California auto-enrolling health plan exchange customers in food stamps?

There’s automated efficiency, and then there’s the Brave New World.  Writer Nicole Hopkins’s mother, a resident of Washington state, found that out when she used Washington’s health plan exchange website to find a new insurance plan, and was presented with exactly one “option”: Medicaid.  Ms. Hopkins mère has always paid for private insurance, and fully intended to continue doing so, even when Obamacare caused her preferred policy to be cancelled.  But the new health plan exchange in Washington doesn’t offer her an option to buy insurance.  It has simply determined that she will be a Medicaid beneficiary.

If that seems high-handed, consider the report of a California business owner to

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Brown signs bill to overpopulate planet

Moonbeam and friends, back when our global problem was an impending new Ice Age

Apparently Jerry Brown didn’t get the memo.  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is 95% certain that humans are causing global warming.  This level of certainty is so categorical that CNN felt quite comfortable in using the long-discredited “hockey stick” graph to illustrate the warming trend. 

Desperate desert tortoise endangered by Jerry Brown

Q.  When does destroying a creature’s natural habitat with human power-generation activities not matter?

A.  When Jerry Brown is governor of California, the creature is the desert tortoise, and the power-generation activity in question is the installation of a huge solar-power facility in the Mojave Desert.

It’s the, um, selective prioritization that warrants calling out here.  The issue of whether the desert tortoise will be fatally inconvenienced by the solar facility is no more clear-cut than it ever is in such cases.  Some environmentalists can always be found

Public transit employee: $458K salary plus $1.2m home-loan concession

If you had to guess, you’d guess this was in the San Francisco Bay area – and you’d be right. The official in question heads the San Mateo County Transit District, which runs trains and buses, and, like all public transit systems, is always in the red.  This means that when state and federal money bail local transit out every year, it’s tax dollars from across America that make executive compensation like this possible.

For a glimpse of the federal dollars being pumped into metropolitan transit, see this summary of the $270 million in Federal Transit Administration grants to California transit districts under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as Obama’s stimulus package. The San Mateo County Transit District received funds from 18 grants for a variety of purposes, from buying new buses to refurbishing track, updating electrical power infrastructure, and upgrading an operations control center. And that’s just the stimulus package; there are routine FTA grants made every year.

Of course, reducing one official’s salary and perks wouldn’t have covered all these costs.  On the other hand,