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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 military action inside the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and (4) the elimination of all offensive weapons by Israel and Hamas directed at one another.
The Muslim and Arab-American communities are experiencing the terrible rise in Islamophobia and anti-Arab rhetoric, the acceptance of hate speech on college campuses and elsewhere against Muslims and Arabs, and the refusal of some to condemn Islamophobia and anti-Arab prejudice without qualifications as a shocking reminder of historic reality. Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate are centuries old prejudices that never go away. An independent Palestinian state remains the hope that Palestinians can live safely and freely and never again face threats to their very existence;
And so on, all backed the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). True to form, “Islamophobia” appears four times and anti-Semitism three times. Resolution 2024 was the project of Sacramento mayor Darrell Steinberg. As Sir Bedevire (Terry Jones) might say, who is this who is so wise in the ways of diplomacy?
Steinberg served as an attorney for the California State Employees Association, which gained a faithful friend in the state Senate. In 2004, the Sacramento Democrat sponsored Proposition 63, the Mental Health Services Act, which backers claimed would get the homeless off the street and keep people out of prison.
Promises Still to Keep: A Decade of the Mental Health Services Act, from California’s Little Hoover Commission, was unable to determine whether the money fulfilled any of the Act’s proclaimed intentions. The Sacramento Bee wondered if the money had been “shoved down a rat hole” with questionable uses “such as yoga, horseback riding, gardening, the purchase of iPads,” and so forth. On the other hand, the measure did give $7.5 million to the UC Davis Behavioral Health Center of Excellence, where Steinberg became director of policy and advocacy.
In 2012, voters faced four measures on taxes and spending. The Senate Governance and Finance Committee held hearings but Steinberg blocked citizens’ access by killing the live broadcast on the California Channel. When this came to light, Steinberg proclaimed, “I pride myself on being open and transparent.” Steinberg now backs Resolution 2024 which claims, “Sacramento is such a special place to live for many reasons.” That is true, but not the way Steinberg spins it.
Twenty years after Proposition 63, the homeless problem is worse than ever. As in San Francisco, dogs run the risk of stepping in human waste. Sacramento has been dubbed “Excremento,” and Steinberg’s Resolution 2024 piles it higher and deeper. As Katy Grimes of the California Globe explains, “it was likely a move to cover and distract from his $66 million budget deficit – and would serve to elevate his political image as Steinberg has his hopes set on a move up to the California Attorney General’s office.”
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 that only costs $750 million is almost an insult at this point.
And Dirksen also never could have anticipated the utility of high speed-rail spending. If he was alive today, he’d likely modify his statement as follows: “A hundred billion here, a hundred billion there, and maybe someday you’ll have a high-speed rail line in California.”
To no one’s surprise, this is in the “news” this week:
As the state faces economic headwinds, California’s mega high-speed rail project between San Francisco to Los Angeles also faces major funding hurdles, the project’s CEO Brian Kelly told state lawmakers Tuesday.
Kelly testified in front of the State Senate’s Transportation Committee on the High-Speed Rail Authority’s updated draft business plan. In Tuesday’s hearing, Kelly told lawmakers the project has $28 billion dollars on hand, but noted it was still a few billion dollars short to complete the Central Valley segment between Merced and Bakersfield. Depending on how long the segment takes to finish, it could cost between $32 Billion to $35 Billion. Kelly said the project is hoping to fill the gap with federal funds. That segment of the project is expected to be fully operational between 2030 and 2033, Kelly said.
Project leaders estimate it will still need an additional $100 billion to finish what voters were originally pitched in 2008: a bullet train that runs between San Francisco and Los Angeles. A timeline on its completion has not been set as the authority waits for environmental clearances for those segments.
Bold emphasis added. Because everyone knows federal money is free, or grows on trees or something. But with a state deficit now likely to be over $70 billion this year, there’s little chance California can pay for the completion of the rail line itself. And there’s no timeline set because everyone with a brain understand the high speed rail line will never be fully completed. The “environmental clearances” make that certain.
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 2020 law called the California Racial Justice Act, every felon serving time in the state’s prisons and jails can now retroactively challenge his conviction and sentencing on the ground of systemic bias.
To prevail, the incarcerated prisoner need not show that the police officers, prosecutors, judge or jurors in his case were motivated by racism or that his proceedings were unfair. If he can demonstrate that in the past, criminal suspects of his race were arrested, prosecuted or sentenced more often or more severely than members of other racial groups, he will be entitled to a new trial or sentence.
We all know what this is about. Blacks are arrested, prosecuted and convicted more often than members of other races because they commit more crimes. Heather has some of the numbers for California:
In Los Angeles, blacks are 21 times as likely as whites to commit a violent crime, 36 times as likely to commit a robbery, and 57 times as likely to commit a homicide, according to police department data. Those data come from reports filed by victims and witnesses, who are themselves disproportionately black.
Blacks over-offend to an appalling degree in other states, too. But liberals cling to the hoary myth that “disparities” in law enforcement can only be due to racial bias in criminal jutice.
The Racial Justice Act is turning California’ criminal justice system into a farce:
When a felon in San Francisco contested his arrest and prosecution for having a loaded handgun in his car, a “race expert” testified that the arresting officer’s use of the phrase “high crime area” demonstrated “bias against people of color.” The trial judge disagreed, but an appeals court reversed and allowed the felon’s claim to proceed. (Speaking of bias, that same expert, Dante King, asserted at the University of California, San Francisco, on Feb. 8 that “whites are psychopaths” whose “behavior represents an underlying, biologically transmitted proclivity.”)
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A case from Contra Costa County last year shows the snowballing potential of the Racial Justice Act. A judge found that four black gang members who had committed murder as part of a bloody feud between two Oakland gangs had been improperly sentenced to life in prison without parole. That conclusion wasn’t based on flaws in the four defendants’ trials, but simply on an alleged historical pattern of sentencing bias toward black gang murderers. The black comparison group in the case was made up of 30 black defendants who had also committed gang murder in Contra Costa County from 2015 to 2022 and who had also received life without parole. All 30 can now sue to erase those sentences.
It is hard to understand how there can be a political movement in favor of more crime, but there you have it. In California, that movement evidently represents the majority. If, for some reason, you still live in California, you should get out while you can.
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 old money San Francisco. Like Joe Biden, whose administration he admires, Newsom is a semi-literate who shows little evidence of reading books. To be fair, the San Francisco Democrat probably outdoes Biden in his affection for China’s one-party Communist dictatorship, and current PRC boss Xi Jinping. For his recent visit, Newsom even cleaned up filthy San Francisco.
Like recurring governor Jerry Brown, who appointed Newsom’s father to judgeships, Gavin Newsom has never said anything that would make a sub-moron’s mouth twitch. He walks around posing, as he intones party platitudes in a scratchy pirate voice. Gov. Newsom inflicted a draconian Covid regime but now wants the people to worship him. This was evident in 2021 but Gavin Newsom prevailed.
The current recall might prompt an independent audit to see how many votes came from false-documented illegals registered to vote when they got their driver’s license. Squads of politiqueros coerce the illegals to vote “a certain way,” code for Democrats. With promises of “free” health care, welfare benefits, protection from deportation and so forth, Newsom shapes up as the politiquero-in-chief.
The new recall provides an opportunity to expose this massive fraud, which could inspire other states to true the vote. If only legitimate citizens and legal immigrants voted, as the law requires, the result could be quite different from 2020 and 2021.
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 Chinese for Affirmative Action.
According to CAA, last year “more than 24,000 Chinese migrants have made a treacherous 60-mile trek through the Darien Gap risking death and disease to eventually cross from Mexico into the U.S.” The “numbers are unprecedented,” and the San Diego Migrant Welcome Center “asked CAA to assist with the influx of arrivals.” For many, “the number one priority was to arrange transit to U.S.-based family and friends.” While this was going on, another People’s Republic of China (PRC) development escaped notice.
In January, a team from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cleaned up the site of an illegal biolab run by Chinese nationals in Reedley, California, near Fresno. The site jostled with dangerous pathogens, and viral agents, some untested by the federal Centers for Disease Control. That is no surprise since the CDC cooperates closely with the PRC, and the CDC’s vaunted Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), which failed to stop Covid from arriving stateside, includes Chinese nationals.
According to The Black Book of Communism, the PRC is the most lethal regime in history, with more than 60 million victims. If the PRC ever did anything with which the CDC disagreed, it’s hard to know what it might be. The same goes for California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who passed away last September. Feinstein maintained a Chinese spy on her staff for 20 years. Gov. Gavin Newsom also has a soft spot for the one-party Communist regime.
San Francisco has become the world’s largest latrine, homeless camp and junkyard, but former mayor Newsom cleaned it all up when Xi Jinping came to town. That was hardly Newsom’s only service for the PRC.
In April 2020, Gov. Newsom announced a $1 billion deal for masks with the Chinese company BYD, which had no experience making protective equipment. Newsom hid the details, even from fellow Democrats and what became of the $1 billion remained something of a mystery. Other massive favors for the PRC stand in plain sight.
For the new span of the Bay Bridge, California rejected federal money and hired a Chinese company which, at the time, had no experience building bridges. The structure came in 10 years late, $5 billion over budget, and riddled with cracked bolts, corrosion and such.
All told, the Golden State is shaping up as Californiachukuo, a development and settlement zone for the PRC. Newsom is the colonial official, and a PRC national now serves on the San Francisco Election Commission, eager to ensure accurate translation of election documents.
As Commissioner Wong should know, back in 1986 a full 73 percent of California voters passed Proposition 63, the Official Language of California Amendment, designed to “preserve the role of English as the state’s common language.” According to this law, the voter guides should be only in English, with good reason. As legal immigrants know, some proficiency in English is a requirement for U.S. citizenship, in turn, a requirement for voting in U.S. elections.
By contrast, Joe Biden believes that illegals are “already American citizens” and should be able to vote. That’s why he brought in some eight million foreign nationals with no English ability, no background checks, and no health requirements. According to Chinese for Affirmative Action, “unprecedented numbers” of them are Chinese nationals, eager to link up with those already here.
All told, Californiachukuo is shaping up as the model for the nation. To paraphrase Walter Sobchak, this is what happens when a constitutional democracy collaborates with a genocidal Communist dictatorship.
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 Wall Street Journal story is headlined: “Blue-State Residents Streamed Into South Carolina. Here’s Why It Stayed Ruby Red.” But it deals with more than one state:
A Wall Street Journal analysis of census data found that a third of [South Carolina’s] new residents between 2017 and 2021 hailed from blue states and a quarter from red ones, according to census data. …
Yet the new arrivals are disproportionately Republican. Estimates from the nonpartisan voter file vendor L2 suggest about 57% of voters who moved to South Carolina during that time are Republicans, while about 36% are Democrats and 7% are independents. That places them roughly in line with recent statewide votes in South Carolina.
It shouldn’t be surprising that when conservatives leave liberal states, they likely will move to conservative ones. The same thing is happening in states other than South Carolina:
The Palmetto State is a prime example of why a yearslong wave of migration to the South has largely failed to change its partisan tint. Many people who leave blue states are Republicans gravitating toward a more politically favorable new home.
In Florida, for instance, 48% of people who moved there between 2017 and 2021 came from blue states while 29% came from red states, Census figures show. Among those who registered to vote, 44% are Republicans, 25% are Democrats and 28% are nonpartisan, according to L2 data. Texas also has a heavier flow of newcomers from blue states but a greater share who L2 data estimates are Republican.
There is much more at the link; it is fun to see Democrats try to spin the numbers:
McDougald Scott and other South Carolina Democratic officials are working to target these new voters and persuade them to vote Democratic by focusing on issues like education…
I live in a blue state (for the time being, anyway) where the public schools are almost unbelievably bad. To be fair, though, the schools in New York and California are likely worse.
…infrastructure…
Have these people never driven on a highway in California?
and healthcare…
What about healthcare? Most people get health insurance through their jobs, and jobs are much more plentiful in red states. Blue states spend incomprehensible amounts of money on Medicaid, but that isn’t exactly a magnet for desirable new inhabitants.
…which she believes the Republicans are neglecting.
Apparently millions of Americans who are moving from blue to red states do not agree. Perhaps this is what it comes down to:
She said South Carolina’s limited access to abortion—which is banned at six weeks of pregnancy—is also something that crosses party lines.
Right. Hey, blue state economies may suck, crime may be rampant, taxes may be too high, government may be corrupt–but if the occasion arises, you can always kill your baby. This is the sales pitch my state’s liberal government is actually trying to implement: come here to get an abortion or a sex change operation, especially if you are a kid! Somehow, it doesn’t seem to be working.
The bottom line is that the Great Sort continues to benefit Red America. The question is, to what extent is the out-migration of normals locking liberalism into the blue states?
Vaunce News 