boom-and-bust budget cycle is the result of its progressive, capital-gains-based income taxes, which make the state budget unusually dependent on the ups and downs of the stock market and the success of California-based technology companies. It’s always entertaining when left-wing lawmakers spend their days blasting the evils of private enterprise and business greed, then secretly hope for those same companies’ success to bail out their spending plans. At least now, after knowing what was coming, Newsom did indeed finally, belatedly, grudgingly, and insufficiently propose some actual budget cuts. As the Associated Press explains, “So far, Newsom has not gutted some of his splashiest policy advancements, including free kindergarten for all 4-year-olds and free health insurance for all low-income adults regardless of their immigration status. But … Newsom is willing to chip away at some of those promises to balance the budget.” The governor cut state operations by 8 percent, mainly by eliminating 10,000 vacant state jobs. He has indeed chipped away at spending, although he’s left alone most of California’s massive spending on climate-change programs. Left-wing groups are angry, but that’s a good sign. Also good, Newsom has publicly vowed not to raise taxes, which are among the highest in the nation. “I feel strongly that we have to live within our means,” he said. But as veteran columnist Dan Walters observes (based on data from the California Taxpayers Association), “However, the fine print of Newsom’s budget contains several indirect tax increases on businesses — mostly by reducing offsets of taxable income — that over the next few years would raise as much as $18 billion.” That is typical Newsom. He often says the responsible thing but leaves out a few details in the fine print. It’s important to keep that in mind as the governor wrestles with another crisis — in the state’s property insurance market. As I’ve reported for The American Spectator, major insurers have stopped writing new policies and are even pulling out of California. We’ve seen this pullback for a year, although the handwriting has been on the wall for much longer. The basic problem: California’s voter-approved system of insurance regulation subjects insurers to a drawn-out process to approve rate hikes. If they can’t adjust rates to reflect their risk, they exit the market. Also this month, Newsom said he will introduce a budget trailer bill that would speed up the timeframe for considering such rate requests — and he even chided the slow pace of the insurance commissioner’s proposed plan. We’ll await the details, but it’s encouraging news even if inexplicably belated. As the Orange County Register’s editorial board asks: “Newsom is on the right track here, but why did it take so long?” Good question. The obvious answer is that maybe rolling up his sleeves to, say, tweak mind-numbing insurance regulations or slash spending isn’t as much fun as meeting with the pope or traveling the country pontificating about democracy and climate change. Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org. The post Newsom Picks Pontificating Over Governing appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

As of today, Joe Biden will not be on the presidential general election ballot in Ohio. Not because of some sort of lawfare or GOP dirty tricks. This isn’t a situation like what happened in Colorado or Maine earlier this year, in which partisan Democrats attempted to block Donald Trump from being on the ballot using a bizarre interpretation of the 14th Amendment’s “insurrection clause” that was written to keep Confederate officials out of Congress following the Civil War. Actually, Joe Biden is currently off the ballot in Ohio because Republicans in that state have done nothing at all. READ MORE from Scott McKay: Are We Seeing the End of Cancel Culture? It’s really simple: The Democrat Party has set its nominating convention to end on Aug. 22, and the deadline for a party to have its candidate on the ballot in Ohio is Aug. 7. The Ohio deadline preexisted the Democrats’ scheduling decision. It was knowable that scheduling the convention would put the Democrat Party at odds with Ohio’s election laws because it wouldn’t be able to declare a nominee before the deadline if it held the convention that late. Team Biden did this to itself. But it’s going to throw a fit because Ohio’s Republican-dominated legislature is refusing to change state law to accommodate the Democrats’ mistake. The nominating convention was also set too late for Biden to be on the ballot in Alabama. Like Ohio, Alabama law specified a lengthy lead time before Election Day — 82 days — for a party to nominate a candidate for that state’s presidential ballot. Unlike Ohio, Alabama’s legislature changed the specified lead time to 74 days. Ohio’s Senate had prepared a bill that would have made the same change in addition to banning contributions from foreign nationals to political campaigns in that state. But when that bill passed over to the Ohio House of Representatives, the foreign nationals ban was stripped out, and the bill didn’t move to the floor before this year’s regular session ended. When asked about the Biden ballot bailout, Ohio House Speaker Jason Stephens gave it a big, fat “meh.” “There’s just not the will to do that from the legislature,” he said. The Democrat minority leader in the Ohio House, an AWFL named Allison Russo, threw a fit. “We’ve seen the dysfunction here in this place,” she said. “And I think we’ve seen that folks have not been able to put aside partisanship and hyper-partisanship and infighting.… I think at this point, you’re probably going to see either, you know, some sort of inner party effects or perhaps court action.” Awww. Or maybe you people should have considered the laws on the books in the various states before you set your convention more than two weeks past the deadline that several had well established in law. There is no obligation on the part of the Ohio legislature to bail out Team Biden for its incompetence here. Certainly, there’s no moral obligation for Ohio to do Biden a solid. Not after East Palestine. And given the efforts of partisan Democrats in Colorado, Maine, and, less successfully, in other states to pervert the 14th Amendment to deny Trump a place on the ballot there, there certainly isn’t a moral obligation for Republican legislators in a red state to change their laws to accommodate Democrats. And there’s no legal obligation. The Democrat Party is a private entity that does not make election laws, as much as it might clearly believe otherwise. What is Russo offering Stephens in return for a special session and a bill putting Biden’s incompetent campaign, together with a full boat of shady electoral practices and machine politics, on the right side of a brand-new ballot deadline? Anything? It would seem that the GOP, which controls Ohio, ought to be in a position to make a few demands in return for such a consideration. And, yet, if you cycle through the news stories covering this unfolding fiasco, you’ll struggle to find any mention of a deal. It’s just gimme, gimme, gimme. Because they know that if Biden isn’t atop the ballot in Ohio, Democrats won’t turn out to vote. That will kill the campaign in several House races in swing districts in Ohio, and it will also doom Sherrod Brown’s efforts to be reelected to the Senate. Brown currently leads by about 5 points in the average of the most recent polls, but that lead — which is likely more Mitch McConnell’s fault than anyone else’s — will likely shrink. If Biden isn’t on the ballot, the Democrats will have some real problems with voter turnout. The failure to consider Brown’s situation when scheduling the convention after Ohio’s ballot deadline is a level of political malfeasance and incompetence that really ought to be punished. It’s one thing for Democrats to run every city they control into the ground. It’s another to turn elections into ballot-harvesting contests and engage in lawfare rather than political campaigning. But this? This is an own goal. Mike DeWine is Ohio’s Republican governor. DeWine should be actively castigating Biden and the Democrats for their utter and complete disrespect of his state’s laws and scolding them for disregarding Ohio. He should be telling them: “This is what you get for ignoring our deadlines.” Is that what he’s saying? Nope. Instead, DeWine is offering the classic Stupid Party response. “I have every confidence that it’s going to get done,” DeWine said. “No one should worry, they’re going to be able to vote for the president or the former president, whoever they want to vote for. You know, this is not going to be a situation where the president’s name is not on the ballot. So it’s either going to be done by the court, or it’s going to be done by the legislature.” DeWine threw the legislature under the bus. And he wrote a check that Ohio’s courts are apparently now going to have to cash. Exactly what legal justification would there be for a state or federal court in Ohio to invalidate a ballot deadline of which the Democratic National Committee was aware — or certainly should have been — before scheduling its convention? If I were the Trump campaign, I would have lawyers lined up ready for go to war in Ohio should Team Biden sue to get on the ballot. This is a fight worth taking on just to outline how utterly lawless Biden and the Democrats are and to press the case that, at some point, the law — and the obligation to abide by it — has to mean something. No, it would seem this is something Ohio’s legislature has to fix. And if Stephens and his colleagues in the Ohio House don’t feel like fixing it, well… Again, what are the Democrats offering? We all know how this will end. Pressure will mount on Stephens and the House Republicans in Ohio until they knuckle under and write a new ballot deadline of 74 days as Alabama did. But it’ll be entertaining to watch Team Biden sweat in the meantime, with the knowledge that it made this mess with no help from anyone else, due to its own terrible planning and stupid choices. And it’ll also be entertaining to see the Allison Russos of the world lose their minds over the “mean-spiritedness” and “dysfunction” of the Ohio GOP for its reticence to bail them out of the consequences of their own idiocy. The post Ohio Legislature Refuses to Bail Out Biden’s Incompetence. Good for It. appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

“The idea that we need to choose between justice and safety is false,” George Soros wrote in 2022. “They reinforce each other: If people trust the justice system, it will work. And if the system works, public safety will improve.” In practice, however, Soros’ influence operation has somehow managed to comprehensively dismantle justice, safety, and trust. In practically every American community that the left-wing financier has touched, the justice system is substantially more broken than it was before. READ MORE from Nate Hochman: America Is Not a Parchment Promise What is remarkable is that the Soros project — which involves flooding city and county prosecutor races with record-breaking amounts of cash, thereby stacking the deck with far-left ideologues — appears to have left a sour taste in the mouth of even the most left-wing voter bases. (Ideology is a powerful thing, but even ideology is often no match for the visceral experience of watching one’s city be transformed into a violent trash heap.) That much was evident Tuesday night, when voters in Multnomah County — the largest county in Portland, Oregon — ousted incumbent Soros prosecutor Mike Schmidt. Schmidt was handily defeated by Nathan Vasquez, a long-time Republican running on a tough-on-crime platform — no small feat in one of the most left-wing cities in the nation. For my sins, I am a native of Portland, Oregon, and I’ve watched the city — once a quirky and eccentric town with an enormous amount of native charm — decline steeply since 2020 (when Schmidt was first elected with 77 percent of the vote). As I wrote in 2021: Portland’s approach to governance over the past two years has been a paradox: an unholy marriage of lax prosecution of real crime and draconian crackdowns against law-abiding small-business owners and citizens. The district attorney for Multnomah County, where Portland is located, declined to prosecute 70 percent of cases related to Black Lives Matter protests last year, and the Portland Police Bureau leaves 911 callers on hold for hours. The city surpassed its all-time annual record for shootings in late September, with three months left to go in the year — and as is often tragically the case, black Portlanders were killed by shootings at twelve times the rate of white Portlanders. After the municipal government effectively stopped enforcing vagrancy laws, the homeless population exploded from about six large encampments to over 100. At the same time, Oregon has consistently led the country in public-health restrictions throughout the pandemic, with Governor Kate Brown routinely forcing businesses to close at unpredictable intervals, even after vaccines became widely available. Oregon’s outdoor mask mandate — which applied to vaccinated and unvaccinated residents alike — was the last remaining in the country, until it was finally repealed at the end of November. Schmidt was the beneficiary of hundreds of thousands of Soros dollars in the run-up to this most recent election but still lost to Vasquez by almost 10 points (as of this writing; the votes aren’t all counted yet). And Portland is only the last in a long line of defeats for the Soros progressive-prosecutor cartel. One year ago this week, Rachael Rollins resigned under the cloud of an ethics investigation from her post as the U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts. That same month, Kim Gardner resigned in disgrace from her post as circuit attorney for St. Louis, Missouri, after a long line of widely criticized radical policies delivered predictably devastating results. A month prior to that, Kim Foxx announced she wouldn’t seek reelection to her office as Chicago’s top prosecutor for similar reasons. In July 2022, Baltimore state attorney Marilyn Mosby lost her primary to a more moderate, conventionally tough-on-crime challenger. In June 2022, Chesa Boudin — the infamously radical son of murderous communist revolutionaries — went down in a recall election in deep-blue San Francisco. All these prosecutors swept into office on the back of the Soros big-dollar gravy train. And all of them promptly set about doing exactly what they were paid to do: wage a sustained war against their own police force, refuse to prosecute crime, coddle criminals while tormenting victims, and dismantle any semblance of a public order. For years, conservatives have been awestruck by the sheer amount of abuse and degradation that voters in cities like Portland and San Francisco appeared to be willing to endure. But if the past two years are any indication, even those famously left-wing populations have a breaking point. Soros and his merry band of anarchists may have just found it. The post The Beginning of the End for the Soros Revolution? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

from The David Knight Show:  TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

by Martin Armstrong, Armstrong Economics: Let me explain something. Klaus Schwab is NOT retiring, nor is he leaving the WEF. Because of all the toxic hatred hurled at Schwab personally, he has only stepped down from the executive position. That is no different from the Chairman of a Board, who is also the CEO, steps […]

Life’s been good to Eagle Joe Walsh