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THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CALIFORNIA - This site is dedicated to exposing the continuing Marxist Revolution in California and the all around massive stupidity of Socialists, Luddites, Communists, Fellow Travelers and of Liberalism in all of its ugly forms.


"It was a splendid population - for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths stayed at home - you never find that sort of people among pioneers - you cannot build pioneers out of that sort of material. It was that population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day - and when she projects a new surprise the grave world smiles as usual and says, "Well, that is California all over."

- - - - Mark Twain (Roughing It)

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

California Approves Recreational Marijuana Ballot Measure



Druggies are Losers

  • That being said, it is way past time to take organized crime out of drugs and end the insane drug war. If someone wants to lay around in their own filth and stay stoned so be it.


(Reuters) - Californians are set to decide whether to make recreational marijuana use legal, as other Western states have done, after the California Secretary of State’s office said on Tuesday the issue could be put to voters in the November ballot.
The proposed so-called “Adult Use of Marijuana Act,” which is supported by Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom among others, would allow people aged 21 and older to possess as much as an ounce of marijuana for private recreational use and permit personal cultivation of as many as six marijuana plants.

“Today marks a fresh start for California, as we prepare to replace the costly, harmful and ineffective system of prohibition with a safe, legal and responsible adult-use marijuana system that gets it right and completely pays for itself,” initiative spokesman Jason Kinney said in a statement.
The measure would also establish a system to license, regulate and tax sales of marijuana, while allowing city governments to exercise local control over or disallow commercial distribution within their borders.
The initiative required just over 402,000 valid signatures to qualify for the ballot and exceeded that number on Tuesday, the Secretary of State’s office said. Secretary Alex Padilla is slated to certify the initiative on June 30.
Opinion polls show attitudes have shifted more in favor of liberalized marijuana laws since California voters defeated a recreational cannabis initiative in 2010.
Sales of both recreational pot and medical marijuana initially would be subject to a 15 percent excise tax.
Read More . . . .


Friday, June 24, 2016

Democrat Gun Control Measure Qualifies for November California Ballot



Fascist Democrats Will Not Stop
Until All Guns Are Banned


(AP) — An initiative to tighten California’s already tough gun control laws has qualified for the November ballot.
The secretary of state’s office says the proposal by Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom exceeded the number of signatures needed to qualify on Thursday.
If voters approve, California would become the first state to require background checks at the point of sale for ammunition.
It would require owners to turn in large-capacity ammunition magazines.
And it would streamline California’s unique program allowing authorities to seize firearms from owners who bought the weapons legally but are no longer allowed to own them.
It would also require owners to report lost or stolen guns to law enforcement, among other provisions.
Newsom, a Democrat, is running for governor in 2018 and has made gun control a campaign centerpiece.
Read More . . . .

Democrat Policy
Import Islamic Terrorists and take your guns
so you cannot defend yourself

.
San Bernardino Islamist butcher Tashfeen Malik was born in Pakistan but lived most of her life in Saudi Arabia. Her original hometown was Karor Lal Esan, 280 miles southwest of Islamabad, Pakistan.
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Malik attended the local center of the Al-Huda International Seminary that is aligned with the radical Wahhabi form of Sunni Islam.

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Democrat Senator gets sweetheart deal to avoid long prison term


FBI raiding Ron Calderon's Senate office
s
"Corruptus in Extremis"

  • If you rob a liquor store the all-powerful state throws the book at you.
  • But if you are a corrupt Democrat Senator, and member of "the private club", the 24 charges against you are lowered to a single count with minimal prison time.  Being a Democrat and a Senator gets you special treatment.


(Reuters)  -  Former California Senator Ron Calderon pleaded guilty in a federal court on Tuesday to a single count of mail fraud, ending a public corruption case in which he admitted to accepting tens of thousands of dollars in bribes, prosecutors said.
Calderon, a Democrat from the Los Angeles suburb of Montebello, left office in 2014 after serving a dozen years in the state Senate and four years in the Assembly.
Sentencing is set for Sept. 19. The 58-year-old former politician reached a plea agreement with federal prosecutors last week, several weeks before he was scheduled to go on trial on charges contained in a 24-count indictment.

His mail fraud offense carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, but prosecutors agreed under the terms of Calderon's plea deal to seek a sentence of no more than 70 months, the U.S. Attorney's Office said in a statement.
Once an influential figure in the California Legislature, Calderon was one of three Democrats in the state Senate suspended over ethics charges in 2014, costing their party a cherished two-thirds Senate majority during an election year.
According to his indictment, Calderon accepted $100,000 in bribes from the owner of a Long Beach hospital to preserve a loophole in the law that allowed companies controlled by the owner to charge more for hardware used in spinal surgeries.
Calderon also was accused of taking bribes from undercover FBI agents posing as Hollywood movie executives in exchange for steering legislation in their favor.
His older brother, Tom Calderon, 62, a former member of the California state Assembly who became a political consultant, also was named in the indictment.
He pleaded guilty last Monday to a federal money-laundering charge for allowing bribes earmarked for his brother to be funneled through his firm, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.
Prosecutors have agreed to recommend a sentence of no more than a year in prison for the elder Calderon brother.
Read More . . . .


Friday, June 17, 2016

Gov. Jerry Brown again refuses to declare a state of emergency on homelessness



California - A State of Insanity
Democrats spend billions on a high speed train 
that no one will ride and even more on 
illegal aliens, but they ignore poverty.


(Los Angeles Times)  -  Los Angeles County's latest efforts to needle Sacramento into giving more aid to the local fight against homelessness appear to be falling flat, with Gov. Jerry Brown saying he won't declare homelessness to be a statewide emergency.

The county supervisors voted Tuesday to pursue a declaration from the state, which would open the door to more state money and staff time to be put into fighting homelessness. 

Before that, the county had been lobbying unsuccessfully for a change in state law that would grant the county authority to seek a special tax on incomes over $1 million to pay for programs to address homelessness. Brown has opposed that as well, saying he has “deep concerns” about the plan and about giving additional taxing authority to local governments in general.


In a statement via a spokeswoman, the governor said Thursday that a gubernatorial declaration of emergency “is not appropriate.”

“We recognize the importance of addressing homelessness in our cities and will continue to support local governments, which remain best positioned to tackle challenges like this and tailor solutions to the needs of their communities,” the statement said.

The budget the governor and state lawmakers agreed on this week would set aside $400 million for affordable housing, to be spent only if a separate deal can be reached on streamlining the process for new construction. The state is also considering issuing a $2-billion bond to build supportive housing for mentally ill homeless people, of which $267 million would be included in the coming year’s budget.

County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, who has led the push for the so-called millionaires tax and for a declaration of emergency, said the county would receive only $30 million or $40 million a year from the bond proceeds to build new housing, while the estimated cost to ramp up homeless services in the county enough to significantly decrease the numbers on the streets is $450 million a year.

The proposed half-cent levy on taxable income over $1 million would bring in an estimated $243 million a year to the county.

The county’s homeless population has grown over the last several years and stood at about 47,000 in this year’s count by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. There were an estimated 115,738 people homeless statewide in 2015.

Read More . . . .



An encampment of tents under an overpass in Fresno.
(New York Times)


Monday, June 13, 2016

Boondoggle - Opponents trash high-speed rail



“It’s like a Saturday Night Live skit”

  • Now the political hacks want to build an elevated high speed rail through the Bay Area.  The money pit spending just gets deeper and deeper.


(Silicon Valley Business Journal)  -  Some of the same Peninsula residents who rose up five years ago to block the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s plans to build an elevated railway from San Jose to San Francisco returned Tuesday night in San Mateo to oppose the alternative.

In the second of three scoping meetings beginning the two-year environmental clearance process for the 51-mile segment, the “blended service” plan with high-speed trains and Caltrain sharing the same tracks was criticized for blocking grade crossings so frequently that it will “inflict on the Peninsula the greatest traffic disaster the Peninsula has ever experienced or will ever experience."

Mike Brady, a Redwood City attorney who has led local opposition to high-speed rail, made that argument, adding, “We cannot put up with this.”

Brady’s argument – that the 20 trains per hour up and down the Peninsula during peak service periods will block most automobile traffic across the line – is a major reason why the pre-2012 business plan called for the line to be completely grade separated where it crossed streets.



Ultimately, however, the goal of many of the residents who spoke Tuesday is not to come up with an acceptable way for the new trains to reach San Francisco, a requirement of the 2008 law that authorized the system, but to stop their northbound runs at San Jose.

“I don’t see why people who want to take high-speed rail wouldn’t take Caltrain to San Jose and change there,” one woman said.

At grade, there are 42 crossings between San Jose and San Francisco where high-speed trains may – and Caltrain already does – hit vehicles and people, frequently with disastrous results.

To meet the statutory requirement that high-speed trains be capable of running nonstop from San Jose to San Francisco in no more than 30 minutes, however, the rail authority plans grade-crossing changes. It would eliminate a handful with $500 million and protect the remainder with specially designed crossing gates that are required by the Federal Railroad Administration for trains operating at 110 mph, 31 mph faster than Caltrain now runs at its fastest.

Elected officials from Peninsula communities already bombarded rail authority chair Dan Richard in March with similar grade-crossing concerns. They worried both about finding money to eliminate them all for safety’s sake at the same time they decried raising track levels – and creating long, railroad-topped walls through their cities – that grade separation would require.

Read More . . . .


Beyond Boondoggle: California High-Speed Rail Delayed 4 Years



(PJ Media)  -  California's high-speed rail project has seen its share of setbacks since President Obama included more than $2 billion in the stimulus bill for its construction.

But most of the delays have been the result of bureaucratic incompetence. And now, without having laid a single foot of track, the project has been delayed again. The first segment, 119 miles through the Central Valley, was scheduled for completion in 2018. But with only half the land purchased and funding for the project still in limbo, the completion date has been pushed back to 2022.
Politico:
State and federal officials downplayed the shift in the timetable, saying it partly reflected more ambitious plans for the Central Valley work, and in any case merely ratified construction realities on the ground. Jeff Morales, CEO of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, said his agency is accelerating its pace after a painfully slow start, with a half dozen construction crews now building overpasses, relocating utilities, and demolishing structures from north of Fresno down to the Bakersfield area. 
“Early on, there was a vision, but no clear sense of how to implement that vision,” Morales said. “We have that now, and we’re moving ahead aggressively.”
To be clear: The project was proposed with "no clear sense of how to implement" the vision. That's a truly remarkable statement for politicians who begged the people of California for a $9 billion bond issue."

Concerns about the project’s viability, however, extend well beyond NIMBY-ism and car-bias. The estimated price tag is now equivalent to 35 times the annual federal subsidy for Amtrak. The state’s voters approved $9 billion in bonds for high-speed rail, and Brown has diverted some revenue from California’s carbon trading program to the project, but Republicans shut off the federal spigot when they took back the House of Representatives in 2010. 

So while Morales says there’s enough money to extend the railway north to San Jose, there’s not yet a long-term funding source to finish the entire job. There is some optimism that private firms can help finance construction in anticipation of profits from running the line, but there is also widespread skepticism about the state’s rosy ridership forecasts.

Meanwhile, the choice to start in the middle, in the sparsely populated and economically depressed Central Valley rather than the dense metropolitan areas to the north and south, has been ridiculed as a recipe for a high-priced train to nowhere. The first segment is actually designed to terminate in an empty lot north of Bakersfield. And the authority recently reversed its plans for its second segment, abruptly announcing that it will head north instead of south—understandable given the engineering challenge of tunneling through mountains en route to Los Angeles, but projecting a bit of a whoopsy-daisy vibe.

“It’s like a Saturday Night Live skit,” Patterson said.


Amtrak rail lines in California.

Nothing to Steal
An intelligent person would simply connect the Amtrak line that dead ends in San Luis Obispo with the Amtrak line at San Jose.  For a tiny fraction of the cost of the insane "high speed" rail fraud most of the state from Mexico to Sacramento would be connected by rail.
.
Instead countless billions will be pissed away as payback to the businesses and unions that fund the campaigns of the Sacramento hacks.  All the special interests have their snouts in the trough of corruption. 

Amtrak Pacific Surfliner at Del Mar, CA
Simply connect San Jose and San Luis Obispo and you have a statewide rail system.  But easy and cheap are words the liar politicians have never heard.

Wednesday, June 8, 2016

California GOP in total collapse


Kamala Harris and Loretta Sanchez

The Death of Democracy

  • Corruption  -  In November California voters will be given a "choice" for U.S. Senate between a Left-wing open borders Democrat and another Left-wing open borders Democrat.




By Gary;

Californians can say goodbye to Democracy, but I fear the mouth-breathing voters do not even have a clue.

Slack-jawed troglodyte Californians are much more interested in their newest phone app, tweets about trendy causes and what their friends ate for lunch than in freedom.

For the few of us who can still think the rotten fruits of the corrupt "top two" primary system have come home to roost. Voters will have a U.S. Senate "choice" between two Democrats:  Kamala Harris and Loretta Sanchez.

There will be no Republican at all on the ballot.  But that does not bother me too much since it was the GOP that created this corrupt "top two" system in a midnight back room deal with no public hearings.

But worse, the Dems and the GOP have prevented voters from voting for minor parties or independent candidates plus your write-in vote is illegal.

It will be Democrat vs Democrat.  Welcome to the true birth of the People's Republic.




From California Secretary of State

Californians gather to view the remains of
the nearly extinct Republican elephant.

A
California GOP Corruption
Under the corrupt leadership of GOP State Senator Abel Maldonado and GOP Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (and backed by other Republicans) party primaries were abolished in California and only the top two vote getters were allowed on the general election ballots..
This was deliberately done to weaken the voting power of Conservatives.
.
Four opposition parties from both the Left and the Right were effectively banned from the November ballot - The American Independent Party, the Green Party, the Peace and Freedom Party and the Libertarian Party.  Maldonado not only wanted opposition parties banned, but independent candidates also.  In addition all write-in votes were made illegal.
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Both Republican and Democrat leaders were happy to eliminate ballot opposition.  Other nations that ban opposition political parties are Communist China, Communist Vietnam and Communist Cuba.

Monday, June 6, 2016

Environmentalists Could Put Sanders on Top in California Primary



(Mother Jones)  -  California's Democratic presidential primary on Tuesday is a make-or-break moment for Sen. Bernie Sanders, who needs a big win in the state to take anything resembling momentum to the Democratic convention in July. His rival, Hillary Clinton, has a narrow edge, leading him by about two points in the RealClearPolitics polling average as of Monday morning.
But in addition to its role in the delegate math—after Tuesday, Clinton will likely have secured a majority of the delegates, when unbound superdelegates are factored in—California's Democratic primary could also be a referendum on how voters in the state want to deal with climate change. 
California is home to some of the country's most progressive climate policies, strong industries for both fossil fuels and renewable energy, and high vulnerability to some impacts of climate change, such as droughts like the one that is still ravaging the state (Donald Trump's opinion to the contrary notwithstanding). According to Yale University polling, 62 percent of Californians are worried about global warming, compared to a national average of 52 percent. A recent poll of California voters in both parties found that clean air and water ranked among the top issues in the presidential election.
In other words, California is uniquely suited to be a prime proving ground for differences between Clinton's and Sanders' approaches to issues like fracking and nuclear power.
"I think it's fair to say overall that California is known nationwide as being an environmental leader," said Michelle Chan, vice president of programs at Friends of the Earth in California. "And it's very much part of our identity as Californians: Our environmental values are part and parcel of how we identify politically."
Both candidates appear to be acutely aware of this. Last week, they courted the environmentalist vote in California. Sanders focused on climate change at a series of rallies, lambasting Trump as a "climate change denier" and calling on Clinton to up her game by coming out in favor of a tax on carbon emissions. Meanwhile, Clinton published an editorial in the San Jose Mercury News that focused on wilderness conservation.
Environmental groups are split between the Democratic candidates. Friends of the Earth endorsed Sanders nearly a year ago, and the Vermont senator also has the support of 350.org founder Bill McKibben. (350.org itself has not yet made an endorsement.) The political arms of the League of Conservation Voters and the Natural Resources Defense Council both support Clinton, as does Gov. Jerry Brown, who has been a forceful advocate for action on climate change. The Sierra Club and Greenpeace remain on the sidelines.
Read More . . . .

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Obamacare Disaster - UnitedHealthcare to pull out of California



Another Obama Victory


(PBS.org)  -  UnitedHealth Group Inc. is leaving California’s insurance exchange at the end of this year, state officials confirmed Tuesday.

The nation’s largest health insurer announced in April it was dropping out of all but a handful of 34 health insurance marketplaces it participated in. But the company had not discussed its plans in California.

UnitedHealth’s pullout also affects individual policies sold outside the Covered California exchange, which will remain in effect until the end of December.

“United is pulling out of California’s individual market including Covered California in 2017,” said Amy Palmer, a spokeswoman for the state exchange.

It’s expected that UnitedHealth will continue offering coverage to employers in California and to government workers and their families through the California Public Employees’ Retirement System.

Representatives of UnitedHealth didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday. In April, UnitedHealth’s Chief Executive Stephen Hemsley said the company was unwilling to keep losing money on the exchange business overall.

“The smaller overall market size and shorter term, higher-risk profile within this market segment continue to suggest we cannot broadly serve it on an effective and sustained basis,” Hemsley said in a conference call with investors in April.

UnitedHealth just joined the California exchange this year, and it only had about 1,200 enrollees so the immediate impact on overall coverage numbers is minimal. The number of individual policyholders outside the state exchange wasn’t immediately known.

Palmer said UnitedHealth policyholders will know their options for 2017 coverage when health plans and rates for next year are announced in July.

Critics of the Affordable Care Act have seized on the company’s exit, state by state, as further evidence the health-law insurance exchanges aren’t sustainable financially and that premiums will rise even higher for consumers.

Read More . . . .