Richard Riordan the last Republican Mayor of Los Angeles left office in 2001.

Trash is a growing problem for residents in Los Angeles and as the garbage piles up, so do the rats, fueling concerns about flea-borne typhus, according to reports.

Last October, after at least nine reports of the disease, Los Angeles officials cleaned up some of the worst piles of garbage, NBC Los Angeles reported. But now, the trash has accumulated once again.

“I can’t walk down the street without thinking that a flea could jump on me,” Estela Lopez, executive director of the LA Downtown Industrial Business Improvement District, told the outlet.

It could reportedly take up to 90 days for the trash to be removed once again, according to NBC Los Angeles. The outlet also reported that the city has no plan for controlling its rodent population.

All that garbage attracts rats, which “pose a public health risk,” an infectious disease specialist told the outlet, because the rodents can lead to the spread of salmonella and bubonic plague — not to mention fleas that have been infected with typhus…”

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Madison Dibble:

“…Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) may have wanted to check the books in her own office before announcing her strict plan to end the “wage gap” if she becomes president.

As IJR reported on Monday, Harris announced a strict plan that aims to close the wage gap in the United States. The senator’s presidential proposal would require that businesses provide their payroll to the federal government. Employees in the same position must be paid the same unless the company can prove significant differences in seniority or merit.

If a company can’t meet the threshold of justification for their wage differences, they will face massive fines — a point Harris bragged about repeatedly.

“I am going to announce the first-ever national priority on closing that pay gap and holding corporations accountable for transparency and closing that gap,” Harris said Sunday night. “You will see the announcement tomorrow and there will be penalties if they don’t.”

The penalties outlined by Harris’ team include a fine of 1% of the company’s profits for every 1% of a “wage gap” that exists.

Harris’ plan would force companies to reveal the “total pay and total compensation gap that exists between men and women, regardless of job titles, experience, and performance.”

Unfortunately for women in Harris’ Senate office, the total compensation gap for her staff is 94 cents on the dollar. According to a report from the Washington Free Beacon, the median male salary disbursement was $34,999 and the median female salary disbursement was $32,999…”

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When Democrats lose, they try to change the rules. How long before this stupid step backfires on them?

MORGAN GSTALTER:

“…The Nevada Senate passed a bill that would give the state’s Electoral College votes to the winner of the popular vote, sending the legislation to the desk of Gov. Steve Sisolak (D).

The state Senate passed the measure on a 12-8 vote on Tuesday, CNN reported.

If Sisolak signs the measure into law, Nevada would become the latest state to join the National Popular Vote interstate compact, an agreement among a number of states to give their Electoral College votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the popular vote.

Currently, 14 states and the District of Columbia have passed legislation to join the pact, which will only take effect if a number of states holding the majority of the Electoral College’s 538 electoral votes join the agreement.

The total is currently at 189 and Nevada’s six electoral votes would boost the number to 195…”

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OKAY, BUT TRY TO GET YOUR FACTS STRAIGHT: Tammy Duckworth, Corey Booker and Tom Carper have formed a Senate Environmental Justice Caucus aimed at eliminating racism in environmental protection. That’s fine. But note that when the Commission on Civil Rights tried to prove that coal ash dumps were disproportionately being located near African-American neighborhoods it ended up finding the opposite: The dumps were disproportionately placed near white neighborhoods.

From Gail Herriot

Facebook censors conservative speech

PETR SVAB:

“…Facebook has encouraged some of its employees to probe the background of conservative commentator Candace Owens for anything that could give the social media giant grounds to kick her off its platforms, an internal Facebook document described and partially leaked to Breitbart indicates.

The document is a spreadsheet on “Policy Review” of what the company calls “hate agents.” It was created in early April and was related to prominent figures recently banned from the platform, a Facebook spokesperson said. Owens was listed on the document under the note, “Extra Credit (We should look into these after we’re done with the above designation analysis).” The spokesperson believed Owens hadn’t yet been investigated.

Owens, who is black, came out as a conservative in a July 2017 YouTube videoand has since become one of the most popular conservative speakers in America. She’s argued that liberal policies have hurt black communities, such as by weakening family structure through welfare incentives, undercutting black workers through supporting illegal immigration, and suppressing black birthrates through promoting abortion…”

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From Australia to Europe, the signs are multiplying that conservative populism is on the rise.

Tyler Cowen:

“…The leftist “resurgence” is primarily a media-driven phenomenon, as the press throws up one synthetic hero after another, Beto-style, while reporting breathlessly on a relatively small number of “activists” in a fashion calculated to make them seem like a wave…”

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Higher education

DAVID BERNSTEIN:

“…Williams students are quoted as claiming that the Palestinians are facing worse oppression than Jews during the Holocaust, because “unlike the seemingly unending Israeli occupation of the West Bank, ‘the purpose of these [World War II] ghettos were basically to control, segregate, and separate the Jewish people for short periods of time.’” Apparently, having even a modicum of knowledge of twentieth century history, or the ability to put current events in a reasonable context, are not prerequisites for admission this “elite” college…”

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Alana Goodman:

“…A charity run by the wife of Rep. Elijah Cummings received millions from special interest groups and corporations that had business before her husband’s committee and could have been used illegally, according to an IRS complaint filed by an ethics watchdog group.

Cummings, 68, a Maryland Democrat, is chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. His wife, Maya Rockeymoore, 48, is the chairman of the Maryland Democratic Party and briefly ran in the state’s gubernatorial race last year. The couple married in 2008. Cummings was once heavily in debt — in part due to hefty child support payments to his first wife and two other women he had children with — but his financial situation has improved considerably over the past decade.

Rockeymoore runs two entities, a nonprofit group called the Center for Global Policy Solutions and a for-profit consulting firm called Global Policy Solutions, LLC, whose operations appear to have overlapped, according to the IRS complaint filed by watchdog group the National Legal and Policy Center on Monday. The complaint states that the arrangement may have been used to derive “illegal private benefit.”

Global Policy Solutions received more than $6.2 million in grants between 2013 and 2016, according to tax records. Several of the nonprofit group’s financial backers — which included Google, J.P Morgan and Prudential — have business interests before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Cummings has served as Democratic chairman of the committee since January and previously served as ranking member…”

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Remarkable headline, maybe a first.

“…Richard Grenell, the U.S. ambassador to Germany and an ardent supporter of President Trump’s agenda, has broken the long practice of embassies seeking — and getting — more funding every year. In what was described as a first, he asked for zero extra in his budget request.

What’s more, in a demonstration of his pledge to be frugal with tax dollars, he ended his last budget year with a $7.7 million surplus…”

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John Fund:

“…Hell hath no fury greater than left-wingers who lose an election in a surprise upset. Think Brexit in 2016. Think Trump’s victory the same year. Now add Australia.

Conservative prime minister Scott Morrison shocked pollsters and pundits alike with his victory on Saturday, and the reaction has been brutal from supporters of the opposition Labor party. They can’t seem to decide whether Australia’s electorate is stupid, evil, or both.

Cathy Wilcox, a newspaper cartoonist, tweeted: “It seems unfair that the morons outnumber the thinking people at election time.” Broadcaster Meshel Laurie concluded that “Australians are dumb, mean-spirited, and greedy. Accept it.” Some were ready to write off the whole country. Brigid Delaney, a columnist for the Guardian, wrote, “It’s the country that’s rotten.” She reported from the Labor party’s Election Night event. People there had to face “the fact that their vision for Australia’s future was not affirmed,” she wrote. That “made them feel estranged and alienated from their own country.”

By contrast, Zareh Ghazarian, a political-science lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne, was snobbishly restrained: “We have completely expected an opposite thing for two years,’ he told the Washington Post. “Voters rejected the big picture.”

By that, he meant that voters have rejected a sweeping Labor-party platform that urged Australia to move in a dramatically leftward direction on everything from higher taxes on retirement income to greater benefits for indigenous people to an ambitious program to reduce carbon emissions by 45 percent from 2005 levels over the next decade. Labor was heavily promoting renewable energy and electric vehicles; many Australians called the plan Labor’s version of the Green New Deal in the U.S….”

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Victor Davis Hanson:

“…Now we turn to the real unspoken question: how did it happen that the top machinery of the U.S. government meddled in an election, and sought to sabotage a presidential transition and early presidency?

Note well: none of the leveraged targets of Robert Mueller turned state’s evidence to accuse Donald Trump of “collusion,” the object of the special counsel’s investigation, although to have done so would have mightily helped their cause and given them John Dean iconic status among leftists. In contrast, we have scarcely begun to investigate wrongdoing at the intelligence and justice departments and already the suspects are fingering each other.

James Clapper, John Brennan, and James Comey are now all accusing one another of being culpable for inserting the unverified dossier, the font of the effort to destroy Trump, into a presidential intelligence assessment—as if suddenly and mysteriously the prior seeding of the Steele dossier is now seen as a bad thing. And how did the dossier transmogrify from being passed around the Obama Administration as a supposedly top-secret and devastating condemnation of candidate and then president-elect Trump to a rank embarrassment of ridiculous stories and fibs?

Given the narratives of the last three years, and the protestations that the dossier was accurate or at least was not proven to be unproven, why are these former officials arguing at all? Did not implanting the dossier into the presidential briefing give it the necessary imprimatur that allowed the serial leaks to the press at least to be passed on to the public and thereby apprise the people of the existential danger that they faced?

Why would not they still be vying to take credit for warning President Obama that Donald J. Trump was a likely sexual pervert, with a pathological hatred of Obama, as manifested in Trump’s alleged Moscow debauchery—a reprobate who used his subordinates to steal the election from Hillary Clinton and who still must somehow be stopped at all costs?

That entire bought fantasy was the subtext of why Mueller was appointed in the first place. It was the basis for the persistent support to this day among the media and progressives for the now discredited notion of “collusion.”

If our noble public servants really believed all that to be true, would not Comey and Brennan instead now be arguing that each, not the other, was bold and smart enough to have included the seminal dossier into a presidential briefing? Comey in public still insists that the dossier is not discredited, though in all his sanctimonious televised sermons, he never has provided any details that support the supposed veracity of Steele’s charges. Why then is Comey not demanding that the FBI take credit for bringing this key piece of intelligence to Obama’s attention rather than fobbing off such an important feat to the rival CIA?

Why, for that matter, are Andrew McCabe and James Comey at odds?

The commonality of their respective sworn testimonies has been that Trump was and remains a danger to the republic—to the extent that McCabe admittedly staged a comical coup attempt and Comey committed a likely felony in leaking to the media classified documents that had memorialized his versions of his own confidential conversations with the president.

Why, given their protestation of innocence and their cry-of-the-heart leaking to save us, would not McCabe and Comey be heaping praise on each other, as each tried to outdo the other in pursuing extraordinary measures to end the clear and present danger of Donald Trump?

McCabe has testified that the dossier was the anchoring evidence that the FBI presented to the FISA court. Comey denies that fact. But once more why would they disagree? And why would they be at odds over supposedly noble leaking to the press?

McCabe claims Comey allowed him to leak gossip and rumors about Trump’s culpability; Comey says he did no such thing. But should not both still be bragging that they had the guts to seed the dossier and related confidential information to the media to the stop the national threat of Donald Trump?

We know that Comey has no intrinsic objection to scattering classified information, because he has bragged that he did just that after his firing to help appoint a special counsel. We know in addition that McCabe has no problem with divulging confidential information because to the media he has accused Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, in a confidential conversation, of volunteering to wear a wire in hopes of entrapping the President of the United States at some incriminating moment…”

and

“…These are rhetorical questions because we know the answers: our top officials at the DOJ, CIA, FBI, and NSC, as well as James Clapper as director of national intelligence, likely broke federal law, betrayed their agencies, and in general acted in an abjectly unethical manner on the premises that 1) Hillary Clinton would be the next president and their behavior would be rewarded; and 2) in the aftermath of her defeat and after Trump became president, that Trump could either be removed or so discredited that their own prior illegality would either never come to light or would be contextualized as noble resistance…”

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Eric Felten:

“…While Washington pols and pundits angrily debate who counts as a spy, and whether any such exotic creatures have ever been employed by the FBI, new evidence is emerging that the FBI not only uses spies, but has done so extensively, including in the Trump-Russia investigation.

On Thursday, CNN host John Berman asked former FBI general counsel James Baker: “Did the FBI spy on the Trump campaign as the attorney general suggested?” Baker didn’t initially say no, but rather objected that the word “spy” has negative connotations.

Baker then seemed to switch the question from whether spying occurred to its intent, saying: “There was no intention by myself or anybody else I’m aware of to intrude or do activities with respect to the campaign.” Then he continued his sentence with a clause that significantly modified even that claim. There was no intrusion of the Trump campaign, he said, done “in order to gather political intelligence to find out what the political strategies were.” The FBI was only interested in what the campaign was up to regarding Russia.

There’s a very big difference between saying “I didn’t spy” and saying “I didn’t spy for inappropriate reasons.” The former is a denial, the latter is all but an admission. Baker asserted there was no spying done to gather information on Trump’s campaign strategies. Which could very well mean there was spying, just not any for the narrow reason given…”

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From Seth Tillman