When Biden took office, one of his first acts was the elimination of our border security. Like a power-hungry dictator, Biden simply decided to ignore our immigration laws. His catastrophic border policy resulted in untold millions of unidentified foreign citizens from around the world pouring into our country. Its impact is now being felt in cities across the country. The worst is yet to come. PETER LEMISKA - AND WE'RE ALREADY THERE!!!
Saturday, June 9, 2018
CITY JOURNAL - BROWNOUT: The Fall of California Under Mexican Occupation
FROM THE MAGAZINE
Brownout
Despite glowing media coverage and its departing governor’s claims, California faces a future loaded with problems.
Jerry Brown’s long political career will likely end in January
2019, when the 80-year-old’s second stint as California governor concludes. In
the media’s eyes—and in his own mind—Brown’s gubernatorial encore has been a rousing
success. His backers say that he has brought the state back, economically and
fiscally, from the depths of the Great Recession, which hit California harder
than it did the rest of the country. Brown has enacted an array of left-liberal
policies, to the delight of progressives, and positioned California as a
blue-state role model for the American future. A decade of phenomenal growth
among Silicon Valley’s landmark companies has boosted the state’s image and
helped restore its overall economy. Democrats hope that California will provide
a template for reestablishing their appeal to voters nationwide.
But the state’s boom shows signs of leveling off: after growing
much faster than the national average for several years, the economy, notes a
recent report by the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation, has now
fallen to around the national average; the state is no longer generating income
faster than its prime rivals such as Texas, Washington State, Oregon, or Utah.
California Lutheran University forecaster Matthew Fienup suggests that the
state’s economic growth could fall below national norms if current trends
continue.
The growth that so impressed over the past five years has masked a
multitude of policy sins, and as California’s economic engine slows down, the
underlying problems are becoming harder to deny. People are moving out in
greater numbers than they’re moving in. Rates of job creation—and the types of
jobs being created—vary widely according to geography. The high-tech hubs of
San Francisco and Silicon Valley have added tens of thousands of well-paying
jobs during Brown’s tenure, but the rest of the state hasn’t done nearly as
well.
Brown has put California on a fiscally unsustainable path. A
disproportionate share of the funds paying for his ever-expanding progressive
agenda derive from Silicon Valley’s capital-gains tax revenues and inflation of
the state’s coastal real-estate prices. Any slowdown in the tech money machine
or drop-off in property values could prove disastrous for Sacramento’s
budget—California gets half its revenue from its top 1 percent of earners.
According to Pew, this makes it the major American state with the most volatile
finances. Both U.S. News & World Report and the Mercatus
Center ranked California 43rd among the states in fiscal health. And that was
during an economic boom.
Brown’s departure will also remove the last (if only partial)
restraint on progressives in the state legislature, who largely do the bidding
of California’s powerful public-employee unions and the green lobby. These
forces will pressure the next governor to ram through even stricter
environmental laws, more onerous labor regulations, and a single-payer
health-care system. California’s teachers are even pushing for an exemption
from state income taxes.
California was once ground zero for upward mobility. No more.
During the new millennium, the Golden State has become increasingly bifurcated
between a small but growing cadre of elite workers and a far larger pool of
poorer families barely scraping by. Wide disparities have opened up between the
ultra-rich and a fading middle class. The Brown administration has largely
ignored the state’s poor and struggling rural areas as it pursues its agenda of
remaking California into a progressive paradise. The bill—socially,
economically, and fiscally—is coming due.
Throughout much of the twentieth
century, California was a population magnet, growing ever more economically
vibrant as it attracted the ambitious and the entrepreneurial from other
American states and from around the world. Now the state’s long-running population
growth is leveling off. During the last decade, high taxes, rising housing
costs, and constrained economic opportunity have sent many California residents
in search of greener pastures. Domestic economic migrants are pursuing their
American dreams in low-tax, pro-growth states like Arizona, Nevada, and Texas.
With fertility rates already below replacement, the state’s
population growth fell below the national average for the first time last year.
Only four states—Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Illinois—are attracting fewer
newcomers per capita. Immigration won’t solve that problem—new arrivals from
foreign countries have trended down over the past decade. Since 2010, Florida
attracted international immigrants at a per-capita rate nearly 70 percent greater
than California’s. Net domestic out-migration, which declined in the early
years of the Great Recession, tripled between 2014 and 2017. Worse, according
to a recent UC Berkeley study, more than a quarter of Californians are
considering picking up stakes, with the strongest proclivity found among people
under 50.
California is aging, too. The state’s crude birthrate (live births
per 1,000 population) is at its lowest since 1907. Los Angeles and San
Francisco ranked among the bottom ten in birthrates among the 53 major
metropolitan areas in 2015. Between 2000 and 2016, San Francisco–Oakland and
San Jose ranked 34th and 47th in terms of millennial growth among the country’s
53 largest metro areas. A dearth of young people would pose particular problems
for an economy like California’s, long dependent on innovation, traditionally
the province of younger workers and entrepreneurs. Seventy-four percent of Bay
Area millennials are considering a move out of the region in the next five
years. Since 2000, Los Angeles–Orange County has seen some of the nation’s
slowest growth of 25- to 34-year-old residents; since 2010, it has remained
substantially below the national average on this measure. The progressive
narrative suggests that those leaving California are poor, poorly educated, or
both. Yet according to the Internal Revenue Service, out-migrant households had
a higher average income than those households that stayed or moved in; even the
Bay Area is experiencing growing out-migration from increasingly affluent people.
Though the new federal tax changes, which will limit state tax deductions, will
likely not affect the wealthiest oligarchs and landowners, they could further
accelerate the departure of the merely somewhat affluent.
The current climate contrasts sharply with the 1950s and 1960s,
when Jerry Brown’s father, the late Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, pursued dynamic
pro-development policies as California’s governor. During those decades, the
state constructed new infrastructure that sparked growth in fields as diverse
as high-tech, aerospace, fashion, agriculture, basic manufacturing, and
entertainment. What was then a model freeway system connected California’s
cities to new middle-income communities in the San Fernando Valley, the South
Bay of San Francisco, Orange County, and along the spine of the San Francisco
Peninsula, which morphed into what we now call Silicon Valley. Pat Brown’s
administrations modernized and extended the state’s water-supply system and
crafted a public university system that was the envy of the nation, if not the
world. Describing Brown’s leadership in transformational terms, biographer
Ethan Rarick called the twentieth century the “California century.”
These reforms sparked a long economic boom not only on the
California coast but also in the state’s massive interior. In those days, the
region had political clout, as Republicans and Democrats competed for votes in
Fresno, San Bernardino, and Kern Counties. Today, the California heartland
tilts Republican but has lost its influence, as political and economic power
has consolidated around deep-blue Silicon Valley and San Francisco.
Like his father, Jerry Brown is a
liberal Democrat, yet he has worked overtime to undermine much of Pat Brown’s
pro-growth legacy. With the cooperation of a compliant state legislature
dominated by liberals, Brown has increased taxes, instituted polices making
energy much more expensive in California than in neighboring states, pursued
regulations causing housing costs to rise to unprecedented levels, and positioned
California as a safe space for illegal immigrants.Brown’s policies embrace the
values not of aspirational California but those of its wealthy coastline
residents. From water and energy regulations to a $15 minimum hourly wage,
Brown’s agenda reflects the ultraliberal political predilections of the Bay
Area. That’s where Brown himself lives, as do many of the state’s political
elite, including Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom and U.S. senators Dianne
Feinstein and Kamala Harris. The rest of the state has been pushed to the
political margins and keenly feels its powerlessness. “We don’t have seats at
the table,” laments Richard Chapman, president and CEO of the Kern County
Economic Development Corporation. “We are a flyover state within a state.”
Though widely praised by left-wing think tanks and progressive
foreign governments, Jerry Brown’s policies have unquestionably exacerbated
income inequality in California. According to the Social Science Research
Council, California now has the highest levels of income inequality in the
United States. In the last decade, according to the Brookings Institution,
inequality grew more rapidly in San Francisco than in any other large American
city; Sacramento ranked fourth on this measure. California is home to a disproportionate
share of the nation’s wealthiest people, including four of the 15 richest on
the planet. Yet more than 20 percent of Californians are considered poor,
adjusted for housing costs. That’s the highest percentage of any state,
including Mississippi. According to a recent United Way study, close to one in
three California families is barely able to pay its bills. Los Angeles, by far
the state’s largest metropolitan area, has the highest poverty rate of any
large region in the country. In the 4 million–strong Inland Empire, a
population nearly as large as metropolitan Boston suffers one of the highest
poverty rates among the nation’s 25 largest metro areas.
Graphs by Alberto Mena
Between 2007 and 2016, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor
Statistics data, the Bay Area created 200,000 jobs paying better than $70,000
annually, but high-wage jobs dropped both in Southern California and statewide.
The number of blue-collar jobs, some of which pay well, has dropped by 500,000
since 2000 and by more than 300,000 since the Great Recession. Minimum-wage or
near-minimum-wage jobs accounted in 2015–16 for almost two-thirds of the state’s
new job growth, according to the California Business Roundtable—and the new $15
minimum-wage law, set to phase in over the next half-decade, will hurt such
entry-level employment, research suggests.
The number of high-paying business- and professional-services jobs
is now growing at a rate considerably lower in Silicon Valley and San
Francisco, moreover, than it is in rising boomtowns such as Nashville,
Dallas–Fort Worth, Austin, Orlando, San Antonio, Salt Lake City, and Charlotte.
Most other California metro areas, including Los Angeles, are doing far worse
when it comes to job growth in this area. The Inland Empire saw a 7 percent
loss of such jobs between 2015 and 2016. As for tech jobs, between 2015 and
2017, San Francisco and San Jose added 23,000 jobs in the science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, for a growth rate of 4 percent and
7 percent, respectively. But the greater Los Angeles area, by far the state’s
largest urban center, gained only 6,500 STEM jobs, for a growth rate of just 2
percent, well below the national average. Even worse, the Riverside–San
Bernardino area added barely 900 STEM jobs, for a growth rate of about 2
percent.
Blame some of this weakness on the Brown administration, for
putting the squeeze on the state’s business community. Brown’s aggressive
stance on energy and climate issues—unrealistic renewable-energy mandates and
reduction targets for fossil-fuel emissions—has placed California at war with
industries such as home building, agriculture, and manufacturing, says
economist John Husing. California’s industrial electricity rates are, as a
consequence, twice as high as those in Nevada, Arizona, and Texas—the states
that have emerged as California’s main competitors for business and residents.
Much of California’s overall job growth—40 percent—during the last
decade has been concentrated in the prosperous Silicon Valley and Bay Area,
which account for about 20 percent of the state’s population. The majority of
the state’s population lives outside the Bay Area and, generally speaking, the
farther you go from there, particularly inland, the worse the economic
situation gets. Among the nation’s 381 metropolitan areas, notes a recent Pew
study, four of the ten with the lowest share of middle-class residents are
Fresno, Bakersfield, Visalia–Porterville, and El Centro. Three of the ten
regions with the highest proportion of poor people were also in California’s
interior. Southern California has lagged its northern rivals, too, leaving
whole swaths of the region in poverty.
Many Californians living in the inland areas had hoped that the
coastal boom would spill eastward, as skilled workers headed out in search of
more affordable living. That’s how it had always worked before. In the 1980s
and 1990s, middle-class Californians flooded out of the costly coastal urban
centers and into the interior counties, running from Riverside to the Central
Valley adjacent to the Bay Area. That flood, though, has slowed to a trickle.
Prior to the 2008 housing crash, the Inland Empire annually gained as many as
90,000 domestic migrants, largely from the coast; in 2017, a mere 15,000
relocated.
Housing costs are a likely cause of
this slowdown in domestic migration. Since 2009, Inland Empire house prices
have increased at a higher rate than that of Orange County, according to data
from the California Association of Realtors and the National Association of Realtors.
Not that housing is remotely affordable on the coast: a median-priced house in
Atlanta, Dallas–Fort Worth, or Houston is between one-half and one-third the
cost in the Bay Area or Los Angeles.
Indeed, at their current rate of savings, many young Californians
will take 28 years to qualify for a median-priced house in the San Francisco
area—but only five years in Charlotte, or three years in Atlanta. And
California millennials can’t look to higher salaries to relieve the housing
pressure, since, on average, they earn about the same as their counterparts in
far less expensive states such as Texas, Minnesota, and Washington. Small
wonder that, for every two home buyers who came to the state in 2017, five
homeowners left, notes research firm Core Logic.
The unaffordability of homes has had an impact on businesses. Many
of California’s biggest non-tech employers have moved their headquarters out of
the state in the last five years or are in the process of doing so. In 2014,
for example, Toyota announced that it would move its North American
headquarters from Torrance to Plano, Texas, just north of Dallas–Fort Worth.
The main reason, according to economist Albert Niemi, Jr., of the Southern
Methodist University Cox School of Business, was housing costs for 6,500 Toyota
workers. Pasadena’s Jacobs Engineering also shipped 700 headquarters jobs to
less expensive Dallas–Fort Worth. Occidental Petroleum left Los Angeles for
Houston in 2014. Glendale-based Nestlé decamped for Rosslyn, Virginia, in 2017.
Amgen, the world’s largest biotech firm, will shift much of its workforce from
pricey Ventura County to cheaper Tampa, Florida.
A reduction in the supply of new housing has driven prices upward.
New single-family construction in the Inland Empire has dropped to one-third of
prerecession levels. California’s statewide rate of issuing building
permits—for both single- and multifamily housing—remains well below the
national average, particularly compared with prime competitor states, such as
Texas. Los Angeles is the nation’s second-largest metropolitan area but ranked
sixth largest in new home construction in 2017, building fewer than half the
number of new homes built in Dallas–Fort Worth and lagging behind even smaller
Austin and Denver.
What’s causing California’s housing crunch? Misguided progressive
policies that have slowed housing construction are at least partly to blame.
Construction firms, for example, must pay “prevailing wages” when undertaking
some new housing projects, raising building costs by as much as 37 percent.
Recent new subsidized “affordable” units in the Bay Area cost upward of
$700,000 to complete. Urban theorists and planners promote government-enforced
“density” requirements on new developments, ignoring data that show
high-density construction to be as much as five times as costly per square foot
as low-density construction. Those costs make it harder for developers to
profit from housing construction, and hence less likely to build, and when they
do build, the higher price tag gets passed on to residents. Rent control now
enjoys widespread support, but it, too, discourages new housing construction.
California’s dramatic demographic shift has added its own problems
to the housing crisis. Since 2010, California’s white population has dropped by
270,000, while its Hispanic population has grown by more than 1.5 million.
Hispanics and African-Americans now constitute 45 percent of California’s total
population. Almost a third of the state’s Hispanics and a fifth of its
African-Americans live on the edge of poverty. Incomes have declined for the
largely working-class Latino and African-American population during the
economic boom, as factory and other regular employment has shifted elsewhere.
Many minorities in proudly multicultural California live in
deplorable housing conditions, with a rate of overcrowding roughly twice the
national average. Los Angeles County, with a population more than 50 percent
Latino or African-American, has the highest level of households with “severe
overcrowding”—defined as at least 1.5 persons per room—of any major
metropolitan area in the U.S. Some 25 percent of Los Angelinos, according to a
recent UCLA study, spend half their income on rent—another unfortunate metric
in which the city comes out on top. And things aren’t looking as though they
will improve for many young blacks and Hispanics anytime soon; the state’s poor
education system has not served them well, with California’s eighth-grade
reading scores ranking among the nation’s worst.
At least those in overcrowded dwellings have a place to live. Even
as homelessness has been reduced in much of the country, roughly one-quarter of
all homeless people in the nation live in the Golden State, and the numbers are
rising. California’s homelessness problem is in part a product of a benign
climate, but soaring housing costs are doubtless playing a role as well. Los
Angeles County has roughly 55,000 homeless people, up 23 percent since last
year. San Francisco, the darling of the tech economy, now has 7,500 homeless
people, essentially 160 per square mile. The problem is spreading to
traditionally affluent areas like Orange County and Silicon Valley, now site of
some of the nation’s largest homeless encampments.
The only way to ensure a just and
sustainable California future lies not in giving Sacramento more power but in
reducing regulations, allowing localities to control their own fates, building
more housing along the periphery, and embracing reasonable standards on
environmental controls. According to the Energy Information Agency, since 2007
California has reduced emissions by 10 percent, below the national average of
12 percent; for all its ambitious green laws, the state ranks a measly 35th in
emissions reduction. Tougher environmental regulations simply push people’s
carbon footprint to other states, where, because of harsher climates,
per-capita emissions tend to be higher. Rather than trying to vamp as the
leader of a visionary nation-state, as Brown has done recently on trips to
Western Europe, Russia, and China, California’s next governor can meet the
still-ambitious environmental goals of the Obama administration without doing
too much additional damage to the state’s beleaguered middle class.
Last year saw the first signs of a middle-class pushback. A
handful of largely Latino and inland Democrats—some backed by the state’s
residual energy industry—killed Brown’s attempt to force a 50 percent reduction
in fossil-fuel use by 2030, a measure that, opponents alleged, would have
necessitated gas rationing. Millennials—faced with diminishing prospects for
good jobs and homeownership—could break with progressives and demand a change.
They might begin to ask the uncomfortable questions that Californians must
answer if they are to avoid bankruptcy: Do we update our water systems, pave
our roads, fix our bridges, hire cops, and improve schools—or continue to pay
for some of the country’s most lavish green incentives and other costly
progressive measures? One recent survey suggests that young people are less
likely to identify as “environmentalist” than previous generations. They could
conceivably turn to an unconventional figure, like independent gubernatorial
candidate Michael Shellenberger, a maverick who threatens to disrupt the status
quo by removing barriers to middle-class growth and reviving the Pat Brown
legacy.
California needs to recapture the dynamics of upward mobility in a
state that once epitomized it. Those of us concerned about a better future for
the next generation have reason to be discouraged. But with all California’s
resources and its culture of innovation, a way can be found to restore the
state’s once-proud reputation as incubator of aspirations and fulfiller of
dreams.
Joel Kotkin serves as Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at
Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity
Urbanism (COU).
HOMELESS AMERICA’S HOUSING CRISIS as 40 million illegals have climbed U.S. open borders.
A dashcam video of downtown Los Angeles on Christmas day reveals a stunning sight: hundreds of tents and lean-tos on the sidewalks that serve as shelter for the homeless. The scene is reminiscent of a third-world country. RICK MORAN / AMERICANTHINKER com
WHAT WOULD HAPPEN TO AMERICA'S HOUSING CRISIS IF 40
MILLION LOOTING MEXICANS WERE SHIPPED BACK OVER THE
A new poll released Sunday found that nearly half of California’s Bay Area residents want to exit the area within a few years over the cost of living and unaffordable housing prices.
Approximately 42 percent of those surveyed said housing was the main reason for their planned exodus. 18 percent said it was due to traffic and congestion, 14 percent cited poverty and homelessness, 12 percent said the cost of living was the biggest factor, and 9 percent blamed high taxes.
According to the poll, released by the Bay Area Council and Oakland-based public opinion research firm EMC Research, forty-six percent of Bay Area residents surveyed between March 20 to April 3, said they are likely to move out of the region in the next few years.
That figure is up from 40 percent last year, and 34 percent in 2016.
The poll also found that 61 percent of the 1,000 people polled indicated they would move out of the Golden State and to another state.
“It’s so expensive,” Travis Dobbs, 38, a software engineer who moved his family from Berkeley to Portland last year, told the San Jose Mercury News. “My wife and I both make good money, relatively speaking, and we can’t afford a house there.”
“Where can you find homes that are less than a million now (in the Bay Area)?” San Francisco resident Ted Heca Oili told local NBC News affiliate in the Bay Area.
In 2014, Breitbart News reported that many workers in the city of San Francisco could not afford to pay their rent, which had led to the displacement hundreds of middle class workers.
Last year, Breitbart News noted that the combination of high housing prices and the homeless epidemic in the Bay Area had contributed to a “crisis” in which trailers and recreational vehicles (RVs) had become the only viable option for residents there. BLOG: FAKEBOOK'S MARK ZUCKERBERG IS AN ADVOCATE FOR AMNESTY AND OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED!
Also last year, one female Facebook contractor said she was forced to live out of her car because she could not afford the high rents in Silicon Valley, where the media platform’s headquarters are located.
In 2014, a rotting, dilapidated, 765-square-foot earthquake shack in San Francisco sold for $408,000. That same year, a tiny 180-square-foot shack listed for sale at $1.98 million.
Adelle Nazarian is a politics and national security reporter for Breitbart News. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
Nope, no blue wave in California. GOP actually better poised for gains because of the Trump wave
Well, the big blue wave didn't turn out quite like Democrats thought it would.
The press is reporting they avoided panic, given that most of their candidates secured spots on the top-two on the November midterm ballot. Whoop dee doo. That's not a blue wave, and it's certainly not victory. Instead, what we really saw were signs of Republican strength in a state written off as solid blue, with bigger-than-expected margins for the GOP that all the Trump-haters out there in the establishment could forecast. We also saw a significant rejection of Democratic Party organizational favorites, which is a sign voters are tired of their lockstep voting practices. A third thing we notice is that heavy television spenders, such as Paul Kerr and Sarah Jacobs, didn't make it. This, remember, was what Hillary Clinton did, instead of go to Wisconsin. It still fails.
With contested races, we can expect a lot more ads flooding our airwaves as the November midterms approach. We can also expect Democrats to fight hard, given that California is the linchpin of their master plan to retake Washington.
But there are more bright spots on the Republican side than the Democratic. For one thing, they have opposition, something they never expected. California, remember, is supposed to be the solidest of all blue states. Yeah, sure. And two, President Trump is popular. This election shows that he has coattails, and voters aren't ready to give up on the Trump experiment, which is actually going so well.
Three, and this is a goody, with Republicans on the ballot, it means Democrats will have to fight an issues campaign. Advantage, Republicans. It means that Democrats in both state and federal races are going to be pinned down and forced to answer questions they don't want to answer about illegals, the gas tax (very potent), Obamacare, the GOP tax cut, green excesses, the high cost of housing, the bums ruining the quality of life in cities, and the bullet train. Once Democrats reveal their true positions, they aren't going to find themselves at an advantage. It certainly isn't going to help the large numbers of moderate-type Democrats who were in some of the top-two spots in the downwind races (they will squirm), and it really won't help the Bernie Sanders-style leftists in similar spots, who will be completely open about their positions.
Here are some more reasons for optimism from various races:
Governor's race: Democrat Gavin Newsom and Republican John Cox. First good thing: Antonio Villaraigosa, who was running on a cater-to-illegals identity-politics ticket, didn't make it. The great Latino wave everyone keeps seeing out there as taking over still hasn't happened. Good thing, because maybe he will have to run on issues instead of appealing to ethnic solidarity. Then there's the fact that he was beaten by Republican Cox. Yes, the analysts say Cox can't possibly win, given that Democrats outnumber Republicans two-to-one on voter registrations. But Cox, who embraced President Trump openly and won his endorsement came out strong in his second-place finish. He wasn't supposed to place at all. When he started out, the analysts said there was no chance. He's still got a bank of Republicans to take votes from, from the candidacy of Travis Allen, and if he energizes them, they will come. And among the high Democratic registration numbers, there are disgruntled Democrats among them, particularly about the illegals. He has a chance, and in the Age of Trump, there can be surprises. Here's another thing: Newsom is no prize. He seems to have an enthusiasm deficit, given that only "hundreds" showed up to his victory party. Matt Drudge is already running unflattering pictures of him on his front page, and he looks like a wimp. Newsom started his campaign early and apparently that was his only advantage.
Senate: Looks like it will be Dianne Feinstein and extreme leftist Kevin De Leon. It probably was a case of Republicans wanting to keep De Leon at bay, given that he's another part of the extreme-left California statehouse machine. Republicans for a long time have been sighing and voting Feinstein, and they probably did it this time, too. Silver lining: A total unknown Republican named James Bradley, with supposedly no chance to win, did place a very close third to De Leon. I know I never heard of him and I had several Republicans to choose from on the ballot. That Bradley did as well as he did does show strength.
Ed Royce's seat, Orange County: Young Kim, a Korean-American Republican endorsed by the retiring Royce, a popular congressman nobody wanted to see go, handily took the first spot. Yes, indeed there is an Asian wave, and much to Democrats' surprise, it's led by Republicans, just as I suspected.
Devin Nunes: Beat his challenger Andrew Janz, a political novice, handily on the tallies, and will face him again in November. With numbers like his, so much for the canard that Nunes no longer in a 'safe' seat, as cognoscenti such as Larry Sabato forecasted.
Dana Rohrabacher's seat: Dana, of course, by a huge margin. Voters love the guy. Surfin' congressman, can't beat it. Two Democratic unknowns split the ballot with half each of what Rohrabacher got. He will have a fight on his hands if the Dems unite, but cripes, he's done so well, why are voters going to change?
Darryl Issa's seat, San Diego County: Lots of obnoxious characters in this one, with saturation advertising. Neither of the top two culprits, Sarah Jacobs and Paul Kerr, made it. And they were the Democratic Party's darlings, with all the loud, noisy endorsements. Voters rejected that. Instead, it was an unknown lefty lawyer named Mike Levin who took the second slot, despite Jacobs trying to convince voters she too was a leftwing extremist in her ads. Voters who want that will go for a leftwing lawyer every time, not a novice with daddy's cash. And in the first place? In this district everyone said was a goner in the blue wave quest? Republican Diane Harkey, someone I have never heard of, but hey, Year of the Woman, right, Democrats?
ILLEGALS VOTING IN MASSIVE NUMBERS IN MEX-OCCUPIED CA
‘Eleven of California’s 58 counties have registration rates exceeding 100% of the age-eligible citizenry.’
‘California has the highest rate of inactive registrations of any state in the country. Los Angeles County has the highest number of inactive registrations of any single county in the country’
''California is going to be a Hispanic state," said Mario Obeldo, former head of MALDEF. "Anyone who does not like it should leave."
(THIS IS DATED. MEXICO NOW HAS INVADED ALL STATES )
And M.E.Ch.A's goal is even more radical: an independent ''Aztlan,'' the collective name this organization gives to the seven states of the U.S. Southwest – Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas and Utah."
THEY STEAL SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS TO STEAL JOBS, DRIVE ILLEGALLY, CONTRACT IN THE TRADES ILLEGALLY, AND VOTE FOR MORE ILLEGALLY and do it by invitation of the Democrat Party!
Mexicans cheat, distribute drugs, lie, forge documents, STEAL and kill as if it’s a normal way of life. For them, it is. Mexico’s civilization stands diametrically opposed to America’s culture. FROSTY WOOLDRIDGE
California Primary: Big Night for Republicans as John Cox Qualifies for November Ballot
Republican businessman John Cox has been projected as the second-place finisher in the California primary for governor, securing a slot at the top of the ticket on the November ballot and lifting GOP hopes to retain Congress.
JUST IN: Republican John Cox will face Democrat Gavin Newsom in California Governor's race in November #CaliforniaPrimary2018
The major news networks made the call with just a small percentage of the vote counted, thanks to a surprisingly strong result from Cox, who far out-performed his poll numbers.
With just 17.2% of precincts partially reporting as of 10:04 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time, Cox had 26.0% of the vote, behind Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 35.1% and far ahead of former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s 11.1%, as well as conservative Assemblyman Travis Allen (R-Huntington Beach), who had 10.9%.
The final RealClearPolitics average of polls had Cox at just 17.5%.
Cox appears to have benefited from an endorsement from President Donald Trump. He also spent heavily in the early months of the race, boosting his name recognition and convincing observers he was the GOP’s only hope. Newsroom’s campaign also boosted Cox, fearing an expensive battle against Villaraigosa in the general election.
The gubernatorial race was once thought to be a guaranteed all-Democrat fight between Newsom and Villaraigosa. Under California’s “top two” or “jungle” primary system, the top vote-winners in the primary advance, regardless of party. The conventional wisdom was that Villaraigosa would turn out the Latino vote and surpass any GOP rivals. Special interests began placing multimillion-dollar bets on that outcome, using the Newsom-Villaraigosa race as a proxy for a battle over school reform, for example. Democrats hoped that race would boost downticket candidates.
But Republicans, led by Allen and others, began organizing a statewide effort to put a repeal of California’s new gas tax on the November ballot. Then Attorney General Jeff Sessions arrived in Sacramento in early March, armed with a federal lawsuit against California’s new “sanctuary state” laws. That inspired conservative activists to mount a revolt against those laws in local governments throughout Southern California. Cox and Allen saw their polls rise.
With a Republican now competing in the most important statewide election, the GOP believes it can turn out its vote in November and protect vulnerable members of Congress in districts that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. That, in turn, will make it much more difficult for Democrats to pick up the 23 seats they need nationwide to win back control of the U.S. House of Representatives and to put former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) back in power.
Villaraigosa struggled to gain traction in the polls. He was also hurt by errors in the voter rolls in L.A. County, which accidentally excluded nearly 120,000 people, many of whom had to cast provisional ballots, and some of whom may not have been able to vote at all. Villaraigosa called on officials to extend voting through Friday.
Republicans appeared to qualify for the general election in several other statewide races, but not for insurance commissioner, where former Republican Steve Poizner won the primary as a “no party preference” candidate. The race for second in the primary for U.S. Senate was neck-and-neck between Republican James Bradley and State Sen. Kevin de Léon (D-Los Angeles); incumbent Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) came in first place easily.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named to Forward’s 50 “most influential” Jews in 2017. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Will Californians Prevail Against the Little Picture of Hell?
The state of California has descended into a modern-day version of Dante’s Inferno, where treachery of all kinds occupies the bottom circle. Public sector unions are running (or rather ruining) the state into bankruptcy, betraying the public trust while charging the taxpayers for the perverse privilege. Republicans collude with the supermajority of Democrats to raise taxes, fees, and unrelenting regulatory burdens.
The public schools indoctrinate their young charges to hate this country and the rule of law. Illegal aliens continue overwhelming the state, draining California’s already depleted public services while endangering our lives, the rule of law, and public safety for all citizens. The federal government has filed lawsuits against Sanctuary California, and ICE is rounding up illegals in their homes and in workplaces. However, demonic pro-illegal forces still parade in the streets and cross our borders, defying American sovereignty. Larger cities have more homeless than homes for citizens.
The natural disasters are hitting crisis level, too. The Bible depicts torturous flames with respite in hell without respite, (Luke 16: 24). So too parched conditions have engulfed California. Wildfires have become a year-round terror, yet the state’s leadership refuses to prepare emergency water storage. This past week, two hundred firefighters had to quell another massive conflagration in south Orange County, and summer hasn’t even begun yet. To make matters legislation to make the current drastic water rationing permanent!
Even wealthy coastal elites have found that the cost of living in California is slowly exceeding its value. Money can’t create water, and financial gain provided nothing for West Los Angeles socialites when a few homeless transients set a blaze along the 405 Freeway overpass along the Santa Monica mountains.
All of this is a testimony to the damage wrought by progressive policies which have transformed California into a picture of hell. That’s precisely what Evangelical preacher Franklin Graham called California … or at least that’s what he called the sanctuary cities. During an interview on the Todd Starnes Show, Graham commented:
"People are leaving the state. The tax base is eroding. They are turning their once beautiful cities into sanctuary cities, which are just a little picture of Hell," Graham said. "Just go to San Francisco and go to this once-beautiful city and see what has happened to it."
But why did the son of the renowned Reverend Billy Graham take time to comment on the harrowing horrors of California? For his latest Gospel Crusade, he visited ten cities in the once-Golden State. Starting on May 20 in Escondido (one of several cities to challenge SB 54, aka the Sanctuary State law over the past three month), Graham is bringing the message of the Good News to the dispirited wasteland along the Left Coast.
Returning to Pastor Graham’s signature statement from the Starnes interview, finally a pastor of stature and renown is condemning sanctuary city policies, and a welcome response from the all-too-quiet church leadership in California and across the country. Pastors should be the first to denounce this misnamed, misleading agenda. The concept of sanctuary comes from the Bible, better known as “cities of refuge” (cf. Numbers 35:11-28), locations reserved for those who had accidentally killed someone. To avoid retribution, they would flee to those cities.
In California, sanctuary policies bar local and state law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration officials to arrest and deport illegal aliens. These cities are not safeguarding otherwise innocent people, but are protecting criminals who have broken into the United States and reside illegally to this day. Pundits left and right contend that these policies actually protect otherwise law-abiding residents to seek help and report crimes. Nothing could be further from the truth.
However, is it fair to tie the long list of hellish outcomes from these left-wing enclaves to their refusal to enforce federal immigration laws?
Yes.
What has happened to sanctuary city San Francisco, for example? The progressivism that made God nothing and man’s “ideas” everything created the s***-hole dystopia that resides there today. It’s an overpriced progressive utopia, to put it charitably. For the vast-majority of residents, even for those who can afford it, a salary of $100,000 a year barely pays the rent. Roommates doubling up is the norm, especially among the Big Tech interns who take the bus to Silicon Valley to work all day on the latest app for the Google, Facebook, EBay overlords.
For the price they pay to live in the city, San Franciscans aren’t getting their money’s worth. Intravenous drug needles litter the streets everywhere. Homelessness is more common than homeownership. “S***hole” better describes the streets of the city, where the feces piles have so overwhelmed the streets, that visitors receive maps on how best to navigate away from the crap and corruption. Street fights among transients and the mentally ill have exploded, rampant moral decline has overshadowed the once great city. Tourists find enough to see, then flee.
Freedom of speech and freedom of religion have lost their place, even though Graham’s latest crusades have succeeded in otherwise unfriendly territory, like Berkeley. Last year, the Patriot Prayer movement, headed by Joey Gibson, attempted to throw two rallies for freedom of speech and thought. The elected officials of San Francisco (including Nancy Pelosi) and the now-deceased mayor Ed Lee, smeared the peaceful program as a “White supremacy rally.” Gibson is half Japanese, by the way.
Where Gibson had tried and failed, Graham’s message of hope accomplished peaceful gatherings with a call to action to California’s Christians. And I say it’s about time. There have been flickers of hope in spite of the deranged left-wing agenda ravaging my home state. Californians in general, and Christians in particular, need to step up. They are called to be light in a dark, hellish world, but nothing good will happen if they don’t vote for their values, then educate the public how to fight against the devilish lawlessness foisted upon us by our political leaders and the cultural elites running—or rather ruining—the state.
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