Quote Of The Week from California

From Columnist Burt Prelutsky:

"Frankly, I don't know what it is about California, but we seem to have a strange urge to elect really obnoxious women to high office. I'm not bragging, you understand, but no other state, including Maine, even comes close.

When it comes to sending left-wing dingbats to Washington, we're number one.

There's no getting around the fact that the last time anyone saw the likes of Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi, they were stirring a cauldron when the curtain went up on 'Macbeth'.

The three of them are like jackasses who happen to possess the gift of speech. You don't know if you should condemn them for their stupidity or simply marvel at their ability to form words."

HT to blogger buddy James Shott at Observations

School Activity Choices: Basketball, Dance, or Gang Rape?

Are we on the eve of destruction?
Psychologists, sociologist and press apologists are trying to explain the brutal gang rape of a 15 year old girl at a homecoming dance, and the actions of the diseased orangutans who cheered it, joined in, or just kept silent.

The disgusting turd pictured above was one of the perpetrators.  He will experience the other end of gang rape in prison.  He's young, so he should be popular.

(CNN) -- For more than two hours on a dark Saturday night, as many as 20 people watched or took part as a 15-year-old California girl was allegedly gang raped and beaten outside a high school homecoming dance, authorities said.

"As people announced over time that this was going on, more people came to see, and some actually participated," Lt. Mark Gagan of the Richmond Police Department told CNN.

The witnesses failed to report the crime to law enforcement, Gagan said.

The rest of the article is full of liberal psychobabble struggling to explain degenerate criminal behavior and is not worth reading. 

It's the Morals, Stupid!

You see, the hooting idiots who laughed traditional Christian morality off the national stage failed to replace it with anything.  Nature abhors a vacuum, and degenerate, diseased chimpanzees disguised as human beings have filled the empty space with the law of the jungle.

Another victory for empty-headed, multi-cultural, non-judgmental liberalism. 

Congratulations America.  We're on the eve of destruction, but it won't be a foreign war that pushes us over the edge...

CNN - Gang Rape
Fox - Degenerates in Custody

Mercury News - More Arrests

Two Chus to Chose

Two politicians named Chu,
What are the voters to do?
Pick the one with a D
to get goodies free
as your state
goes down the tubes

From the LA Times:

State Board of Equalization Vice Chairwoman Judy Chu won the most votes Tuesday for the open 32nd Congressional District seat...

Judy Chu, a Chinese American, campaigned on her experience and deep roots in the district and worked to build coalitions across ethnic lines. She will face Betty Tom Chu ... in the runoff on July 14.

I don't even want to know what the State Board of Equalization is, but it probably helped push the Golden State into the toilet.

LA Times

Government Bubble

The end of the Clinton era saw the bursting of the dot com bubble. Rampant speculation had driven tech stock prices to unsustainable levels, and what went up came crashing back down.

We just witnessed the housing bubble's big bang, with resulting downsizing of irresponsible lifestyles. There is talk of bulldozing entire vacant neighborhoods in some failed cities like Detroit.

Unfortunately, government gamblers who are incapable of learning anything continue to pump hot air into the increasingly unstable big government bubble. California voters repudiated their politicians, and now no one knows what to do, since slashing spending doesn't come naturally to a political candy man.

President Obama, fresh from blowing $4,000,000,000,000, brazenly says we are borrowing too much money from China, we're broke, and the irresponsible spending must stop. Oh, and he also wants to fund windmills and free health care for everybody.

Paul Krugman can always be relied upon for liberal doses of economic advice.

Like practically all liberals, he stubbornly pins California's fiscal disaster to proposition 13, the conservative ballot measure that capped property taxes. Krugman goes a step further, predicting the same disaster for the US for the same reason: Those angry, stingy conservatives are blocking "responsible" tax increases that would pay for all this spending.

It's always too little taxation; never too much spending.

We all want something for nothing and the politicians are too cowardly to tell us no, so we end up with more government than we can afford.

China and the US are in a Mexican standoff: We can't stop irresponsible borrowing, they can't stop irresponsible lending, and the negative synergy has us on a mutual downward spiral.

Why doesn't it occur to anyone to downsize our overleveraged government?

NYT - Krugman

All That Glitters is not Gold

The woes of New York, Michigan and California are familiar to us now. New York has regulated and taxed itself into oblivion, Michigan's workers have priced themselves out of the global market, and California's progressive wizards have turned its gold into lead.

Only California liberalism could produce a situation where there is a surplus of empty houses while people live in tent cities. But there's trouble in the sun belt as well. Nicole Gelinas writes in the City Journal:

But during the boom times, elected officials in Arizona, Florida, and Nevada took a page out of the old states’ playbook, driving up spending at an unsustainable pace. Now that the growth of the low-tax states has hit a wall, shattering revenues, they face a tough choice: they can raise taxes to fund permanently higher costs, or they can aggressively cut spending.

This is happening in other sunbelt states as well. They are not in as deep as Michigan and California, so these states still control their own destiny, but the author is not optimistic.

But the low-tax, low-services culture is up against a potent force: the inexorable mathematics of budgets that take on a life of their own once they’ve passed the point of no return. If the way that Arizona, Florida, and Nevada are confronting the current crisis is any guide, these states will continue to grow—but they will also grow a little bit more like us.

Can we learn from the failed liberal experiments of Michigan, California and New York? Or are we doomed to replicate them in Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada?

Merctus.org - Freedom Study
CJ - Malanga
CJ - Gelinas

A Minority in a Strange & Hostile Land

Minorities

We need to show more sympathy for these people.
* They travel miles in the heat.
* They risk their lives crossing a border.
* They don't get paid enough wages.
* They do jobs that others won't do or are afraid to do.
* They live in crowded conditions among a people who speak a different language.
* They rarely see their families, and they face adversity all day, every day.

I'm not talking about illegal aliens ~ I'm talking about our troops! Doesn't it seem strange that our politicians are willing to lavish all kinds of social benefits on illegals, but propose to cut funding for our troops?

* Courtesy of Uncle Doc, from the failed state of Mexifornia

California: Build by Rugged Pioneers, Destroyed by Entitled Liberals

Here's a funny joke:

In 1850, California became a state. The State had no electricity and no money. Almost everyone spoke Spanish. There were gunfights in the streets.

So, basically, it was just like it is today, except the women had real breasts and the men didn't hold hands.

Victor Davis Hanson gives us some California history and catalogs its bounty: Silicon Valley, farmland, minerals, natural resources. On its own, it used to be the 6th largest economy in the world. He also analyzes what went wrong. Liberals have hijacked this land of plenty bequeathed to them by their hard working ancestors and turned it into a bankrupt third-world sewer.

If we can agree that Californians have somehow squandered a rich natural and inherited wealth, what were the root causes of this collective suicide?

... less discussed is the common culprit: a weird sort of utopian mindset. Perhaps because have-it-all Californians live in such a rich natural landscape and inherited so much from their ancestors, they have convinced themselves that perpetual bounty is now their birthright -- not something that can be lost in a generation of complacency.

Californians count on the wealth of farming but would prefer their rivers to remain wild rather than tapped. They like tasteful redwood decks but demand someone else fell their trees for the wood. Californians drive imported SUVs but would rather that you drill for oil off your shores rather than they off theirs. They pride themselves on their liberal welfare programs, but drive out with confiscatory taxes the few left to pay for them.

Californians expect cheap imported labor to tend their lawns and clean their houses, but are incensed at sky-high welfare and entitlement costs that accompany illegal immigration.

Gaze upon California, America, a failed liberal experiment. Having destroyed this great state, progressive Utopians are now turning their attentions to the other 49. And that's no Joke.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/03/accounting_for_californias_sui.html

California: Failed State

Liberalism, which clings to the childlike belief in the free lunch, has wrecked the once great state of California

California, land of energy, agriculture and a treasure trove of brilliant human capital, is collapsing in upon itself, straining under the weight of a staggering $40 billion plus deficit.

In Homage to Catalonia, a personal narrative of his participation in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell marveled at the ability of Marxists to reduce to a state of filth and chaos any building they occupied.

Like Orwell, Americans may now marvel at the state of filth and fiscal chaos liberal Democrats reduce almost any state or municipality they occupy. Detroit, Chicago, Michigan, California... Only liberalism could bring the world's sixth largest economy to it's knees in one generation.

I take no glee in pointing this out. California once embodied America and our optimistic, expansionist ideals, but no longer. This collapsed welfare state is exhibit A in the gallery of liberalism's failures. Of course, the New York Times and a yapping chorus of progressive apologists don't see things this way. So who's to blame, according to left? Why Republicans, of course! This is from the NY Times, toilet paper of record:

The roots of California’s inability to address its budget woes are statutory and political. The state, unlike most others, requires a two-thirds majority vote in the legislature to pass budgets and tax increases. And its process for creating voter initiatives hamstrings the budget process by directing money for some programs while depriving others of cash.

For months Republicans have vowed not to raise taxes, which in California means no increase in either the sales, gas or personal income tax.

The American Prospect pushes the liberal line even further: Proposition 13 and the ensuing property tax cuts wrecked the state. So there we have it: A state completely run by free-spending liberal Democrats at every level collapses and the Republicans are to blame.

Wayne Allyn Root throws a bucket of cold water on this nonsense:

The good news is that California leads the nation. The bad news is that California leads the nation in deficit, debt and the amount of residents escaping to other states.

*California leads the country in spending on government employees.

*California spends twice as much as the national average on education (with dismal results).

*California spends almost $200 million per year on free college educations for illegal immigrants (no that's not a typo).

*California has the most draconian anti-business rules and regulations in the nation. That forces businesses to spend too much. The result is that California is the most costly place in America to do business (according to the Milken Institute's business cost index).

*California is heaven for trial lawyers and hell for small businesses. That could be why so many major employers have left the state (according to Investor's Business Daily).

*California has the second highest income tax rates in all of America. And it is among the nation's leaders in virtually every tax category possible- income taxes, business taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, taxes on real estate transactions, taxes on stock transactions, capital gains taxes, workers compensation taxes, the list is endless.

Behold the Fruits of Rampant Liberalism!

* Record breaking debt and junk bond rating. Highest debt ever for any state in the history of the nation.

* Job growth 20% lower than the nation. But it's not just any jobs that California is losing. According to the California Manufacturers and Technology Association, the state has lost 440,000 high-wage jobs.

* 3rd highest unemployment rate in the nation.

* Reverse Gold Rush. Last year, over 144,000 more people left California than moved in. That led the nation. This was the 4th straight year of out-migration.

Liberals can try to refute this, but the facts are clear, and Californian refugees are voting with their feet.

If President Obama and the liberal Democrats in Congress have their way, soon we'll be saying:

We're all Californians Now.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123431135774170619.html
http://www.rootforamerica.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry090113-085202
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/us/17cali.html?_r=1&hphttp://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=failed_state
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/01/12/business/NA-GEN-US-California-No.-8-Economy.php
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/us_world/NATLCalifornias-Exodus.html

Joke of the Day: California Then and Now

You can learn a lot from a Freeper...

I frequent and highly recommend FreeRepublic.com. This post is from a thread I was in and it's too good to not pass on. Btw, follow the P8riot link at the bottom. He has put together a really nice web site. I love Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar" and P8riot's take on the 2nd amendment hits the bullseye.

To: Silverfiddle

Just got this in an email:

Do you know what happened back in September of 1850?

California became a state. The State had no electricity. The State had no money. Almost everyone spoke Spanish. There were gunfights in the streets.

So, basically, it was just like it is today, except the women had real breasts and the men didn't hold hands.

29 posted on Tuesday, August 05, 2008 7:24:58 AM by P8riot (I carry a gun because I can't carry a cop.)

Senator Schumer: The Mouth That Roared

According to Reuters, California is mulling whether to investigate Senator Charles Schumer's role in the IndyMac Bank Failure.

The megaphone mouth senator, who's been known to knock down grannies and trample small children who have the misfortune of being between him and the press, can often be found lecturing us, finger in air and reading glasses perched professorially upon his noble proboscis. Even by grandiose senatorial standards, this guy is full of himself (and other substances).

Schumer sent a letter to the FDIC expressing concerns abut IndyMac's solvency. Problem is, his letter contained confidential inside information, and he publicized the letter (What good is it to do something if you can't grandstand?). This caused a good old fashioned bank run, only Jimmy Stewart wasn't around to save the day like in the holiday classic "It's a Wonderful Life."

Now IndyMac employees have filed a complaint with the California Attorney General's office. Schumer's defenders claim this is merely Republican "swift boating." Pointing out that the aggrieved party's PR firm has conservative clients, including those who "swift boated" that great Naval hero, John Kerry.

One small wrinkle though: The California Attorney General is Jerry Brown, formerly known as Governor Moonbeam. This is not a man who crawls in bed with conservatives, but his office is seriously considering the issue.

I think a court docket would be the perfect stage for the Senator from Egoville, NY