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Author: Leslie Eastman

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Leslie Eastman

I am an Environmental Health and Safety Professional, as well as a science/technical writer for a variety of news and professional publications. I have been a citizen activist since 2009, and am one of the co-founders of the San Diego-based group, Southern California Tax Revolt Coalition.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on November 28, 2013 4 Comments
The last time we checked on Hobby Lobby after a 60,000 citizen buycott in support of its case against Obamacare, it looked likely that US Supreme Court would take up the case. SCOTUS has now formally done just that.
The U.S. Supreme Court today agreed to review the lawsuit filed by Hobby Lobby against the federal government over the Obamacare mandate that employers provide contraceptive coverage in their health plans. Hobby Lobby, which is owned by an Oklahoma City family with strong Christian beliefs, says a 1993 law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, protects the company from the mandate. The company is particularly opposed to paying for coverage that includes the morning after pill.
The court also accepted a related case from Pennsylvania involving a Mennonite family with a furniture-making business. In that case, a federal appeals court initially ruled that the owners could not challenge the mandate on religious ground because a company did not enjoy the same rights as individuals.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on November 28, 2013 12 Comments

Progressives are being forced to eat a lot of crow this Thanksgiving. At the national level, Obamacare is being plucked apart in the media.  In California, a touchstone of liberal green dreams and one of the state's biggest turkeys is being thrown under the bus by...

Posted by Leslie Eastman on November 24, 2013 9 Comments

Americans planning to travel around the East Coast this Thanksgiving are in for a real weather treat: A nor'easter is swirling together and it could hit the east coast just in time for Thanksgiving, Quartz reports. The storm looks like it will stretch from New England down...

Posted by Leslie Eastman on November 21, 2013 3 Comments
The last time we checked on San Diego,  former Mayor Bob Filner was pleading guilty to sex harassment charges and  Democrat City Councilmember Todd Gloria was interim chief. It looks like Gloria is going to continue in that role for a bit longer, as the results of the November 19th special election produced two candidates for a run-off.
As of 11 p.m. local time Tuesday, Republican Kevin Faulconer led a field of 11 candidates with 44 percent of the vote, giving the GOP a chance to recapture an office they held for much of the last four decades and an opportunity for a rare win leading a major American city. David Alvarez, a first-term city councilman, had 25 percent. Nathan Fletcher, an executive at wireless technology titan Qualcomm Inc. and former state assemblyman, had 24 percent. Alvarez had trailed Fletcher for most of the evening, but had pulled ahead by 1,456 votes as the clock ticked past 11 p.m.
Post-election analysis shows a combination of Latino voters and union support helped carry Alvarez into the next phase:
The city's burgeoning Latino population helped propel a native son and child of Mexican immigrants into a mayoral runoff against a fellow city councilman to replace the disgraced Bob Filner, who resigned amid sexual harassment allegations. David Alvarez, a first-term Democratic councilman, began the short campaign with far less name recognition than some rivals but defeated them with heavy financial backing from organized labor and support in Hispanic communities.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on October 27, 2013 5 Comments
I have been following the disturbing news from Egypt closely; while it was hoped that a new president and a ban on the Muslim Brotherhood might stem more violence against its Coptic Christians, it looks like that is not to be:
The wedding party stood outside the church, eagerly awaiting the ceremonious arrival of the bride. Instead, drive-by shooters killed four, including two children and the groom's mother, and injured 18. Beyond its poignancy, the attack in Cairo's industrial neighborhood of Warraq was significant for being one of the first to target Egypt's Christians specifically, versus the now-common attacks on their church buildings. "Since the revolution, this is the first instance Coptic people were targeted randomly in a church, with weapons," said Mina Magdy, general coordinator for the Maspero Youth Union, a mostly Coptic revolutionary group formed in response to church burnings in 2011 after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak.
Interestingly, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul spoke about the issue of Muslim violence against Christians at a Value Voters summit earlier this month:
“Christians are being attacked around the world, but you won’t hear much about it on the evening news because the answer’s not convenient,” Paul continued. “It doesn’t fit the narrative we have been told about radical Islam. The president tries to gloss over who’s attacking and killing Christians. The media describes the killings as sectarian. But the truth is, a worldwide war on Christians is being waged by a fanatical element of Islam....”

Posted by Leslie Eastman on October 27, 2013 36 Comments
Meghan McCain says her Arizona senator dad is “depressed” and “frustrated” with the tea party faction of the Republican Party, which she called “the hyper-conservative wing.” The comments were part of Meghan's promo for her new show, which no one will watch, Raising McCain. As a Tea Party activist, I am all for making both McCains even more frustrated. One of the most important developments in the new conservative movement has been encouraging regular Americans to participate directly in politics. In California, that has meant many have gotten involved in local Republican groups and have become versed in the ways of state party politics and its Byzantine rules. Recently, the Tea Party California Caucus  formed in response to the state Republican Party's continued lack of enthusiasm for formulating and implementing conservative policy. On Canto Talk, I recently had a chance to interview its founder Randall Jordan, as well as California Tea Party coordinator Dawn Wildman.  The caucus recently participated in the California Republican convention in Anaheim; Jordan says they met with "100 % more success" than they were anticipating and now the GOP establishment "can't ignore us and knows we are not going away."

Posted by Leslie Eastman on October 26, 2013 6 Comments
California Governor Jerry Brown's had a mixed reaction to several pieces of gun control legislation that recently hit his desk:
California Gov. Jerry Brown split the difference Friday on the pile of gun-control bills sitting on his desk, opting to sign five but veto seven, including a bill that would have banned the sale of many popular hunting rifles. “The state of California already has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, including bans on military-style assault rifles and high-capacity ammunition magazines,” said Mr. Brown in his veto message. “While the author’s intent is to strengthen these restrictions, this bill goes much farther by banning any semi-automatic rifle with a detachable magazine.”
Yet, Brown still managed to sign bills that prohibit the use of lead ammunition for hunting, ban kits that convert ammunition magazines to hold more than 10 rounds, make it a crime to leave a loaded gun in an area where it may be accessed by a minor without permission, and a bill that prohibits gun ownership by people who make serious threats to psychoanalysts. Dawn Wildman, President of San Diego's SoCal Tax Revolt Coalition, noted that without the help if the National Rifle Association working with Californians, the results could have been much more restrictive. She cites a list of items that were defeated before hitting Brown's desk, including:
Assembly Bill 174: This bill would have banned the possession of any firearm, magazine, or ammunition that was previously “grandfathered in” by previous legislation. Assembly Bill 108: This bill would have placed criminal liability on gun owners for failing to lock their firearms away every time they left the house, regardless of whether anyone would be present in the home.
In response to the legislation that did garner Brown's signature, a California Assemblyman is using Colorado's recent recall elections as a model for sending a message to elected advocates of excessive gun restrictions.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on October 24, 2013 8 Comments
(Photo: Saint Joseph Abbey website) As we near the end of October, I thought this seemed like an appropriate free market success story to share: Monks in Louisiana win right to sell handcrafted caskets
When the state Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors told the Benedictine monks of St. Joseph Abbey in southern Louisiana they could not sell their handcrafted caskets to the public, the normally peaceful order took the fight to court. Hurricane Katrina had wiped out the order's traditional income from selling timber, so the brothers decided to market the simple cypress boxes they had long built to bury monks who died. They were priced at $1,500 or $2,000, far less than a funeral home would charge. But the state board, composed mostly of embalmers and funeral home directors, ordered the monks to stop. Their five-year legal battle ended quietly at the Supreme Court last week with a defeat for state-enforced "economic protectionism" and a victory for small entrepreneurs. It is part of a growing trend of successful "economic liberty" cases championed by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian legal group based in Arlington, Va.
The costs of a typical funeral have risen from about $700 in 1960 to over $7000 today.  It looks like as technologies have been developed or improved in this country, both life and death have gotten more expensive: Legal Insurrection #03

Posted by Leslie Eastman on October 19, 2013 7 Comments

With both houses of Congress passing the budget deal, and the Tea Party being smeared by both parties, I wanted to give my Legal Insurrection friends some reasons to have hope and a reason to focus locally. Many of these reasons can be found in Ballotpedia, an...

Posted by Leslie Eastman on October 16, 2013 2 Comments

In news that is almost as surprising as the San Diego Chargers' 19-9 Win over Indianapolis during Monday Night Football, it seems our former mayor is taking a trip down the road of personal responsibility. Bob Filner (Democrat) has plead guilty to three separate sex harassment...

Posted by Leslie Eastman on October 01, 2013 8 Comments

As a big fan of capitalism, I am fascinated by the concept of crowdfunding, whereby individuals network and pool their money via websites to support potentially profitable enterprises initiated by savvy entrepreneurs. It's small-scale venture capitalism! Perhaps the best known crowdfunding enterprise is Kickstarter, which offers a...

Posted by Leslie Eastman on September 29, 2013 11 Comments

No matter how much the elite media and establishment politicos want to kill-off Tea Party, it seems that we citizen activists refuse to roll over and die. If anything, we are pushing back smarter as well as harder. Case-in-point:  Some excellent news about the Tea Party forcing...

Posted by Leslie Eastman on September 24, 2013 10 Comments

I have always held out hope that the Egyptians would recall their proud, pharaonic roots and quell the growing Islamo-extremism within their country. Today, I caught the first positive news I have read about the region in a long time: An Egyptian court has banned the...

Posted by Leslie Eastman on September 21, 2013 10 Comments
In the midst of a "government shutdown" diatribe and immigration reform fizzles,  a key bill quietly passed in the Senate by a huge margin that was actually quite important to many Americans:
Producers of high-tech products from MRI scanners to semiconductors are breathing a sigh of relief after U.S. lawmakers acted on Thursday to prevent the shutdown of a 90-year-old helium reservoir in Texas. The U.S. Senate vote was hardly a squeaker, at 97-2, to keep the Federal Helium Program running past its scheduled closure on October 7. The House of Representatives voted earlier in the year to keep the reserve running, but without action in the Senate panic set in, triggering some frantic lobbying. More than 100 organizations, universities and companies, including Siemens, Philips, Samsung, and General Electric, wrote to Congress last week urging it to keep the reservoir open or risk a disruption to the U.S. economy, putting millions of jobs at risk.
Helium is a key industrial gas, which has a lot of useful properties that also make it a very hard-to-obtain commodity. It is lighter than air, which is great for balloons...but also a property that allows and easy escape from Earth's atmosphere. It is an inert, non-reactive gas, which is useful in applications that must be kept dry and oxygen-free, but that also means helium can't be "trapped" by forming other compounds and then extracted chemically. Helium is a by-product of radioactive decay, which is "mined" from underground reserves. In fact, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s Crude Helium Enrichment Facility in Texas supplies about 40% of the Helium produced in this country. It turns out this government intervention is part of the shortage problem.
Where Congress once mandated that the federal government keep a reserve of this crucial gas, it reversed course several decades later. In 1996, Congress moved to privatize the federal helium program, requiring all of the government’s helium supplies to be sold off by 2015. "The legislation in 1996 says we were supposed to get out of the helium business," says Joe Peterson, the Bureau of Land Management’s assistant field manager for helium in Amarillo. "The hope was by 2015, by the time the reserve was sold down, that new sources of helium would be online and take up the demand. However, it has not happened yet."

Posted by Leslie Eastman on September 19, 2013 54 Comments
As the co-founder of a Tea Party, you might guess that the federal agency that frustrates me the most is the Internal Revenue Service. However, from the eyes of this environmental health and safety professional, the tax men are a close second to the agents of the Environmental Protection Agency. One of the reasons is its aggressive handling of an investigation that the agency says was conducted because of possible violations of the Clean Water Act.
The recent uproar over armed EPA agents descending on a tiny Alaska mining town is shedding light on the fact that 40 federal agencies – including nearly a dozen typically not associated with law enforcement -- have armed divisions. ....The incident that sparked the renewed interest and concern occurred in late August when a team of armed federal and state officials descended on the tiny Alaska gold mining town of Chicken, Alaska.
To put it in perspective, below is a picture of this den of polluting iniquity, which has a population of 17 with dozens of seasonal workers. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="462"] Chicken, Alaska in 2006[/caption] The agency's officials have been as forthcoming about their raid as the US State Department has been about Benghazi. From FOX News:
The raid, according to one Senate staffer close to the matter, was conducted as such because of information received from the Alaska State Troopers about rampant “drug and human trafficking” in the area, the Alaska Dispatch reports. That purported explanation was seemingly debunked by a spokeswoman for the law enforcement agency who told the newspaper that it did not advise EPA officials to conduct the raid, adding that no evidence exists to believe those crimes are occurring. Calls seeking additional comment from the Alaska State Troopers were not returned early Friday. “Their explanation — that there are concerns with the area of rampant drug trafficking and human trafficking going on — sounds wholly concocted to me,” Murkowski told the newspaper. “This seems to have been a heavy-handed and heavy-armor approach. Why was it so confrontational? The EPA really didn’t have any good answers for this.”
Interestingly, the mission statement of the EPA centers on protecting human health and safety and the environment. I assert that sending armed agents to terrorize citizens runs counter to that mission.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on September 14, 2013 41 Comments

As in other countries, many children in this country unfortunately face death and violence as well.  So, today, I am offering some items that have come across my screen that show American Justice at is finest and which involve children. One of the most heart-wrenching stories...

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