MEXIFORNIA - THIRD-WORLD DUMPSTER STATE OF CALIFORNIA DEMS SAY OUR ILLEGALS COME FIRST! - BIG OIL GOUGING CONSUMERS... BIG DEAL! - "In May, Oakland announced it would divert $2.9 million from the gas tax to pay for lighting — even as the city paid for attorneys for illegal aliens facing deportation."

Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth

Rachel Maddow. Crown, $30 (432p) ISBN 978-0-525-57547-4

Petroleum-industry profits inexorably subvert good governance, argues this scattershot indictment of the oil and natural gas industries. Maddow (Drift), host of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, surveys Big Oil’s recent misdeeds, including Western oil companies’ support for Equatorial Guinea’s Obiang dictatorship, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and blocking rules to regulate fracking practices that cause earthquake swarms and pollution in Oklahoma (while the same companies demand tax breaks). Anchoring the book is Russian president Vladimir Putin’s cutthroat petropolitics. Maddow contends he turned Russia’s oil and gas sectors into cesspools of corruption and inefficiency, seized well-managed private oil companies and arrested their CEOs, and made energy a foreign policy weapon while getting investments and technology from ExxonMobil. Maddow tells these stories in colorful, sardonic prose—she pillories Putin’s campaign “to piss in the punch bowl of free elections all over the civilized world”—but the resulting hodgepodge doesn’t always support her portrayal of oil and gas as a “singularly destructive industry” that “effectively owns” governments; her absorbing account of Putin’s skullduggery is really about a vampiric government victimizing the oil industry (and includes an unconvincing link to Trump-Russia collusion theories). Maddow’s absorbing but inconsistent exposé demonizes more than it analyzes. 

Blue State Blues: California Democrats Try to Avoid Blame for High Gas Prices

Justin Sullivan / Getty

JOEL B. POLLAK

25 Oct 201935

3:56

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced this week that he would ask state Attorney General Xavier Becerra — the same guy who is always suing the Trump administration — to investigate whether oil and gas companies are to blame for high fuel prices in the state.

As if Newsom and the Democratic Party had nothing to do with the problem. Prices are usually the outcome of many factors, but in this case California Democrats share directly in the blame.

In 2017, for example, Democrats used their supermajority in both houses of the state legislature to force through a 12-cent-per-gallon gas tax, ostensibly to pay for transportation infrastructure that they had failed to account for in the actual state budget. The public reacted angrily, and Republicans won a rare recall election against first-term Sen. Josh Newman (D-Fullerton) in June 2018, who was one of the Democrats lending key support to the gas tax hike.

Democrats did all they could to rig that election. As Breitbart News noted in 2018 (original links): “Democrats began changing the rules for recall elections — by allowing unlimited contributions from fellow elected officials, by letting voters rescind their signatures on recall petitions, and by moving the date of the recall election to the June 5 primary.” All to no avail: voters punished Newman’s gas tax vote by recalling him by a nearly 60-to-40 margin.

The California GOP then gathered enough signatures to place a gas tax repeal on the November 2018 ballot. The party’s gubernatorial candidate, John Cox, made repealing the gas tax the centerpiece of his campaign against then-Lt. Gov. Newsom. The issue was one of the few on which the majority of California voters agreed with the GOP. The gas tax is a regressive one, falling disproportionately on working-class residents who must commute for work.

But then, in one of the most egregious acts of political fraud ever committed, the state’s Democrats — in this case, led by Becerra himself — gave the referendum, Proposition 6, a misleading title, using “Eliminates Certain Road Repair and Transportation Funding” for “Gas Tax Repeal Initiative.” Moreover, instead of voting “No” on the gas tax hike, California voters would have to vote “Yes” on Prop 6, creating additional confusion for the electorate.

Opponents of the repeal also allegedly used contractors for the California State Transportation Agency (Caltrans) to campaign against Prop 6 during work hours, stopping traffic illegally to do so. And it was not as if California Democrats ever intended to restrict the money for transportation. In May, Oakland announced it would divert $2.9 million from the gas tax to pay for lighting — even as the city paid for attorneys for illegal aliens facing deportation.

California Democrats have made fuel expensive in many other ways. The state is rich in oil and gas potential, but restricts drilling to a few areas, and Democrats are trying to eliminate it in places where it already exists. The state ‘s Low Carbon Fuel Standard raises prices 12 to 14 cents per gallon. And California’s cap-and-trade system, which Gov. Newsom defended against a Trump administration lawsuit this week, is raising local gas prices even more.

So it is laughable that Newsom and California Democrats are now pretending, like O.J. Simpson, to find the real culprit. “It’s sort of like your best friend stealing your wallet, and then helping you look for it when you notice that it’s missing,” said one letter-writer to the Los Angeles Times.

That is an accurate description, except for one detail: California Democrats are not the voters’ “best friends.” On this issue, at least, that title belongs to Donald Trump.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

Democrats turning California into a third-world hellhole: Going without electricity edition

By Tom Trinko

Democrats are turning California into a third-world hellhole without electricity, water, and freedom.

Due to Democrats' love for trees, at least 800,000 Californians will be without power for several days.  Instead of properly managing California forests to reduce the chances of big fires, Democrats are saying Californians have to go without lights, refrigerators, and air-conditioning.  Democrats could also avoid this by not making the power company financially liable for all forest fire damages, but since PG&E is a company, not an illegal alien, the Democrats couldn't care less about doing what's best for California.

While they try to blame climate change and the infrastructure, the reality is that neither of those has caused any significant changes in the last ten years — but now, suddenly, due to Democrat policies, Californians have to start living in the 18th century.

The Democrats who run California also refuse to build more water storage capacity even though the state's population has dramatically increased, ensuring that water has to be rationed during droughts.

Democrats are turning California into a third-world country economically.  The income inequality between the über-rich Silicon Valley workers and the rest of Californians is huge, just like in third-world countries, while the elites live in luxury and the rest live in squalor. 

Democrats are doing a great job manufacturing poverty and homelessness even as they fail to instill hope in Californians.

California has four times more homeless per capita and three times more poor per capita than the rest of America.  Half the homeless in America are in California, even though California has only 12% of the U.S. population.  Also, blacks are six times more prevalent in the San Francisco homeless population than they are in California in general.

The homeless explosion has brought the return of third-world diseases like typhus to California — not to mention streets littered with human feces.

Democrats are trying to keep people from having cars, just like the people of the Third World.  After all, a car gives people the freedom to move, and freedom is a bad thing in the minds of Democrats since it limits the power the government has over citizens.

Recently, Gavin Newsom, the Democrat governor, transferred millions of dollars that the voters had been ensured would go to improve the state's failing road infrastructure to a fund designed to convince Californians to give up their cars.

Democrats are also working to make cars unaffordable for any but the richest Californians.

Californians pay $1.53 more for a gallon for gasoline than the rest of America.  That's $21 more for a tank of gasoline.  Facebook employees won't notice it, but the poor in California who can't afford to live near their jobs are paying through the teeth.

Like all third-world tyrants, Democrats are doing everything they can to eliminate democracy in California.

The jungle primary, where the top two candidates in the primaries go against each other, has resulted in many races where two Democrats are running against each other, giving voters who don't agree with the Democrats' failed policies no one to vote for.

California is doing nothing to ensure that people who shouldn't vote don't vote.  Instead, the people running the state are doing everything possible to let illegal aliens vote.  When illegal aliens go pick up their driver's licenses, they're automatically enrolled to vote unless they say they're not citizens.

California is also trying to end democracy by keeping the Republican presidential candidate off the ballot.  Democrats passed an unconstitutional law to keep any candidate who didn't release his tax returns off the ballot solely to keep Californians from voting for Trump.

Finally, the Democrats are going after freedom of the press.  An undercover journalist revealed that Planned Parenthood was selling aborted baby parts.  Instead of investigating that illegal practice, Democrat Kamala Harris decided to put the journalist on trial.

Democrats keep telling us California is the future if they get elected.  That means that poverty, homelessness, the end of democracy, and a press that reports only what Democrats want heard are what Democrats are promising us.

If you're an immensely wealthy Google employee, California is Heaven.  If you're not, it's becoming more and more like Hell.

You can read more of Tom's rants at his blog, Conversations about the obvious, and feel free to follow him on Twitter.