“Trump administration officials have put the Office of Personnel Management on the chopping block,” Fox News reports, “in an ambitious but controversial bid to reorganize the federal government.” OPM employees could be sent home “if Congress will not agree to their plan to eliminate the agency.”

The  Trump administration wants to divide operations among three other federal agencies, but the OPM, like the HAL computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, does not like the prospect of disconnection.

OPM boss Margaret Weichert is even bucking proposed furloughs and wants a “legislative solution” that would keep the OPM around. Congressional Democrats charge that Trump is “taking 150 federal employee hostage” and blast his plan as a political ploy to control the civil service system.

Limited liability companies exist to protect business owners and employees from being held personally liable for any debts taken on by the business. When they were first developed several hundred years ago, they proved invaluable as an engine for economic growth, making it possible for the modern economy to develop as it has.

But sometimes that immunity has been exploited by business owners and employees who, either through outright criminal behavior or deliberate negligence, caused harm to others. That’s where the legal concept of “piercing the corporate veil” comes into play, which allows courts to cut through their immunity from liability in these cases, making it possible to hold the people who are most directly responsible for the harms they caused accountable for their actions.

Millennial Natalie Harp has battled stage two bone cancer for most of her life. To make matters worse,  a medical error made in 2015 while receiving treatment left her wheelchair-bound and in constant pain. There was no known cure for her condition, and her quality of life was in quick decline.

Natalie was quickly running out of treatment options. Two rounds of chemotherapy failed to eradicate her cancer. Opioids, medical marijuana, and barbiturates were unable to relieve her pain. She was denied entry into numerous clinical trials. As her condition worsened, Natalie was also advised to consider voluntarily stopping all eating and drinking (a method commonly shorted to VSED).

Courageously, she refused, insisting, “No, I just want to get better.” Miraculously, she did.

Gov. Gavin Newsom will soon be paid $209,747 per year, up from his current salary of $201,680, the Sacramento Bee reports, but there’s more. Starting December 2, the top Democrat and Republican legislators will also get a 4 percent salary boost to $132,107, while the pay of “rank and file lawmakers” will rise to $114,877.

Also in line for raises of 4 percent are the lieutenant governor, attorney general, controller, treasurer, secretary of state, superintendent of public instruction, insurance commissioner and members of the state board of equalization. The raises are not due to any performance measure this elite group might have met or surpassed. The raises come courtesy of the California Citizens Compensation Commission, which cited a “strong economy and a healthy state budget.” 

California taxpayers have long been aware that politicians and bureaucrats need watching. Accordingly, the 1967 Bagley-Keene Open Meeting Act implements a provision of the California Constitution declaring that “the meetings of public bodies and the writings of public officials and agencies shall be open to public scrutiny.” The Act also mandates open meetings for state agencies, board, and commissions, but this mandate does not always prevail. As Katy Grimes of the California Globe reports, the Omnibus Resources Trailer Bill for 2019-20 contains language exempting a commission of the California Air Resources Board and CalEPA from the Bagley-Keene Open Meeting Act. And as Grimes notes “this isn’t the first time the ARB has found itself exempted from the Open Meetings Act.”

In 2012, CARB boss Mary Nichols teamed with Assembly Speaker John Perez to exempt the ARB from the open meetings act. Senate Bill 2018 “specifically exempted CARB from open meeting rules in upcoming cap-and-trade auctions, allowing CARB’s Western Climate Initiative, Inc. to manage carbon trading auctions without any public scrutiny.”

It has never been easy to own a bookstore, but in recent years things have gotten more difficult with the emergence of Amazon. Already slim margins have tightened even more as customers increasingly choose online shopping over the local bookstore. But for one bookstore in Manhattan, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission is another threat to its bottom line and possibly its existence.

The Strand Bookstore in the East Village is a New York City icon and, according to its website, the “home of 18 miles of new, used, and rare books” or 2.5 million books to be precise. After the Strand’s 92 years in business, the Landmarks Preservation Commission voted 8-0 on June 11 to designate the building a historic city landmark. According to the bookstore’s owner, this decision is nothing to celebrate.

As monumental boondoggles go, it’s hard to top California’s bullet train. So much so that it deserves a second look from a little different angle this week!

To date, California has spent over $4 billion on the project. But many of the farmers whose land was taken over by the state’s central planners to build the high-speed train route over the last three years have yet to see a penny, even though their operations have been significantly disrupted and they’re losing money because of it. The Los Angeles Times‘ Ralph Vartabedian reports:

Up and down the San Joaquin Valley, farmers have similar stories. The state can take land with a so-called order of possession by the Superior Court while it haggles over the price.

But farmers often face out-of-pocket costs for lost production, road replacement, repositioning of irrigation systems and other expenses, which the state agrees to pay before the final settlement.

Those payments and even some payments for land have stretched out to three years. State officials have offered endless excuses for not paying, the farmers say.

In the turbulent history of Yankee imperialism that Latin American demagogues have used for a century as a pretext to keep the region underdeveloped, we had not seen anything like it: a leader of Latin America’s anti-imperialist left turned into Washington’s docile poodle.

I am referring to Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the Mexican president who has just agreed to become President Trump’s implacable border policeman in order to avoid incurring the wrath of the U.S. president in the form of tariffs. This is the same López Obrador who just weeks ago was demanding apologies and compensation from Spain for the conquest of Mexico five-hundred years ago and who supports Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in the name of Mexico’s right to conduct a foreign policy immune to pressure from other countries.

“Half Moon Bay hotel gets $1.6M fine for blocking beach access,” headlines an Associated Press report, but how such “blocking” took place is not exactly clear. As the June 14 piece explains, the California Coastal Commission (CCC) has fined the Ritz-Carlton hotel $1.6 million for “failing to provide public access to its nearby beaches.” The hotel “failed to display signs informing the public that beaches are free and open to anyone” and may have come up short on what the Commission wanted by way of free parking for beachgoers not staying at the hotel. So the $1.6 million fine was for what the Ritz-Carlton did not do, not for any actual “blocking” of beachgoers.

Of the $1.6 million penalty, $1 million will go to “a commission fund that provides signs, trails, stairs, and other amenities to help the public use state beaches.” The remaining $600,000 will go to the Peninsula Open Space Trust, “a Palo Alto land conservation group, to help purchase a property north of the hotel to expand public beach access.” So the Commission is taking funds from the hotel and transferring them to another private group to buy a property. The piece failed to explain how the Commission gained this incredible power.

As we noted back in 2012, California’s high-speed rail bosses faced the same problems as the devious Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman) in Blazing Saddles. He needed land for his railroad, but one thing stood between him and that property: “the rightful owners.” And the notorious Mongo (Alex Karras) said the raids on the town of Rock Ridge were all about “where choo-choo go.”

California’s “bullet train” was supposed to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco, but new governor Gavin Newsom says that would be too expensive. As Ralph Vartebedian of the Los Angeles Times notes, “the California bullet train project will probably run out of money before it can fulfill Gov. Gavin Newsom’s modest plan to build a high-speed operating segment between Bakersfield and Merced.” Trouble is, Central Valley farmers have yet to be compensated for land that high-speed rail has already appropriated.