“Fast food chain In-N-Out was responsible for a 2017 grass fire in rural Arroyo Grande,” Kaytlyn Leslie of the San Luis Obispo Tribune reports, but an overcooked cheeseburger with fries did not touch off the blaze. According to a lawsuit filed by Cal Fire, a tractor mowing grass on property owned by In-N-Out caused the fire. As the suit charges, a hot clutch on the mower ignited chaff, which then spread to dry grass and scattered brush. Cal Fire claims that such fires “ordinarily do not happen unless someone was negligent,” and seeks $1.2 million from the popular burger chain to recover costs. The two-year delay might cause taxpayers to wonder, and Leslie cites other reasons for reasonable doubt. 

Motherless Brooklyn is a stylish homage to classic film noir. It also provides a powerful narrative for the uncompromising way in which power can be wielded by those with access to it. Add in the story’s unusual context — urban renewal in post-war New York City — and Motherless Brooklyn might well contend for the most pro-liberty film to come out of Hollywood in 2019.

As Lawrence McQuillan noted in March, “The DMV took its sloth-like reputation to a new level last summer when average wait times in branch offices grew nearly 50 percent from the year before. Five-to-seven-hour waits were common.”  The DMV also “botched record-keeping duties in 2018 by mishandling thousands of voter registrations from its motor-voter program.” And last December, California’s DMV “failed to comply with regulations when it issued nearly 2.5 million federally mandated Real IDs in 2018 after requiring only one residency document instead of two.” As this corruption, waste and incompetence marches on, Michelle Mears of the California Globe has uncovered what the DMV is up to behind the scenes. 

At Wednesday’s debate in Atlanta, Sen. Elizabeth Warren touted her plan to hike taxes on the wealthy. The socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders liked Warren’s idea, and spoke of criminally prosecuting private companies. The sole dissenter on the stage was Sen. Cory Booker, who expressed a need for wealth creation. The New Jersey Democrat had discovered in the African American community a keen interest in entrepreneurship. That failed to pique the attention of other candidates, leaving Booker all alone, a kind of non-Spartacus moment.

President Trump has nominated (and fired) numerous individuals to governmental positions while in office. Arguably, his most popular nominee was Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb. As a Modern Healthcare article notes, “Dr. Scott Gottlieb accomplished a rare feat during his two-year tenure as head of the Food and Drug Administration—he earned praise from Republicans and Democrats alike.”

Although popular, Gottlieb considerably expanded the power and regulatory oversight of the FDA. For example, he took unprecedented steps in regulating tobacco markets and began a “historic crackdown” of the vaping industry. He also established the agency’s first board to regulate homeopathic drugs, an expanding component of the healthcare field.

For months now, California legislators have been decrying the state’s housing crisis. That crisis will soon be made worse by the Natomas Levee Improvement Plan, launched in Sacramento in 2007. The plan aims to reduce the area’s vulnerability to flooding and will make improvements to Garden Highway that runs atop the current levee.  It was only this year, some residents learned, that the plan would seize and demolish their houses, in place for more than 30 years. 

In 2008 Al Gore said climate change threatens to “destroy the future of human civilization.” He continued, “We are facing a planetary emergency which, if not solved, would exceed anything we’ve ever experienced in the history of humankind.” To address the problem will “require us to end our dependence on carbon-based fuels.” Not everyone agrees with Mr. Gore’s conclusions on climate change, but for those who do, why are they not strong advocates of nuclear power? It is a proven technology in use today that emits no greenhouse gasses and can substitute for massive amounts of fossil fuels.

“Election materials in 2020 will be available in 14 Asian languages for limited-English proficient voters,” reports Theodora Yu in the Sacramento Bee.

The reason so many languages will be accommodated is that the California Appeal Court ruled that Secretary of State Alex Padilla had “improperly” used a higher-percentage threshold of voting-age citizens to determine which languages receive services, therefore depriving those entitled to access under state law. The languages now covered are: Bengali, Burmese, Gujarati, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Lao, Mien, Mongolian, Nepali, Tamil, Thai, Telugu, and Urdu.

The court’s polyglot legal ruling came in response to a lawsuit by the ACLU, the Asian Law Caucus, and the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. And it raises a concern or two. 

Health insurance costs have gone through the roof since the Affordable Care Act (ACA) fully went into effect in 2014. In 2019, those costs have gotten so out of hand that relatively higher-income earning American households who used to buy health insurance are instead choosing to drop it.

The Cold War, which effectively ended thirty years ago with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, was a contest between the capitalist democracies of the West against the socialist dictatorships of the East. The result was a decisive victory for capitalism and democracy. Now, with the rise of self-described socialists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, socialism is increasingly popular, especially among younger Americans. Why?