Jerry Brown

On May 12, California Governor Jerry Brown, during a visit to that state's Orange County, said, "The freeloaders — I’ve had enough of them." His statement came during what the Orange County Register called "an impassioned defense" of the state's recently passed "road-improvement plan. The "freeloaders" he targeted with his remark are the state's taxpayers, those who wish to recall a tax-…

A Sunday item in the San Francisco Chronicle covered what reporter Justin Phillips has found is a major challenge for that city's restaurateurs. You see, many of them are struggling with how much virtue-signaling is appropriate in the wake of the election of Donald Trump and that city's defiant insistence on remaining an illegal-immigrant sanctuary. In light of a recent Harvard study on the…

A January 24 item in the East Bay Times, which serves the San Francisco East Bay area, wondered: "What’s behind the spate of recent restaurant closures?" While it didn't ignore the problem, the article made only glancing references to current and planned increases in state and city minimum wages. Preliminary year-end statistics at the U.S. government's Bureau of Labor Statistics show that Bay…

During Friday night’s Last Man Standing on ABC, in the episode titled “Three Sisters,” Mike Baxter (Tim Allen) does an Outdoor Man commercial promoting the store’s California earthquake kits. As he does the pitch, he looks into the camera and asks the question that many rational people would love to ask the voters of California – why is Governor Jerry Brown still your governor?

The image of America as “a shining city on a hill” (or a similar phrase) has been a staple of conservative political rhetoric for several decades. In a Tuesday piece for The New Republic, Matthew Pratt Guterl, a professor at Brown University, adapted the metaphor for leftist domestic use: “The nation as a whole seems no longer interested in celebrating any vision of equity, justice, and mutual…

Another major employer has decided to join the long list of companies moving jobs from California to more business-friendly states. This time, it's $12 billion titan Jacobs Engineering, which is moving its "corporate operations," almost definitely meaning its headquarters, from Pasadena to Dallas, Texas. Press reaction, especially outside of business-oriented outlets, has ranged from nonexistent…

Has Newsweek just admitted to something the rest of the press knows but won't acknowledge? In promoting its insufferably fawning portrayal of California Governor Jerry Brown, the weekly magazine tweeted that Brown is "arming California to meet an economic recession head-on." Recession? What recession?

On Tuesday, shortly after Governor Jerry Brown signed California's $15-an-hour minimum wage legislation, the Associated Press's Michael R. Blood and Don Thompson called the move "a victory for those struggling on the margins of the economy and the politically powerful unions that pushed it." As seen in a NewsBusters post on March 31, it's definitely a win for union members whose wages are set…

The Associated Press sent its cameramen and reporters out to get the reaction of small business owners to California's just-passed six-year plan to raise the state's minimum wage to $15 an hour. Anyone expecting the AP to find representative responses clearly doesn't understand how the far-left propaganda machine disguised as an objective news service operates. All three business owners…

A Los Angeles Times story by Liam Dillon and Patrick McGreevy hailed the "historic" increase in the state-mandated minimum wage to $15 an hour. Apparently giddy with excitement, the pair also unwisely told readers that many public-sector employees who earn far more will be receiving big raises as a result of the legislation with having to bother negotiating with the government entities involved…

This sentence actually appeared at the web site of the San Jose Mercury News Monday afternoon regarding California's Democratic Governor Jerry Brown: "In his 2016 budget plan, the notoriously frugal governor warned that a $15 minimum wage would cost the state about $4 billion a year and risk plunging it back into the red." Yesterday, Governor Brown "sudden(ly) embraced" the $15 minimum wage. At…

What do you do if you are a liberal governor trying to present the public image of a concerned environmentalist and then get caught red handed using state employees to find oil on your personal property? Why you have Adam Nagourney of the New York Times perform spin control to paint a picture of yourself as a rugged outdoorsy type surviving as a nature boy on that very same land you wanted to…

Imagine a Republican or conservative governor boasting of his or her use of "the coercive power of government" to accomplish center-right policy goals. The political and media backlash would be furious — and justified. Such statist rhetoric is becoming ever more commonplace on the left, and is rising to ever higher political levels. The establishment press is mostly ignoring this development,…

Tuesday's All Things Considered on NPR followed the lead of CNN earlier in the day in spotlighting a pro-euthanasia activist's reaction to California Governor Jerry Brown signing the "End of Life Option Act." Host Kelly McEvers allowed only a brief mention of opponents calling the governor's move "a dark day for California." McEvers then gave guest Christy O'Donnell, who has terminal lung cancer…