Some expect it even more than others. Which brings us to the media’s conventional theories as to why Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie was defeated in the Democratic primary on Saturday in a landslide by state Sen. David Ige. Yes, Abercrombie angered many Democrats when he refused the request of dying, beloved Sen. Daniel Inouye to appoint Congresswoman Colleen Hanabusa as his successor. Yes, Abercrombie wasn’t particularly skilled in selling a positive image.

But if he hadn’t taken on the powerful Hawaii State Teachers Association (HSTA) in 2011 and forced teachers to take a 5 percent pay cut to make the state budget balance, he probably wouldn’t have faced Ige or a serious challenger in the primary. A Honolulu Star-Advertiser analysis from July 31, 2011, notes that Abercrombie only wanted teachers to share the same pain as other public employees:

Abercrombie imposed a “last, best and final offer” that roughly matches the pay cuts taken by the state’s largest public employee union, the Hawaii Government Employees Association.

This led the HSTA to seek out Ige to run for governor. In February, the union formalized its support, giving a huge boost to the obscure lawmaker.

And now Abercrombie is only the second Hawaii governor to ever lose a re-election bid.

CA teachers spared the pension pain facing other public employees

The contrast with Jerry Brown could not be more instructive.

In 2011, the California governor unveiled a pension reform proposal that was unusually ambitious. In an approach similar to Abercrombie’s on the 2011 Hawaii state budget, Brown’s plan held that there should be shared pain to address  a fiscal problem — in this case, the long-term underfunding of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System and some local government pension funds. That translated into legislation under which affected employees eventually will have to roughly split the total cost of their pensions with taxpayers.

But this year’s law to shore up the California State Teachers’ Retirement System ignores that framework. Instead, taxpayers will foot 90 percent of the cost of new CalSTRS funding and teachers only 10 percent.

More $ meant for struggling students heads to CA teachers

In California, some public employees are more equal than others. Jerry Brown figured that out long ago.

In Hawaii, the governor only figured that out Saturday.

Meanwhile, there’s more evidence that the Local Control Funding Formula education reform approved last year was a ruse cooked up by Brown, the CTA and CFT to free up more funds for teacher compensation — not primarily a way to help target funds for struggling students. This is from the Sac Bee:

Sacramento-area school districts have begun giving teachers pay raises and bonuses, often retroactively, as they receive more funding from the state.

Twin Rivers Unified, Elk Grove Unified and El Dorado Union High are among the many local school districts that have negotiated raises with their unions that reach back to last year or beyond. The pay hikes are on top of the “step-and-column” increases traditionally given to educators annually based on their years of service and level of education.

The raises come after a 2012 voter-approve tax hike and a multiyear state plan to increase school funding through a new formula intended to direct money to low-income students and English-language learners.

As Cal Watchdog noted last week, this same scenario is unfolding in Los Angeles Unified.

It is not what voters were promised when they backed tax hikes in 2012. It is not what the media were told would happen when the Local Control Funding Formula was enacted in 2013.

But it’s par for the course. In California, as in Hawaii, unions dominate government — especially teacher unions. Mess with their compensation, and you’ll pay a price. And if that means other unions play the role of second-class citizens in Democratic Party politics, so be it.

This, in turn, is likely to lead to stories about the Russian community in the Sacramento area and its troubling history. This is from a 2006 Los Angeles Times story:

“SACRAMENTO — Organizers of the annual Rainbow Festival were prepared for trouble.

“The Q Crew, a local ‘queer/straight alliance,’ distributed cards telling people what to do if approached by hostile demonstrators. Sympathetic local church groups formed a protective buffer along the festival ground’s cyclone fence. Mounted police were on patrol.

“Jerry Sloan manned a table for Stand Up for Sacramento, a recently formed gay self-defense organization.

“‘So far, so good,’ he said. ‘No Russians.

“The festival, held last month amid the gay bars, restaurants and shops of midtown’s ‘Lavender Heights’ neighborhood, went off without conflict. But the elaborate security preparations reflected growing tensions between Sacramento gays and the city’s large and vociferous community of fundamentalist Christians from the former Soviet Union.”

Things appear much better now than in 2006 and 2007, when there was a fatal hate crime, but it is still an issue and will probably be part of how the California media covers Sochi.

Thoughtcrime: How dare you cite homophobic non-Westerners!

But there’s another angle that always amazes me. It’s the gigantic double standard the Western mainstream media have about homophobia. When they point out its existence in Russia — or anywhere in the U.S. or Europe — there is a judgmental tone. As someone who opposed Proposition 22 in 2000, this doesn’t bother me. I’m a libertarian, not a social conservative.

However, when people point out homophobia in non-Western nations, it’s often depicted as a sign of their intolerance, incredibly enough. As a Buzzfeed map illustrated last summer, there are 76 nations in the world where it is illegal to be homosexual — Arab and Muslim nations in the Middle East and Asia and nations with a variety of religions in Africa and the Caribbean. Russia is not on the list. In these 76 nations, gay loathing is an accepted and encouraged cultural norm, and being gay opens one up to criminal sanctions.

Yet while homophobic Russians in Russia and the Sacramento Valley are fair game for critics of homophobia, the Western media’s cultural/racial/ethno-protectionism insulates residents of 76 other nations from such criticism by implying that those who offer the criticism are the problem — not the homophobes they criticize.

“1984” never came to pass, but Orwell’s conception of thoughtcrime is one of the most powerful forces in modern culture. How strong is it? Even liberal gays won’t swim against the tide.

By John Seiler

George Orwell’s nightmare of an “Orwellian” totalitarian regime taking over his native United Kingdom — Airstrip One — has come true. As he wrote in the appendix to “1984”:

“Newspeak was the official language of Oceania, and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism….

“The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression  to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.

“To give a single example — The word free still existed in Newspeak, but could only be used in such statements as ‘The dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds.’ It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free,’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless.”

That obviously is the situation in today’s UK, where Big Brother imposes Newspeak and intellectual freedom no longer exists. Consider this story:

“An American evangelist said he was arrested and interrogated about his Christian faith after he was caught on a London sidewalk preaching that homosexuality is a sin.

“Tony Miano, a retired deputy sheriff and former chaplain with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept., was charged with ‘using homophobic speech that could cause people anxiety, distress, alarm or insult.’

“Miano had been preaching on a London street corner during the Wimbledon Tennis Championships with a ministry group called Sports Fan Outreach International.

“He was preaching about immoral living — and cited homosexuality as an example of lifestyle choices that are contrary to biblical teaching.

“ ‘I never used any gay slurs,’ he said. ‘You would never hear me using slang or discriminatory language against homosexuals or any other group. That would be contrary to my faith.’

“At some point, the evangelist quoted I Thessalonians 4:1-2 — a passage of scripture that mentions sexual immorality.

“ ‘I talked about women addicted to romance novels, men addicted to pornography, people with lustful thoughts, heterosexual fornication and homosexuality,’ Miano told Fox News. ‘When I mentioned that the Bible was clear that homosexuality is a sin, a lady walked by and she glared at me and hurled the f-bomb.’

“Miano said the woman came back a short time later and began to videotape his sidewalk sermon. Then, she called the police.

“ ‘They were concerned about homophobic speech,’ he said. ‘But I told them I don’t fear homosexuals. The language I used was not homophobic, as I was not promoting fear or hatred of homosexuals.’

“Miano said he did not limit his remarks to homosexual acts.

“ ‘I did not speak solely about homosexuality as a form of sexual immorality but also about any kind of sex outside marriage between one man and one woman, as well as lustful thoughts,’ he said. ‘All of these are considered mainstream Christian positions and have been taught and believed by Christians for thousands of years.’”

Notice how the woman, brainwashed by Big Brother, ratted out the preacher’s thoughtcrime to the Thought Police?

At least Chaplain Miano won’t have his free speech suppressed when he returns to California. The First Amendment still protects him. For now, anyway.

By Chris Reed

Happy New Year’s, everybody. I am sure that 2013 is the year that California turns the corner. OK, maybe not. But I am confident there will be 12 months this year, the Mayan crisis having passed.

The balance of power in California is so tilted in favor of public employee unions that I’ve often compared it hyperbolically to another one-party state, the one based in Pyongyang. But a story in the San Jose Mercury-News brings to mind another allegory for California: George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” an amazingly durable fable about how power corrupts, the failed promise of collectivism and the disaster that was Stalinism for the socialist cause.

When the animals in Orwell’s novella take over Mr. Jones’ farm, they adopt the Seven Commandments of Animalism, in which the most important of the seven is the guarantee that all animals are equal. By novel’s end, the pigs have taken over, and the Seven Commandments have been boiled down to one: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

In California, the Legislature kills legislation that would allow school districts to quickly fire teachers who are actual sexual predators. But what about public employees who watch depravity but don’t actually do things like feeding semen to schoolkids? If they’re not teachers, typically they’re out of luck and soon out of a job. This is from Monday’s Merc-News:

“The head of San Mateo County’s probation department retired Monday under the cloud of an investigation by federal authorities into whether he had child pornography, officials said.

“A family member of Stuart J. Forrest filed paperwork with the county’s public worker retirement system that made his departure effective immediately, county spokesman Marshall Wilson said.

“He had been on paid administrative leave from his $140,000 a year salary position since Dec. 21, when news broke of the investigation. …. Forrest began working for the probation department in November 1977 and was named its chief in April 2009. …

“If Forrest is charged and convicted of a crime, it could mean forfeiting rights to a county pension. Under a broadening of state law to take effect in January, public workers convicted of a job-related felony will lose their retirement benefits, according to Government Code section 7522.70.”

Yes, I get the point that all public employees in California are subject to loss of pension for a job-related felony, including teachers. But the story of Mark Berndt and how the Los Angeles Unified School District had to pay him $40,000 to get rid of him remains sickening.

You don’t see most white-collar unions putting up obstacles to removal of perverts from their jobs, much less succeeding with this tactic.

Yet in California Teachers Association-occupied Sacramento, that’s exactly what happened. The Seven Commandments of Unionism no longer hold sway. Instead, all public employees are equal, but some public employees are more equal than others.

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

California policy makers are busy mandating wind and solar farms in its deserts. But along its coastline, the Water Quality Resources Control Board is busy enforcing inconsistent environmental policy right out of George Orwell’s novel “Animal Farm.”

Orwell wrote: “All animals are equal but some are more equal than others.”

So it seems with the California Water Quality Resources Control Board’s apparently inconsistent policy of mandating that 19 California coastal power plants must stop using ocean water to cool their steam-generating power plants (called “once through cooling” technology) in order to protect marine life.

At issue is a mandate from the California’s State Water Resources Control Board to stop the loss of 57 seals, sea lions or sea turtles per year from ocean water intake systems to cool steam-generated coastal power plants. By contrast, California’s projected 18,000 wind turbines would kill more than 75,000 birds per year with no consistent order to halt such impacts. (That’s estimated at 4.27 bird kills per turbine per year by Nature Magazine.)

Instead, the Water Board is requiring coastal power plants to use either costly fresh water or air-cooling systems to protect marine life from being sucked into its water intake pipes. With fresh water resources in short supply along California’s coastline and a seeming official definition that drought is perpetual, it seems inconsistent to mandate a switch to costly fresh water or precious groundwater supplies to cool coastal power plants.

Only a Water Board in California could come up with a regulation to import river water hundreds of miles away from the Colorado River or the Sacramento Delta to cool power plants next to the ocean to protect a few seals and turtles. Biologists might say that this policy just results in taking fresh water from salmon populations in the Sacramento Delta.  But the Water Quality Act doesn’t factor environmental tradeoffs into its regulations.

There are groundwater basins near power plants along the urban coastline, but drawing water from them for power plant cooling might create another problem: sea water intrusion into local water aquifers. There is no way under the Water Quality Act to consider whether environmental regulations create even worse environmental impacts. Every solution breeds new and sometimes even worse problems.

Rejecting Alternatives

Despite an appeal to no less than the U.S. Supreme Court, the Water Board has thus far rejected the use of a cost-benefit analysis or less costly alternative mitigation methods to protect marine wildlife.  The Water Board’s policy might be internally consistent with its interpretation of the Water Quality Act but, paraphrasing Ralph Waldo Emerson, is it “a foolish consistency that is the hobgoblin of foolish minds”?

What is the reason for such a double standard of protecting marine life but not bird life described above? Is it to further an environmentalist agenda to bring the cost of nuclear energy and natural-gas-generated power more equal to green power so that it can compete in the electricity market?

Or is shutting down California’s two non-polluting nuclear power plants possibly just to appease nuclear power opponents? There is no way to know. It certainly is environmentally inconsistent and makes no economic sense.

California has an inconsistent policy of no oil drilling platforms within visual distance of its coastline unless camouflaged, and a zero tolerance policy for any loss of marine life from coastal power plants.

On the other hand, California does not have the same standard for large wind or solar farms in desert areas with visually blighting win turbines and solar panels and the accompanying loss of bird life and disturbance of turtle habitats.

Nor does it seem consistent when geothermal power plants in northern California require 11 million gallons of additional “treated wastewater” from a 30-mile pipeline from the City of Santa Rosa. And to think that environmentalists are concerned about the impacts of oil and gas “fracking” on deep subterranean water supplies that are no source to plant or animal life and would be diluted in any event.

One can rationalize the inconsistent policy of the State Water Board by saying that it must comply with the Federal Water Quality Act while wind farms must only comply with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).  But if the loss of a small number of marine mammals and fish is really an issue, then why not just prohibit commercial fishing or fresh water sport fishing?  All animals are equal, aren’t they?

Delta Smelt

Or what about the environmental lawsuit that resulted in a court-ordered shutdown of 90 percent of water deliveries to farms and cities from 2007 to 2010 to protect a few tiny sardine-like smelt fish in the Sacramento Delta?

According to those who filed the lawsuit, the smelt had become nearly extinct from the Delta due to the hydraulic pumps on the California Aqueduct. But the smelt uses its small size and transparency to hide from predator fish and concentrate in cooler deep water during droughts, according to Peter B. Moyle, “Inland Fishes of California,” p. 228.

No mention was made in the media that cutting 90 percent of water deliveries probably wiped out uncounted thousands of striped and largemouth bass, catfish, carp, bluegill and crappie fish that live in the California Aqueduct. Environmental protection is a highly selective and inconsistent process in California.

If archaeologists thousands of years from now have to excavate a 300-mile pipeline to provide cooling water to coastal power plants, they would be mystified at finding a rational answer for it without understanding the politicized bureaucratic culture that produced it.

We can’t look to so-called environmental science or the legalistic scripture of the Federal Water Quality Act to understand all the inconsistencies and absurdities in energy and water policies in California. Sometimes we can find insight in novels such as Jane Austen’s “Lady Susan” where the main character writes in a letter to a friend: “In short, when a person is always to deceive, it is impossible to be consistent.”

It is apparent that politics, not impacts to plant or animal life, is what really drives environmental policy in California.