California
April 13, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
Biden’s HHS boss Xavier Becerra misses California and might want to run for governor, Katy Grimes of the California Globe reports. In his current post, Becerra “doubled down on tyrannical COVID policies, including mandatory masking and vaccines for everyone including pregnant women and infants, as well as business and school lockdowns.” Before that, Becerra, was “up to his eyeballs” in a scandal that started when the DNC’s Debbie Wasserman Schultz
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March 31, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
I want to speak briefly about the terrible incident and accident that happened in Baltimore this morning. At about 1:30, a container ship struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge, which I’ve been over many, many times commuting from the state of Delaware either on a train or by car. I’ve been to Baltimore Harbor many times. And the bridge collapsed, sending several people and vehicles into the water — into the
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March 29, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
California’s Chino Valley School District has established a policy of notifying parents if their children start “transitioning” to a different gender. California attorney general Rob Bonta is suing the district on the grounds that the policy: has placed transgender and gender nonconforming students in danger of imminent, irreparable harm from the consequences of forced disclosures. These students are currently under threat of being outed to their parents or guardians against
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March 22, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
On March 20, the Sacramento City Council passed Resolution 2024, which: Calls for an immediate and permanent bilateral ceasefire to urgently end the current violence; a true and effective bilateral ceasefire must include four key simultaneous elements. (1) Hamas must cease all military operations directed against Israel, (2) the immediate unconditional release of all Israeli hostages held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip, (3) Israel must stop the bombing and
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March 14, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Everett Dirksen, the Republican Senate leader back in the 1960s, is famous for saying, “A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. . .” That was in the days before multi-trillion dollar deficits. A billion dollars is hardly a rounding error in a federal program these days, and $1 billion is usually considered the entry fee for any proposed new program. A program
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March 4, 2024 — John Hinderaker
You might think that the leftists who run California would be worried about the rapid decline of that state, but no: they are doing all they can to accelerate it. In the Wall Street Journal, Heather Mac Donald outlines California’s latest descent into racialist madness: What would happen if lawmakers reinvented the criminal-justice system to target “systemic racism” instead of crime? California is about to find out. Thanks to a
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February 28, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
Californians are ramping up another recall for Gov. Gavin Newsom, a good thing for America even if it fails, as in 2021. A new recall in California will divert attention from races across the country, force Democrats to spend millions. The best outcome would be a successful recall of Newsom his own self. The coiffed Democrat is a construct of the Brown, Newsom, Pelosi and Getty families, a belch from
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February 26, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
By a unanimous vote, the San Francisco supervisors have made Kelly Wong a member of the San Francisco Elections Commission. The Chinese national is the first non- U.S. citizen to hold the post, and under U.S. law she is not allowed to vote. Wong’s priority is to ensure that voter materials are translated in a way that people can understand, work she already performs as an “immigrant rights advocate” at
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February 23, 2024 — John Hinderaker
The Great Sort is under way, as normal people move to red states and liberals move to blue states. (That last is hypothetical and hasn’t actually been observed.) When massive numbers began leaving blue states like California and New York for red states like Texas and Florida, many conservatives worried that those blue staters might bring their bad voting habits with them. Happily, that doesn’t seem to have happened. This
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February 19, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
Hereditary, recurring governor Jerry Brown, 85, wants California’s supreme court to remove from the November ballot a measure that would give the people final say on tax hikes. That invites a look at Brown’s past dealings with the state’s high court. In 1977, Brown’s choice for chief justice was Rose Bird, 40 years old and without judicial experience. In 10 years as California’s chief justice, Bird heard 64 capital cases
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February 17, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
California’s Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act requires voter approval for all new taxes passed by the legislature and two-thirds voter approval for all new special tax increases. The Act also demands clear definitions of what is a tax or a fee, along with truthful descriptions of new tax proposals. Before any tax or fee is enacted, politicians must clearly outline how the revenues would be spent, and so on.
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February 14, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Anyone who follows California politics will know that California adopted a “jungle” primary system some time ago, in which all candidates for an office in the spring primary run on a single ballot line, with the top two finishers advancing to the November general election. The Republican Party has fallen so low in California in recent years that several U.S. Senate races have come down to two Democrats in November.
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January 14, 2024 — John Hinderaker
California pioneered modern product liability law, which probably has done some good although it had unintended consequences, too. But now California has gone too far. Its appellate court has held that a manufacturer can be sued for not producing a product: Some 24,000 patients have sued Gilead Sciences in California state court for failing to introduce an allegedly safer version of an HIV drug. The Food and Drug Administration in
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January 10, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
Does California Governor Gavin Newsom, the product of the “four San Francisco families – the Browns, the Newsoms, the Pelosis and the Gettys” that have dominated California politics for decades, need more power? Assembly Constitutional Amendment 7, which Scott reported on here last week, will do just that. There’s more to the backstory that should be known. The California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), Proposition 209 on the 1996 ballot, eliminated
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January 7, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
California Gov. Gavin Newsom attended Santa Clara University on a “partial baseball scholarship,” and as he told Liz Mullen of Sports Business Journal in 2019, “the only reason I am governor of California, the only reason you are talking to me right now, is because of baseball.” That same year, veteran California commentator Dan Walters advanced other reasons Gavin Newsom might be governor of California: Newsom is succeeding someone who
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January 5, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
Despite the “worse than usual malevolent morons” in state government, Steve Hayward remains in “Krazifornia” because of natural “attractions” and something called Proposition 13. For many Californians and people across the country, that may require explanation. Back in the 1970s some Californians, primarily seniors, were literally being taxed out of their homes. Hereditary Gov. Jerry Brown and the legislature did nothing to address this problem, but a response came in
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January 4, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
Yesterday, pro-Hamas protesters showed up in force in the California Assembly, the California Globe reports, forcing members to call a recess, but “then upgraded to adjournment.” Isaac Bryan, a Los Angeles Democrat, called the protest a “powerful showing of civil disobedience,” but Yuba City Republican James Gallagher said in a statement: We cannot allow pro-Hamas radicals to continue shouting down government proceedings and bullying people into silence. We must stand
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