Meanwhile, the Democrats...

In California Democrats could lock themselves out of the ballot for the governor's race.

And in New York, they are playing dirty in the governor's race. 

As New York goes hard left, San Francisco edges back towards the center

...It’s a bicoastal split screen that speaks to a realignment of America’s progressive power base. In New York, Mamdani, a democratic socialist who took office on Thursday, was swept into power on promises of free buses, childcare and widespread rent freezes. In San Francisco, Mayor Daniel Lurie, an heir to the billion-dollar Levi Strauss fortune, has focused on austerity measures, beefing up policing, reviving a hollowed-out downtown core and supporting the booming artificial-intelligence industry.

San Francisco, once an incubator to a host of modern progressive ideas from the LGBTQ+-rights movement to ethnic studies in classrooms and protections for undocumented immigrants, has changed. Even progressives acknowledge it isn’t the liberal trendsetter of yesteryear.

That shift has already upended the national political narrative around the city. For decades a lefty caricature and punching bag for conservatives, pundits and politicians on the right are now racing to make Mamdani the face of the Democratic Party in the midterms. Meanwhile, moderates in San Francisco, while celebrating their victories, hold their city up as a warning sign for what they cast as the excesses of the left.

“The message is you can take things too far,” said Nancy Tung, chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party and a moderate who’s helped lead the city’s centrist shift. She added, “Don’t expect that voters won’t notice forever.”

Or as Chris Larsen, a billionaire crypto titan who has been pouring money into local elections, put it: “The cost issue was the overriding thing in New York. Whereas, in San Francisco, it was cleaning the mess that the far left created over the last decade … It was safe, clean streets and getting back our reputation, which I think we largely have now.”

Read the rest here

Wealth Tax Floated in California Has Billionaires Thinking of Leaving

Billionaires including Peter Thiel, the tech venture capitalist, and Larry Page, a co-founder of Google, are considering cutting or reducing their ties to California by the end of the year because of a proposed ballot measure that could tax the state’s wealthiest residents, according to five people familiar with their thinking.

Mr. Thiel, 58, who owns a home in the Hollywood Hills and operates a personal investment firm from Los Angeles, has explored opening an office for that firm, Thiel Capital, in another state and spending more time outside California, three of the people said.

Other billionaires who appear to be making moves to decrease their presence in California include Mr. Page, 52, a longtime resident of Palo Alto. He has discussed leaving the state by the end of the year, according to two people briefed on the talks. In mid-December, three limited liability companies associated with Mr. Page filed documents to incorporate in Florida, according to state records.

The moves are being driven by a potential California ballot measure from the health care union, Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, the people said. The proposal calls for California residents worth more than $1 billion to be taxed the equivalent of 5 percent of their assets.

If the measure gains enough signatures to reach the state ballot in November and wins approval, it will retroactively apply to anyone who lived in California as of Jan. 1, 2026. Those with $20 billion in assets who resided in the state on that date would face a one-time tax of $1 billion and have five years to pay it, according to the terms of the measure.

Whether the proposal will reach California’s ballot is far from certain, but some billionaires may be unwilling to take the risk. For Mr. Page, whose net worth is estimated at $258 billion, the measure could result in a one-time tax of more than $12 billion. The tax bill for Mr. Thiel, whose net worth is around $27.5 billion, could be more than $1.2 billion.

Read the rest here.

Quote of the day...

“California’s redistricting scheme is a brazen power grab that tramples on civil rights and mocks the democratic process,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in an emailed statement. “Governor Newsom’s attempt to entrench one-party rule and silence millions of Californians will not stand.” -Pam Bondi US Attny General

From here.

This should be comedy gold coming from an administration that is aggressively, and largely successfully demanding that GOP held state legislatures gerrymander their congressional districts as extremely as possible. But it's actually not funny. It is further evidence that the DoJ has been reduced to being Donald Trump's personal law service, paid for by American taxpayers. The corruption and brazen abuses of power by this administration are without any precedent in this country.

The gerrymandering wars is a flashing warning light for US democracy

After the extraordinary scene of Texas Democrats fleeing their state to forestall a rare mid-decade gerrymander, Texas Republicans nevertheless moved this week to approve a new congressional map. It is designed to give their party five additional seats in Congress in next year’s midterm elections, as requested by President Trump. 

California Democrats responded this week by rushing to advance their own plan to draw a new congressional map to counter Texas Republicans. Red and Blue states across the country are now predictably threatening to join this bare-knuckle political brawl. 

Although partisan gerrymandering has sadly become a routine practice pushing us further into tribalism and dysfunction, the current crisis should be seen for what it is: a flashing red warning light for our democracy. 

Indeed, if this race to the bottom continues, every aspect of our democratic system of governance could be captured by extreme partisanship, and every last vestige of trust necessary for that system to work could soon be lost. At that point, it may well be too late to change course. 

Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) has proposed the best way out of the current standoff: a federal bipartisan embrace of independent commissions to draw electoral maps so that voters can choose their politicians rather than self-interested politicians cynically rigging the system to their partisan advantage.

That would solve the immediate crisis, but we must also confront the larger issue of extremism dominating our politics.

The truth is our democratic system has been completely hijacked to yield outsized power to the partisan fringes. These voters on the far left and right of the political mainstream view politics as an existential tribal struggle that must be won at all costs, and they thus demand that their elected officials engage in tribal warfare and scorched-earth politics. 

Read the rest here.

Why San Francisco Flushed $1.7 Million Down A Toilet They Couldn't Build

...Fifteen months after city officials were ready to throw a party in the Noe Valley Town Square to celebrate funding for a tiny bathroom with a toilet and sink, nothing but mulch remains in its place.

The toilet project broke down the minute taxpayers realized the city was planning an event to celebrate $1.7 million in state funds that local politicians had secured for the lone 150-square-foot structure. That’s enough to purchase a single-family home in San Francisco — with multiple bathrooms.

Even more confounding was the explanation that the tiny bathroom would take two to three years to install because of the city’s labyrinthine permitting and building process. City leaders quickly canceled their potty party, and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California took back the funds.

Read the rest here.

You know that you have lost it when even the New York Times is roasting your city for its dysfunctional moonbat government that can't build a single seater public relief station with a budget of more than a million and half and spends another half million on designer trash bins that run $12k a pop. (They decided not to go ahead with that one either.)

California’s minimum wage woes are a cautionary tale for the nation

As people rushed to do holiday shopping and prepare meals for family gatherings last month, it was impossible not to notice the rise in prices in recent years. The same is true for the price of labor, particularly for low-wage workers in California — and this is not coincidental.

California’s minimum wage increased from $15.50 an hour to $16 an hour on Jan 1. But some workers will see an even bigger hike. 

Fast food workers will enjoy a $20 per hour minimum wage — a 29 percent increase over the previous rate — beginning in April, and certain health care employees will see a jump to as much as $23 an hour in June, rising to $25 an hour in 2026. Notably, the latter includes not only what one might usually think of as health care workers, but also medical facility support staff, including janitors and cleaning crews, security guards and hospital gift shop cashiers.

The economic implications are all too familiar, as we have seen this scenario play out over and over again. A portion of the increase in labor costs for minimum wage workers will be passed along to consumers through higher prices. Indeed, within weeks of the fast food minimum wage bill, Assembly Bill 1228, being signed into law in September, McDonald’s and Chipotle announced that they would be forced to raise food prices in California.

Some workers will benefit, but many others will see their hours cut and benefits slashed or end up losing their jobs to compensate for the higher costs. Pizza Hut restaurants across the state are already planning on eliminating more than 1,200 delivery driver positions (a number that is likely to grow) in response. And in New York City, which just raised its minimum wage to $17.96 an hour last month, companies such as Uber and DoorDash are compensating by imposing higher delivery fees, and food delivery workers are seeing fewer tips and reduced hours and scheduling flexibility. 

Read the rest here.

Reparations for Black Californians could top $800 billion

SAN FRANCISCO -- It could cost California more than $800 billion to compensate Black residents for generations of over-policing, disproportionate incarceration and housing discrimination, economists have told a state panel considering reparations.

The preliminary estimate is more than 2.5 times California's $300 billion annual budget, and does not include a recommended $1 million per older Black resident for health disparities that have shortened their average life span. Nor does the figure count compensating people for property unjustly taken by the government or devaluing Black businesses, two other harms the task force says the state perpetuated.

Black residents may not receive cash payments anytime soon, if ever, because the state may never adopt the economists' calculations. The reparations task force is scheduled to discuss the numbers Wednesday and can vote to adopt the suggestions or come up with its own figures. The proposed number comes from a consulting team of five economists and policy experts.

Read the rest here.

California; the world's largest lunatic asylum masquerading as a state. 

Ouch

Calexit continues

Elon Musk has told friends and associates he plans to move to Texas.

Details.

On a personal note, I left California five years ago. Since then two of my friends have also left.

LA launches retaliatory eviction against church lead by John MacArthur

 Outrageous. The church should sue LA and seek punitive damages for what is a naked abuse of power.

L.A. Wants To Seize Private Apartment Building to Prevent Rent Increases

Los Angeles politicians will make housing affordable, by force if necessary.

On Friday, City Councilmember Gil Cedillo introduced a motion that asks city staff to draft plans for using eminent domain to seize Hillside Villa Apartments, a 124-unit, privately-owned development in the city's Chinatown neighborhood to avoid rent increases at the property.

The property is currently under an affordability covenant that requires its owner to rent out a number of its units at below-market rates. That covenant is set to expire soon, meaning rents on some 59 units will increase to market rates—which means rent hikes of up to $1,000 per unit.

"We think it is important enough that we need to take action to preserve those units. We don't want to generate more homeless people," Conrado Terrazas Cross, Cedillo's communications director, tells Reason, saying that many tenants would not be able to afford the coming rent increases.

"I think it's a brilliant idea but I need to know: Are we in Cuba or Venezuela?" says Tom Botz, the L.A.-area developer who owns the building, about the proposal to seize his property.

Botz tells Reason he purchased the development company that built Hillside Villa roughly 20 years ago. The building's construction had been financed by a number of government grants and loans, including a $5.4 million loan from Los Angeles' since-abolished Community Redevelopment Agency in 1986.

A condition of that loan was that the developer rent out units in the building at below-market rates for 30 years. Other government grants and loans that helped finance the building came with their own specific affordability requirements.

The affordability requirements from the redevelopment loan were supposed to expire in June 2019. Beginning in May 2018, tenants in Hillside Villa started to receive notices that their below-market rents would be increasing in a year's time. In March 2019, tenants were given the option of signing new leases at the increased rates or face eviction.

Read the rest here.

The blue-state exodus gains momentum

Nine years ago I published a piece that asserted, “Voters around the country are concluding it’s better to be red than dead” — applying almost the exact opposite meaning to an old phrase referring to communism. New Census Bureau figures appear to confirm my prediction — mostly.

My point was that many voters were, and are, increasingly fed up with the high-tax, heavy-regulation and increasingly social wokeness model that has come to characterize most blue states — i.e., those dominated by liberal politicians and policies.

I argued that voters wanting to live in a business-friendly, fiscally responsible state that minimizes its tax burden would either vote out the liberals destroying their state’s economy or flee to a red state. The latest Census Bureau report highlights the red-state shift.

According to Election Data Service’s analysis of the Census Bureau report, “population projections point to a ten [congressional] seat change over 17 states across the nation by year 2020.”

Seven states are projected to gain one or more congressional seats after the 2020 election; 10 states are projected lose one seat.

The red-state leader is Texas, with a projected pickup of three congressional seats following the 2020 census — and that after gaining four congressional seats after the 2010 election. Florida will pick up two seats, and Arizona, Colorado, Montana, North Carolina and Oregon will each gain one, according to the analysis.
All 10 losing states – Alabama, California, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and West Virginia – lose only one seat.
Of the seven states gaining seats, five voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Of the 10 states losing seats, five voted for Trump and five for Hillary Clinton. 

But two or those five losing states that voted for Trump – Michigan and Pennsylvania – surprised most analysts, since they have been blue-leaners for several years. And West Virginia is losing population in part due to a struggling state economy that has been so dependent of coal.

Arguably, even some of the blue-state gainers may support my general point.

If you are blue-leaning Californian who wants to escape the Golden State’s drift into madness but stay on the left coast, Oregon might be a reasonable alternative.

Ditto for Colorado, which has turned from red to blueish over the last decade or so as Californians increasingly head for the hills, so to speak.

But that trend also highlights a problem: Some of the people fleeing destructive blue-state taxes and regulations appear to drag their pro-big-government philosophy with them — apparently oblivious to the fact those policies destroyed the state they are trying to escape. 

Read the rest here.

California Shows The Limits Of Progressivism

More than 2 million Californians recently were left without power after the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric—which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year—preemptively shut down transmission lines in fear that they might spark fires during periods of high autumn winds.
 
Consumers blame the state for not cleaning up dead trees and brush, along with the utility companies for not updating their ossified equipment. The power companies in turn fault the state for so overregulating utilities that they had no resources to modernize their grids.

Californians know that having tens of thousands of homeless in their major cities is untenable. In some places, municipal sidewalks have become open sewers of garbage, used needles, rodents, and infectious diseases.

Yet no one dares question progressive orthodoxy by enforcing drug and vagrancy laws, moving the homeless out of cities to suburban or rural facilities, or increasing the number of mental hospitals.

The demand for socialism is on the rise from young Americans today. But is socialism even morally sound? 

Taxpayers in California, whose basket of sales, gasoline, and income taxes is the highest in the nation, quietly seethe while immobile on antiquated freeways that are crowded, dangerous, and under nonstop makeshift repair.

Gas prices of $4 to $5 a gallon—the result of high taxes, hyper-regulation, and green mandates—add insult to the injury of stalled commuters. Gas tax increases ostensibly intended to fund freeway expansion and repair continue to be diverted to the state’s failing high-speed rail project.

Read the rest here.

People are fleeing San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO – Social media influencer Sarah Tripp and her husband, Robbie Tripp, moved to San Francisco in 2016 brimming with optimism.

“We thought, here’s a city full of opportunities and connections where you go to work hard and succeed,” says Tripp, 27, founder of the lifestyle blog Sassy Red Lipstick.

But after a year-long hunt for suitable housing in San Francisco only turned up “places for $1 million that looked like rundown shacks and needed a remodel,” the couple packed up and moved to Phoenix.

They went from paying San Francisco rents of $2,500 for a one-bedroom, one-bath apartment that was far from shopping and other amenities, to purchasing a newly constructed 3,000-square-foot, four-bedroom, four-bathroom home where they’ll raise their newly arrived baby boy.

“It was cool to be living near all those high-tech startups,” Tripp says of her time in the Bay Area. “But you quickly saw that if you weren’t part of that, you’d be pushed out. It’s just sad.”

For the better part of two decades, the Bay Area has been a magnet for newcomers lured by a modern-day technology Gold Rush. But increasingly only those who have struck it rich can afford to stay.

Once a bohemian mecca that welcomed the Beat poets and '60s hippies, San Francisco now lays claim to the most expensive housing in the West, with a median home price of $1.4 million. There's also $5 a gallon gas, private schools priced like universities and chic restaurants that cost nearly double the national average.

Earlier this year, the San Francisco Bay Area was second only to New York – and ahead of Los Angeles, Washington and Chicago – when it came to people leaving major U.S. cities. More than 28,190 departed in the second quarter of 2019, almost double 2017's rate, according to a regular Migration Report from real estate brokerage Redfin.

Read the rest here.

California To Become Yugoslavia

It is hardly a controversial opinion to state that the United States is disintegrating. To be more precise: the ties that bind us together as Americans are fraying, and even dissolving. I don’t believe that this is going to result in the political disintegration of America, as in the Civil War, but I could be wrong about that. The forces of disintegration grow stronger, and there are no counterforces of any potency. The media love to bang on about how Donald Trump is dividing the country by practicing racial politics, and they’re not entirely wrong about that. But I submit to you that nothing Donald Trump says will have remotely the impact that the State of California is about to have through revising its public education curriculum to fill it with Social Justice Warrior content, particularly on race.
The Los Angeles Times reports:

In actions that would affect more than 6.5 million California students, state lawmakers are poised to make ethnic studies a graduation requirement in high school and at Cal State universities, raising the stakes for a team of educators drafting the model curriculum, those who are arguing for changes to it, and also for critics — who see an academic field dominated by one-sided, insular political correctness and separatism.

More:

The high school requirement — the first such in the nation, according to a legislative analysis — appears to have broad backing among Sacramento lawmakers and beyond. A separate bill, mandating an ethnic studies class for every Cal State student, has drawn a mixed reaction at campuses. Although there is wide support for ethnic studies courses, some Cal State faculty and administrators strongly oppose a state requirement. The public’s chance to comment on the model curriculum closes Thursday.
“California is committed to getting this work right,” Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the state Board of Education, said in a letter to the Los Angeles Times. “We will not accept a curriculum that fails to address difficult issues in a way that promotes open-mindedness and independent thought — skills our students need to understand vital societal and civic forces.”
At its core, supporters say, ethnic studies classes teach students how to think critically about the world around them, “tell their own stories,” develop “a deep appreciation for cultural diversity and inclusion” and engage “socially and politically” to eradicate bigotry, hate and racism. This description, from the draft of the model curriculum, is meant to guide California K-12 educators in creating coursework whether or not the new graduation requirement becomes law.
Among those who say the proposed curriculum falls short of its lofty goals is Williamson M. Evers, a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution , based at Stanford.
“Instead of an objective account of the history of ethnic groups and their current situation, this is a biased portrait emphasizing suffering and victimization, serving as a kind of road map to create ideological activists based on racial identity,” Evers said. “Will you be graded on having the politically correct answers?”
Among other things, Evers objects to the association of capitalism with forms of oppression. He also is put off by the academic language that has grown up around the field, which employs such terms as “herstory” and “hxrstory” to replace “history.”

The curriculum’s supporters don’t deny that it’s politicized:

Read the rest here.

The World is Going Mad

And California appears to be one of the epicenters for this madness.

California abandons $77 billion high-speed rail plan

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Tuesday he’s abandoning a plan to build a high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco, a project with an estimated cost that has ballooned to $77 billion.

“Let’s be real,” Newsom said in his first State of the State address. “The current project, as planned, would cost too much and respectfully take too long. There’s been too little oversight and not enough transparency.”

The idea championed by Newsom’s predecessor, Jerry Brown, is years behind schedule. The latest estimate for completion is 2033.

Newsom, though, said he wants to finish construction that’s already under way on a segment of the high-speed train from Bakersfield to Merced, through California’s Central Valley, arguing it will revitalize the economically depressed region.

He’s also replacing Brown’s head of the state board that oversees the project and pledged more accountability for contractors that run over on costs.

Read the rest here.

California Moves to Tax Text Messages

California: WTF!
Texas: Sux 2 b u

Details

I am so glad to be out of that left wing lunatic asylum masquerading as a state.

California to require solar panels on all new dwellings

California has a major housing crisis and people at the lower end of the socio-economic scale are leaving in droves because of the high cost of living in the Golden State. A large part of that is the result of high taxes on just about everything and one of the most unfriendly environments for business in the Union. Adding around $10k to the price of a new house doesn't strike me as likely to help with that.