California

A Hundred Billion Here . . .

Featured image 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 »

California Is About to Get Even Worse

Featured image 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 »

Pompadour and Circumstance

Featured image 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 »

Californiachukuo

Featured image 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 »

Red States Getting Redder

Featured image 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 »

When Voters Met Rosie

Featured image 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 »

Brown Droppings

Featured image 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.  »

Schiff for Brains?

Featured image 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. »

Crazyfornia Gets Crazier

Featured image 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 »

White Governor Supremacy

Featured image 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 »

Gavin Escuela

Featured image 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 »

Pillage People Revisited

Featured image 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 »

Hamas New Year in California [With Comment by John]

Featured image 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 »

Gail Heriot wants you

Featured image Speaking of identity politics, as I do in the adjacent post on Claudine Gay, we should note that the left never gives up. That is what occurs to me and it is the place where William McGurn begins his Wall Street Journal column “Making discrimination okay again.” In the column McGurn recounts the efforts of California Democrats to make discrimination by race legal after its apparently decisive legal defeats: Do »

California Ups the Ante

Featured image California has so much going for it that it should have been indestructible. But it turns out there is nothing that liberalism can’t destroy. People–that is, taxpayers–are fleeing California in droves, and the state is experiencing a budget crisis. Conversely, illegal aliens who cross the southern border undetected generally head for California, where they know they can expect a warm welcome. And it is about to get warmer. California is »

California Copies Colorado

Featured image Following Colorado’s lead, California Lt. Gov Eleni Kounalakis is exploring “every legal option” to remove former President Trump from California’s 2024 presidential primary ballot.” According to Kounalakis, the move is “not a matter of political gamesmanship. This is a dire matter that puts at stake the sanctity of our constitution and our democracy.” As Sir Bedivere (Terry Jones) might say, who is this who is so wise in the ways »

The Pangloss-Pétain Governor

Featured image In his debate with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, California Gov. Gavin Newsom claimed, “We’ve already established that more people are moving from Florida to California.” That caught the attention of Lee Ohanian, research fellow at the Independent Institute, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and professor of economics at UCLA. “The rate of California’s population outflow to Florida has in fact accelerated,” professor Ohanian explains. “In 2022, California had a »