Leftists look to tax Netflix

“Government! Three fourths parasitic and the 

other fourth Stupid fumbling.” 

― Robert A. Heinlein

Stranger in a Strange Land

(New York Times)  -  Dozens of California cities looking to shore up revenues are flirting with a new idea — tax your “Gilmore Girls” binge.

Pasadena was among the first to say publicly this fall that it wanted to tax video streaming services like Netflix, a step that could make up for lost tax revenue from growing numbers of cord-cutters.

At 9.4 percent, the so-called Netflix tax would treat streaming services as a traditional utility, the city said. If you use multiple services — for example, Hulu, Amazon Video and HBO — it would be added to each bill.

The move in Pasadena, with a population of about 140,000, has drawn consternation from technology companies and consumers who worry that it could be copied across the state.

“Websites and apps are not utilities and it defies logic to tax them like electricity, water or gas,” said Noah Theran, spokesman for the Internet Association, a trade group.

No California city has yet to begin collecting the tax. But roughly 40 cities, among them Glendale, Santa Barbara, Stockton and Sacramento, have gotten guidance from municipal consultants on how they might.

One question officials would need to resolve is where to stop, analysts say. If streaming video is taxable, then what about music, podcasts or video games?

“It opens a big Pandora’s box,” said Paul Verna, an analyst at eMarketer, a technology research company.

Mr. Verna said many of the streaming video tax proposals in California have bubbled up under the radar. If there is to be a larger debate, it will erupt when people start seeing their bills, he said.

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Democrat "Super-Majorities" in the People's Republic of California

Assemblywoman Ling Ling Chang (R-Diamond Bar)

A Leftist Dictatorship is One Seat Away

• The votes are still being counted. GOP Assemblywoman Ling Ling Chang is ahead by only a handful of votes for a State Senate race. A Democrat win creates a Leftist super-majority in the legislature.
• The GOP is a nearly worthless group that lives on the campaign bribes of wealthy special interest groups. But a Democrat Leftist super-dictatorship is scary.

(Los Angeles Times)  -  The Senate race between Assemblywoman Ling Ling Chang (R-Diamond Bar) and Democrat Josh Newman has narrowed significantly, making the Democrats' chances of securing a supermajority in both houses of the Legislature suddenly much more likely.

As of Friday afternoon, as outstanding votes continued to be counted, Chang's lead over Newman had been cut to just 187 votes in the 29th Senate District, which includes parts of Orange, Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties.

The day after the election, Chang enjoyed a nearly 3,900-vote advantage, but that lead shrank dramatically as mail and provisional ballots were tallied this week.

Democrats already have secured a supermajority in the Assembly, but doing the same in the state Senate, where they needed to flip only one seat, seemed unlikely until Friday's vote totals were reported.

With a supermajority, a political party can raise taxes, place measures on the statewide ballot, enact laws immediately with an “urgency” clause and override a governor’s veto.

It could be more than a week before the final tally is made available: Orange County, which accounts for the biggest bloc of voters in the district, says it has about 13,000 ballots left to count in the race. San Bernardino County needs to count about 2,000 ballots, according to officials.

"I don't think all the votes will be counted before Thanksgiving Day," said Jim Nygren, a consultant for Chang. "We'll just keep watching the votes."

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Senate District 29 is comprised of portions of Los Angeles County,
Orange County and San Bernardino County. 

California Democrats bet big on an anti-Trump strategy. It didn't work

The GOP Really Defeated Themselves

• Republicans could have put the funding for Jerry Brown's corrupt High Speed Rail on the ballot to give their candidates a rallying point, but as usual the GOP caved and did jack shit.
• If the GOP actually stood for something they might, just maybe, attract voters.

(Los Angeles Times)  -  Although Donald Trump’s victory stunned true-blue California, Democratic strategists in the state are grappling with another reality: Relying on anti-Trump sentiment as a strategy to launch more Democrats into the state Legislature doesn’t appear to have delivered as they’d hoped.

In the final weeks before the election, Democratic party leaders and consultants doubled down on the effort to tie GOP candidates to Trump in campaigns up and down the state, placing his name and image on mailers, television ads and lawn signs.

So far, although it appears Democrats will pick up three seats in the Assembly, there were four races in which the anti-Trump strategy was used and didn’t work. And the Democratic victors appear to be winning by closer margins than pollsters had expected. 

“The overall impact was kind of a dud,” said Andrew Acosta, a consultant for Democrat Dawn Ortiz-Legg. In the race for the Assembly, Ortiz-Legg compared her Republican opponent, Jordan Cunningham, to Trump, emphasizing his stances on women’s reproductive issues.

Ortiz-Legg lost to Cunningham by nearly 10 points in the 35th Assembly District on the Central Coast, despite the fact that state Democrats vastly outspent Republicans to help her. 

“We rolled with the Trump hit, and it obviously didn’t have the impact we were hoping it would,” Acosta said.

Assemblywoman Catharine Baker (R-Dublin) survived a challenge from Democrat Cheryl Cook-Kallio, even after her rival took pains to compare the socially moderate Republican to Trump on gun policy and equal pay. Democrats ignored that Baker had said early on she would not vote for Trump. The Republican incumbent won by 12 points even though Democrats enjoy a 12-point advantage in voter registration in her Bay Area district.

The “Trump effect” also failed in Democratic attempts to flip U.S. House seats. The most vulnerable Republican, Rep. Steve Knight of Palmdale, who denounced Trump and said he couldn’t vote for his party’s nominee, coasted to reelection with an 8-point victory. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had spent big in an attempt to link Knight to Trump. The strategy also failed in two Central Valley districts. 

In Southern California, where the tactic was aggressively pursued, Republican Dante Acosta prevailed in his Assembly race despite his opponent’s frequent efforts to compare him to Trump. Assemblyman Marc Steinorth (R-Rancho Cucamonga) is ahead by 4 points and, if trends hold, will likely hold on to his seat against Democratic challenger Abigail Medina, who called Trump and Steinorth “two sides of the same coin.”

“Honestly, it was just a really lazy way of political consulting,” said Jessica Patterson, CEO of the California Trailblazers program, which grooms Republican candidates for office.

In Orange County, for example, Assemblywoman Young Kim (R-Fullerton) is losing to Democrat Sharon Quirk-Silva. With ballots still being counted, Kim trails by just 1,500 votes in a district that has added more than 14,000 registered Democrats since January alone and where the Democratic voter registration edge has grown to 9 percentage points from less than 2 in 2014. Quirk-Silva made Trump such a central part of her campaign that she filed papers with the FEC as an independent expenditure committee opposing him.

Democrat Al Muratsuchi defeated Assemblyman David Hadley after spending months tying the Republican to Trump through lawn signs and the hadleytrump.com website. Although unofficial results showed Muratsuchi winning the coastal L.A. County district by 6 points, voter registration favors Democrats 41% to 30%, a gap that’s widened by 3 points since two years ago.

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Mike Antonovich did not lose because of Trump. He lost because GOP
registration in his Glendale-Pasadena area has been in free fall for years.

Pretend Elections in The People's Republic of California

California Leftists Live 

in an Alternate Reality

Leftist Loon Democrats obediently Goosestep for an ultra-corrupt Hillary Clinton.

The question is do Leftists have a soul?

With other choices available on the ballot how can any decent person cast a vote to put a known criminal in the White House? How do these morons sleep at night?

A Pretend U.S. Senate "Election"

Voters were allowed to select which open borders Democrat Leftist would be allowed to represent them in Washington. All other political parties and independents were banned from the general election ballot.

From California Secretary of State

California secession group to hold meet-up at State Capitol

For a huge 25 days the California Republic was an independent nation.

An Independent California

• The drive for smaller government that is closer to the people is worldwide. Scotland looks at independence from Britain, Catalonia from Spain, the Kurds from Turkey or the now broken up former Yugoslavia.
• So why not California? I have an open mind.

(San Francisco Chronicle)  -  An organization hoping to facilitate the secession of California from the Union is holding a meet and greet on the Capitol steps in Sacramento next Wednesday, November 9, 2016, or, the day after the presidential election.

The Yes California Independence Campaign, which is based in San Diego, is aiming to qualify a citizen's initiative in 2018 to get a referendum for secession on the ballot in 2019. They'll be in Sacramento to garner support for their initiative. 

"In our view," a statement on its website reads, "the United States of America represents so many things that conflict with Californian values, and our continued statehood means California will continue subsidizing the other states to our own detriment, and to the detriment of our children."

Mexico in 1840 with an independent Texas.
Borders are not written in stone so why not an independent California?

And it appears the organization has been considering its strategy for quite a while now. On its site, you'll find a link to a 33-page "Blue Book" wherein the organization answers any hypothetical questions about the state becoming its own country. The details for the secession — dubbed the #CalExit — include such topics such as "Will we join the United Nations?" and "Will we have our own Olympic team?".

While the notion of an independent California does seem well-intended — points about immigration, environmental concerns, and education are thoughtful — the practicality of such a proposal is tenuous at best.

Will this secession campaign be viable? In a word: No. As we know from the Civil War, just because a state wants to secede doesn't mean the Union will let it. As Washington Post writer Philip Bump wrote earlier this year, Congress simply would not, for many reasons, allow it.

"There's no mechanism for Congress to simply say, 'Sure, off you go.' Once you're in, you're in," he wrote. "The United States was born an expansionist enterprise, and the idea of contraction, it seems, never really came up."

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