Politicians like to kick problems down the road and Californians can find an example in the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles. As we noted last November, DMV offices have been forcing Californians to wait for hours for routine services. Part of the problem was DMV employees sleeping on the job for hours a day, over a period of years. The DMV full earned the Golden Fleece Award for waste and incompetence, but another stemmed from a task not in the DMV’s normal job description.

Like all states, California features voter registration agencies. Even so, under the “Motor Voter” law, the DMV automatically registered to vote those who received driver’s licenses and in recent years the DMV has issued driver’s licenses to more than one million people who are not eligible to vote. Californians were curious how many ineligibles might have voted in 2016 and in 2018, but Secretary of State Alex Padilla declined to state. That fueled demands for an audit, but governor Brown tapped the state Department of Finance, part of the governor’s office, to audit the DMV and release a report in March 2019. No report has been released but there may be hope for better results.

As the California Globe reports, a joint legislative audit committee will hear a bipartisan request to audit the DMV, and in June the committee will vote whether or not to authorize California State Auditor Elaine Howle to conduct the job. Howle is a proven sleuth who uncovered a $175 million slush fund kept by University of California president Janet Napolitano. If allowed to perform her job without interference, Howle could give Californians some answers about DMV incompetence and the agency’s role in voter fraud.

The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has long been characterized as the embodiment of government ineptitude, but a series of recent events have taken the department’s incompetency to a new level. For example, during the past year customer lines have stretched out through its branch office doors, wrapped around the buildings, and flowed down sidewalks, reflecting the dramatic increase in wait times suffered by California residents. Wait times of five to seven hours were common throughout the state. The problem is likely to continue as 23 million Californians have yet to obtain a federally mandated Real ID card, required by October 1, 2020, in order to board an airplane without a passport.

In response to the chaos, newly inaugurated California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) created a “DMV Reinvention Strike Team” in early January to offer recommendations for “new long-term leadership and reform at the DMV.” The Strike Team, led by the Secretary of the California Government Operations Agency Marybel Batjer, will present its findings after a review. An important component of its recommendations should be the seamless integration of new, proven technology into DMV operations to help improve customer service, especially to reduce wait times and long lines.

Last week, President Trump announced plans for an executive order that would deny federal research funds to universities that do not support free speech. The president has yet to reveal how the order would work, and opposition to the plan raised some rather strange arguments.

The executive order is “unnecessary,” argued Noah Feldman in Bloomberg News, because public universities are already subject “to the full reach of the First Amendment.” The president’s order “would be telling universities what speech can or cannot be allowed on campus.” In reality, campus “diversity” bosses are already telling students and faculty alike that some kinds of speech are not allowed on campus, particularly speech that supports First Amendment free-speech rights. Consider the case of Keith Fink.

As a UCLA student, Fink won three national debating championships, earned a law degree, then returned to the campus as an instructor. Students from all disciplines packed out his course on free speech, which covered violations by campus bosses. UCLA bosses proceeded to limit enrollment to Fink’s classes, conduct a rigged review process, and finally fire the professor. As Sarah Brown wondered in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Why Did a UCLA Instructor With a Popular Free-Speech Course Lose His Job?” To all but the willfully blind, the reason is pretty clear, and UCLA also went after Fink’s supporters and even his college debate coach.

When some federal bureaucrats have the opportunity to feast out on the town at taxpayer expense, they go all out.

Washington Post investigative journalist Robert O’Harrow reports on how well some of the bureaucratic regulators on the federal government’s payroll are eating and traveling these days.

They are federal financial regulators who filed for expenses like corporate CEOs, seeking reimbursement for limos, deluxe air travel and meals in posh restaurants.

There was an UberBlack ride from the District to neighboring Alexandria, Va., for $250, according to internal records obtained by The Washington Post. Two airline tickets to a meeting in Vienna came in at more than $11,000 each, even as a staffer found a way to the same event for a fraction of the price. A meal for three at Joe’s Seafood near the White House cost $450 — including $45 for a dish of Dover sole and $43 for halibut, according to receipts for the meal.

J. Mark McWatters, head of the National Credit Union Administration, and his chief of staff, Sarah Vega, and their guests also showed a fondness for wine and top-shelf liquor, including, in one instance, a $45 glass of 18-year-old single-malt whiskey, records show. In 2016 and 2017, they expensed more than $2,500 worth of alcoholic beverages — most of it under Vega’s account — despite a written policy prohibiting reimbursement for the purchase of alcohol.

“They have expensive taste,” John Kutchey, deputy executive director of the NCUA, explained to agency investigators who asked about the spending last year.

By nearly all fiscal measures, the state of Illinois is a basket case. Driven by political promises to pay exceptionally generous pensions to state government employees it cannot afford, the state government’s finances are drowning in red ink.

Its public employee pension liabilities have grown so large that the state’s new governor, J.B. Pritzker, is considering transferring the effective ownership of the state’s public assets, such as airports, tollways, public water systems, and state parks, to state and local government employee pension systems. Wirepoints Mark Glennon reports:

What a change the last couple of months have brought to Venezuela! A few weeks ago, the Venezuelan resistance movement lay in ruins. Today the wind of history seems to be carrying it towards victory, even though it is as yet unclear when.

In 2017 President Nicolás Maduro decided to stamp out once and for all the democratic opposition. He ordered the Supreme Court to strip away the powers of the opposition-dominated National Assembly, and he put together a Constituent Assembly, whose real mission was to establish totalitarian rule.  Despite massive street protests and widespread international condemnation, Maduro got what he wanted—total control and a divided and demoralized opposition.

But he pushed his luck too far. Last May he reelected himself in an election in which no genuine opposition candidate participated and in which nonvoting was widespread. The regime was deeply unpopular, as any regime would be after shrinking by half the country’s GDP in five years, causing a two-million percent hyperinflation, generating a humanitarian crisis because of the lack of food and medicine, triggering an exodus of three million people, and using brutal force against anyone who protested.

Imagine a world in which the great majority has no respect for facts or for truth of any sort, where ideological convictions rule almost everyone’s understanding of the world, where truth has become an endangered rhetorical species on the brink of extinction.

In such a world, facts would still exist, of course, and true propositions would still stand in stark contradiction of false ones, but hardly anyone would care.

The scientists would have been co-opted to support the prevailing ideological narrative, along with the news media, the schools and universities, and all the organs of respectable opinion. People who dissented from the orthodoxy, especially on such sensitive matters as global warming, abortion rights, and discrimination against various state-defined victim classes, would be convicted of hate crimes or some such thing and packed off to prison.

As the Davis Enterprise reports, the University of California at Davis has tapped Renatta Garrison Tull, associate vice provost for strategic initiatives at the University of Maryland, to serve as vice chancellor for diversity, equity, and inclusion. UC Davis has created the new position to “engage more effectively with the recruitment and retention of the best and brightest students, faculty and staff.” With advanced degrees in electrical engineering, Tull is pretty bright herself, but her new position is completely unnecessary and defies California law.

Allan Bakke was a bright, highly qualified student, but during the 1970s UC Davis medical school twice rejected him in favor of minority students with lower academic qualifications. Bakke sued and won, but the UC system continued to discriminate against students of no color and Asians. UC bosses essentially told them they have “too many” of you people. This reflects the diversity dogma that all institutions must reflect the racial and ethnic proportions of society. That is not state or federal law, and California pushed back against discrimination at the ballot box.

New hope for depression patients may be on the horizon.

A recent WebMD article reports that a special panel of experts assembled by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration strongly endorsed a new drug to help patients with treatment-resistant depression (a form of depression resilient to many anti-depressants). This new drug, named esketamine, also provides an unprecedented ability to take effect within days whereas others require months.

With nearly 30 percent of Americans experiencing depression at some point in their lives, and with the sporadic success of currently available treatment options, esketamine has tremendous potential to help millions manage their depression. As UCLA assistant professor of psychiatry Walter Dunn, who served on the panel, expressed, “I think esketamine has the potential to be a game-changer in the treatment of depression.”

It’s no secret that the media are in bad shape and that is particularly true in California. Journalists think Jerry Brown is some kind of sage, even after the recurring governor dismissed safety issues on the Bay Bridge with, “I mean, look, shit happens.”  In similar style, former state senate boss Kevin de Leon claims his father is a Chinese cook born in Guatemala, and everybody in the capitol press corps simply believes him.  And longstanding publications look the other way at key stories. Fortunately, help is at hand.

The new California Globe, edited by the capable Katy Grimes, covers the Golden State in the style she displayed at CalWatchdog and other publications. The Globe has been all over the bullet train boondoggle, the DMV disaster, outlandish energy mandates, and new laws that go easy on violent criminals. The Globe is also interested in government waste, fraud, and abuse and the backstory is always the welfare of California taxpayers.