Despite his respectable showing in a statewide poll, the California League of Women Voters is still excluding Libertarian Party senatorial candidate James P. Gray from it’s televised debate August 10th.

Update: The CLoWV is claiming that Judge Gray’s poll isn’t valid. For more, go here.

For my money, why not include a firebrand such as Judge Gray? Perhaps we will get some original discourse, and then perhaps people will tune-in? As we have seen with the major network’s large-scale rejection of most of the Democratic National Convention, the people are bored with the same yadda-yadda-yadda.

Organizers of the Democratic National Convention have forced Al-Jazeera to remove their banner:

Americans tuning into television coverage of this week’s Democratic convention will see signs for media outlets like CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS, but not Al-Jazeera after the Arab satellite channel was asked to remove its banner near the podium.

The 24-hour Qatar-based news outlet won over millions of Arab viewers before and during the US-led war on Afghanistan in 2001 after showing exclusive footage of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

During this week’s convention in Boston, where Senator John Kerry will be officially nominated to run for the White House, the TV channel had erected a colourful $US30,000 ($A42,411) banner that would have been seen by millions of television viewers as part of the convention backdrop.

But it was ordered to remove the sign by convention organisers, who said the decision was made for aesthetic reasons.

Not mentioned in most reports on Planned Parenthood’s “I had an abortion” T-Shirts is that it says in fine print below “and I’m proud of it.” I ask, is this really something a person should be ‘proud’ of? I mean should dentists be selling t-shirts saying “I had a root canal, and I’m proud of it”?

Verizon will be introducing fiber optic access in Huntington Beach. I wonder when they will get to Westminster?

Note that socialist propagandist Michael Moore will be on Fox News Bill O’Reilly show tomorrow.

On reading many letters to the editor on the subject of ‘gay marriage’, I sometimes think I am transported into some sort of bizarro world.

But then I think back to my many debates with my European friends, who commonly believe that governments are formed among men to create their rights.

This is not our tradition in America. Here, we believe out rights are intrinsic. And we form governments, surrendering to them certain of those rights, in order to secure the others, which are innumerable.

Among those is the right of contract, of which marriage is one. It is simply not the purview of government, as per our American tradition, to define the nature of the marriage contract. It is only the responsibility of government to enforce that contract once it is entered into.

I was amazed at tonight’s episode of The Casino on Fox. First, the owners made moralistic judgements only after some high roller hit it big at the tables (a double-fault; any seasoned gambler knows that, in the end, the house always wins). Second was the other other girl’s questioning of the ‘legal prostitute’ “what will you tell your children? That works on this assumed context we have in this nation that things like prostitution are, unquestionably, bad. An examination of sexual world history will shed great doubt on that assumption.

Some might think that the biggest career boost to come from the Democratic National Convention in Boston this week would be for John Kerry, John Edwards, or perhaps Hillary Clinton. But that blessing may indeed go to Fox News Sunday Power Player of the Week, radio talk show host Howie Carr (free registration required):

There’s a reason Massachusetts keeps electing Republican governors

[...]

University of Massachusetts-Boston political scientist Paul Watanabe offers some conventional reasons for the GOP’s success in governors’ races: The Republicans have fielded much better candidates, and independents are increasingly influential and open to voting for the GOP.

But that doesn’t fully explain why Democrats make up 85 percent of the state legislature but no Democrat can get elected to the top state job. The Howie Carr theory does. Essentially, it holds that while Massachusetts may be passionately liberal, many Massachusettsans realize that hasn’t yielded a state government of principled liberalism. Instead, state lawmakers are more intent on helping key allies – teachers unions, public employees, advocates of gay rights, etc. – than on addressing such basic quality-of-life issues as the economy and crime. A Republican governor means there’s at least one powerful check on this warped liberalism.

Carr, a popular radio-talk show host and local columnist, has made his name hammering on this theme. “Around here, GOP governors aren’t supposed to be CEOs – they’re supposed to be wardens. No one expects anything of the legislature except rampant thievery and nepotism,” he joked during the last gubernatorial campaign.

Rental rates in Los Angeles and Orange Counties have now surpased even San Francisco:

As of June 30, apartment owners collected an average monthly rent of $1,336 in Los Angeles and Orange counties — by far the most populous section of Southern California. The rental price represented a 3.7 percent increase from the same time last year, according to RealFacts, a Novato research firm that has been monitoring Western apartment rents since 1989.

In a five-county cluster within the San Francisco Bay area, June apartment rents averaged $1,310 per month, a 1 percent decrease from the same time last year.

None of the other 17 Western markets surveyed by RealFacts have average apartment rents above $1,300. The metropolitan areas surveyed are in California, Washington, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, Arizona, Idaho, Utah and New Mexico.

The rapidly growing Southern California swath of Riverside and San Bernardino counties generated the West’s biggest rent increase. Apartment rents in the region averaged $978 in June, 6 percent higher than last year.

Of course, The Bay Area is still reeling from the collapse of the Clinton Bubble. But, throughout California, the expense and time required to do residential development, as well as a tax scheme which grossly favors localities undertaking commercial development (frequently fueled by coercive redevelopment programs), has created a chronic housing shortage.