News Items

Open the Books is back with another important government transparency report. This time, the organization looked closely at California payrolls, and found that 218,667 public sector employees earn six-figure salaries (in many cases far above that threshold), at a cost of $35 billion.
If Californians are fine with this sort of thing, more power to them, but it’s important to be knowledgable about where and how tax dollars are spent.

I want to tell you how welcome you are to the White House. I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone. 

More disappointing than the Obama administration itself (which was very disappointing), were the seemingly endless hordes of fake liberals constantly justifying and making excuses for his well documented litany of civil liberties abuses.

Ken White over at law blog Popehat has written a very useful article on whether or not Trump is likely to be the existential threat to free speech that so many are concerned about.
Fortunately, he argues that free speech is pretty well protected at the judicial level, adding that most contemporary attempts to whittle away at First Amendment rights actually emanate from “liberal” judges targeting hate speech, as opposed to conservative ones.

Something to think deeply about, irrespective of where you fall on the ideological spectrum.
Written by Jason Stapleton and published at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE):

Yesterday, Michael Cieply, a 12-year veteran of the New York Times who left this past July, wrote a phenomenal article at Deadline Hollywood titled, Stunned By Trump, The New York Times Finds Time For Some Soul-Searching. Before highlighting some key excerpts, let’s set the stage.

This is disturbing, depressing and sickening.
The Washington Post reports:

With so much interest and speculation out there, I thought it might be useful to share The Daily Caller’s List of People Donald Trump Is Considering For Senior White House Jobs. According to the DC, the list was “provided by a member of the transition team on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press.”
Here it is:

Since the article I published earlier today had a more negative tone, I want to end the day on a more positive note. As I explained in yesterday’s piece, I want Trump to be successful because our fellow countrymen and women need him to succeed.

Before we move forward, let’s start with the following extraordinarily disturbing report out of CNBC: