California Drought ‘Presents An Opening’ For Republicans, Senate Candidate Says

Tom Del Beccaro announces for U.S. Senate

• I'm not sure I care, but here is another dreamer running for U.S. Senate from the People's Republic.
• Del Beccaro said, "to give up your front lawn. Which is equivalent to giving up the American dream.”  Pretty lame for a Senate campaign if you ask me.  "Vote for me. I support green grass during a drought."  Very lame.

(The Daily Caller)  -  Tom Del Beccaro, the former chairman of the California Republican Party running for an open U.S. Senate seat, says he thinks the drought affecting residents in his state will cause voters to turn to the GOP.

In an Monday interview with The Daily Caller, Del Beccaro cited the drought and blasted the policies of Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown when asked why he thinks a Republican has a shot in the race to succeed outgoing Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer.

“The issue cuts across all demographics, all political lines,” Del Beccaro said. “And I mean you literally had Jerry Brown come out and say to people, you have to give up your front lawn. Which is equivalent to giving up the American dream.”

Speaking by phone from the road in San Diego, Del Beccaro said: “The arrogance of, ‘you have to give up your lifestyle’ versus government having a responsible plan presents an opening that probably has never existed in the last 20 years for Republicans.”

The Republican also argued that the “unemployment caused by a lack of water hits the Latino community the hardest.” He also spoke of the impending “collision course between our immigration policies and our water policies.”

“There’s not enough water for the people here,” he said. “Yet they expect over the next 20 years or so another 15 to 17 million people will come…You can’t ration your way to 17 million more people.”

California Attorney General Kamala is the most high-profile Democrat in the race. Another Republican, Rocky Chávez, is also running.

Del Beccaro is painting Chávez, who said he would vote to repeal Obamacare, as not sufficiently conservative.

“So obviously, someone who supports Obamacare isn’t going to do well among Republicans and someone who supports the flat tax and a common sense solution to our water problems will,” Del Beccaro said.

Read More . . . .

A Winter Wildfire in the Eastern Sierra - California's Drought

Eastern California is on its own

• Not much can be done for Eastern California.  But I am still waiting for Sacramento to address desalination plants for the people and businesses of California.

BISHOP -- The fire came up quickly here in the eastern Sierra Nevada, destroying 35 homes and taking the mountainside community of Swall Meadows by surprise. Who would expect a roiling wildfire -- throwing fireballs and whipping up flame whirls through 7,000 acres of sagebrush, piñon and Jeffrey pine -- in the dead of winter?

"Three years before, I had 12 feet of snow at my house on that exact date in February," said volunteer Fire Chief Dale Schmidt, whose Wheeler Crest station in the remote Swall Meadows neighborhood is surrounded by carcasses of burned homes. "Four years ago, they would have had a couple to 3 feet of snow where the fire started. That's the mental state people were in: Winter is not the season for fire danger."

It is now.

As California enters its fourth year of drought, communities across the West are confronting a new reality -- a year-round fire season. Perhaps nowhere are the consequences as obvious as in Swall Meadows, where the 300 residents are now shoveling ash instead of snow.

Coping with chronic fire danger is the focus of the latest installment of this newspaper's ongoing series, "A State of Drought." Since January -- the driest and warmest in California history -- the state's firefighters have battled nearly 850 wildfires, twice as many as in a normal year. In 2014, the state endured 1,000 more wildfires than in a typical year.

Drought and steadily rising temperatures have lengthened the fire season by an average of 70 days compared with four decades ago.

Twigs should be bending now, not breaking. The ground around Swall Meadows should be wet and mushy. But there's been so little snow in recent years that locals have taken to saying, "Now we get 15 feet of wind."

And a fire in February.

The Battle Over Water

The neighborhood of Swall Meadows sits on the high-desert edge of the Owens Valley, a place whose fortunes and fate have revolved around battles over water. This is where the city of Los Angeles, a century ago, lured ranchers into selling their irrigated land and Owens River water rights. At one point in the 1920s, dissident ranchers set dynamite to the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Books, including Marc Reisner's seminal "Cadillac Desert," have been written about it. The 1974 Oscar-winning movie "Chinatown," starring Jack Nicholson, dramatized it.

To look at the landscape, it's hard to imagine a place like this would have that much water to fight over. It's brown and scrubby -- dotted like a plucked chicken with sage and bitterbrush.

This is not the Sierra of Yosemite and Lake Tahoe, where dense forests and scenic meadows and miles and miles of rolling foothills gradually spill into the Central Valley. This is what locals like to call the "front side" of the Sierra, where the mountains fall as sharply as a guillotine on the landscape. The peaks are so high -- at 13,000 feet -- that storms blowing in from the Pacific tire out by the time they get here, leaving the Owens Valley in a "rain shadow."

In a typical year, only about 5 inches of rainfall, just enough for the desert peach and wild iris to cast their blooms across the glacial moraine and, with snowmelt, fill Southern California aqueducts. Since January, the rain gauges here have barely registered.

Read More at the San Jose Mercury News.com

The War Against the Los Angeles Aqueduct
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One hundred years ago, the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct gave birth to our modern metropolis while forever constraining the destiny of the rural communities near the water’s source in the Owens Valley. In contemporary Los Angeles, we express our collective guilt by referring to the 233-mile engineering marvel as our “original sin.” But vague expressions of guilt have done little to assuage the anger in the Owens Valley—an anger that has often boiled over into violence.
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Peace prevailed over the first decade following the aqueduct’s 1913 completion. But when a thirsty Los Angeles started pumping groundwater from beneath the valley floor in 1923, the city’s secret land deals and legal maneuverings encouraged a culture of mistrust among Owens Valley residents. On May 21, 1924, local farmers dynamited the Alabama Gates, a part of the aqueduct near Lone Pine where operators could divert water in case of an overflow. Six months after the bombing, dozens of valley residents occupied the gates, opening the emergency spillway and thus diverting Los Angeles’ water supply into the parched bed of the Owens Lake.  Read More: LA Magazine.

Venice Beach officials want topless sunbathing

The God given right to go topless

• I am sure that somewhere in the fine print of the Constitution is the right of a woman to go topless at the beach. 
• Meanwhile the prudish, Taliban inspired Democrat Mayor of Los Angeles is opposing the freedom of women.

(New York Post)  -  Leaders in the Los Angeles beach district of Venice have asked that women be allowed to sunbathe nude on the beach, saying they want equality and a more European feel at the popular tourist destination, local media reported on Wednesday.

The Venice Neighborhood Council voted 12-2 to approve the recommendation, saying it “supports women being afforded the same rights as men to sunbathe topless,” according to Los Angeles Times and local KTLA-TV news.

The council also noted that Venice Beach, known for its boardwalk of shops and offbeat character, was founded and designed after Venice, Italy, and cultivated a more European sensibility.

The recommendation will be sent to the Los Angeles City Council and Mayor Eric Garcetti for consideration. A spokesman for Garcetti appeared to pour cold water on the idea.

“I think it’s safe to say that most of our constituents would rather we keep our eyes on more pressing problems facing our city,” said Yusef Robb, the mayor’s director of communications.

Topless sunbathing is legal on a number of California beaches but barred in Los Angeles County, where a local ordinance prohibits the display of genitals or “any portion of the (female) breast at or below the upper edge of the areola.”

(New York Post)

And the problem with topless is???

Yes!!!  Equal rights for women!

How California’s Democrats Are Screwing Immigrants

Not Hiring Illegals Would be a Crime

• While I disagree with the author on a lot of immigration policy he makes a number of interesting points about the open borders Democrat and Republican parties.

By Ruben Navarrette

(The Daily Beast)  -  In the 1990s, Republicans controlled the Golden State and made a mess of the immigration issue by leading with emotion and passing half-baked laws that raised serious questions.

Today, Democrats control California, and they’re making a mess of the immigration issue by leading with emotion and proposing half-baked laws that raise serious questions.

Each camp was more interested in sending a message than making good policy.

For Republicans, the message was “Keep Out.” But no one took that directive seriously, given that contributions from big business is the mother’s milk of the GOP, and big business would be a lot smaller without illegal immigrant labor. Take California agribusiness, which contributes mightily to Republicans in the state. The industry generates more than $45 billion annually in revenue, and it would shrivel up like a raisin in the sun without illegal immigrants.

Indeed, a big reason that the nation’s most populous state is home to an estimated 2.5 million illegal immigrants is because it’s also home to countless farmers, ranchers, restaurateurs, hoteliers, construction firms, small-businessmen, and homeowners who rely on illegal immigrant labor for their slice of the California Dream. This game is all about supply and demand, and you never hear those tough-talking Republicans say anything about cracking down on the demand side.

How is this possible???
Somehow the Chinese have managed to harvest their crops for thousands of years without importing Mexican farm labor.  I have even heard rumors that in the olden days white and black people used to work on farms.  But today the government pays welfare to American citizens of all races not to work and imports cheap foreign labor for big business.

Meanwhile, California Democrats want a gigantic expansion of rights, benefits and protections for the undocumented.

Their message is “bienvenidos.” In their language, that translates to: “Welcome to California. Stay a while. You’re just as good as anyone born in this country, and so we’re going to give you the same rights and privileges they have. We can’t give you legal status or a green card. But we can give you a lot of other things to make your stay more comfortable.”

At a news conference in Sacramento, a group of Democratic legislators—switching back and forth between English and Spanish—recently unveiled a package of 10 bills that would, among other things: create an Office of New Americans in the governor’s office to better serve the undocumented; provide illegal immigrants with subsidized health care by extending Medi-Cal coverage to all Californians, regardless of immigration status; limit use of “E-Verify” (the government-run database that employers use to check if prospective hires are legally eligible to work) and prevent “abuse” by employers; and ban businesses from discriminating against residents based on their immigration status, citizenship, or language.

That last one is a beauty. If it extends to hiring, it flies in the face of federal law, namely the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act that made it a federal crime to knowingly hire an illegal immigrant. Now California wants to make it a state crime to not hire one? Employers can now pick their poison: They can violate one law or the other.

I question the motivation for this outburst of legislative generosity. And I have a theory as to why they are doing this now.

For the last few years, President Obama was deporting an average of 400,000 illegal immigrants every 12 months and unlawfully detaining thousands of women and children from Central America in horrendous conditions. Meanwhile, the Democratic members of the California legislature—even the Latino Caucus—were saying nada about it, and I’ve wondered how they were going to work through their guilt and atone for this dereliction of duty.

Now, with the California Democrats’ grab bag of giveaways, freebies and protections, we have the answer.

Read More . . . .

Somehow Kenyans have managed to harvest their crops for thousands 
of years without importing Mexican labor.

For the sheltered among us - This is called a FARM. They grow food there. 
This photo is from a 19th Century American farm back when Americans planted and harvested their own crops without imported labor.

America the Lazy.
Congress is looking at immigration "reform".  While some reform is needed, big and small businesses want reforms that import more inexpensive foreign workers while countless millions of Americans are PAID by the government to sit on their asses and do nothing.

Californua GOP continues to struggle

California voters gather around to see 
a rare site - the nearly extinct Republican elephant.

A California Wake Up Call

“In 2012, Mitt Romney carried 59 percent of the white vote and he carried independents. In 2004, this would have elected him president. In 2000, it would have given him an Electoral College landslide. In 2012, it gave him second place.”

(The News Press)  -  Jim Brulte, California’s Republican chairman, has sobering but useful words for his party’s leaders and 2016 candidates: If they don’t learn from what happened to the GOP here, they may doom themselves to repeating its decidedly unpleasant experience.

“California is the leading edge of the country’s demographic changes,” Brulte said in an interview. “Frankly, Republicans in California did not react quickly enough to them, and we have paid a horrible price.”

One measure of the cost: In the three presidential elections of the 1980s, California voted twice for Ronald Reagan and once for George H.W. Bush. The state has not gone Republican since, and it won’t get any easier in 2016.

The hole is deep enough that Brulte has concentrated his own energies on rebuilding the party from the bottom up. He has enjoyed some real successes at the local and county levels, and the GOP eliminated the Democrats’ veto-proof majorities in the state Legislature in the 2014 midterms.

28.6% of California voters have refused to register as a Democrat or
a Republican.  They have chosen to belong to smaller opposition
political parties or be independents.

But the Republicans are still vastly outnumbered in both houses — 25-14 in the state Senate, 52-28 in the Assembly — and the Democrats picked up a seat in 2014 in the U.S. House of Representatives. They have won all of California’s statewide offices in three of the last four elections. The last time that happened: 1882.

The principal cause of the GOP’s troubles is its alienation of Latinos, Asian-Americans and African-Americans in a state whose population is now a majority non-white. Republicans can win in 2016 without carrying California, but the party’s struggles here highlight the extent to which the GOP is making its life in presidential years very difficult with its increasingly hard line on immigration, its image as a bastion for older, white conservatives, and its solicitude for Americans with very high incomes. When House Republicans in Washington voted to repeal the estate tax last week, it was helping all of 5,400 of the wealthiest households in America, not exactly a move with mass appeal.

As has often been the case in American history, California is simply the harbinger of changes — in this case demographic — that are happening more slowly elsewhere. “The one thing no one can stop,” says Rep. Ted Lieu, a Democrat who was elected to Congress here in 2014, “is that every month, the rest of America looks more like California.”

The Republicans’ problem with Latino voters is especially pronounced here. The passage of Proposition 187 in 1994 with the strong support of Republican Gov. Pete Wilson — the ballot measure barred illegal immigrants from a variety of state services — simultaneously alienated Hispanic voters from the GOP and mobilized many of them into the political process.

The same thing is now happening nationally. The growing anti-immigrant sentiment in the GOP has cut the Republicans’ Latino share of the vote from the 40 percent range for George W. Bush to 27 percent for Mitt Romney in 2012. The party’s strenuous opposition to President Obama’s executive actions on immigration will only make this problem more acute.

But even more remarkably, Republicans have also suffered severe declines among Asian-Americans. According to the exit polls, a majority of Asian-Americans voted for George H.W. Bush in 1988. But in 2012, Romney won only 26 percent of their ballots.

Rep. Xavier Becerra, a Democrat whose district here includes Koreatown, Little Tokyo, Chinatown and Historic Filipinotown, notes that when he was first elected to Congress in 1992, a large share of Asian-Americans leaned Republican. That’s no longer true, and both Becerra and Lieu pinpointed the immigration issue as the primary cause for the shift.

Republican opposition to the Dream Act, designed to give relief to illegal immigrants brought to the United States as minors, especially rankled Asian-Americans, Lieu said: “Republicans were saying, ‘Come support us, we like you, but we want to deport your children.’”

Brulte thus takes particular pride in his outreach efforts to Asian-Americans. His party’s victorious legislative candidates last year included state Sen. Janet Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American, and Young Kim, the first Korean-American Republican woman to serve in the California Legislature.

But this was only a start, and as 2016 approaches, every GOP candidate should tack this reminder from Brulte on a headquarters wall: “In 2012, Mitt Romney carried 59 percent of the white vote and he carried independents. In 2004, this would have elected him president. In 2000, it would have given him an Electoral College landslide. In 2012, it gave him second place.”

Read more at News-Press.com

How About Some Election Reform?

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Some 28.6% of California voters have no interest at all the either the GOP or the Democrats.  They have chosen to register as independents or a members of smaller opposition political parties like the California American Independent Party, the Green Party, the California Libertarian Party, and the Peace and Freedom Party
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But because of corrupt election rigging by the two larger parties, independent candidates and smaller opposition parties are not even allowed on the November ballot.  Voters are force fed a "choice" of only two parties, and in many districts only one party is on the ballot.
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Meanwhile every democratic nation on earth has multiple parties elected to their legislatures.  Below is the National Assembly of Quebec.  Eighteen political parties ran in their 2014 elections and four parties won seats.
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Election reform is needed today to open up the California legislature to independents and other political parties.

National Assembly of Quebec

Like Quebec has done, California needs to open our 

their elections to all groups.

California Democrats trying to raise cigarette tax

Democrats want all that you have

• Government is never large enough for a Socialist.  There are always more voters with "needs" that must be funded with your hard earned money.

(Fox News)  -  California Democrats are trying again this year to pass a tax increase on cigarette sales, one of several bills that attempt to curb tobacco use. 

The bill if passed would increase the tax from 87 cents to $2.87 a pack, after roughly 17 years without an increase.

State Democrats have also proposed bills to limit the public use of chewing tobacco and electronic cigarettes and to increase the legal smoking age from 18 to 21 that if passed would make California the only state to increase the minimum age.

Tobacco interest groups such as the Cigar Association of America told FoxNews.com on Wednesday that they will be looking into different tactics to fight the tax but no decisions have been made yet. 

The bill to increase the smoking age passed unanimously in the Senate Health Committee with bipartisan support and is now headed to the chamber’s appropriations committee. 

However, the legislation to increase the cigarette tax, now being considered by the Senate Governance and Finance Committee, will likely face a more difficult path toward passage. 

The bill needs to pass with a two-thirds majority, which means it would need support from Republicans, who have previously opposed such measures.

And similar efforts have failed 17 straight times in California, according to The Los Angeles Times.

In 2012, for example, a ballot initiative to increase the tax by $1 was narrowly defeated after the tobacco interests spent $47.7 million in opposition, the newspaper also reported.

The other measures this year would ban the use of electronic cigarettes in public places where tobacco smoking is already prohibited, prohibit the use of chewing tobacco in professional baseball stadiums and try to reduce litter by banning single-use filters, which are on the vast majority of cigarettes.

Read More . . . .

Santa Barbara Congressional Seat Opens Up

Swing District - A hot race in 2016

(Sacramento Bee)  -  Democratic Rep. Lois Capps announced Wednesday that she will not seek re-election in 2016, potentially setting up a high-dollar battle in her central coast district, which has only a small Democratic voter registration edge.

The 24th Congressional District was almost completely revamped by the state’s independent redistricting commission after the 2010 census. It stretches from Santa Barbara, Capps’ hometown, to Paso Robles and Democrats outnumber Republicans by just three percentage points, 37 percent to 34 percent, with a high proportion of independents.

Capps, 77, faced a stiff challenge last year from Republican Chris Mitchum, son of movie star Robert Mitchum, and won re-election by just 3.8 percentage points.

GOP Assemblyman
Katcho Achadjian of San
Luis Obispo may run.

“It’s time for me to return home,” Capps said in a YouTube video.

She won the seat in a 1997 special election after her husband, Walter, died of a heart attack just nine months into his first congressional term.

After Capps’ retirement announcement, the political buzz over potential successors began immediately with her daughter, Laura Capps, atop many lists due to her family and high-level political connections. She was a White House speechwriter during the Bill Clinton administration and is married to Democratic political consultant Bill Burton. who was President Barack Obama’s press spokesman in the 2008 campaign.

Santa Barbara Mayor Helene Schneider, a Democrat, announced Wednesday that she would seek the seat. “I am running for Congress to get things done in Washington. We need more common sense and fewer political stalemates,” Schneider said in a statement.

Another potential Democratic candidate is Assemblyman Das Williams, who also hails from Santa Barbara and will be forced out of the Assembly next year by term limits, but he’d almost certainly step aside for Laura Capps.

Santa Barbara Republican small businessman Justin Fareed announced he would run. “The real choice in this election will not be between a Democrat or a Republican, but rather the progress that will move us forward in a positive direction or the status quo that most certainly will sacrifice it,” he said in a statement.

The 24th Congressional District is 37% Democrat, 34% Republican and 29% independent and smaller opposition political parties.

Mitchum could run again but the most likely Republican possibility is Assemblyman Katcho Achadjian of San Luis Obispo, one of the Legislature’s most centrist GOP members. He reportedly is taking a few days to discuss it with his family before making a decision.

Achadjian also must leave the Assembly next year due to term limits and has taken out papers to run for the state Senate seat now held by Democrat William Monning, who’s eligible for one more term in the upper house. Monning’s incumbency and the 17th Senate District’s more than 15-point Democratic registration advantage would make that race problematic for Achadjian, however.

Still another Republican possibility is former Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado, who ran against Capps in 2012 and lost by 10 percentage points.

It’s even possible that former Republican Assemblyman Jeff Gorell, who ran for Congress last year from a neighboring district but lost, could shift to the 24th CD. It includes a tiny slice of Ventura County, Gorell’s home turf.

Read More . . . .

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article17893193.html#storylink=cpyRead More . . . . 

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The Golden State Olden Days
President Ronald Reagan (R-California) with Santa Barbara GOP
Congressman Bob Lagomarsino in the center and some pussy no new
taxes liar on the right.  Now Santa Barbara is represented by Democrats.

California's 24th congressional district election, 2014
Primary election
Party		Candidate	Votes	%
	Democratic	Lois Capps (incumbent)	45,482	44.5
	Republican	Christopher Mitchum	15,927	15.6
	Republican	Justin Donald Fareed	15,013	14.7
	Republican	Dale Francisco	12,256	12.0
	Republican	Bradley Allen	6,573	6.4
	Democratic	Sandra J. Marshall-Eminger	3,675	3.6
	Democratic	Paul H. Coyne, Jr.	1,753	1.7
	No party preference	Steve Isakson	947	0.9
	Republican	Alexis Stuart	527	0.5
Total votes			102,153	100.00
General election
	Democratic	Lois Capps (incumbent)	103,228	51.9
	Republican	Christopher Mitchum	95,566	48.1
Total votes			198,794	100.0
	Democratic hold

Jerry Brown's fraud exposed on Sacramento Delta tunnel project

Lies and Damned Lies

• Pro-tunnel supporters lied from day one.  You don't spend $25 Billion and not send even one more drop of water south.
• The entire corrupt project is designed to rape the Sacramento Delta in order to repay campaign contributors wanting to suck on the public teat.
• Again, corrupt special interests want to destroy the natural beauty of California so agri-business corporations can farm in the desert and new strip malls, housing and golf courses can be built in ScCal.  Building desalination plants instead is never even addressed.

(San Jose Mercury News)  -  Governor Jerry Brown has billed his $25 billion plan to build two massive tunnels under the Delta as a way to not just make it easier to move water from north to south, but also increase the reliability of water supplies and bring back salmon and other endangered species

But now the Brown administration is proposing a major and politically risky change: dropping a 50-year guarantee to restore the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta's environment. A centerpiece of the project, the environmental plan included $8 billion to preserve 100,000 acres of wetlands and dozens of other restoration efforts.


The dramatic course correction, whose details have not yet been made public, comes after biologists at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other federal agencies told the state they won't issue permits for the environmental plan. The reasons, the biologists say, is that the state cannot prove it will restore salmon, smelt, sturgeon and other wildlife struggling for survival in the Delta.

Losing the guarantee of 50 years of environmental restoration would create a substantial political problem for one of Brown's signature projects.

it would also be harder to gain support from water districts around the state -- whom Brown is counting on to pick up the $17 billion cost to build and operate the tunnels. That's because the 50-year "habitat conservation plan" was supposed to guarantee them reliability from endangered species lawsuits and decisions by the federal government that have limited Delta pumping in recent years to protect endangered fish.

Richard Stapler, a spokesman for the California Natural Resources Agency, confirmed Friday that the state in the next few months will release an addendum to the project's environmental impact report that reflects the proposed change.


Read More . . . .

$25 Billion in Government Spending
Follow the money.  Businesses and labor unions are lining up to rape the Sacramento River Delta so they can get a slice of a monstrously huge government spending project.

A
Sacramento Delta Must be Saved for Future Generations.

GOP Sheriff takes on Jerry Brown on illegal aliens

Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood

How about obeying the law?

The Kern County Sheriff takes on Democrats 

who deliberately encourage law breaking.

(Los Angeles Times)  -  Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood was hiking along the bluffs overlooking Bakersfield last year when he got a call from Gov. Jerry Brown.

"What are you trying to do to me?" the sheriff said Brown asked him.

"What are you trying to do to me?" Youngblood shot back.

A Republican in one of the reddest counties in the state, Youngblood had riled the Democratic governor when he announced that his department would defy the Trust Act, a law signed by Brown that restricts cooperation between local law enforcement officials and federal immigration agents.

The sheriff said the law put him in an impossible position, stuck between a federal program that relies on local jails to hold inmates who might be deportable and a state law that says inmates in jail for low-level crimes can't be detained past their release dates.

That kind of stance has won him enemies in California's immigrant-rights movement and frequent comparisons to Joe Arpaio, the brash Arizona sheriff notorious for his workplace raids and ID checks.

Youngblood, 64, said he isn't trying to make headlines. The Vietnam War veteran, who grew up working in the potato sheds around Bakersfield, said he's happier hiking or riding his quarter horse, Sparky.

He lives in the same modest suburban neighborhood where he grew up, on Bakersfield's now heavily Latino Eastside, and bristles at accusations that his policies encourage racial profiling, pointing out that a third of his deputies are Latino.

As he drove through town on a recent morning, past oil derricks, gated golf courses and strip malls lined with Mexican restaurants and carnicerias, Youngblood outlined his philosophy on immigration.

The federal government should start enforcing immigration laws — or write new ones, he said. He criticized President Obama's new deportation policies, which say most immigrants who have not committed serious crimes and have fewer than three minor crimes on their records should not be priorities for removal.

"You're in this country illegally and we're going to give you three bites of the apple? That's three victims!" Youngblood said. "If you commit crimes, you oughta go."

At a time when the Democrat-controlled Legislature has moved to allow such immigrants to drive, practice law and pay in-state college tuition — passing 26 immigrant-friendly laws last year alone, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures — Youngblood is an outlier.

He has largely refused to sign paperwork that immigrant crime victims need to apply for U visas, which allow some victims to stay in the country lawfully. As president of the Major County Sheriffs' Assn., a national advocacy group, he has asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to share data with police so patrol officers can determine whether the person they stop may be in the country illegally.

Read More . . . .