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California versus Trump and his mentally-retarded supporters…

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« on: November 12, 2016, 08:33:55 pm »


from The Washington Post....

While the country shifts to the right, California keeps moving left

The state and others on the West Coast backed Clinton and passed a flurry of liberal measures.

By KATLE ZEZIMA | 6:00AM PST - Friday, November 11, 2016

Police advance on protesters who shut down the 101 freeway Wednesday in opposition to the upset election of Republican Donald Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton in the race for president. — Photograph: David Mcnew/Getty Images.
Police advance on protesters who shut down the 101 freeway Wednesday in opposition to the upset election of Republican
Donald Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton in the race for president. — Photograph: David Mcnew/Getty Images.


SANTA ANA, CALIFORNIA — Manuel Guerrero is terrified by the impending presidency of Donald Trump and how it will affect Latinos like him. But huddled over the trunk of a Toyota Camry as he put the final touches on a posterboard sign, he vowed that he and his fellow Californians would fight.

“California is not gonna take this,” he said as he held the sign, which read “F--- Trump.”

Then Guerrero, a 30-year-old artist, walked toward the sidewalk in front of a gas station parking lot, where he and a few dozen others protested, chanted, and waved Mexican flags amid a haze of exhaust and marijuana smoke. They crossed a six-lane highway as passersby honked their horns and pumped their fists out open windows.

California has long been in the vanguard of American politics, routinely enacting liberal legislation and policies long before the rest of the nation and a hotbed of support for Democrats such as Hillary Clinton. But in the aftermath of an election in which the country as a whole shifted to the right, the Golden State is now out of step with the rest of the nation by moving even farther to the left.

“In California, we are decisively going in a different direction than the rest of the country,” said Kevin de Leon, the Democratic president pro tempore of the state Senate.

The electoral map illustrates the United States' geographical and political divides in bright red and blue relief. But nowhere on Tuesday was the gulf between liberals and the conservative tack that won the electoral college more stark than here in California and other parts of the far West.

Nevada chose Clinton over Trump, an outcome driven in large part by the state's growing Latino population. It was one of the few states to send a new Democrat to the Senate, Catherine Cortez Masto, who will become the country's first Latina senator. Nevada also legalized the recreational use of marijuana, and voted to require background checks for most gun purchases and transfers. Oregon elected the nation's first openly LGBT governor. Washington raised its minimum wage to $13.25 an hour by 2020.

Here in California, voters legalized marijuana, enacted the nation's first background checks for ammunition purchases, banned large-capacity gun magazines, increased the tax on cigarettes and vaping devices, reinstated bilingual education, boosted income taxes on the wealthy, and banned the sale of single-use plastic bags.

The state also elected Kamala Harris, a Democrat, to the Senate. Harris will become the first Indian American and the second black female senator. The state overwhelmingly voted for Clinton in the presidential contest, with 61.5 percent of the electorate — one of the highest in the country — casting ballots for the former secretary of state, compared with 33.3 percent for Trump.

Months ago, Governor Jerry Brown (Democrat) joked about building a wall around California to “protect it from the rest of the country” if Trump is elected, a quip that is now recirculating. Some are even calling on California to secede from the rest of the country. A group that had previously dedicated itself to that cause rallied on the statehouse steps in Sacramento on Wednesday, stating a goal of getting a secession referendum on the 2018 ballot. Its leader tweeted on Thursday that he has received 18,000 emails in recent days.

Online, people are using the term “Calexit,” a take on Britain’s “Brexit” vote to sever ties with the European Union.

Shervin Pishevar, the co-founder and co-chief executive of San Francisco venture capital firm Sherpa Ventures, tweeted on Tuesday that he would begin and fund a “legitimate campaign” to help the world’s sixth-largest economy become its own nation, “New California.”

“It’s the most patriotic thing I can do,” he told CNBC. “The country is at a serious crossroads.”

De Leon and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon said on Wednesday in a statement issued in English and Spanish that they felt like “strangers in a strange land” after the election. The men ordered attorneys to look at how a Trump presidency would affect federal funding of state programs, investments that rely on foreign trade and federal enforcement of various laws, including those relating to immigration. They vowed to “lead the resistance” to any efforts to “shred our social fabric” or Constitution.

“California is America before America is itself,” de Leon said in an interview. “That means the good, the bad and the ugly, not just the good things that happen in California.”


California Governor Jerry Brown (Democrat) joked before Election Day that the state might have to build a wall around itself if Donald Trump was elected. — Photograph: Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press.
California Governor Jerry Brown (Democrat) joked before Election Day that the state might have to build a wall
around itself if Donald Trump was elected. — Photograph: Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press.


In 1994, California voters passed an initiative designed to set up a state-run immigration system and deny most benefits, including education, to undocumented immigrants. Backlash to the proposition, which was strongly backed by then-Governor Pete Wilson, is widely considered a watershed moment that eventually led to the decimation of the Republican Party in the state.

Today, California allows undocumented immigrants to obtain driver's licenses and access in-state tuition at public universities. The state is also one of the most diverse in the nation. According to the census, 38.8 percent of Californians identify as Latino, 14.7 percent as Asian and 6.5 percent as black.

Those demographic changes are spurring political ones here in Orange County, once a mostly white bastion of Republicanism that has become increasingly Latino and Asian. While blue-collar Democrats who switched parties to vote for Trump in the Rust Belt helped propel him to the presidency, voters in Orange County chose a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time since the 1930s.

“I've always referred to Orange County as the ‘Orange Curtain’ because it’s so conservative,” said Adriana Garcia, a 40-year-old Democrat who lives in Newport Beach. She cried as she talked about a Trump presidency, concerned that it might subject her, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, to racist and sexist hatred she has never experienced.

“I thought it was wild” that Orange County tilted for Clinton, she said. “I'm sad more places didn't.”

Neighboring Riverside County also flipped to Democrat from Republican in 2012, as did Nevada County in the state's north.

Protests flared across the state on Wednesday after Trump's victory, with dozens arrested. A group of high schoolers in Berkeley walked out of class. In Oakland, more than 7,000 people took to the streets. In Los Angeles, hundreds of people blocked freeways. In front of City Hall, some protesters burned a giant papier-mâché Trump. Fewer protesters came out in L.A. on Thursday night, but those who did marched through the streets, halted traffic, threw bottles and set off fireworks. At least 185 people were arrested, a number that will likely rise, said Norma Eisenman, a Los Angeles Police spokeswoman.

Here in Santa Ana on Wednesday night, protesters spent more than an hour continually crossing the four-way intersection, walking in a square from the gas station to an auto-parts store to a food stand where some picked up Mexican corn, to a 7-11 and back to the gas station. They held signs reading, “Not our president” and “Dump Trump,” and yelled profanities about the president-elect. A 2-year-old held a sign reading, “Stop white supremacy.” Some wore bandannas around their faces, prepared for the police to deploy tear gas.

The group marched along the main street and the protest ballooned in size, with 650 people ultimately standing in an intersection until 2 a.m. Participants got into a standoff with police, who fired beanbags and used other non-lethal crowd-control methods; police said the crowd members threw bricks, bottles and other objects. Ten people were arrested, including three juveniles, on charges including disorderly conduct and assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer, said Corporal Anthony Bertagna of the Santa Ana Police Department. He said that a brick was thrown at a police car and that three others were seriously damaged. Two businesses also were damaged and 167 police officers from the county responded.

Many here expressed anger at white Americans, saying they helped propel Trump to the presidency and endorsed racism and xenophobia.

“Can I give you a hug on behalf of white people?” Jennifer Hellman, 36, asked Guerrero as the two stood in the parking lot of a strip mall of mostly Latino stores. “We're not all like this.”

The two embraced as a woman on a bicycle rode by, screaming an expletive about Trump.

Oliver Lopez, 33, and his wife, Lucy Dominguez, 37, stood in front of a neon gas station sign, arms around each other and each holding a sign that read, “Peace.”

Dominguez said she chose the sign because the nation needs peace in this moment. She was born in Mexico, became a citizen and voted for Clinton. She was angry about and hurt by Trump's assertion in his campaign kickoff speech that some Mexicans are drug dealers and rapists.

“I'm not a rapist. My family are not rapists,” she said.

Lopez said he is glad he lives in California.

“It gives me a sense of safety,” he said. “We're leaning more to the left.”


• Katie Zezima is a national political correspondent covering the 2016 presidential election. She previously served as a White House correspondent for The Washington Post.

__________________________________________________________________________

Read more on this topic:

 • PHOTOGRAPH GALLERY: Protests swell across U.S. in wake of Trump victory

 • ‘Not my president.’ Thousands protest Trump in rallies across the U.S.

 • Trump meets with Obama at the White House as whirlwind transition starts

 • What the future of marijuana legalization could look like under President Trump

 • Nebraska and California voters decide to keep the death penalty


https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/while-the-country-shifts-to-the-right-california-continues-to-move-left/2016/11/10/1c6cc602-a6d9-11e6-ba59-a7d93165c6d4_story.html
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« Reply #1 on: November 13, 2016, 03:32:23 am »



If they want to fight draft them and send them to Iraq

you have everything ass backwards which is normally what happens from the left, the things they accuse other people of doing things when it's really them doing it, all thanks to the left wing crony media which has done it's best to stir up a race war

these stupid fools they need to either move to a country with a dictatorship and no voting rights because they are the mentally-retarded supporters and useful idiots of the george soros foundation,if they acted like this in a communist country they would either be locked up in a gulag or put into a mental hospital and receive electric therapy.

when trump is president he should arrest and jail george soros confiscate all his money use it to build the wall.

 
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« Reply #2 on: November 13, 2016, 04:24:06 am »

Death to this vile creature who is working to destroy our lives

ARREST GEORGE SOROS



Use existing criminal and civil laws to shut down his anti-American juggernaut.
March 31, 2016

It is time to hold radical ringleader George Soros to account for the growing civil unrest that he has helped to foment in this presidential election cycle and his efforts to shut down Donald Trump rallies using physical force and intimidation.

Soros, the billionaire speculator, is the preeminent funder of the activist Left in America, which means he is the Number One funder of the domestic terrorism that is part and parcel of the Left.

Soros makes no secret of his contempt for leading GOP candidate Trump. In January he said "Donald Trump is doing the work of ISIS." Ideas like banning entry to the U.S. by Muslims might "convince the Muslim community that there is no alternative but terrorism."

Soros favors the decline of the U.S. and spends lavishly on activism to bring that collapse about. He has spent an estimated $7 billion or more on giving left-wing groups the resources to screw up the country.

He has used his vast fortune to topple governments in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. He "broke" the British pound, was accused of wreaking havoc on the Malaysian ringgit, and was called an "economic war criminal" in Thailand. A French court convicted him of insider trading.

America is his current target.

Soros calls America "the main obstacle to a stable and just world order" and hails Communist China for having "a better-functioning government than the United States." He says European-style socialism "is exactly what we need" and funds open-borders groups in order to corrode the nation's culture and change its electorate.

And he's at the forefront of the Left's push to defeat Trump by any means possible -- lawful or otherwise.

What do the violent mobs assaulting Donald Trump fans and supporting the Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street movements have in common? Money from Soros and the huge philanthropies he has endowed to turn America into a socialist country. Black Lives Matter and Soros-funded MoveOn have been heavily involved in hardball tactical strikes against Trump and his supporters.

The morally flexible Soros works the American system from the inside and the outside, using both lawful and unlawful, illegitimate tactics.

Some of the anti-Trump activism he funds consists of conventional political activities.

Soros recently contributed $5 million to a new super PAC called Immigrant Voters Win. The PAC's FEC filings indicate it is run out of the Washington, D.C. office of a Soros-funded 501(c)(4) nonprofit called Center for Community Change Action (formerly called Campaign for Community Action). ACORN alumnus Deepak Bhargava is the nonprofit's executive director and Sixties radical Heather Booth is a member of its board. It is expected to conduct a $15 million voter-mobilization effort against Trump in Colorado, Florida, and Nevada.

But when Soros funds activist groups involved in illegitimate efforts to deny Americans their right to participate in the political process he crosses a line.

There is no right to riot or to silence one's political adversaries.

"Although the right to peacefully protest is enshrined in the Construction," law professor John F. Banzhaf III writes, "there is no constitutional or other legal right to commit criminal acts to make a point."

And as legal analyst Andrew Napolitano wrote after unruly Bernie Sanders supporters and other left-wing activists forced the cancelation of the Trump rally March 11 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the law imposes on police "an affirmative obligation to take all reasonable steps to protect the speaker’s right to speak, the audience’s right to hear and the protesters’ right to protest." Put another way, "protest of political speech is itself protected speech, but protest cannot be so forceful or dominant that it vetoes the speaker."

Fox News legal analyst Peter Johnson Jr. added that "The First Amendment does not confer upon you or me or [Fox host] Steve Doocy the right to go to someone's rally and try to disrupt it, or destroy it, or to pull apart posters, or to start fights, or to attempt to commit an assault on a presidential candidate."

Johnson's comments came after admitted Bernie Sanders and Black Lives Matter supporter Tommy DiMassimo dramatically rushed the stage March 12 in Ohio when Trump was speaking. The college student, who was grabbed by security before he got to Trump, said he intended to silence the Republican candidate he accuses of having what he called "violent white supremacist ideas." He had previously bragged on Twitter that he planned to "spit on their false king [i.e. Trump.]"

What these so-called protesters do when they try to bring about a desired political result by frightening people amounts to terrorism. Terrorism isn't always about blowing up buildings or killing people. It can also consist of activity intended to frighten, demoralize,  or neutralize an enemy—in other words, a variety of psychological warfare.

"Terror means make it impossible to go to the public square. Make people afraid to go to Times Square. Make them afraid to go to train stations. Make them afraid to travel. Make them afraid to go to a Donald Trump rally. Make them afraid to go to any political rally. Make them afraid they might be hurt, they might be arrested, they might be intimidated, they might get sued ... "

The outrageous behavior by left-wing activists that is now routinely tolerated by police today would have quite properly landed a person in jail earlier in America’s history. 

But the social justice warriors of the Left, who perversely fetishize political protest as if it were the highest expression of civic responsibility, have defined deviancy down.

Whatever left-wingers do for their cause cannot be bad. And if it's violent, they find a way to excuse it and the media cheers them on, hailing them as heroic visionaries, early adopters, and trailblazing influencers.

Left-wingers believe that using physical force and intimidation for the right reasons is legitimate political protest protected by the First Amendment. In the leftist worldview, which holds that the U.S. Constitution protects everything they consider to be good whether or not it's mentioned in the actual text, this right to agitate on behalf of their twisted ideology supersedes all other rights.

The right to protest is exalted above property rights, according to Baltimore's joke of a mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (D). While her city burned last year after black career criminal Freddie Gray died in police custody, the street gang-loving mayor consoled the rabble, implying their violent activities constituted legitimate contributions to public discourse.

"I made it very clear that I work with the police and instructed them to do everything that they could to make sure that the protesters were able to exercise their right to free speech," she said. "We also gave those who wished to destroy, space to do that as well."

Black Lives Matter organizer DeRay Mckesson describes rioting as "a cry for justice." He told Yale students that "looting for me isn't violent, it's an expression of anger," and that "The act of looting is political. Another way to dissolve consent. Pressing you to no longer keep me out of this space, by destroying it."

Prosecutors and law enforcement need to start thinking outside the proverbial box and begin using the ample tools the law provides to deal with Soros, the most dangerous man in America, because he leads a massive, well-funded effort to deny the American people their right to participate in free and fair elections. The protesters whose groups Soros pays to break up political rallies are criminal thugs little different than the brown-shirted Sturmabteiling (S.A.) of the Third Reich.

If the tables were turned and a conservative billionaire were to lead and finance a violent organized insurgency against his political adversaries how long would it take before the authorities took action against him?

The criminal and civil provisions of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), state racketeering statutes, and class-action lawsuits could be used to end Soros's long-running scheme to interfere with the civil rights of Americans and fundamentally transform the country.

American law protects free speech, the right of peaceable assembly, and the right to protest, but it does not protect efforts aimed at silencing people or preventing them from getting involved in the democratic process.

David French argues at NRO that leftist activities like blocking roads and "every other protest tactic that violates the rights of innocents" need to be punished. He writes:

"The leftist media loves to love this lawlessness, and public officials are relentlessly pressured into administering the most meaningless slaps on the wrist — sometimes even letting protesters walk without charges. The Left demands most-favored-criminal status for its social-justice warriors, and it typically gets exactly what it demands. Criminality largely goes unpunished, so-called direct action is rewarded with fawning accolades from the media and celebrities, and the rule of law is diminished."

When police refuse to combat unlawful, disruptive protest, they fail in their "basic duty to protect the law-abiding public," while creating "waves of bitterness and resentment."

French says unspecified parties should work around "spineless local prosecutors" and sue the protesters into penury.

"Answer each lawless act with a civil complaint, seek injunctions, take discovery to reveal the full extent of leftist astroturfing — do you really think these protests represent spontaneous, uncoordinated events? — and collect money damages. Protesters aren’t deterred by small fines and short detentions, but financially ruinous damage awards raise the stakes."

Professor Banzhaf explains how to do it.

Protesters, he notes, broke the law in Arizona when they recently blocked a major highway leading to a Trump event and created a 10-mile backup. "The threat of arrests — only three reportedly occurred — and fines weren't much of a deterrent."

"Effectively trapping people in cars by blocking traffic satisfies the elements of false imprisonment," which clears the way for civil litigation, according to Banzhaf.

The recent actions against Trump are just the beginning. Activists are going to become more aggressive in disrupting Republican events as the campaign heats up. He writes:

"Now spreading to political campaigns is what we have unfortunately all too often tolerated on college campuses — protestors who interrupt speakers to prevent others from hearing them, who physically block attendees' access, and who threaten violence to squelch speech. Unless we do something about it, the problem will persist — and could get worse."

Using civil legal action has been "so effective in fighting for civil rights, women's rights, smokers rights (to obtain damages), nonsmokers' rights (to clean air), gay rights, gun rights, and in many other areas," that it is time to consider using lawsuits to shut down criminal disrupters.

"Victims of disrupters can also sue for civil conspiracy even if their individual actions, such as yelling out at a rally, aren't themselves criminal, but become so when done as part of a conspiracy to unlawfully cause harm."

An added benefit of civil proceedings is that they would "open the door to discovery, including those aimed at verifying concerns expressed in various media that those with even deeper pockets are involved in the planning, funding, and/or execution of these criminal disruptions."

In other words, George Soros.

More trouble is on the horizon.

Soros-funded groups, including MoveOn, Institute for Policy Studies, Demos, People for the American Way, and National People's Action, have endorsed Democracy Spring, a leftist project that among other things aims to overturn the Citizens United ruling and thereby gut the free speech protections of the First Amendment.

Demonstrations are scheduled to begin April 2 in Philadelphia after which participants will spend 10 days walking 140 miles to the U.S. Capitol for what is being billed as "the largest civil disobedience action of the century."

According to lead organizer Kai Newkirk, Democracy Spring is not -- wink, wink -- an explicitly anti-Trump event. But it is certain to become one as Newkirk more or less admits in a lie-filled screed posted online. "Trump's statements, proposed policies, and threats of violence concerning undocumented immigrants, Muslims, the KKK, protesters exercising their First Amendment rights, and others have crossed a very serious line into the territory of fascism and hate speech."

And anyone who remembers the Arab Spring of 2011 knows that an event named after it isn't likely to be peaceful.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/262364/arrest-george-soros-matthew-vadum





« Last Edit: November 13, 2016, 06:15:39 am by Im2Sexy4MyPants » Report Spam   Logged

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« Reply #3 on: November 13, 2016, 10:08:33 am »


It's really hilarious reading the reader comments posted to The Washington Post article.

You can tell which are the stupid Trump supporters, based by the comments they post which are along the lines of “Time to cast California, Oregon, Washington (state) and all those commie, pinko lefties adrift from the USA”. Except that those dumbarse Trump supporters (you'd need to be mentally defective to support a liar and failed businessman like Trump, who has been bankrupted SEVEN TIMES) are too thick to work out that the three western states have by far the highest average personal income, so therefore pay the highest (by far) federal taxes per capita in the USA, and are therefore subsidising those Trump-supporting retards (the REAL Jesuslanders) who post dumb comments like that. Hillarious, how stupid & thick Trump supporters are. We've even got a few of them in this country too, and their stupidity is graphically on display.
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« Reply #4 on: November 13, 2016, 10:13:53 am »


And its hilarious how Trump supporters (who were promising to make the USA ungovernable if Clinton had won the election) are now whining & whinging about intelligent folks protesting and causing disruption over a RETARD becoming the next US President.

Time to get in the beer & popcorn and watch Trump presiding over a country which is going to morph into a FAILED STATE under his presidency.

The sooner the northeastern states and the west coast states break-away and take their wealth with them and leave the stupid Jesuslanders to it, the better. Those dumb Jesuslanders will be able to pray to the god delusion inside their heads to take care of them once the money supply from the northeast and the west coast gets cut-off.

Haw haw haw!!
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« Reply #5 on: November 13, 2016, 11:54:26 am »

you people and your kind are a braindead cult of clowns

and the washington post is only good to wipe your arse
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« Reply #6 on: November 13, 2016, 03:27:07 pm »

Oh great - yet another Trump thread.
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« Reply #7 on: September 18, 2017, 12:01:45 am »


from The Washington Post....

In message of defiance to Trump, lawmakers
vote to make California a sanctuary state


The legislation would prohibit local law enforcement agencies from co-operating with
federal immigration officials. It also forbids law enforcement from inquiring about a
person's immigration status. The bill now goes to California Governor Jerry Brown,
who is expected to sign it into law.


By KRISTINE PHILLIPS | 6:25PM EDT - Saturday, September 16, 2017

Protesters hold signs as they listen to speakers at a rally outside City Hall in San Francisco in January. — Photograph: Jeff Chiu/Associated Press.
Protesters hold signs as they listen to speakers at a rally outside City Hall in San Francisco in January. — Photograph: Jeff Chiu/Associated Press.

IN what appeared to be an act of defiance against President Trump and to the dismay of many in law enforcement, California lawmakers took a significant step toward making the state a so-called “sanctuary state”.

The California Senate on Saturday passed Senate Bill 54, controversial legislation that would protect undocumented immigrants from possible deportation by prohibiting local law enforcement agencies, including school police and security departments, from co-operating with federal immigration officials. It also forbids law enforcement from inquiring about a person's immigration status.

The California Values Act provides an expansive protection to the state's undocumented population, estimated to be about 2.7 million, at a time when the Trump administration continues to aggressively crackdown on those who are in the country illegally and on so-called sanctuary cities — communities that limit local law enforcement's co-operation with immigration agents.

The strictly party-line vote sends the bill to California Governor Jerry Brown (Democrat), who is expected to sign it in to law.

Kevin de León (Democrat-Los Angeles), president pro tempore of the state Senate and California's most powerful Latino politician, introduced the bill in December. It sailed through the state Senate and Assembly without Republican support.

“Once signed into law and enacted, SB-54 will prevent state and local law enforcement officers and resources from being commandeered by President Trump to enforce federal laws,” de León said in a statement Saturday, adding later: “Our undocumented neighbors will be able to interact with local law enforcement to report crimes and help in prosecutions without fear of deportation — and that will make our communities safer.”

Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher (Democrat-San Diego) said California’s “families, schools, workplaces and communities” will be safer.

Those in law enforcement, however, disagreed.

The California State Sheriff's Association, which has vocally opposed the bill, said that limiting public safety agencies' ability to cooperate with immigration agents places communities at risk.

“We are disappointed that the Legislature chose political symbolism over public safety in approving SB-54,” the association said in a statement.

Brown and de León reached a compromise this week that allows law enforcement to have some flexibility. For example, the bill gives officers discretion to cooperate with immigration agents if a person has been convicted of a serious or violent felony and any felony punishable by imprisonment in a state facility.

Officials can report a person who has been convicted in the past 15 years of crimes such as unlawful possession or use of a weapon, driving under the influence, or drug- and gang-related offenses, as long as those offenses were felonies.

The revision also requires the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to give inmates credits toward reducing their sentences, regardless of their immigration status, if they complete educational and rehabilitative programs.

The compromise was accepted by immigration advocates but did not persuade law enforcement organizations to support the bill. In a statement after the deal was reached on Monday, the California State Sheriff's Association said that despite the changes, “the bill still goes too far in cutting off communications with the federal government.”

“Our overarching concern remains that limiting local law enforcement's ability to communicate and cooperate with federal law enforcement officers endangers public safety,” the association said.

Senate Republican Leader Pat Bates (Laguna Niguel) said in a statement that the latest amendments “may have removed some obstacles.”

But the bill, she added, “would still impose unnecessary restrictions. These restrictions will make it more difficult to stop dangerous criminals from being released into our communities.”

California is not the first state to pass a sanctuary law. The Oregon legislature passed a similar bill in 1987.

The vote came just a day after a legal blow to the Trump administration's crackdown on sanctuary cities. A federal judge on Friday blocked the Justice Department from withholding grant funds from Chicago and other cities that refuse to co-operate with immigration authorities.

Last August, a federal judge in Texas temporarily blocked parts of a state law that was supposed to outlaw sanctuary cities and penalize local officials for not cooperating with federal deportation efforts.

Brewing in the White House and on Capitol Hill is a debate on what to do with the hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country as children, after Trump announced that his administration is ending an Obama-era program granting legal status to “dreamers”. Departing from a campaign promise to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, Trump said that he favors some protections for dreamers, whom he called “good, educated and accomplished young people.”


Matt Zapotosky and Maria Sacchetti contributed to this report.

• Kristine Phillips is a general assignment reporter for The Washington Post.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • VIDEO: How santurary cities are responding to Trump's threat to defund them

 • VIDEO: Federal judge sides with sanctuary cities in dispute with Trump administration

 • Judge rules Justice Department can't keep grant money from unco-operative sanctuary cities

 • Trump's die-hard supporters are fuming after an apparent about-face on ‘dreamers’

 • Trump and Democrats strike DACA deal. Yes? No? Sort of? Trump's world can be confusing.

 • Federal judge blocks Texas' harsh anti-sanctuary law

 • Chicago sues Justice Department over new police grant rules targeting sanctuary cities


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/09/16/in-message-of-defiance-to-trump-lawmakers-vote-to-make-california-a-sanctuary-state
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« Reply #8 on: November 12, 2017, 01:13:14 pm »


from the Los Angeles Times....

U.S. cities, states defy Trump, still back Paris climate deal

By ERIK KIRACHBAUM | 3:05PM PST - Saturday, November 11, 2017

California Governor Jerry Brown speaks in the U.S. Climate Action Center at the COP 23 Climate Change Conference on Saturday in Bonn, Germany. — Photograph: Martin Meissner/Associated Press.
California Governor Jerry Brown speaks in the U.S. Climate Action Center at the COP 23 Climate Change Conference on Saturday in Bonn, Germany.
 — Photograph: Martin Meissner/Associated Press.


DETERMINED TO demonstrate that large numbers of Americans remain committed to fighting climate change, a loose alliance of cities, states, companies and universities from across the United States gathered on the fringes of a United Nations climate conference in Bonn on Saturday to pledge their support for the Paris agreement.

California Governor Jerry Brown, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore were among the leaders of the U.S. coalition during a series of speeches and panel discussions in a grand pavilion named the “U.S. Climate Action Center”. It was set up just outside the building where the U.N. climate conference is taking place. The American political and business figures told the audience that states, cities and businesses have real power that they can leverage in the fight against climate change even though the federal government wants to bail out.

“It is important for the world to know — the American government may have pulled out of the Paris agreement, but the American people are committed to its goals, and there is nothing Washington can do to stop us,” Bloomberg told the audience in the packed tent. He noted that the alliance of 20 states, 110 cities and 1,400 businesses would be the world's third-largest economy and represented about half of the U.S. economy.

President Trump announced in June that the United States will withdraw from the 2015 Paris agreement at the first possible date in 2020, arguing it was detrimental to U.S. business. Trump has expressed doubt about climate change, questioning how much human activity has contributed.

The Trump administration is represented at the Bonn talks of nearly 200 nations by a senior diplomat but has taken a low-key approach — in stark contrast to the attention-grabbing U.S. Climate Action Center.

Brown, who is on a whirlwind 10-day trip to four countries promoting climate change and California, was one of the featured speakers on Saturday that faced dozens of hecklers in the crowd who demanded his state do even more to fight pollution, stop fracking and oil drilling, and slow global warming.

After some good-natured jousting with the green activists, Brown praised them for their dissent and announced he would “reframe my speech”. He also told them he was a former cheerleader in college and that he liked their rallying cry “We're still in” so much that he led the whole audience in a cheering: “We're still in, we're still in”.

“Only in California can we stimulate this kind of opposition with strong advocates on all sides — [even though] we're doing more than anyone else,” Brown said. “This is one of the reasons why California has the most aggressive goals: no matter what we do, we're being challenged to do more, and I agree with that. We'll do a lot more.”

Brown then diverted from the rest of his planned “America's Pledge” speech to say:

“California is the most aggressive, most far-reaching climate action state in the country and in the Western Hemisphere. Is it enough? No. Do we have a lot of pollutants? Yes. Do we have 32 million cars driving 335 billion miles every year? Yes. Are we going to stop them today? No. Are we going to stop them in time? Yes, if America's pledge is picked up by the rest of the country and rest of the world. If we can take some of that noise and bottle it into energy, we'll get the job done. America, we're here, we're in and we're not going away.”

Bloomberg and Brown appeared along with Fiji Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, who presiding over the U.N. conference at its climate headquarters in Bonn that runs until Friday. The talks are focused on designing a detailed set of rules to help guide forward the 2015 Paris climate agreement that established a goal of ending the fossil-fuel era by the end of the century.

Earlier on Saturday, Senator Edward J. Markey (Democrat-Massachusetts) promised the United States would remain committed to its climate change goals.

“We are here in Bonn to say we are not saying ‘bon voyage to our commitment on climate’,” he said.


• Erik Kirschbaum is a correspondent for the Reuters International News Agency, a non-fiction author, a long-time Springsteen fan, and an unabashed crusader for renewable energy. He has written about topics anywhere from entertainment to climate change in over 20 countries for many news organisations including the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Berlin.

http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-germany-climate-change-conference-20171111-story.html
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« Reply #9 on: December 30, 2017, 12:32:12 pm »


from the print edition of the Los Angeles Times....

Trump not in Golden State of mind

He has yet to visit California, a first since Eisenhower.
For the president, it's home to ‘the resistance’


By BRIAN BENNETT | Friday, December 29, 2017

President Donald J. Trump once said that California was “out of control”. — Photograph: Susan Walsh/Associated Press.
President Donald J. Trump once said that California was “out of control”. — Photograph: Susan Walsh/Associated Press.

WASHINGTON D.C. — President Trump's love for all things gold apparently doesn't extend to the Golden State.

Trump is about to become the first president since Dwight D. Eisenhower 64 years ago to skip a visit to California during his first calendar year in office. And he doesn't appear to have any plans to take Air Force One to the country's most populous and economically powerful state before he marks his first full year in office on January 20th.

Even past presidents who, like Trump, didn't win the state's electoral votes made it a destination, if only for California's allure as the Golden State of campaign cash.

For Trump, it's ground zero for “the resistance”.

A president so fixated on the 2016 election results as Trump may not want to be reminded that just 31% of California's voters chose him while 61% decided “I'm with her” — giving Hillary Clinton over 4 million more votes and the state's 55 electoral votes.

A few weeks afterward, President-elect Trump alleged on Twitter that there was “serious voter fraud” in California, as well as in Virginia and New Hampshire, claims for which he never suggested evidence.

Since then, California has been at the forefront of those states and organizations pushing back against Trump's policies to vastly scale back federal healthcare subsidies, environmental protections and safety regulations, and to crack down on legal as well as illegal immigration.

Trump noticed early on. California is “out of control,” he told Fox News in February.

“It's hard to imagine an environment less alluring to him right now than deep-blue California,” said Dan Schnur, a professor of political communications at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and a former Republican.

“He'll get here eventually, but we probably shouldn't hold our breath that it's coming anytime soon,” Schnur added.

Of the 29 states Trump has visited since taking office, just eight are west of the Mississippi River. He's mostly visited friendly red states in the Southeast and the Northern industrial belt that he won, often holding political rallies indistinguishable from his campaign events. Of the 20 states that went to Clinton, Trump has been to eight.

The devastating wildfires that hit the state prompted a few sympathetic messages from Trump, and support for some disaster aid. But Trump did not visit, even as he traveled to Florida, Louisiana, Texas and Puerto Rico following devastating hurricanes this year.

Jim Brulte, chairman of the California Republican Party, said he was fine with Trump not traveling to the state. “The president has a lot of things he has to do. We Californians are OK. We are used to being on the far end.”

He added: “He's the first president that's got significant tax reform and restructured the federal courts in his first year. We'll trade that for a visit to California anytime.”

Trump has made four foreign trips this year, but when he is in the United States, he doesn't like staying away from the White House, the presidential retreat of Camp David, or one of his resort properties, typically in New Jersey, Virginia or Palm Beach, Florida.

If and when Trump does visit California, he would have one of his own places to visit. The Trump National Golf Club in Los Angeles, on the bluffs of Palos Verdes overlooking the Pacific Ocean, describes itself as the “ultimate Southern California destination.”

So far that attraction has been lost on Trump. Recent history suggests California is unaccustomed to the snub.

While Eisenhower was the last president to skip California during his first year, he arrived during his 13th month, in February 1954, to vacation at Smoke Tree Ranch, the home of Paul Helms, an Eisenhower golfing buddy and owner of the Helms Bakery company, near Palm Springs. (The former Helms Bakery in Culver City is now an entertainment and shopping venue.)

During his stay with Helms, Eisenhower left the ranch for a night — to get a chipped tooth fixed, the White House said. The brief absence spawned decades of conspiracy theories that he had visited Edwards Air Force Base to visit aliens being held there. The same night, the Associated Press incorrectly published a bulletin that Eisenhower had died of a heart attack.

Before Eisenhower, presidents rarely traveled by air, making trips to the West Coast far more difficult.

Franklin D. Roosevelt didn't make it to California as president until October 1st, 1935, roughly two and a half years into his first term. He went by train — no president had yet done an official trip by air — for the dedication of Hoover Dam and a visit to Los Angeles.

His successor, Harry Truman, flew to San Francisco within three months of becoming president upon Roosevelt's death, to attend the closing session of the founding conference of the United Nations in June 1945.

Eisenhower's successor, John F. Kennedy, came aboard Air Force One to speak at a fundraising dinner for the California Democratic Party in Los Angeles in November 1961. Collecting campaign cash has been a draw for presidents ever since.

Lyndon B. Johnson flew to California in June 1964 for a two-day swing that included the dedication of the new campus of UC Irvine, as well as a campaign fundraising speech in Los Angeles where seats went for $100 each, far less than current political prices, even accounting for inflation.

At the Los Angeles fundraiser, Johnson claimed credit for passage of the “largest tax cut in American history” — a boast Trump would less accurately assert more than half a century later.

Richard Nixon, a native of the state, often visited what he called his Western White House in San Clemente, making his first visit as president within months, in June 1969. Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all made trips within their first months as president, and, of course, so did Ronald Reagan, the former California governor.

While Trump has been MIA in California, fundraising for California Republicans has continued. Brulte said Vice President Mike Pence visited in October with House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and helped raise more than $5 million for legislative races during visits to McCarthy's hometown of Bakersfield, Sacramento and the Beverly Hills home of developer Geoff Palmer.

The Republican Party often taps wealthy supporters in the state to help fund races across the country. Trump made campaign swings through California in April, May and June of 2016.

Trump plainly hasn't always liked his pre-presidential visits to California. In Los Angeles in December 2013, he grumbled about the cold weather, pointing to the chill as evidence for his belief that global warming is “a total, and very expensive, hoax” — comments that were doubly unwelcome to many Californians.


__________________________________________________________________________

Los Angeles Times staff writer David Lauter in Washington contributed to this report.

• Brian Bennett covers the White House for the Los Angeles Times and writes about national security and immigration as well. Since starting in the L.A. Times Washington D.C. bureau in 2010, he has documented a pattern of excessive force by U.S. Border Patrol agents and revealed the first arrest on U.S. soil using a Predator drone. He reported for TIME magazine starting in Hong Kong in 2000, from Pakistan and Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks and was its Baghdad bureau chief in 2003 and 2004. A native of Riverside, California, he misses being able to pick avocados and oranges in the backyard.

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_popover_share.aspx?guid=d43c5d5c-2ec6-4bfe-8a77-1b2bf9b6b44a
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« Reply #10 on: January 07, 2018, 12:50:49 pm »


from the Los Angeles Times....

Trump's plan to open California coastal waters to new
oil and gas drilling probably won't go very far


By BETTINA BOXALL and TONY BARBOZA | 4:00AM PST — Saturday, January 06, 2017

Oil companies may have trouble justifying the cost of new offshore developments at a time when hydraulic fracturing on land is cheaper. Above, oil rigs in the Santa Barbara Channel in March 2015. — Photograph: Al Seib/Los Angeles Times.
Oil companies may have trouble justifying the cost of new offshore developments at a time when hydraulic fracturing on land is cheaper.
Above, oil rigs in the Santa Barbara Channel in March 2015. — Photograph: Al Seib/Los Angeles Times.


THERE ARE two things working against the Trump administration's proposal to open up California coastal waters to new oil and gas drilling: state regulators and simple economics.

California has powerful legal tools to head off new offshore development, and the price of oil offers little incentive to the energy industry to pursue expensive drilling projects next to a hostile state.

“I don't think there's any reasonable chance that there will be any leasing or drilling along the coast,” said Ralph Faust, former general counsel for the California Coastal Commission. “This just seems like grandstanding” by the Trump administration.

The Interior Department on Thursday released plans to open vast areas off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to new oil and gas exploration and drilling through a five-year leasing program that would begin in 2019.

But there are myriad obstacles opponents can throw in front of the proposal, not to mention questions about whether the oil industry has much of an interest in California's offshore reserves at a time when domestic oil production is at its highest level in decades.

Under the plan, the federal government would offer 47 leases in U.S. waters on the outer continental shelf, including two each off the Northern, Central and Southern California coasts and one off Washington and Oregon.

The governors of all three states issued a joint statement on Thursday saying they would do whatever it takes to block new leasing off their shores, which include some of the nation's most pristine coastlines.

The first hurdle for the Trump plan is a period of public comment and an extensive environmental review under federal law, which opponents can use to challenge the proposal as ecologically harmful.

In California, the state coastal commission also has the authority to review activities in federal waters to ensure they are consistent with the state's coastal management plans.

“The commission has extremely broad and very powerful authority to say ‘no’ to federal actions that would harm the coast of California and harm coastal waters,” said Steve Mashuda, an attorney at Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization.

The commission is ready to use it.

“Nothing galvanizes bi-partisan resistance in California like the threat of more offshore oil drilling,” coastal commission Chairwoman Dayna Bochco said in a statement. “We've fought similar efforts before, and we will fight them again.”

While the U.S. Secretary of Commerce could override a commission finding that new oil drilling violated the state's management plan, federal courts have tended to side with states in such contests.

And California has another weapon: State Lands Commission jurisdiction over tidelands and waters that extend roughly three miles offshore.

That gives the commission the ability to stop the construction of pipelines that are the most economical way of transporting oil and gas from offshore rigs to land.

“In some ways that is an even more formidable tool that the state of California and like-minded local governments can utilize to deny approval of things like oil terminals and pipelines crossing state sovereign tidelands,” said Richard Frank, director of the California Environmental Law & Policy Center at UC Davis.

There are 23 oil platforms in federal waters off California and four in state waters — near Santa Barbara County, Huntington Beach and Seal Beach. There are also four artificial islands used as drilling platforms off Long Beach and one off Rincon Beach in Ventura County.

But images of oil-drenched sea birds and fouled beaches during the massive 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill soured the state on offshore oil development. There have been no new federal leases off California since 1984.

Moreover, uncertainty over prices makes costly new drilling projects in California's deep offshore waters difficult to justify financially compared with cheaper hydraulic fracturing operations on land.

Oil is trading at about $60 a barrel — roughly the price that would make an offshore project profitable, said Peter Maniloff, an economist at Colorado School of Mines who studies the oil and gas industry.

But “you want to be confident that prices will remain that high before undertaking a very large investment to drill an offshore well,” Maniloff said. “And it's hard to be confident of that because fracking has driven prices down.”

“This announcement is not a game changer for the oil industry or for California,” he added. “I would not expect substantial drilling or production off California.”

Michael Livermore, an environmental law professor at the University of Virginia, said that “based entirely on the Department of Interior’s own analysis, drilling off the coast of California is a terrible idea.”

He cited a section of the leasing proposal that found waters off Central California did not meet the government threshold for benefits exceeding the costs of oil drilling. “Waiting in the region could provide greater value to society than leasing in the 2019–2024 Program,” according to the report.

Livermore also questioned whether any company would be willing to risk the public backlash were there to be a spill in such closely watched waters.

David Hackett, an oil industry expert and president of Stillwater Associates, an Irvine-based transportation energy consulting firm, supports more oil development off the California's coast.

But given fierce state and local opposition, he doubts new oil rigs will start popping up in the Pacific.

“Even if California was supportive, it would take a decade for production to begin,” he said.


• Bettina Boxall covers water issues and the environment for the Los Angeles Times. She shared the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting with colleague Julie Cart for a five-part series that explored the causes and effects of escalating wildfire in the West. She began her journalism career as a photographer at a small Texas daily and reported for newspapers in Vermont and New Jersey before joining the L.A. Times in 1987.

• Tony Barboza is a reporter who covers air quality and the environment with a focus on Southern California. He has been on staff at the Los Angeles Times since 2006, is a graduate of Pomona College and completed a Ted Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • Trump has big plans for offshore oil development. But will it ever happen?

 • California offshore drilling could be expanded for the first time since 1984 under federal leasing proposal

 • Governor Jerry Brown: Trump's plan to expand offshore drilling is ‘reckless, short-sighted’


http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-california-offshore-drilling-20180106-story.html
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« Reply #11 on: January 07, 2018, 05:46:20 pm »

Jerry Brown is a fool
people are leaving California in droves to get away from high taxes the place is broke and shit hole
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« Reply #12 on: January 07, 2018, 08:28:57 pm »

people are leaving California in droves to get away from high taxes the place is broke and shit hole


Ah, yes....the people who are leaving California in droves are those stupid rightie fuckheads who support Donald Trump.

They are fucking off to the mentally-fucked-up state of Texas where people believe the god delusion inside their head is real.

As far as California is concerned, it is “good riddance” 'cause the more mentally ill people they can get rid of, the better.

I posted a thread about this way back in July last year....


Hahaha: stupid boofhead righties flee California … Californians will be cheering





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« Reply #13 on: January 08, 2018, 01:32:23 pm »

leftist clowns are fuckheads lost in total denial
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« Reply #14 on: January 08, 2018, 07:17:52 pm »


from The New York Times....

In Clash Between California and Trump, It's One America Versus Another

The growing divide between California and President Trump erupted this week,
over marijuana, immigration, taxes and the environment.


By TIM ARANGO | Sunday, January 07, 2018

A cannabis dispensary in Oakland, Calif., on Monday. Legal recreational marijuana sales in the state began this year, just before the Justice Department announced it would renew tough enforcement of federal marijuana laws. — Photograph: Jim Wilson/The New York Times.
A cannabis dispensary in Oakland, Calif., on Monday. Legal recreational marijuana sales in the state began this year, just before the Justice Department
announced it would renew tough enforcement of federal marijuana laws. — Photograph: Jim Wilson/The New York Times.


LOS ANGELES — When drivers entered California recently from the borders with Arizona and Nevada, they were greeted with signs welcoming them to an “official sanctuary state” that is home to “felons” and “illegals”. It was a prank, but the message was clear: By entering California, they might as well have been entering foreign territory.

And in many ways it feels like that these days, as the growing divide between California and the Trump administration erupted this past week over a dizzying range of flash points, from immigration to taxes to recreational marijuana use.

What had been a rhetorical battle between a liberal state and a conservative administration is now a full-fledged fight.

Just as Californians were enjoying their first days of legal pot smoking, the Trump administration moved to enforce federal laws against the drug. On the same day, the federal government said it would expand offshore oil drilling, which California’s Senate leader called an assault on “our pristine coastline”.

When President Trump signed a law that would raise the tax bills of many Californians by restricting deductions, lawmakers in this state proposed a creative end-around — essentially making state taxes charitable contributions, and fully deductible. And California's refusal to help federal agents deport undocumented immigrants prompted one administration official to suggest that state politicians should be arrested.


A protest in Los Angeles against the election of President Trump in November 2016. — Photograph: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters.
A protest in Los Angeles against the election of President Trump in November 2016. — Photograph: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters.

The clash between California and Mr. Trump and his supporters — between one America and another — began the morning after he won the presidency, when Kevin de León, the State Senate leader, and his counterpart in the Assembly, Anthony Rendon, said they “woke up feeling like strangers in a foreign land.”

Since then the fight has metastasized into what could be the greatest contest over values between a White House and a state since the 1950s and 1960s, when the federal government moved to end segregation and expand civil rights.

Back then, of course, the ideologies and values at issue were reversed, as conservative Southerners, under the banner of states' rights, fought violently to uphold white supremacy. In these times it is liberal California making the case for states' rights, traditionally a Republican position.

“It seems like every day brings a new point of contention between two very different types of leadership,” said Jim Newton, a lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles.

And it does not end there: New laws that went into effect on January 1st in California raised the minimum wage, allowed parents to withhold gender on birth certificates and strengthened what were already some of the toughest gun laws in the country by restricting ammunition sales and assault weapons, and barring school officials from carrying concealed weapons at work. Taken together, the measures are the surest signs yet of how California is setting itself apart from Washington — and many parts of America, too.

Mr. de León, along with almost the entire leadership of California, has been a bulwark against the Trump administration. Mr. de León introduced the so-called sanctuary state legislation — the California Values Act — that restricts state authorities from cooperating with federal immigration agents, and places limits on agents entering schools, churches, hospitals or courthouses to detain undocumented immigrants. The law went into effect on January 1st, provoking a prankster — presumably a Trump supporter — to put up those highway signs, and setting off a war of words between California and the administration.

The state should “hold on tight,” said Thomas Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in an interview on Fox News last week.

“They are about to see a lot more special agents, a lot more deportation officers,” he said. “If the politicians in California don't want to protect their communities, then ICE will.”

Mr. Homan went on to assail politicians who support the sanctuary policy, suggesting they should be arrested.

Darrell Steinberg, the mayor of Sacramento, California’s capital, reacted angrily on Wednesday, saying on Twitter that “they certainly know where to find me.”



(click on the image to read the Tweet)

Also this week, Mr. de León introduced legislation to limit the impact of the new tax bill on Californians by essentially allowing residents to pay their state taxes in the form of a charitable contribution, which could then be deducted when filing federal income tax.

Mr. de León also said he was working with Eric H. Holder Jr., an attorney general under President Barack Obama, to push back against attempts to enforce federal marijuana law, which Attorney General Jeff Sessions said on Thursday he would allow federal prosecutors to do.

“Whether Jeff Sessions likes cannabis is not the question,” Mr. de León said. “The people of California voted overwhelmingly to legalize marijuana for recreational use.”

For his part, Mr. Trump is the first president since Dwight D. Eisenhower to not take a trip to California in his first calendar year in office, not even to visit his golf course in Rancho Palos Verdes, south of Los Angeles, or a mansion he owns in Beverly Hills, or to tour the vast damage left in the wake of a series of wildfires. By contrast, he has made multiple trips to other states hit by natural disasters, including Texas and Florida after Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.

In California, every state leader is a Democrat, including the governor and the leaders of the State Senate and Assembly. Of the state's 53 members in Congress, only 14 are Republicans, and analysts believe several of them are in jeopardy of losing their seats to Democrats in next year's mid-term elections because of opposition in California to Mr. Trump.

Still, not every Californian is lining up to join the opposition. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House majority leader, has stood firm with the president, was a strong supporter of the tax bill, and has said he believes there is still an opportunity for Democrats and the administration to come together, particularly on immigration. In an interview with Fox News on Friday, he said, “I think there is a plan for securing the border, for dealing with chain migration.” He added, “I think there is a common ground that both sides can get to.”

But California's diversity — 40 percent Latino, and with an estimated 2.3 million undocumented workers, according to a Pew Research Center survey — is regarded by many people here as a powerful counternarrative to the Trump administration's anti-immigration policies and the ugly racial incidents and outbursts of white supremacy that have surfaced during his presidency in places like Charlottesville, Virginia.

Beyond demographics and politics, charting its own course is part of the identity of California. “We are the frontier,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political scientist at the University of Southern California. “Beyond us, there's nothing but ocean.”


Immigration advocates at a Los Angeles City Council meeting in March, held to discuss the Trump administration's threats to cut funding for the city and other so-called sanctuary jurisdictions for undocumented immigrants. — Photograph: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters.
Immigration advocates at a Los Angeles City Council meeting in March, held to discuss the Trump administration's threats to cut funding
for the city and other so-called sanctuary jurisdictions for undocumented immigrants. — Photograph: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters.


California is not the only liberal state standing up to the Trump administration. But as the most populous state, with close to 40 million people — if it were a country it would be the world's sixth largest economy, sandwiched between Britain and France — California has been energized in the age of Trump to take the lead in opposing what many here believe is a depressing reversal of American progress.

“California has distinguished itself from the federal government for a long time,” said Elizabeth Ashford, a political consultant who has worked for Governor Jerry Brown, former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Senator Kamala Harris. “Certainly Arnold spent a lot of time talking about California as almost a nation-state. And many Californians feel that way.”

She continued, “For Californians and California there's always this concept of a Golden State, a model of what a state can be and achieve.” These days, with the country roiled by a resurgence in white supremacy and nasty fights over immigration and diversity, essentially a battle over American identity, she said, “there are sharp distinctions that many Californians are drawing between us and them.”

Those distinctions may become sharper, as a generational shift in California Democratic politics, driven by leaders like Mr. de León, could tilt the state further to the left. Mr. de León, 51, is mounting a primary challenge to Senator Dianne Feinstein, 84, by positioning himself more to the left — and more stridently opposed to the president — than his rival.

Ordinary Californians have found other ways to push back.

One of them is Andrew Sturm, a graduate student in visual arts at the University of California, San Diego. Last year, Mr. Sturm was with a friend in Tijuana, Mexico, at a spot near the border where prototypes of Mr. Trump's planned wall had been positioned.

“We were thinking, man, these things look like drive-in movie screens,” he said. “We were thinking about how we could do something with them.”

The result was a display of political art, in the form of light. One evening this fall at dusk, Mr. Sturm and other activists, working from the Mexican side of the border, erected theater lights and used stencils to project images onto the prototypes — of a ladder, of the Statue of Liberty.

“I felt kind of sick as a U.S. citizen,” he said, referring to Mr. Trump's immigration policies. “I didn't want folks in Mexico to think this is how we all feel.”


Jennifer Medina contributed reporting.

• Tim Arango is a Los Angeles correspondent for The New York Times. Before moving to California, Mr. Arango spent seven years as Baghdad bureau chief, covering the drawdown of American forces in Iraq, the rise of the Islamic State, the downfall of Prime Minister Maliki, the return of the American military, and the offensives against the Islamic State in Falluja and Mosul. Doubling as the Istanbul bureau chief for five years, he also covered Turkey's decline from a rising Islamic democracy to an authoritarian state, a trajectory punctuated by mass protests, terror attacks, a botched coup, a migration crisis, and a military incursion into Syria. Before heading overseas, Mr. Arango had been a media reporter for The N.Y. Times since 2007. He is from Vermont.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • California Defiant in Face of Federal Move to Get Tough on Marijuana


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/07/us/california-sanctuary-marijuana.html
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« Reply #15 on: January 10, 2018, 10:06:52 am »


WOO HOO …… now this would light the fuse with Trump. Bring it on!! 



from the print edition of the Los Angeles Times....

‘Donate’ state taxes? Let's give this nutty plan a try.

By GEORGE SKELTON | Monday, January 08, 2018

Kevin de León, the state Senate leader, says, “The Republican tax scam offers corporations and hedge fund managers massive tax breaks and expects California taxpayers to pick up the costs.” — Photograph: Robert Gauthier/The Los Angeles Times.
Kevin de León, the state Senate leader, says, “The Republican tax scam offers corporations and hedge fund managers massive
tax breaks and expects California taxpayers to pick up the costs.” — Photograph: Robert Gauthier/The Los Angeles Times.


EVEN FOR California government, this seems nutty: calling a state income tax payment a “charitable contribution” so it can be deducted on a federal tax return.

I recently wrote that the idea was cockamamie. Then last week, it was actually introduced as legislation by state Senate leader Kevin de León (Democrat-Los Angeles).

On second thought, maybe the concept isn't so screwy. And even if it is, given the pugnacious, polarized time we're caught in, it's probably a justifiable tax dodge in an effort to defend millions of California taxpayers from President Trump and the Republican Congress.

It fits snugly with the current shoot-first, ask-questions-later political climate.

Under the new GOP tax law, 6.1 million Californians who itemize their federal income taxes stand to lose an average of $8,438 in state and local tax deductions. That's because the law caps state and local tax deductions — mainly on income and property — at $10,000 total. The average California deduction was $18,438 in 2015, the latest year with complete data, according to the Government Finance Officers Association.

De León's solution, gleaned from academicians, is to allow Californians to take advantage of a federal loophole and deduct more than the $10,000 cap. They'd do that by claiming the amount over the limit as a charitable contribution to a state California Excellence Fund. There's no dollar limit on charitable contributions.

California government would treat the so-called contribution as a state income tax payment. There'd be a 100% state tax credit for the “donation.” All the money would flow into the general fund for regular government programs. And the taxpayer could soften the federal tax bite by exceeding the deductions cap.

At least that's the theory. Trump and Congress probably would have a different idea: Forget it. The IRS could quash it, or Republican lawmakers could amend the law.

“This isn't a pie-in-the-sky idea,” UC Davis tax law professor Darien Shanske says. “It could fit comfortably with existing law. That's not to say Congress wouldn't change existing law.”

UCLA law professor Kirk Stark has studied this concept for years and notes “it's not a new thing. Many states have charitable tax credits.” Even California does. But no state has anything approaching the scale that De León proposes.

In all, 21 states offer tax credits for donations to specific causes. Popular in some Southern red states are generous credits for funding private school vouchers.

In California, there's a program — created by a De León bill in 2014 — that offers a 50% tax credit for donations to the Cal Grant college scholarship fund. There's also a program that allows a private property owner to grant an easement to a land conservancy and receive a 55% tax credit. Several states offer that.

All that's OK with the IRS. But concocting a scheme so millions of Californians can deduct untold additional thousands of dollars on their federal returns would undoubtedly rattle the IRS and Trump.

But the president would need to use a scalpel targeted at California and other blue states trying to evade federal taxes, rather than taking a meat cleaver to every tax credit. Trump presumably wouldn't want to anger loyal red states that use tax credits to fund pet conservative causes.

Democrats suspect Trump of vengefully picking on high-tax blue states anyway.

“The Republican tax scam offers corporations and hedge fund managers massive tax breaks and expects California taxpayers to pick up the costs,” says De León, who's running against veteran U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a fellow Democrat.

But, I asked him, is his bill really good tax policy?

“What is not good tax policy,” he replied, “is what happened in Congress. It's the worst tax policy in the history of this country. Perhaps the world.”

Actually, California's current tax policy is pretty rotten — literally rotted out from decay — and the Legislature should be focused on rebuilding it. But very few are interested. It's too tough politically.

As I've often written, the state tax system leans too heavily on high-end income taxes and ignores California's growing service economy. There's virtually no sales tax on services. The result is a highly volatile system that produces gushes of revenue in good times but slows to a trickle when the economy's bad. It's periodically boom or bust for the state budget.

What's needed is to lower income and sales tax rates and make up the lost revenue by extending the sales tax to services.

Senator Bob Hertzberg (Democrat-Van Nuys) is drafting a bill to do some of that. It would extend the sales tax to services used by businesses, but not by individuals. He'd also lower middle-class income taxes.

“Under Trump's plan, the business tax is going down,” Hertzberg says. “So add a little extra state cost. It would still be deductible.”

But his bill would require a two-thirds majority vote. So it's doomed. De León's bill needs only a simple majority vote. So it can pass.

Would Governor Jerry Brown sign it? He hasn't said. It's not the kind of gimmicky stunt Brown would ordinarily sanction these days. But given that it's a dagger at Trump and Republicans, and is drawing national attention, he just might.

It doesn't pass the smell test. But hardly anything political does these days. And it could save California taxpayers money. So open the windows and go for it.


__________________________________________________________________________

• Political columnist George Skelton has covered government and politics for more than 50 years and for the Los Angeles Times since 1974. He has been a L.A. Times political writer and editor in Los Angeles, Sacramento bureau chief and White House correspondent. He has written a column on California politics, Capitol Journal, since 1993. Skelton is a Santa Barbara native, grew up in Ojai and received a journalism degree at San Jose State.

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« Reply #16 on: January 11, 2018, 11:17:20 am »


from the print edition of the Los Angeles Times....

Florida (only) exempt from offshore plan

California and New York Democrats accuse White House of partisan favoritism.

By GRAY ROHRER and MATT PEARCE | Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, right, holds a news conference in Tallahassee, Florida, with Republican Governor Rick Scott to announce that the offshore oil drilling plan unveiled last week won't include Florida. — Photograph: Scott Keeler/Tampa Bay Times.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, right, holds a news conference in Tallahassee, Florida, with Republican Governor Rick Scott to announce
that the offshore oil drilling plan unveiled last week won't include Florida. — Photograph: Scott Keeler/Tampa Bay Times.


TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA — Democratic officials in California and New York accused the Trump administration of unfair partisan treatment on Tuesday after Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke exempted Florida from expanded offshore drilling — under pressure from the state's Republican governor — without offering similar exemptions to other coastal states.

The administration's move comes after a bipartisan backlash from politicians on both coasts after it announced plans last week to consider allowing new leases off most of the U.S. coastline to explore offshore oil and natural gas reserves.

“We are not drilling off the coast of Florida,” Zinke said at a hastily called news conference at the Tallahassee airport after meeting with Republican Florida Governor Rick Scott, who opposed the new drilling.

“President Trump has directed me to rebuild our offshore oil and gas program in a manner that supports our national energy policy and also takes into consideration the local and state voice,” Zinke said in a statement. “I support the governor's position that Florida is unique and its coasts are heavily reliant on tourism as an economic driver.”

But Zinke's announcement instantly drew criticism from Democratic officials who also oppose drilling off their states' coasts, saying they oppose drilling for the same reasons Florida's governor does.

“California is also ‘unique’ & our ‘coasts are heavily reliant on tourism as an economic driver’,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said on Twitter. “Our ‘local and state voice’ is firmly opposed to any and all offshore drilling. If that's your standard, we, too, should be removed from your list. Immediately.”

“Secretary Zinke must also abandon his efforts to drill along California's beautiful coastline,” Senator Kamala Harris (Democrat-California) tweeted. “Protection of our ocean shouldn't depend on the D, R, or I after the governor's name.”

In New York, Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo also tweeted a protest. “New York doesn't want drilling off our coast either,” he said. “Where do we sign up for a waiver @SecretaryZinke?”

Florida's elected officials from both parties, including Democratic Senator Bill Nelson, whom Scott is expected to challenge this year, and GOP Senator Marco Rubio, had also expressed opposition to the offshore drilling plan.

Late on Tuesday, Nelson denounced Zinke's announcement as a “political stunt orchestrated by the Trump administration to help Rick Scott.”

“Suddenly Secretary Zinke announces plans to drill off Florida's coast and four days later agrees to ‘take Florida off the table?’ I don't believe it,” Nelson said in a statement.

Under the Trump administration's original plan released for comment last week, the federal government would offer 47 leases in U.S. waters on the outer continental shelf, including two each off the Northern, Central and Southern California coasts, and one off Washington and Oregon.

There already are 23 oil platforms in federal waters off California and four in state waters — near Santa Barbara County, Huntington Beach and Seal Beach. There are also four artificial islands used as drilling platforms off Long Beach and one off Rincon Beach in Ventura County.

But images of oil-drenched seabirds and fouled beaches during the massive 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill soured the state on offshore oil development. There have been no new federal leases off California since 1984.

Oil drilling has likewise been a sensitive issue in Florida, with its miles of coastline, especially since the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010, which ravaged Louisiana's coast and left gooey tarballs on Florida Panhandle beaches.

Then-Governor Charlie Crist, a Democrat who is now a congressman, called a special session to ban oil drilling, but Florida lawmakers balked at the proposal.

As a candidate in 2010, Scott supported oil and gas drilling off Florida's shores as a way to reduce oil dependency and gas prices.

Despite the partial rollback of the plan, Zinke said the administration was still dedicated to aggressively seeking energy resources throughout the country.

“I don't want your kids ever to fight on foreign shores for a resource we have here,” he said. “But there's places where resources are sensitive, and there's places where we're not going to go forward with [drilling for oil], and one of them is off the coast of Florida.”

Scott was not the only Florida Republican criticizing the proposal last week, with U.S. Representative Vern Buchanan calling it “reckless, misguided and potentially catastrophic to Florida.”

The Florida Petroleum Council hailed the administration’s move as a way to benefit state consumers by potentially creating jobs and additional government revenue while strengthening national security.

“Allowing us to explore our offshore energy will boost our state economy and spur investment — all while safely co-existing with our agriculture, tourism and fishing industries as well as U.S. military operations,” Executive Director David Mica said in a statement.


__________________________________________________________________________

News Service of Florida contributed to this report.

• Gray Rohrer is a reporter for the Orlando Sentinel.

• Matt Pearce is a national reporter for the Los Angeles Times and frequently writes about violence, disasters, social movements and civil liberties. A University of Missouri graduate, he has covered news in the Midwest for a number of publications and previously wrote about technology, culture and the Middle East as a featured writer for the New Inquiry. He hails from Kansas City, Missouri.

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« Reply #17 on: January 11, 2018, 11:17:30 am »


from the print edition of the Los Angeles Times....

Jeff Sessions' attack on the California way

If he prosecutes growers he will make weed more dangerous.

By GUSTAVO ARELLANO | Wednesday, January 10, 2018

The reversal of a U.S. policy allowing leeway for state-sanctioned sales of marijuana could push banks to rethink their plans. Above, a line at MedMen dispensary in West Hollywood. — Photograph: Christina House/Los Angeles Times.
The reversal of a U.S. policy allowing leeway for state-sanctioned sales of marijuana could push banks to rethink their plans.
Above, a line at MedMen dispensary in West Hollywood. — Photograph: Christina House/Los Angeles Times.


KEYBOARD CONFESSIONAL: I've never smoked marijuana in my life. I don't care for kush. I hate its smell. Edibles scare me. I can't tell the difference between THC and TBS. The one time pals offered me a joint, I declined and drank Cactus Cooler instead.

But I support the right for any adult to light up. I voted to legalize marijuana in California, as the majority of residents did, because the drug war is a disaster that destroys too many lives and wastes billions of dollars. Legalizing is great for our image as Progressive Paradise, and my only regret is that we let Colorado do it first. You know what Colorado also beat us on? Craft beer. Let us never lose again to a state with the weirdest airport in the world.

Recreational dispensaries finally opened last week, which provoked the wrath of U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. “Good people don't smoke marijuana,” he once said. I wish he'd repeat that in front of my butcher friend, who survived Stage 4 colon cancer and regained his appetite with the help of some fat blunts.

America's top lawman rescinded an Obama-era pledge that feds wouldn't crack down on states that allow marijuana, whether for pleasure or for pain. Such respect for states' rights “undermines the rule of [federal] law,” according to Sessions — funny, because he's from Alabama, which last year wanted to bar transgender folks from using the bathroom of their choice despite federal protections.

Sessions' memo is a targeted attack on the California way.

Make no mistake: He has it in for us, and not just because our attorney general, Xavier Becerra, keeps smacking the Trump administration with lawsuits as if it were a piñata. Sessions could've issued his downer-doobie edict last summer, when Nevada began the sale of recreational marijuana. He could've piggybacked on Maine Governor Paul LePage's veto this fall of a bill that would've allowed weed sales. (LePage is also a toke teetotaler; he once wrote, “The dangers of legalizing marijuana and normalizing its use in our society cannot be understated.”)

No, Sessions waited until 2018, when the eyes of the nation had turned to our Green Rush. He waited to humiliate us, to try and scare us into submission.

You can't put the nugget back in the stash, Brother Beauregard. The United States is irrecoverably going ganja. And in California, we're ready to provide a map for the future, one the rest of the country can use to roll out the reefer economy the right way.

We've screwed up before. Proposition 215 in 1996 made us the first state in the country to allow medicinal marijuana. Other states followed, of course. But let's be honest: While we were pioneers, the actual execution wasn't pretty. Getting a doctor's note for a card became easier than finding a good wave in Santa Cruz and made a mockery of Proposition 215's original intent. The black market exploded as a result, and that shadiness haunts the industry from the Emerald Triangle to grow houses in suburbia.

Proposition 64 in 2016 showed that California had learned its lesson. We want weed regulated like alcohol; that helps root out a lot of the unsavory and allows further respectability to seep into the business. Legal Lady Jane also offers relief for city budgets: in San Diego alone, the Union-Tribune reported, tax revenue would start at “$5.5 million per year initially, with steady increases up to $13.7 million … in June 2023.”

Sessions could've waited to see how California went forward. He could've even directed the Department of Justice to assist us on enforcement. Such a partnership could've helped thaw the Cold War we have with Trump.

Instead, Sessions may start prosecuting users, sellers and growers, which will only push marijuana even more underground and make it more dangerous. Don't take it from me. Representative Dana Rohrabacher (Republican-Costa Mesa), who long ago blocked me on Twitter because I like to mock his xenophobia, blasted Sessions in a statement for delivering an “extravagant holiday gift to the drug cartels.”

If Rohrabacher and I can agree on something, then all of us can unite on this. We squabble about everything here in California; I still maintain the only thing that brings us together is Huell Howser reruns. But a threat against our new weed trade and those who use it is another issue we can all rally around.

There's no one way to fight Sessions. Resist whatever the feds may bring; take revenge on politicians who support him come November; support your friendly neighborhood dispensary.

As for me? Maybe, just maybe, in defiance of any federal overreach, I'll buy and use a cannabis product for the first time in my life. I don't even smoke tobacco, so I'm thinking something like chocolate peanut butter cups. Or maybe gummies. They've always seemed psychedelic and cool to me. Anyone got any recommendations?


__________________________________________________________________________

• Gustavo Arellano is the former publisher and editor of Orange County's alternative weekly OC Weekly, and the author of the column ¡Ask a Mexican!, which is syndicated nationally.

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« Reply #18 on: February 06, 2018, 12:05:14 pm »


from the print edition of the Los Angeles Times....

Mixed signals stymie auto firms — a clash over clean air regulations

California battles with Trump administration to push tougher clean air regulations, putting carmakers in a bind.

By EVAN HALPER | Monday, February 05, 2018

E-Golf electric cars hang in a Volkswagen plant in Germany last year. Automakers' transition to cleaner tech is further along overseas than it is in the U.S.A. — Photograph: Jens Meyer/Associated Press.
E-Golf electric cars hang in a Volkswagen plant in Germany last year. Automakers' transition to cleaner tech is further along overseas than it is in the U.S.A.
 — Photograph: Jens Meyer/Associated Press.


WASHINGTON D.C. — An intensifying clash between California and Washington over getting cleaner, more fuel-efficient vehicles on the road has put auto companies in a bind as they contemplate what cars they should be rolling onto showroom floors.

The signals to automakers couldn’t conflict more: California, with the nation's largest auto market, is stepping up pressure to stay on track with the state's ambitious climate goals. The Trump administration is moving to free the companies of such obligations and even has threatened to strip California of its power to impose existing requirements within its borders.

At stake: Governor Jerry Brown's plan to get 5 million electric vehicles onto California's roads by 2030 as well as the kinds of cars that drivers nationwide will be able to buy over the next decade.

Carmakers are left to gamble on how aggressively to follow California's blueprint as the Trump administration tries to undermine it.

The dilemma is largely of the industry's own making: Car companies have lobbied Trump to ease up on fuel economy standards, which currently call on them to sell cars by 2025 that average 54 miles per gallon.

But those same companies are keenly aware that ignoring the plans laid by California can be perilous.

They can't afford to manufacture different cars for different parts of the country, and California plans to keep the current, ambitious fuel economy goal and the electric vehicle mandate that goes hand in hand with it. So unless the Trump administration can block the state from going its own way, relaxing federal rules won't help the automakers much.

“The signal the administration is sending to auto companies is: Do whatever you want,” said Dan Becker, who runs the Safe Climate Campaign. “The world is looking to California to resist these rollbacks that will not just impede the growth of electric vehicles, but also the growth of more fuel-efficient gasoline vehicles.”

Market analysts agree, saying the one thing standing in the way of Brown's latest electric vehicles goal could be the Trump administration's plan to relax fuel economy targets.

If the administration can force California to join the federal government in weakening standards, said Salim Morsy, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, “there is no doubt that would slow down electrification…. It would be a blow for the state, and whether it could reach that 5 million goal would become unclear.”

California has unique authority under the Clean Air Act, allowing the state to keep aggressive mileage targets in place even if the federal standards are weakened. Other states are allowed to adopt California's rules, which 13 states and the District of Columbia have done.

But the Environmental Protection Agency keeps threatening to challenge California's authority, pointing to the state’s outsize influence over what cars get built.

“Federalism doesn't mean that one state can dictate to the rest of the country,” EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said at a Senate hearing on Tuesday.

The state is showing no sign of flinching. Its power to set its own vehicle emission guidelines has been in effect for 50 years. The state and the EPA have been in negotiations in an effort to reach a compromise that would keep emissions targets uniform nationwide.

So far, not much seems to be happening at the bargaining table. California has little incentive to make concessions.

The tension will increase next month when the EPA completes a review of the current rules and starts to lay out its plans for rolling back mileage standards. The agency is under pressure from automakers objecting that there isn't a large enough market now to support a big infusion of smaller, lighter, less-polluting cars and trucks.

It's a familiar story in the auto industry: Gas prices are low, the profit margin on sport utility vehicles is high, and even as the companies boast of plans to roll out dozens of new electrified vehicles in the next few years, they would prefer to soak up profits from the SUV-buying binge for as long as possible.

Then-Ford Chief Executive Mark Fields warned the president a year ago that unless the mileage standards were more flexible, about 1 million American auto jobs could be lost.

The warning was widely dismissed by industry experts, who said it was based on misleading assumptions about gas prices, the cost of battery technologies and the types of workers who would be hit. The same study Fields cited envisioned another scenario in which keeping the mileage rules would lead to an increase of 144,000 jobs.

Many analysts say the industry's reluctance to push cleaner prototypes into the market echoes faulty business decisions American auto companies made more than a decade ago that helped precipitate a financial disaster for them that required a massive government bailout.

At the time, a business model that relied on selling more and more of the biggest and heaviest passenger vehicles drove the companies into financial distress when gas prices spiked, climate consciousness increased and drivers went looking for alternatives.

“GM went into bankruptcy with a promise to stop making so many bigger cars and start making littler cars,” said Maryann Keller, an analyst who has been tracking fuel economy issues for three decades. As long as gas is cheap and government incentives for driving low-emission vehicles are limited, however, persuading drivers to buy them is a challenge.

“The United States stands alone on this,” she said. “Other countries are moving forward…. Electric vehicles do not sell themselves. They are sold because there is government policy that supports their purchase.”

Some of the same firms lobbying to slow the transition here are racing to update their offerings abroad, where the evolution to newer technologies is much further along.

California Air Resources Board Chairwoman Mary Nichols called it “ironic” that the companies are not focusing their lobbying on policies that promote the use of the vehicles.

“At the same time they're complaining that they’re having a hard time with meeting the fuel economy standards, the industry is rushing to meet the demands from Asia and Europe, and not just California, for all kinds of electric vehicles,” she said.

Wall Street analysts say the transition to cleaner engines is inevitable here too, as all the major auto companies plan for a future in which the internal combustion engine becomes obsolete. The question is how far America will lag behind other nations in weaning itself off big cars and trucks, and how much that lag will undermine the fight against climate change.

Currently, automakers sell 150 types of electric vehicles and hybrids worldwide, according to Adam Fowler of Beacon Economics. Only about 25 of them can be found in showrooms in tech- and climate-conscious San Francisco and Los Angeles. In most states, he said, buyers will find only seven of those clean-tech cars and trucks on offer.

Environmentalists are having a tough time persuading a climate-skeptical administration that that is a problem. So they are turning their fire on the auto companies.

The Sierra Club and the Safe Climate Campaign are unleashing on Ford, rallying public pressure on the company to support the current fuel standard. As the Washington Auto Show got underway, the groups released a video accusing Ford of driving the nation backward, punctuated with a driver whose SUV joltingly flies into reverse and transforms into an antiquated, low-tech Model T.

“We are targeting the auto companies because it is hard to target this administration,” Becker said. “What can we say about the harm they are doing that they are not already out there saying themselves?”


__________________________________________________________________________

• Evan Halper writes about a broad range of policy issues out of Washington D.C. for the Los Angeles Times, with particular emphasis on how Washington regulates, agitates and very often miscalculates in its dealings with California. Before heading east, he was the L.A. Times bureau chief in Sacramento, where he spent a decade untangling California's epic budget mess and political dysfunction.

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« Reply #19 on: March 12, 2018, 01:48:33 pm »


from the Los Angeles Times....

Trump loves winning, but in his presidency and business,
California has gotten in his way


By NOAH BIERMAN | 12:40PM PDT — Sunday, March 11, 2018

Deborah Joyce of Laguna Beach, left, talks with Nina Magnusdottir during a tour last month to view the border wall prototypes from the Tijuana side. President Trump is scheduled to see the prototypes on Tuesday. — Photograph: Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times.
Deborah Joyce of Laguna Beach, left, talks with Nina Magnusdottir during a tour last month to view the border wall prototypes from the Tijuana side.
President Trump is scheduled to see the prototypes on Tuesday. — Photograph: Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times.


PRESIDENT TRUMP's well-documented clashes with California owe plenty to politics, culture and personality. But at bottom, what drives the president's toxic relationship with the nation's most populous state is this: his near-obsessive desire to be seen as a winner.

No state represents losing for Trump more than California, whether in business or politics. No surprise, then, that he didn't rush to visit. He arrives on Tuesday later into his term than any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt, back when presidents weren't flying routinely; FDR crossed the continent by train.

Trump's trip, to inspect prototypes for a border wall with Mexico that many Californians loathe, is expected to draw large protests. Besides that inspection in San Diego, the president plans to meet with members of the military and attend a high-dollar fundraiser in Beverly Hills.

As a candidate, Trump used to boast he could become the first Republican to win the state, and its 55 electoral votes, in nearly three decades. Instead, Hillary Clinton won California by 4.3 million votes, more than accounting for her nearly 3-million advantage in the popular vote nationwide. California's result became the basis for Trump's false claim that millions of illegal immigrants voted for Clinton.

It was a loss that stung long after his inauguration.

“If Abe Lincoln came back to life, he would lose New York and he would lose California,” Trump fumed to the Associated Press last year.

His resentment toward California extends beyond the election, however. The Golden State is the seat of an entertainment industry that dismissed him as a reality television creation, the home of a business culture where his real estate dreams were stymied and, now, the headquarters of a resistance movement that has tried to cast a cloud over his legitimacy as president.

One of his most embarrassing controversies, an imbroglio over a pre-election payment to a porn actress to keep quiet about an alleged affair, is playing out in a Los Angeles courtroom.

Trump has at times tried to comfort himself with the notion that the state's protesters and its courts, which have ruled against him on significant immigration issues, stand apart from other Americans and other judges.

Barry Bennett, a former political advisor to Trump, said, “Never in history have the political beliefs in California versus the rest of the nation been so different.”

Yet much of the nation, when it comes to Trump, is siding with Californians. The president's popularity is above 50% in only 12 states, according to the polling organization Gallup. In California, just 22% of voters approved of the job Trump was doing as president in a USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll in November; 66% disapproved. That suggests a significant loss of support even from his dismal election showing, though two-thirds of Republicans remain supportive.

Decades before Trump, Republicans were using the liberal state as a foil, and ambitious California Democrats have long seen huge political upside in feuding with Republican presidents. Several Democrats running for statewide office this year bragged in fundraising appeals last week that they were defending California against a lawsuit from Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions over immigration enforcement — a suit that Sessions came to California last week to trumpet, in a sort of warm-up act for Trump.

Governor Jerry Brown, who is also fighting the federal government's efforts to roll back environmental regulations, last week accused the Trump administration of “going to war” with the state.

The White House insists that Trump comes in peace — though with an edge that reflects the less than peaceable relationship.

“If anybody is stepping out of bounds here, it would be someone who is refusing to follow a federal law, which is certainly not the president,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters on Friday. “We're going for what we hope to be an incredibly positive trip.”


Anti-Trump protest in downtown Los Angeles after his election in 2016. — Photograph: Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times.
Anti-Trump protest in downtown Los Angeles after his election in 2016. — Photograph: Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times.

Many Republican politicians in the state won't be welcoming Trump, either. Of more than a dozen GOP candidates the Los Angeles Times contacted, most said they had no plans to attend his events.

“I'm telling them to stay away,” said one Southern California Republican consultant who requested anonymity to avoid alienating the president. “We're not going to diss the president, but we're not going to go do a photo op with him, either.”

Another consultant said a client seeking an Orange County congressional seat would not participate in Trump's activities, to avoid making the president any more of an issue in the local campaign than he already is.

Many of the state's Republicans don't share Trump's hostility toward immigrants. Kevin Faulconer, San Diego's Republican mayor, likes to highlight his city's business ties with Tijuana and told the L.A. Times in an interview last year that the area's Latino community “helps define us.”

For Trump, however, the state — by its diversity, liberalism and aggressive environmental regulation — provides an especially vivid version of a potential future America that he vilifies.

He has been furious with what he sees as a dangerous protection of immigrants in the country illegally by so-called sanctuary cities — the object of Sessions' lawsuit. Trump called Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf a “disgrace” after she issued a warning about imminent immigration raids, and he assailed her again Saturday night at a raucous political rally near Pittsburgh.

The White House used its Twitter account last week to accuse the state of putting “the interests of criminal aliens ahead of the well-being of American citizens.” That tone surprised some observers, coming from the White House's official account.

“This tweet is written as though you are talking about a hostile foreign power,” Walter Shaub, former director of the Office of Government Ethics, responded on Twitter. “You do realize that you're talking about an American state, right?”

Trump's own animosity is familiar and long-standing. “California in many ways is out of control, as you know,” he said during an interview last year with Fox News. “And from an economic standpoint, people are leaving California and going to Texas and other places that run in a different manner.”

His list of California sparring partners is lengthy: Jerry Brown; Arnold Schwarzenegger, the last Republican governor of the state, who has spoken out against Trump and replaced him as host of “Celebrity Apprentice”; Representative Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat who leads her party in the House; Representative Adam B. Schiff of Burbank, the most visible Democrat in the congressional investigation of Russian election interference; and Senator Kamala Harris, who is considering a presidential run.

“The president has shown himself to be many things, including vindictive,” said Schiff, whom Trump has derided as “Little Adam” and “Leakin' Adam”. He predicted Trump would face an unfriendly welcome.

Despite Trump's insistence while campaigning in the California primary in 2016 that “we're going after places that no other Republican goes after,” a proposal to place staff and other resources in all 50 states was quickly batted down, according to one former campaign staffer who requested anonymity to avoid alienating colleagues. Clinton beat Trump in California by a nearly 2-1 margin, 62% to 32%.

Business deals haven't come easily for Trump in California, either. His largest land holding is Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes.

In the 1980s, he backed away from buying stakes in the San Diego Padres and the Hollywood giant MCA. In Los Angeles, he tried and failed to build the tallest building in the world on Wilshire Boulevard, and put in a low-ball offer to buy the Beverly Hills Hotel, one of his hangouts, but lost the bidding to oil magnate Marvin Davis.

In 1988, Trump downplayed his interest in the state, with a characteristic knock.

“I'm really concerned about the whole earthquake situation in L.A.,” he said. “I am a tremendous believer that someday Las Vegas may be the West Coast.”


__________________________________________________________________________

L.A. Times staff writers Brian Bennett and Christi Parsons in Washington and Christine Mai-Duc in Los Angeles contributed.

• Noah Bierman covers the White House in Washington, D.C. for the Los Angeles Times. Before joining the newspaper in 2015, he worked for The Boston Globe in both Boston and Washington, covering Congress, politics and transportation in the immediate aftermath of the Big Dig. He has also reported on higher education, crime, politics and local government for the Miami Herald, the Palm Beach Post and the Duluth (Minnesota) News-Tribune. Bierman is a native of Miami who attended Duke University.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • Trump to enter enemy territory, but will California ‘resistance’ rise up or stay home?

 • Jeff Sessions' lawsuit is an invitation for California to break the law

 • California leaders rebuke Sessions as ‘going to war’ over state immigration policy


http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-california-20180312-story.html
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« Reply #20 on: March 12, 2018, 11:52:57 pm »

Oh Yes Trump Should Be Very Afraid Of California
the libtards are leaving in droves looking for a better life

Donald Trump Is Making America Great Again

But Jerry Brown is such a retard he has turned California
into a 3rd world shithole










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« Reply #21 on: March 13, 2018, 01:19:39 pm »


from the Los Angeles Times....

His Royal Trumpness visits Southern California, but not Orange County?

By Gustavo Arellano | 8:55AM PDT — Monday, March 12, 2018

President Donald J. Trump. — Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press.
President Donald J. Trump. — Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press.

SO President Trump will visit our state this week. Ain't that a hoot? He's already declared war on California's middle class with a punitive tax code, sicced Attorney General Jeff Sessions on our pro-marijuana and pro-immigrant policies, and insulted many of our fine representatives, including Adam Schiff (Democrat-Burbank), Nancy Pelosi (Democrat-San Francisco) and Maxine Waters (Democrat-Los Angeles) — but strangely enough, never Dana Rohrabacher (Republican-Huntington Beach), who's so pro-Russia he makes Boris Badenov look like Captain America.

We see this jaunt for what it is: The emperor wants to inspect his new lands and show the world he can make the conquered natives bend the knee. It's taken a while, though; no president has taken longer to visit California after his election since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936. The reason for the delay? His Trumpness has no clothes. He's terrified of us. He wants nothing but adulation and glory and doesn't dare meet anyone who'll offer any bit of criticism whatsoever.

That's why his only two scheduled appearances so far are a fundraiser with the One Percenters in Beverly Hills and a review of prototypes for his beloved border wall. And that's why he's skipping Orange County. No rally, no fundraiser, no nada.

Because we, of all people, don't want him here. And in other news, The New York Times had an original insight about Los Angeles.

This development is big — Big One-big. Orange County has served as the Republican Party's emotional-support animal for generations. Barry Goldwater once famously quipped that the only states he carried during his disastrous 1964 presidential run were Arizona and Orange County. It's where rising conservative stars used to test their material before party elders and wealthy donors, where angry suburban voters reliably voted GOP in the name of liberty and fewer Mexicans.

Trump did hold a raucous rally at the Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa in April 2016. He bragged to his audience that 31,000 people were there — never mind that the Amphitheatre only holds 8,500. He returned that May to a far-smaller crowd at the Anaheim Convention Center, then ignored OC and hasn't even texted since.

It seems even Trump is capable of learning. He must've realized that this isn't the Orange County of old.

We've been majority-minority since at least 2004. Activists have created progressive pockets from Laguna Woods to Santa Ana and beyond. GOP registration has fallen precipitously as young voters have either sided decline-to-state or Democrat. All of these changes culminated in Hillary Clinton taking OC in the general election, the first time a Democrat did so since FDR in 1936.

Of course it wasn't just activists and demographics that helped Clinton along — it was Trump. I know a lot of GOPers who despised their candidate so much that they either didn't vote for any president or wrote in someone else. Jon Fleischman of the Flash Report, a man so conservative he probably doesn't do left turns while driving, announced on social media that he voted for Vin Scully as president.

Trump did the political equivalent of USC losing to Fresno State in the Freedom Bowl. (Look that one up, sports-hating lefties.) And what's happened in Orange County ever since should give the rest of the country hope. At the positive extreme: Invigorated activists have harangued OC's congressional GOP base, pushing two long-timers, Representatives Ed Royce of Fullerton and Darrell Issa of Vista, into early retirement. In 1990, the GOP held a 22 point lead over Democrats in voter registration; at last count, it was down to 2.8 thanks to young people and Latinos.

The media and political sharks have taken note. National correspondents from The Wall Street Journal to CNN to even Curbed have parachuted in to proclaim that this isn't John Wayne's Orange County any more. (Pro tip: Even John Wayne wasn't John Wayne — all his children are half-Latinos.).

One almost feels sorry for Trump, that he can't get a hero's welcome in Orange County. In 1984, Ronald Reagan kicked off his re-election campaign at Mile Square Park in Fountain Valley to an audience of 50,000, with 15,000 people turned away. This is when the Gipper told reporters the quote that local conservatives bragged about for decades: that Orange County was where “all the good Republicans go to die.”

Now, thanks to Trump, OC has turned into the GOP's graveyard. Enjoy the Golden State, 45, and don't let the California burritos hit you on the way out.


__________________________________________________________________________

• Gustavo Arellano is the former publisher and editor of Orange County's alternative weekly OC Weekly, and the author of the column “Ask a Mexican”, which is syndicated nationally. Arellano has won numerous awards for the column, including the 2006 and 2008 Best Non-Political Column in a large-circulation weekly from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, the 2007 Presidents Award from the Los Angeles Press Club and an Impacto Award from the National Hispanic Media Coalition, and a 2008 Latino Spirit award from the California Latino Legislative Caucus.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-arellano-trump-visit-california-20180312-story.html
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« Reply #22 on: March 14, 2018, 04:15:35 am »

Trump is not royal he is the winner Grin

California a bankrupt mega taxed shithole that is losing bigtime because their leaders are libtard fuckwitts

Jerry Brown calls his voters freeloaders when really he's describing himself and his retarded dipshit government

« Last Edit: March 14, 2018, 04:51:15 am by Im2Sexy4MyPants » Report Spam   Logged

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« Reply #23 on: March 14, 2018, 12:59:27 pm »


California taxpayers are financing the useless, lazy parts of America which are full of stupid Trump supporters.

The state of California needs to break away from the USA and become a separate, sovereign country so they don't have to subsidise all those Trump-supporting leeches.

I'm sure Oregon and Washington states would be only too happy to join California.

And in a similar vein, the citizens of New York state and the New England states are likewise paying considerably more in federal taxes than their states are getting back from the federal government, so they should likewise break away from the USA and form a separate, sovereign country to stop themselves been leeched off by the Trump-supporting parts of Jesusland.

When you have blood-sucking leeches sticking their noses in your trough, you need to do something to stop them.
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« Reply #24 on: March 20, 2018, 12:26:48 pm »


California needs to cut itself off from the leeches and parasites in Trump country and stop feeding them money.

California is the sixth-largest economy in the entire world....so why do they need the retards who reside in Trump country?
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