These are my links for April 26th from 12:32 to 12:53:

• California budget nut remains uncracked – Jerry Brown's insider attempt to crack California's budget nut has been no more successful than Arnold Schwarzenegger's outsider attack.

  Both relied on unrealistic assumptions about Capitol reality – Schwarzenegger because he was a newbie and Brown for reasons known only to him.

  Brown offered a complex mixture of spending cuts and tax extensions tailored to the supposed predilections of a disaffected California electorate.

  Nearly four months later, however, the Capitol is stalemated – and not merely because of its deep ideological divisions.

  For weeks, Brown negotiated with a few Republican senators who were evidently willing to place an extension of temporary taxes before voters if public pension and budget reforms were part of the ballot package.

  The talks eventually collapsed. Brown says, in effect, the Republicans demanded too much, but it's also evident that he, Democratic lawmakers and their allies, especially public employee unions, got cold feet.

  Private and public polls indicated that if taxes, pension reforms and a spending limit were placed on the ballot, voters might easily reject the taxes and pass the two others.

  A new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll underscores the Democrats' dilemma, finding voters' support for a tax election and pension and budget reforms is very high but for taxes is barely 50 percent.

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  California's budget will remain uncracked until either voters pass tax increases by voting for them at the ballot or the Democrats get serious about cutting spending.

  I see neither anytime soon and California's economy will stay in the doldrums.

• Lamar Alexander: The White House vs. Boeing—A Tennessee Tale – The National Labor Relations Board has moved to stop Boeing from building airplanes at a nonunion plant in South Carolina, suggesting that a unionized American company cannot expand its operations into one of the 22 states with right-to-work laws, which protect a worker's right to join or not join a union. (New Hampshire's legislature has just approved its becoming the 23rd.)

  This reminds me of a White House state dinner in February 1979, when I was governor of Tennessee. President Jimmy Carter said, "Governors, go to Japan. Persuade them to make here what they sell here."

  "Make here what they sell here" was then the union battle cry, part of an effort to slow the tide of Japanese cars and trucks entering the U.S. market.

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  Read it all…..

  This example explains why America has lost its manufacturing might…..