RACISM - White girl forced to be an Indian

Wow. Now This is Racism.

• A world gone mad. An insane racist law allows an Indian Tribe to force a girl who in 63/64th non-Indian to live with that tribe.
• Naturally the semi-worthless California Supreme Court does nothing.

(ABC News)  -  The California Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to intervene in the case of a 6-year-old girl with Native American ancestry who was removed from her Los Angeles-area foster home and placed with relatives in Utah.

Foster parents Rusty and Summer Page are fighting the decision under the federal Indian Child Welfare Act to place Lexi with relatives of her father, who is part Choctaw.

The legal fight has gone on for years. Lower courts found the Pages had not proven Lexi would suffer emotional harm by the transfer.

Call me crazy, but this in an Indian,
not a little girl who is 1/64th Indian.

The Pages have three children and want to adopt Lexi, who has lived with them in Santa Clarita since she was 2.

Lexi clutched a teddy bear and cried as she was taken from the Pages' home on March 21 as neighbors prayed and sang hymns in support of the family.

The Pages' lawyer, Lori Alvino McGill, said she was not surprised by the court's decision not to intervene, saying it was a longshot she had to take.

"Every day without a stay threatens irreparable harm to the Pages and to Lexi," McGill said.

The appeal to return Lexi to the Pages is still before the 2nd District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles. McGill said she plans to take the case as far as the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Indian Child Welfare Act was passed in the 1970s to reunite Native American families broken up at disproportionately high rates due to cultural ignorance and biases within the child welfare system.

Lexi, who is 1/64th Native American, was 17 months old when she was removed from the custody of her birth parents. Her mother had substance abuse problems, and her father had a criminal history, according to court records.

McGill complained that the Pages have not been able to speak with Lexi since she was moved, as they were assured.

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California poll: Trump ahead in GOP primary

The Golden State Rains Gold for Trump

(Politico)  -  Donald Trump leads the Republican field in California more than two months before the state’s primary, according to a new statewide poll of Republicans.

Trump leads with 37 percent among registered Republicans in California, according to a USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll released Sunday. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz follows with 30 percent, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich trails with 12 percent.

Trump leads his opponents in most areas of the state. Cruz tends to do well with conservative voters in the Central Valley, according to the poll.

The poll was conducted by phone March 16-23. It has a margin of error of 2.8 percentage points for the full sample and 5.5 points for the Republican primary sample. The poll included 1,503 registered voters in California, 391 of whom are registered Republicans.

Delegate-rich California votes June 7 along with Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico and South Dakota; it is the last day of the Republican primary calendar.

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Measure to hike California's minimum wage to $15 qualifies for ballot

Just Vote and FREE Money 

Will Appear in Your Wallet

(Reuters)  -  A proposal to raise California's minimum wage to $15 an hour by the year 2021 has qualified to be listed on the upcoming November ballot in the state, officials said on Tuesday.

The development comes as a wave of minimum wage increases at the state level sweeps the United States as the federal minimum wage has gone more than six years without an increase from $7.25 an hour.

The California Secretary of State's office said supporters of the measure, pushed by Labor group coalition Lift Up California, had gathered more than the 400,000 signatures needed to have the Fair Wage Act of 2016 placed on the ballot.

"California has led the country on environmental, health and civil rights protections and it’s only appropriate that we would become the first state to enact a minimum wage that allows millions of families to live in dignity," Los Angeles County Democrat Supervisor Sheila Kuehl said in a statement.

She added that the measure would build on the efforts of Los Angeles lawmakers, who last year passed a law hiking the city's minimum wage to $15 by 2020.

The measure would boost the state's minimum wage to $11 an hour in 2017, and increase it by a dollar an hour every year until reaching $15 an hour in 2021. After 2021, the minimum wage would be adjusted annually based on the rate of inflation.

The California Chamber of Commerce said earlier this month that it would oppose any state-wide ballot initiatives for a $15 minimum wage, arguing that it would create new costs for state and local governments as well as businesses.

A Field Poll published last August showed that about seven out of 10 respondents favored the measure, with nearly half saying they strongly favored it.

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Trump bump could mean good news for California Republicans

(San Francisco Chronicle)  -  With no statewide officeholders, little pull in the Legislature and a dwindling number of registered voters, California Republicans have teetered on the brink of irrelevancy for years.

But there’s an unlikely savior on the horizon who could help them inch back toward relevancy just in time for the June 7 California primary: Donald Trump.

The Republican presidential campaign front-runner is projected to be very close to securing the 1,237 delegates for the GOP nomination on California primary day, and analysts predict his name on the ballot could bring 15 to 30 percent more Republicans to the polls — both to vote for and against him. Only registered Republicans can vote in the party’s closed GOP primary, where 172 delegates are up for grabs.

The immediate beneficiaries of a Trump bump could be the Republicans on the U.S. Senate ballot, none of whom has been given much chance to finish in the top two in the race and advance to the general election in November. Bolstered by their party’s wide advantage in registered voters, two Democrats — Attorney General Kamala Harris and Rep. Loretta Sanchez of Santa Ana, have led in polls and raised millions of dollars. Their GOP rivals — former California Republican Party Chairmen Tom Del Beccaro and Duf Sundheim — are miles behind in both the polls and cash raised. Wealthy Silicon Valley businessman Ron Unz, a 1994 GOP candidate for governor and the author of 1998’s Prop 227, which effectively eliminated bilingual education in California, also entered the race this month.

Heavy GOP turnout forecast

Typically, about 46 percent of the voters in a California primary vote Republican. But the Trump factor — and the love-him-or-hate-him voters he is expected to drive to the polls here, as he has elsewhere — could boost Republican turnout enough to vault one of the Republicans into the top two.

“Frankly, I had written that race off as having the two Democrats in the top slots until this week” when the California primary became relevant because of Trump’s delegate math, said Jennifer Duffy, a senior editor at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report who analyzes Senate races nationally. “I think Republicans are now in a position to at least take a shot at one of those (top two) slots. A shot.”

It’s only been a few days since more definitive predictions of California’s relevancy started surfacing after Tuesday’s primary contests in five states scrambled the delegate math. So it is a bit early to find tangible signs of a Trump bump. Sacramento political consultant Paul Mitchell has not noticed an uptick in Republican voter registration.

“If (a surge) does materialize, it would impact down-ticket races,” said Mitchell, vice president of Political Data and one of the state’s leading experts on California’s racial and demographic groups. Mitchell has promised to run around the state Capitol naked if two Democrats advance to the general election in the Senate race.

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ISIS inspired California student in campus stabbings

That make two ISIS Calif. attacks

FRESNO, Calif. (CBS News) -- A California college student who went on a stabbing rampage that wounded four people before he was shot down by a campus police officer was inspired by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) but acted alone, the FBI said Thursday.

Faisal Mohammad, 18, appears to have become self-radicalized, drawing motivation from terrorist propaganda that he found online before launching the Nov. 4 attack at the University of California, Merced, authorities said.

"Every indication is that Mohammad acted on his own," Gina Swankie, a spokeswoman for the FBI's Sacramento field office, said in a statement. "It may never be possible to definitively determine why he chose to attack people on the U.C. Merced Campus."

The knife attack happened a month before a gun-wielding husband-and-wife team in San Bernardino killed 14 people and wounded 21 others at a workplace holiday party. In that case, too, investigators said they were influenced by ISIS, but not directly connected to it. Like Mohammad, they had not raised red flags that put them on a watch list.

In both cases family members said they were unaware of their loved ones' interests in terrorists groups.

In Merced, Mohammad burst into a classroom, stabbing two students. He stabbed a construction worker who intervened, then ran from the building, where he knifed a school employee sitting on a bench. Police shot and killed Mohammad.

The FBI says the college freshman from Santa Clara, California, had visited the websites of ISIS and other extremist groups for several weeks. He planned the attack at least a week before carrying it out, investigators said.

During the rampage, Mohammad carried a backpack containing a two-page, hand-written "manifesto," detailing plans to bind students to their desks with zip-tie handcuffs, authorities have said. Then, he was going to make a fake 911 distress call, ambush responding officers with a hunting knife and steal their guns to shoot a list of targeted classmates.

Mohammad's backpack also held a photocopy of an ISIS flag and a list of items he would need for the attack, the FBI said.

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Kevin McCarthy Draws Opponent - Central Valley Congressional Races Heat Up

Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy met in secret with rich oligarchs and political Elites to defeat Donald Trump.

(Bakersfield Californian)  -  A Tea Party rabble-rouser will challenge the House majority leader. Two Democrats will fight for a shot at another congressman. 

At 5 p.m. Friday, Kern County’s 2016 election picture was locked in place as the final filing deadline passed.

Ken Mettler
takes on McCarthy

The re-election campaign of Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, went from sleepy to intriguing this week when local conservative Republican and businessman Ken Mettler leapt back into the political world to challenge the House majority leader for his 23rd Congressional District seat.

Mettler joins Gerald Morris of Rosamond and Wendy Reed of Quartz Hill in Los Angeles County as a McCarthy challenger.

But the former Kern High School District trustee, who has made headlines as a candidate for Assembly and Kern County leader of the Proposition 8 battle against same-sex marriage, has the potential to rally outsider Republican voters.

And, in a year where Republican outsiders Ted Cruz and Donald Trump are energizing opposition voters, that could make for an interesting and amusing contest.

In a release announcing his candidacy, Mettler criticized McCarthy for supporting the $1.1 trillion Omnibus spending bill.

“I promise to fight a reckless Washington agenda that is bankrupting our government and saddling our children with a mountain of debt,” Mettler wrote.

Kevin McCarthy's 23rd Congressional District

GOP Congressman Valadao faces multiple Democrats

And let us not forget the 21st Congressional District where a pair of Democrats will challenge two-term incumbent Rep. David Valadao, R-Hanford. They are Bakersfield attorney Emilio Huerta, son of labor leader and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta, and Fowler Mayor Pro-Tem Daniel Parra.

The two have already scuffled, squabbling for the California Democratic Party endorsement and the money that would have come with it.

Parra outmanuevered Huerta, who entered the race in January, and seized the pre-endorsement. Huerta successfully challenged the pre-endorsement, sending it to a caucus vote at the Democratic Party convention in late February.

Parra won the caucus vote, but not by enough to block Huerta from gathering the signatures to send the matter to the convention floor on the final day.

Huerta collected nearly twice the needed signatures and succeeded in overturning Parra’s endorsement. But he missed a shot to claim the endorsement himself, leaving both men without formal Democratic Party support.

The big question that will come out of the scrum is whether either Democrat can challenge Valadao, who has twice claimed strong wins in the 21st District despite a more than 15-point voter registration advantage for Democrats.

Former Republican state Sen. and Assemblyman Phil Wyman is running a Quixotic campaign for U.S. Senate. California Attorney General Kamala Harris and Rep. Loretta Sanchez, both Democrats, are the leading candidates for the post.

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The 21st Congressional District of Rep. David Valadao, R-Hanford

Democrats allow you to kill yourself

Medically Assisted Suicide

---- You never needed the permission of the state to kill yourself, nor was their much government could do about it if you did.  But now it's legal.

(NPR)  -  California Gov. Jerry Brown signed landmark legislation last October that would allow terminally ill people to request life-ending medication from their physicians.

But no one knew when the law would take effect, because of the unusual way in which the law was passed — in a legislative "extraordinary session" called by Brown. The bill could not go into effect until 90 days after that session adjourned.

The session closed Thursday, which means the End of Life Option Act will go into effect June 9.

"We're glad to finally have arrived at this day where we have a date certain," says Sen. Bill Monning, D-Carmel.

"It's a historic achievement for California, and for a limited universe of people dealing with a terminal illness," Monning says. "It could indeed be a transformative way of giving them the option of a compassionate end-of-life process."

Disability-rights advocates fought hard last year against passage of the legislative act, and they continue to voice concern.

Marilyn Golden, senior policy analyst with the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund, says it would be impossible to know, for example, if a depressed patient went to many doctors — who all denied the request for lethal medication — before finding one who agreed to write the prescription.

"We are looking ahead at measures to protect people from abuse," Golden says, "and to explore and inform doctors, nurses and pharmacists that they don't have to participate."

As written, the law requires two doctors to agree, before prescribing the drugs, that a patient has six months or less to live. Patients must be able to swallow the medication themselves and must affirm in writing, 48 hours before taking the medication, that they will do so.

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Suicide Booth

Desalination plant for Baja California, not Alta California

Baja California Gov. Francisco Vega de Lamadrid, at center in beige jacket, presides at a groundbreaking ceremony in the community of La Chorera, site of desalination plant set to open in 2017 to supply residents in the San Quintin agricultural region. — Gob. de Baja California

El Niño is a bust, and MEXICO acts

California political hacks sit on their hands while Mexican politicians build desalination plants.

TIJUANA (San Diego Union Tribune) — A New York City-based company working with two Mexican partners has launched construction of an ocean water desalination plant in the agricultural region of San Quintin some 160 miles from the San Diego border.

Scheduled to open in the summer of 2017, the plant would provide 5.8 million gallons of water daily to more than 100,000 residents of the region.

The cost of the project is about $32 million at current exchange rates. It is the first to be approved under Baja California’s new public-private partnership law.

“This would not have been possible without this new very important tool that we have in Baja California,” Baja California Gov. Francisco Vega de Lamadrid said at a groundbreaking ceremony on Saturday.

The financing and construction of the facility is being carried out by a consortium made up of RWL Water Group and two Mexican partners, Libra Ingenieros Civiles and R.J. Ingenieria. Under the agreement, the group would operate the plant for 30 years.

RWL Water’s founder and chairman is Ronald S. Lauder, a former U.S. ambassador to Austria who also served as the president of the World Jewish Congress.

San Quintin is an important agricultural region that specializes in export-oriented produce, such as strawberries, tomatoes and cucumbers. But unlike other areas of Baja California, it does not receive water from the Colorado River and has struggled with a limited water supply.

The future facility, located in the fishing community of La Chorera, is one of two desalination plants now under construction in Baja California. A similar-sized reverse-osmosis plant in the port city of Ensenada is scheduled for opening in April 2017.

The state of Baja California also has been pursuing the possibility of a public-private partnership to build a third desalination plant with a capacity for 100 million gallons a day, with the possibility of selling some of that water to U.S. consumers.

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The drought goes on in Alta California

GOP race could go to California

(Breitbart News)  -  After the strong showing by 

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) (R- TX)

 on Super Saturday, when he won Kansas and Maine and came a close second to Donald Trump in Kentucky and Louisiana, it is increasingly clear that the Republican race might only be decided in June, in the California primary.

Republican strategist Ed Rollins told Fox News on Saturday night that the race could go all the way to California, where there are a staggering 172 delegates at stake:

MONICA CROWLEY: It’s possible that Ted Cruz or somebody else or maybe the collection of existing candidates will rack up enough delegates to deny Donald Trump the 12 — the over 1,200 delegates that he needs. But once you move into winner-take-all it becomes increasingly unlikely.

ED ROLLINS: Last day of the primaries, which is June 6th, which is California, this 294 bound delegates [including other states] at that point in time. That’s a lot of delegates.

MARTHA MCCALLUM: So you can see it as that scenario, because even Super Tuesday, ed, was not a sweep for Donald Trump … every time we get together to do this, we see Ted Cruz doing a little bit better than people thought, taking a couple of the states away from Donald Trump that looked like they were his when you went into the evening. So it is possible you go all the way to California.

As Breitbart California political editor Jon Fleischman explained last year, California could involve hand-to-hand combat all over the state, including in reliably Democratic congressional districts:

… whichever candidate wins the plurality of the vote in each of California’s 53 U.S. House Districts will be awarded the three delegates from that district. In addition, a small number of statewide delegates will all go to the winner of the plurality of the statewide GOP vote …

These rules mean that candidates do not have to approach California as a huge, monolithic and prohibitively expensive place in which to campaign. Candidates can campaign regionally, or even micro-target specific Congressional Districts.

Our very blue state has a vast number of very liberal seats where the number of voting Republicans is, frankly, miniscule. But these small voting universes of GOP voters in Democratic strongholds will decide the fate of three delegates to the RNC convention.

In the most recent Field Poll, California Republicans preferred Cruz slightly to Trump. Trump led the poll last fall.

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California Reservoirs Are Dumping Water in a Drought

California - A State of Lunatics

Billions spent on a bullet train to nowhere while 

water is dumped out to sea during a drought.

(KQED)  -  There’s a rule in California that may seem bizarre in a drought-stricken state: in the winter, reservoirs aren’t allowed to fill up completely.

In fact, even as this post goes up, a handful of reservoirs are releasing water to maintain empty space.

The practice, which has long inflamed combatants in California’s water wars, is due to a decades-old rule designed to protect public safety. If a major winter storm comes in, reservoirs need space to catch the runoff and prevent floods.

But with advances in weather forecasting, some say this preemptive strategy is outdated. A new, “smart” flood control system could save water in years when Californians need it most.

At one of the state’s major reservoirs — Folsom Lake, east of Sacramento — the volume of water spilling from the dam has swollen eight-fold in the past few weeks, sending billions of gallons downstream, much of it into San Francisco Bay.

Dumping water out to sea during a drought

Early in February the reservoir reached a key threshold: 60 percent full, which is the highest water level allowed during the winter months, according to rules from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency.

Last year, most of the reservoir was a dry, dusty lakebed.

“What reservoir was left was confined to the old river channels before we built the dam,” says Drew Lessard of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages the reservoir.

Just an average-size winter storm can send huge volumes of water down the American River into Folsom Reservoir, boosting the lake by 10 percent or more. A major storm can produce dramatically more than that.

Sitting 40 percent empty allows the reservoir to act as a buffer against floods, gulping the runoff without overflowing. In years where the upstream reservoirs are fuller, Folsom Reservoir is required to remain 60 percent empty.

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