Gore Vidal documentary

Good documentary on Gore Vidal now playing at the Opera Plaza Cinema. His skewering of Jerry Brown during a 1982 Senate campaign event is by itself worth the price of admission. Brown was visibly not amused, though everyone else was.

Paying for a boondoggle

Bump at the pump to pay for high-speed rail

Though California is already facing a $443 billion Wall of Debt, Governor Brown and the state legislature have hijacked $250 million of the cap-and-trade money for the high-speed rail boondoggle.

Of course the unions approve, since even dumb projects create jobs for union members, which is all they care about.

ISIS leader: "I'll see you guys in New York"

From Slate:

Baghdadi fought in some capacity with Sunni militant groups after the U.S. invasion of Iraq but was arrested in 2005 and interred by U.S. forces at Camp Bucca, the main U.S. detention facility after the closing of Abu Ghraib. He wasn’t considered much of a threat and was released in 2009. The former commanding officer of Camp Bucca recently told the Daily Beast that when Baghdadi was released, he told his captors, “I’ll see you guys in New York.” (The guards at the prison were from a Long Island-based military police unit.) The commander, Col. Kenneth King, says Baghdadi “was a bad dude, but he wasn’t the worst of the worst” and is surprised he rose to such prominence.

Thanks to The Dish for the link.