California versus Trump and his mentally-retarded supporters…

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

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?

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

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

Meet the mayor who dared to take on the president…
…will resistance help or hurt city?

Libby Schaaf is the left's newest hero. Will Trump punish Oakland for it?

By MARK Z. BARABAK | Monday, March 19, 2018


Mayor  Libby Schaaf drew President Donald J. Trump's ire after she warned Oakland of an impending ICE raid. — Photograph: Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times.

OAKLAND — When Mayor Libby Schaaf delivered her most recent State of the City address, she moved the event from Oakland's City Hall to a location rife with symbolism, the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California.

It was a way of sending a message, about openness and inclusion, that was characteristic of a mayor known more for the quiet details of policy planning than the clenched-fist politics of this urban liberal hotbed.

What followed a few weeks later, tipping off the community to an impending federal immigration raid, was an even more emphatic statement.

The results were swift: condemnation by the nation's attorney general and its chief immigration enforcement officer, a dressing-down from President Trump and Schaaf's overnight transformation — depending how one views it — into a left-wing heroine and brave face of resistance, or the law-breaking, mollycoddling embodiment of left coast lunacy.

Schaaf sees it more simply: “I would describe myself as a mayor.”

“Mayors are connected to their communities,” she said. “They do what they believe is in the best interest of their communities, irregardless of political ideology, and they do what's best in the interest of their communities, sometimes, without regard to what might feel popular.”

Actually, there is zero danger of seeming too anti-Trump in a city where he received less than 5% of the vote, or in much of the rest of the state, for that matter; if anything, Schaaf had been viewed as too passive by the president's more combustible critics.

Now, she has not only cemented her prospects for a second term in November — Schaaf faces just token opposition — but positioned herself for even grander designs, if so inclined.

‘Badge of honor’

“In California, being the mayor that stood up to Donald Trump is as good as it gets,” said Jim Ross, a Democratic campaign consultant who lives in Oakland and has supported Schaaf but also worked in political opposition.

“When you get called out by the president of the United States, that is a badge of honor that every other statewide Democrat would sell their fundraising list to have,” agreed Sonoma State's David McCuan, who has tracked Oakland politics since growing up decades ago in nearby Richmond.

Even so, there are some here who both loathe Trump and his immigration policies and criticize Schaaf for her brazen act, fearing retribution from a president with a lavish history of payback.

“I wish she'd simply made that notification quietly,” said Joe Tuman, one of more than a dozen candidates who ran against Schaaf for mayor. “Because she's in [Trump's] gun sights, rhetorically speaking, Oakland is in his gun sights.”

Noel Gallo, a councilman who represents a large immigrant population in the city's Fruitvale district, fears his constituents — many of whom are in the country illegally — will be the ones who pay a price. “The city of Oakland does need federal support for many services,” Gallo said. “I don't want to get into a fight with Trump at that level.”

Nor, Schaaf responded, does she. She sat at a corner table in her City Hall office, the rainy morning brightened by a cheerful bouquet from a well-wisher, and made her case with lawyerly precision.

The immigration raid, she asserted, was aimed not at hardened criminals but at residents who, save for their undocumented status, were upstanding residents.

Quiet warnings issued through community leaders hadn't worked, Schaaf said — “I had tried going through those informal channels” — so she issued a public alarm to ensure “the information about rights, responsibilities and resources was spread widely.”

Not, as critics have charged, to act as “a gang lookout,” but to avoid panic.

Instead, political bedlam ensued.

Schaaf, 52, is about as thoroughly Oakland as they come; “a scrappy localist,” she calls herself.


Mayor Libby Schaaf says the immigration raid was aimed not at hardened criminals but at upstanding residents. But some fear her public warning may lead to federal payback.
Above, protesters in San Francisco. — Photograph: Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press.

A city of challenges

Schaaf was born here and began her civic engagement at age 5, wearing a sandwich board to help her mother raise money for the Oakland Symphony. She played Cinderella and Raggedy Ann at Children's Fairyland, an amusement park on the shore of downtown Lake Merritt, interned at the zoo and has lived in the city her whole life, save for attending college in Florida and law school in Los Angeles.

As a young attorney, she served on three commissions and the boards of several nonprofits before being hired at City Hall, first as chief of staff to the council president, then as a top aide to then-Mayor Jerry Brown. In 2010, she was elected to the City Council and four years later, with Brown's blessing, emerged from the field of 14 candidates to become mayor.

The job is a tough one, historically more akin to a minefield than a pathway to higher office. Brown used eight years hunkering down to reinvent himself and help shed his flaky image. But for most recent mayors, their time in City Hall ended badly.

That is because for all of its advantages — a vibrant cultural scene, strong sense of community, lovely climate and abundant natural beauty — Oakland has long suffered.

It is a highly segregated city, and has been for generations, with a vast disparity between life in the mostly white, affluent hills and the disadvantaged “flats,” where black and brown residents have faced some of the worst ravages of urban America: drugs, crime, a dearth of jobs and opportunity, and toxic relations between police and minorities.

Recent years have seen a considerably lower crime rate, a building boom and greater prosperity, as a flood of tech wealth has washed over the Bay Area.

But the uneven spread of that abundance has produced its own set of issues. Soaring rents have contributed to a growing homeless problem and complaints that Oakland, historically an affordable alternative to San Francisco, is pricing out its middle class, just as that city has done.

“You have the juxtaposition of Google zillionaires and the hipster-tech types opposite communities that have faced decades of flight, systematic unemployment and a lack of investment,” said McCuan, who heads the political science department at Sonoma State.

On top of those challenges, Schaaf has faced a police sex abuse scandal and the deadliest fire in city history, in which 36 young people crammed into the Ghost Ship, a warehouse-turned-artist-collective and party site, were killed.

Compared with those awful episodes, Schaaf suggested, a verbal lashing from Trump is nothing. “A little surreal,” she said of her newfound celebrity, “but I've tried very hard not to let it distract me.”

‘1,000% focused’

She has avoided social media and its vitriol, left the front office to deal with the public outcry — more than 1,000 phone calls, almost all critical and most from outside the Bay Area — and refused invitations to go on national television and mud-wrestle with the president. (Not that she seems particularly suited to the endeavor.)

She predictably waved aside talk of higher office, saying she was “1,000% focused” on being reelected mayor, and professed not to worry about any personal consequences, even though the White House ominously warned the Justice Department was looking into the matter.

She has, however, retained outside counsel — a pro bono attorney, Schaaf emphasized, at no cost to the city.

And yes, the mayor allowed, she has some concern that Oakland may be made an example and punished by Trump and his administration, so others won't follow her defiant lead.

But she's undeterred. “At the end of the day,” she said, “I believe that I'm speaking for the values of the people that I represent and that we would not be cowed by a bully.”

__________________________________________________________________________

• Mark Z. Barabak covers state and national politics for the Los Angeles Times, based in San Francisco. A reporter for nearly 40 years, Barabak has covered campaigns and elections in 49 of the 50 states, including all or part of the last 10 presidential campaigns and dozens of mayoral, gubernatorial and U.S. Senate contests. He also reported from the White House and Capitol Hill during the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations.

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=a9dbe72b-6ca7-4778-8158-8cf09d53b247
http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=4b43fbb8-8c75-4425-9f2b-ed9bf5cfb802

[Im2Sexy4MyPants]

she is a law breaker they can take her to court and lock her up
if she wants to declare war on the elected american government
they can send in the troops arrest her for treason and try her in a military court

it has happened before

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Warning the population about impending fascist raids is neither illegal, nor treasonous.

It is being patriotic and standing up against the stupid fuckwit currently residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C.

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

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

California's unexceptional resistance

President Trump's war against the Golden State is a war against the nation.

By DAVID L. ULIN | Wednesday, March 21, 2018

THE EVENING BEFORE the 2016 presidential election, Governor Jerry Brown joked at a political dinner in Sacramento: “If Trump were ever elected, we'd have to build a wall around California to defend ourselves from the rest of this country.”

At the time, it seemed a safe-ish bit of humor because, of course, Hillary Clinton would win. When she didn't, I came to imagine Brown's remark as the opening volley establishing California as the state of resistance — unique, independent, distinct from the rest of the United States.

Since the president and his minions descended on Southern California like a late winter storm earlier this month, I've found myself reckoning with a new realization: It's the other way around. California is not the resistance so much as it is the mainstream. We don't need to defend ourselves against the rest of the country, because we represent it.

Don't get me wrong; I realize that California's politics don't prevail in Washington, let alone many state-houses. I understand that resistance is essential. Indeed, I am drawn to the whole idea of it, with its whisper — I won't call it a promise, exactly — of the people rising up.

(I was born in the early 1960s and came of age in the backwash of the counterculture. I went to my first demonstration in 1977 when I was 15; we were protesting Kent State University's plan to build a gym annex on the site where, seven years earlier, the Ohio National Guard had gunned down four students. We lost.)

I am drawn, as well, to the idea of California as a free state. Like the governor, I've done my share of cracking wise about the need for a “big, beautiful wall,” but one that runs north from the Gulf of California, not east from the Pacific Ocean — a barrier to keep “the Americans” out.

We Californians, after all, like to think of ourselves as the vanguard, as special in nearly every sense. We take pride in living at the cutting edge of art and culture, technology and social change. These days, we see in the multicultural landscapes of our cities a vision of what America could, and should, become.

We sometimes call this sensibility California exceptionalism. The phrase derives from Carey McWilliams' book, “California: The Great Exception”, which was published in 1949. It's one of the cliches of the state, a corollary to the myth of West Coast reinvention, the faith that life here lends itself to re-creation, to a smarter, richer, better way of life.

That this is self-serving, smug even, is obvious. We know California has its own complex and less-than-progressive history, (See Proposition 187, the racial divisions that led to the 1992 uprising and the Watts riots a quarter-century earlier, the ongoing disaster of Proposition 13). We're beset with intractable contemporary problems (homelessness, economic inequality). And yet, we cling to a vision of ourselves as exceptional.

The truth is that California is more an exaggeration, an apotheosis, of America than an anomaly. We are less distinct, less separate than we would like to believe. At our best, we share with the rest of the nation a halting, if generally forward, movement toward what the Constitution calls “a more perfect union.”

Californians are, and should be, proud that the rule of law has expanded civil rights. So are the majority of Americans. Like nearly 70% of our fellow citizens, we understand that climate change is real. Most of us want to establish a path to legalization not just for “Dreamers,” but for their parents, as do the vast majority — nearly 90% — of people in the United States.

When the president and U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions came West in early March, they did so with the intent of accelerating what our governor is calling a “war against the state of California.” The main target of their displeasure (and the target of a federal lawsuit) are three immigration statutes, including the California Values Act, all of which limit cooperation by state authorities with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

But “California values” is a misnomer for these laws; it is American values we're talking about.

To wrap our minds around what that means, we can return to McWilliams and his notion of California exceptionalism. In the nearly 70 years since his book appeared, his intentions have been widely misunderstood. California, he wrote, “is the great catch-all, the vortex at the continent's end into which elements of America's diverse population have been drawn, whirled around.” And Californians “are more like the Americans than the Americans themselves.”

During his election eve remarks in 2016, Brown added this: “We don't like walls, we like bridges.” Another volley, and he wasn't speaking only for the Golden State.

__________________________________________________________________________

• David L. Ulin is a contributing writer to Opinion at the Los Angeles Times.

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=01b24f54-6b6d-4153-8f25-8cbbc5d773ba

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

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

California's air and land protections are targeted.
It's White House versus California.

Trump administration vows to end state’s tough emissions rules and its ability to limit sale of federal acres.

By EVAN HALPER and JOSEPH TANFANI | Tuesday, April 03, 2018


Under the Clean Air Act, California is the only state that can adopt its own emissions rules, but other states can then adopt them.  — Photograph: Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration openly threatened one of the cornerstones of California's environmental protections Monday, saying that it may revoke the state's ability under the Clean Air Act to impose stricter standards than the federal government sets for vehicle emissions.

The announcement came as the administration confirmed it was tearing up landmark fuel economy rules that formed a key part of the effort by the Obama administration and California officials to combat global warming — and as the Justice Department sued to block a state law that limits the federal government's ability to sell any of the 46 million acres it controls in California.

The double-barreled move marks a sharp assault on the state's efforts to protect its environment as the Trump administration seeks to open more land in the West for mining, drilling and other interests.

California's elected leaders and environmental activists vowed to fight the push, while the administration argued that the state had exceeded its authority under the law.

“Cooperative federalism doesn't mean that one state can dictate standards for the rest of the country,” Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt said in a statement, which added that California's authority to set its own emissions standards was “being re-examined.”

The “EPA will set a national standard for greenhouse gas emissions that allows auto manufacturers to make cars that people both want and can afford — while still expanding environmental and safety benefits of newer cars,” Pruitt said.

“It's in everyone's best interest to have a national standard, and we look forward to working with all states, including California, as we work to finalize that standard.”

Governor Jerry Brown criticized the federal statement on auto emissions rules as a “belated April Fools' Day trick.”

“This cynical and meretricious abuse of power will poison our air and jeopardize the health of all Americans,” the governor said in a statement.

Although the state's authority to set its own clear-air standards has existed for decades, the other measure the administration went after — the law regarding federal land — is newly adopted.

The measure, passed by the Legislature in October, seeks to give California effective veto power over sales of federal land, not just parks or wilderness, in the state.

The law says the state won't recognize any sale, donation or exchange of federal land unless the California State Lands Commission has the right of first refusal over any deal.

The Legislature's own analysis of the bill said it raised “substantial constitutional questions.”

The Justice Department asked a federal court in Sacramento to overturn the law, saying it violated the Constitution's supremacy clause, which gives federal law primacy over state law, and a separate clause that gives Congress power “to dispose of” federal property.

The two moves joined a rapidly lengthening list of battles between California and the Trump administration over a wide range of issues, including the environment, immigration and civil rights. Last month, the Justice Department sued to block three California state laws, saying they were an unconstitutional attempt to thwart enforcement of federal immigration laws.

Pruitt's announcement said that the administration would abandon the federal goal of having vehicles average 55 miles per gallon by 2025. That target will be replaced with a weaker fuel economy standard that the administration will settle on at a later date.

The action sets up the administration for a confrontation with California and a dozen other states that use California's emissions standards.

Under the Clean Air Act, California is the only state that can independently adopt its own emissions standards, but other states can then adopt them. Several of the states that have done so have vowed to defy the administration's effort to weaken mileage standards.

The current national fuel economy targets represent the single biggest action the federal government has taken to curb greenhouse gases. They are crucial for California and other states to meet their goals for climate action and to reduce smog and other air pollution.

The targets are also essential to an effort led by Brown and others to carry the country toward meeting the obligations in the Paris accord on climate change that the Trump administration is refusing to honor.

The administration's action came at the behest of automakers, who say the 55-mile-per-gallon standard will impose too heavy a cost.

But an all-out fight between the federal and state governments over California's power to set emissions standards could backfire on automakers.


Scott Pruitt, EPA chief, says one state can't “dictate standards for the rest of the country”. — Photograph: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press.

Pruitt's legal ability to revoke California's authority is uncertain and any such move could be tied up in court for years. In the meantime, auto companies would be faced with the complicated and costly prospect of building and selling two different sets of cars — one for California and the other states that follow its standards, and one for the rest of the country.

The resisting states account for more than a third of all car sales. Although automakers have been hopeful some deal could be brokered, perhaps with California agreeing to weaken the more immediate targets in exchange for federal buy-in to more aggressive goals through 2030, that is looking increasingly unlikely.

Pruitt says he's not interested in making such concessions, and California officials say they see no reason to go along with his rollback. The tone between state air regulators and the EPA chief has grown increasingly tense.

“California will not weaken its nationally accepted clean-air standards,” said Mary Nichols, the state's chief air quality regulator. “Today's decision changes nothing in California and the 12 other states with clean car rules.”

Senator Dianne Feinstein (Democrat-California) warned that “the years of litigation and investment uncertainty will be far harder on the auto industry than simply living up to the fuel economy standards they once embraced.”

“The EPA is willfully ignoring the fact that these emission standards are working. Cars are becoming more fuel-efficient and consumers are saving money at the pump,” she said. “… There simply is no reason to roll back that progress.”

But automakers complain they are confronting a market in which gas prices are low and consumers are more interested in purchasing SUVs and pickups than the fuel-efficient passenger vehicles the federal mandates favor.

“Manufacturers need to sell vehicles that customers need and want today to fund the technological shifts and electrification and automation expected in the future,” said a statement from John Bozzella, chief executive of the Association of Global Automakers, an industry group representing the U.S. operations of car companies.

The EPA, in its statement announcing that it would propose new, lower fuel economy rules, basically adopted the automakers' analysis, pushing aside opposing views.

Industry officials and analysts note that electric cars and hybrids account for just 3% of vehicle sales in the United States, even as they are taking off in other countries. Environmentalists blame the companies, saying they are putting too much of their marketing and product development energy into SUVs.

If automakers prevail in their bid to relax mileage standards nationwide, said Dan Becker, director of the Washington-based Safe Climate Campaign, they will “grow weaker by making too many gas guzzlers, the very course that led GM and Chrysler to bankruptcy and an $85-billion bailout not even a decade ago.”

“Auto companies have the cost-effective technology — better engines and transmissions, high strength, low-weight materials — to safely meet the 2025 standards,” he said. “This is auto mechanics, not rocket science.”

And Becker warned that California is already in the process of developing its aggressive mileage targets for beyond 2025, targets that a different White House could decide to embrace nationally, leaving car firms that start backtracking now in a bind.

The more immediate dilemma that automakers — and consumers — face is how to contend with different rules applying to different parts of the country. Industry analysts say no good would come of it.

“Different standards in a single market will only cause harm to consumers, the environment, the economy and automakers,” Rebecca Lindland, executive analyst at Kelley Blue Book, said in an email. The fallout, she wrote, could include higher car prices, difficulty selling cars across state lines, and possibly more older, higher-polluting cars being used as consumers get discouraged from buying new models.

“Nobody wins if we can't come to a single standard agreement which promotes the most fuel-efficient versions of vehicles consumers already want to buy,” Lindland said.

The legal battle over federal land raises a different set of issues.

According to federal officials, the state law could block the Army's plan to convey 78 acres to a developer in the East Bay city of Dublin, a separate Navy contract with a developer for a property called Admiral's Cove in Alameda, and the long-running plan by the Veterans Affairs Department to rebuild its 388-acre West Los Angeles campus by leasing land for housing, and to provide an easement for the Purple Line Metro project.

“The Constitution empowers the federal government — not state legislatures — to decide when and how federal lands are sold,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said on Monday in a statement announcing the lawsuit.

“California has once again passed an extreme statute found in no other state to obstruct the federal government,” Jesse Panuccio, the acting associate attorney general, told reporters at the Justice Department.

__________________________________________________________________________

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

• 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.

• Joseph Tanfani covers the Justice Department and Homeland Security in the Washington, D.C., Los Angeles Times bureau. Before joining the L.A. Times in 2012, he worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he was a reporter and investigations editor, and at the Miami Herald, the Press of Atlantic City and the Williamsport Sun-Gazette.

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=ae5466e5-d212-48b0-bbe3-5b135cf9b96e

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Good luck winning that fight in the courts, dumbshit Pruitt, before Trump eventually bows out as the 45th Prez of the USA, even if he wins a second term. California's lawsuit against the EPA will be tied up in the many levels of the US court system for at least a decade, possibly more. And that will severely hurt the stupid car companies who have allowed their GREED to cloud their better judgement. Foreign car makers will be laughing all the way to the bank, because even if Trump slaps tariffs on their fuel-efficient cars which DO comply with California's rules, their products will still be cheaper than American car makers who will be forced to either produce two classes of vehicles, or else give up on the third of the USA which has tough fuel economy and emissions rules in place.

Hilarious how stupid & dumb Trump, Pruitt and those American car makers are, eh? That should cost a shitload of American jobs!!

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

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

EDITORIAL: EPA's reckless step backward

In a giveaway to industry, the Trump administration eases fuel economy standards for new cars.

Tuesday, April 03, 2018

THE WORLD is increasingly speeding toward a future of clean, zero-emissions cars. China, the largest auto market, plans to ban the sale of new vehicles powered by gasoline or diesel in the coming decades. France, Britain, Norway and India have also pledged to phase out fossil fuel vehicles. And automakers have responded. Volvo pledged in 2017 to sell only hybrid or battery models starting next year, while General Motors, Ford, Volkswagen, Daimler and other big carmakers have said they will roll out more and more electric models to serve the growing market demand worldwide.

But here in the United States, President Trump and his anti-environmental protection sidekick, Scott Pruitt, are determined to head recklessly in the opposite direction. It's up to California and other environmentally responsible states to stop them.

On Monday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced it has abandoned  ambitious but much-needed fuel economy rules that required automakers to step up the improvements in their cars' and SUVs' mileage and emissions. Adopted under the Obama administration, the regulations were a crucial piece of the national effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions and slow global climate change.

Indeed, the regulations being heedlessly ditched were slated to improve the average fuel economy of new cars and trucks 50% by 2025, to almost 55 miles per gallon. To meet the new standards, automakers were expected to develop and sell more hybrid and electric models, which, over time, would slash oil consumption, smoggy tailpipe pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions.

But those benefits apparently carried little weight with Pruitt, a stalwart shill for the fossil fuel industry, who claims the Obama administration rushed the analysis of whether the regulations were feasible and set the standards too high. That's mere pretext, given that Pruitt has used his tenure at the EPA to systematically attack responsible, science- and health-based regulations. Nor, apparently, is it enough that he's weakened national environmental protections; Pruitt has suggested he may go after California's essential air quality regulations and climate change program as well.

In order to address the enormous contribution cars and trucks make to California's unusually severe air-quality problems, the federal Clean Air Act gave the state unique power to adopt vehicle emissions rules that are more stringent than the EPA's. The federal government can block the state rules only if the EPA deems them inconsistent with the Clean Air Act's efforts to protect public health or welfare. Thankfully, Governor Jerry Brown and state leaders have made it clear that California is not rolling back its clean-car rules. Other states can follow California's lead on tailpipe standards, and a dozen states, representing about one-third of the U.S. auto market, have said they will continue to do so.

That would leave manufacturers with two options. They could go the costly route of making two versions of each vehicle: A more fuel-efficient model for states with California's standards, and a less fuel-efficient model for the rest of the country. Or they could just comply with California's rules, which would negate the EPA's rollback. Or Pruitt and Trump could try to deny California its longstanding power to enact emissions standards, triggering (another) legal battle with the state.

It sure sounds like Pruitt is readying for a war. “Cooperative federalism doesn't mean that one state can dictate standards for the rest of the country,” he said in a statement. California leaders, already practiced in Trump resistance, are digging in as well.

Pruitt's efforts are a colossal waste of time and money. Every other government in the industrialized world recognizes that climate change is real and that it will take serious action now to minimize the devastating effects of global warming. The leading world economies also recognize that there is a much-needed shift from fossil fuel vehicles underway, and they are choosing to lead the transition to low- and no-carbon transportation systems.

Even automakers know this. That's why most of them are already developing and marketing electric and hybrid models to sell around the world. Instead of making progress toward innovation and a cleaner future, Trump and Pruitt have chosen, irresponsibly and cynically, to keep this country guzzling gas and pumping out carbon.

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=40f18d8f-3d71-48c7-b9bc-c54b1f6722f2

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

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

California sues U.S. over car mileage rules

State joins 16 others in fight over vehicle emission rules as Brown levels attack on EPA head Pruitt.

By PATRICK McGREEVY and BEVAN HALPER | Tuesday, May 02, 2018


The California-led lawsuit seeks to block the EPA's effort to weaken rules requiring cars and SUVs to average nearly 55 miles per gallon by 2025.
 — Photograph: Gary Kazanjian/Associated Press.

SACRAMENTO — An angry Governor Jerry Brown on Tuesday announced a lawsuit by California and 16 other states against the Trump administration to stop it from rolling back aggressive national fuel economy standards championed by the state.

In comments at the Capitol, Brown called actions of the Trump administration “so outrageous,” adding that “Trump is definitely running a one-man demolition derby on science, the Clean Air Act and a lot of things we are trying to do.”

Brown called Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt “Outlaw Pruitt,” and accused him of “breaking the law.”

“He's flouting the Clean Air Act and the legitimate needs and well-being of the American people,” the governor said.

The California-led lawsuit filed in federal court seeks to block the EPA's effort to weaken rules requiring cars and SUVs to average nearly 55 miles per gallon by 2025.

The rules are crucial to California and other states' ability to meet their climate action goals, as well as to fulfilling their vow to carry the country toward meeting its obligations under the Paris agreement on global warming. Under the Trump administration, the federal agency has said the standards are too onerous and need to be reconsidered.

While the administration has yet to announce how far it intends to roll back the mileage targets, a draft of its plan seen by lawmakers shows it is poised to significantly weaken them. The plan the EPA has drafted with the Department of Transportation would reduce the target from 55 miles per gallon to 42 miles per gallon.

It would also revoke the authority California and other states now have to keep in place the stricter targets.

The states argue that the EPA acted arbitrarily and capriciously in trying to unravel the aggressive targets, failed to follow its own regulations and violated the Clean Air Act.

“The states joining today's lawsuit represent 140 million people who simply want cleaner and more efficient cars,” Brown said. “This phalanx of states will defend the nation's clean car standards to boost gas mileage and curb toxic air pollution.”

The lawsuit comes only days after Pruitt assured members of Congress that he was committed to compromise with California and would seek mileage targets the state could embrace. But soon after Pruitt made those assurances in congressional hearings, his agency's draft plan surfaced. It showed no intention of brokering a deal and instead strikes a hostile posture toward California and other states.

Trump was elected on the promise of reducing red tape and regulations for businesses, and the EPA has sought to scale back rules on several major industries. “Cooperative federalism doesn't mean that one state can dictate standards for the rest of the country,” Pruitt said in a recent statement on the emission standards issue.

Even the auto industry has become unnerved at how aggressively the EPA is going after emissions standards. A Trump administration war on the issue with California, which Brown said on Tuesday is “sharpening,” threatens to tangle the regulations up in years of litigation, leaving car makers uncertain of what to plan for.

EPA officials declined on Tuesday to respond to the allegations in the lawsuit or the name-calling by the governor.

The administration did not respond directly to a question about why it has had such a heavy hand with states, despite the normal deference urged by conservatives.

“Certainly the administration supports state rights,” Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said at Monday's press briefing. “In regard to the specific lawsuit, we're reviewing that,” she added.

California has been at the forefront of environmental protections for decades and pioneered efforts to regulate tailpipe emissions in the 1970s, when it created the country's first standards for nitrogen oxide emissions from tailpipes.

Starting in 2010 during the Obama administration, the EPA, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and California Air Resources Board established a single national program of greenhouse gas emissions standards for model year 2012-25 vehicles.

That program permits automakers to design and manufacture to a single target, according to state Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who filed the lawsuit.

The attorney general noted that last month the EPA reversed course and claimed that the clean car standards for model years 2022-25 should be scrapped. Becerra said the federal government offered no evidence to support the decision and the expected rules that may weaken the existing 2022-25 standards.

Becerra, who joined Brown at the Capitol to announce what is the state's 32nd legal challenge to the Trump administration, said the existing clean car standards are achievable, science-based and “a boon for hard-working American families.”

“Enough is enough,” Becerra said. “We're not looking to pick a fight with the Trump administration, but when the stakes are this high for our families' health and our economic prosperity, we have a responsibility to do what is necessary to defend them.”

The lawsuit was filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and California was joined as a plaintiff by other states including Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon and Pennsylvania among others, as well as the District of Columbia.

The states that sued represent some 43% of the U.S. automobile market, Brown said.

Brown was in fighting form on Tuesday, pounding the podium and blasting Pruitt for “his expensive travel tastes and funny little redecorating plans,” a reference to Pruitt taking first-class airline flights and spending tens of thousands of dollars to remodel his office, including installation of a sound-proof telephone booth.

The governor said the changes would make the U.S. auto industry less competitive with China and other countries in providing cleaner, more efficient engines.

“This move by Pruitt with the help and encouragement of Trump is not going to make America great,” Brown said. “It's going to make America second-rate and probably will jeopardize America's auto industry.”

He noted the Obama administration agreed to the standards with states including California based on two years of study.

“You can't just like some tin-horn dictator say, ‘I'm tearing up a rule that is based on a two-year-determination process’,” Brown said.

The states' lawsuit was supported by members of Congress from California including Senator Dianne Feinstein (Democrat-California) and Representative Doris Matsui (Democrat-Sacramento).

“The Trump administration cannot ignore the science and the law,” Feinstein said.

California has sued the Trump administration on environmental issues more than a dozen times and the state has won each case that has been decided, Becerra said.

The Trump administration's pending plan to freeze the fuel economy targets at 42 miles per gallon and pre-empt California's ability to set its own emissions standards, meanwhile, drew a scolding on Tuesday by Sentor Tom Carper (Democrat-Delaware), the ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee.

Carper cited a leaked copy of the EPA proposal, which he said argues that “states may not adopt or enforce tailpipe greenhouse gas emissions standards when such standards relate to fuel economy standards and are therefore preempted” by federal law.

“Such a proposal, if finalized, would harm U.S. national and economic security, undermine efforts to combat global warming pollution, create regulatory and manufacturing uncertainty for the automobile industry and unnecessary litigation, increase the amount of gasoline consumers would have to buy, and runs counter to statements that both of you have made to Members of Congress,” Carper wrote in a letter on Tuesday to Pruitt and Transportation Secretary Elaine L. Chao.

__________________________________________________________________________

• Los Angeles Times staff writer Noah Bierman contributed to this report. Bevan Halper and Bierman reported from Washington.

• Patrick McGreevy covers the California Legislature out of the Sacramento bureau. Since joining the Los Angeles Times in 1998, he has worked in the City Hall and San Fernando Valley bureaus, writing about subjects including Valley secession, LAPD reform and city government during the administrations of Mayors Richard Riordan, James Hahn and Antonio Villaraigosa. He is a native of San Diego and a graduate of San Jose State University.

• 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.

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=9ec05529-f8c1-405b-9f67-a466a65f0891

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

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

EDITORIAL: California versus EPA, round 10

Wednesday, May 02, 2018

WORLD LEADERS may negotiate their climate change accords in foreign capitals, but the efforts to stem global warming may succeed or fail based on what happens in courtrooms here in the United States.

On Tuesday, Governor Jerry Brown and state Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced that they have filed California's 10th, and potentially most consequential, lawsuit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Joined by 16 other states and the District of Columbia, California is defending a planned increase in vehicle fuel-economy standards against an attack by EPA head Scott Pruitt.

Adopted under the Obama administration, the clean-car regulations were a crucial piece of the national effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions. And California, which has the unique authority to set its own vehicle emission standards, had agreed to forgo more stringent standards in favor of national regulations that would have a bigger impact on greenhouse gases.

Last month Pruitt announced the agency would abandon the stiffer fuel economy requirements, which were supposed to be phased in from 2022 to 2025. Pruitt is widely expected to weaken or even eliminate fuel standards, and he is reportedly looking to do so in a way that circumvents California's authority to adopt its own rules.

An attack on California's authority would not only hinder the Golden State's ability to clean up the air; it would stymie a dozen other states that have adopted California's vehicle emissions standards. And that would cripple efforts to combat climate change: Cars and trucks recently surpassed power plants as America's largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.

The clean-car rules were slated to improve the average fuel economy of new cars and trucks by 50% by 2025, to almost 55 miles per gallon. To meet the new standards, automakers were expected to develop and sell more hybrid and electric models, gradually cutting smoggy tailpipe pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions.

The states' lawsuit argues that the EPA acted arbitrarily to overturn the standards, violating its own rules and the Clean Air Act. Becerra said the federal government offered no evidence to support its decision.

California leaders rightly recognize the threat posed by Pruitt and the Climate Change Denier-in-Chief. Fortunately, the 17-state coalition formed to fight the EPA's clean-car rollback represents about 43% of the U.S. market for new cars and 44% of the U.S. population. That should make it abundantly clear to the administration and to the automakers lobbying for looser standards that Americans do not want to move backward on climate change and clean air.

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/desktop/latimes/default.aspx?&edid=4fe1eccc-e459-4dc6-ad3d-2b3cd8c9b7f4

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

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

Potential fallout from EPA's fuel economy rollback plan

Climate and air quality would suffer under the proposal, study shows.

By EVAN HALPER | Thursday, May 03, 2018


Emissions from transportation generate the most greenhouse gases, and would keep rising under the plan. — Photograph: Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times.

WASHINGTON D.C. — The Trump administration's plan to scrap vehicle fuel economy rules would lead to a surge of oil consumption that independent researchers warn threatens to paralyze the ability of the United States to make crucial progress in confronting climate change.

The administration's blueprint, as detailed in a confidential draft that was leaked to lawmakers and the media last week, would propel Americans to consume up to hundreds of thousands of barrels of additional oil daily and spend billions of dollars more on fuel, and leave cars and trucks sending more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than they do today, according to a study released on Thursday by Rhodium Group, a research firm that tracks the progress nations are making in meeting climate goals.

The dire projections about how the plan would hinder the ability of California and the rest of the nation to slow climate change comes as state research already shows that a retreat on the emissions rules would hamstring California's effort to reduce the air pollution choking the state's population centers.

As California this week launched a 17-state legal effort to block the administration's rollback of vehicle mileage-per-gallon targets, Rhodium assessed the potential fallout of scaling back the rules.

“The decisions we make today are going to have a long-term effect on total vehicle emissions,” said Kate Larsen, a director at the firm. “We were already going to have to do a lot more to meet our goals, even with the standards created in the Obama administration.”

Rhodium's snapshot of how things would play out under the Trump administration's draft plan to freeze fuel efficiency targets at 42 miles per gallon — instead of pushing toward 55 miles per gallon by 2025, as the current law envisions — reflects a nation heading in a profoundly different direction than the world's other economic powerhouses.

The plan would have American vehicles consuming as many as 283,000 extra barrels of oil per day by 2025. By 2030, the amount of additional oil consumed could grow to as much as 644,000 barrels daily, the firm found. That is more fuel than is used each day in a large state such as New York or New Jersey. The increase could exceed the total annual oil production of Alaska.

As for greenhouse gases, by 2030 the increase from relaxed mileage targets could near the total emissions that Colorado sends into the atmosphere for everything it does, including from burning gas in car engines, producing electricity at power plants and releasing potent methane from drilling operations.

Transportation recently surpassed power plants as the area of the economy generating the most greenhouse gases. Its emissions need to be reduced dramatically to slow the pace of global warming. But under the administration's vision, they would keep going up.

The severity of the effects would depend on oil prices. If prices stay at current levels or drop, the impact in terms of air quality and climate change would be particularly acute. When gas prices are low, consumers buy more SUVs and pickups, which burn more gas.


The severity of the plan's effects would depend on oil prices, which influence which cars people buy. — Photograph: Anne Cusack/Los Angeles Times.

Tougher fuel economy rules are particularly useful to efforts to reduce emissions in times of low prices at the pump, when consumers are less apt to turn to higher-efficiency vehicles to save money. Even when gas prices are low, according to federal data, the fuel economy rules still save consumers money over the long haul. The amount they add to the cost of a vehicle is dwarfed by the amount drivers save in fuel.

In the best-case scenario, drivers would spend some $90 billion more at the pump as a result of the plan drafted by President Trump's Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation, according to the Rhodium Group. But the costs could pile up to more than $200 billion.

The plan, Larsen said, would also slow or halt key research and design developments by auto companies, creating a long-term ripple effect on the types of cars rolled out of factories. “These vehicles will stay on the road for a long time,” she said. “It would be a real loss not just for the vehicles that come off the assembly line in the next five years, but for that whole generation of vehicle technology that won't benefit from continually improved efficiency over those years.”

The administration's plan remains a draft, and it could change before becoming official. The draft goes further to relax mileage targets than even auto companies had been seeking. Some of the automakers are growing increasingly anxious that the administration is pushing too far, according to sources involved in negotiations. The companies worry the administration is inviting costly and protracted litigation with states like California, which could create years of uncertainty for the industry.

Or worse yet, it could leave the industry confronting two different mileage standards: one federal standard, and one set by California using its authority under the Clean Air Act and a waiver it was given by the federal government.

The Trump administration plan aims to revoke California's authority to stick to stricter emissions. Legal scholars are dubious that it would succeed.

“They are doing a retread of arguments that were made during the Geroge W. Bush administration,” said Jody Freeman, who was President Obama's advisor on climate change and now directs the environmental law program at Harvard. Two federal district courts rejected the arguments at that time, she said.

But before the administration even gets to the point of making its case, it will have to persuade the courts that any rollback at all is warranted. The lawsuit California and other states filed on Tuesday argues that the administration has yet to do the work required to justify even modest changes in the fuel targets. The Obama administration backed its rules with thousands of pages of research and data. The Trump administration has yet to offer anything close to an equally exhaustive scientific and economic review to back its plan.

“If you want to reverse a policy, you have to do so based on facts and data that is not arbitrary,” Freeman said. “They have yet to provide the level of specificity you need to do an about-face like that.”

__________________________________________________________________________

• 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.

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=41bce9c6-3e73-4a52-aa0b-8f3b4d3c6d6d

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

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

EPA's agenda gets down and dirty

Disavowed research is used to justify putting mega-polluting big rigs on America's roads.

By EVAN HALPER | Tuesday, May 29, 2018


Lawmakers, including Republicans, and most of the trucking industry oppose plans to allow trucks that run on rebuilt diesel engines.
 — Photograph: Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times.

WASHINGTON D.C. — At a time when acts of defiance against the Trump administration are routine in Sacramento, the rebuke that breezed through the California Assembly this month still came as a jolt. Even Trump loyalists in the chamber joined in.

The message to the administration was clear: Forget about your plan to unleash on freeways a class of rebuilt trucks that spew as much as 400 times the choking soot that conventional new big rigs do. Getting caught behind the wheel of one of these mega-polluters in California would carry a punishing $25,000 minimum fine under the measure that lawmakers passed 73 to 0. It had the support of 25 Republicans.

“This was a reaction,” said Chris Shimoda, vice president of government affairs for the California Trucking Association, which sponsored the legislation. “A lot of people have made the investments to clean up their trucks. They don't want to see an obvious loophole that allows others to be gross polluters and undercut them.”

Equally strong reactions are rippling across the country in response to the Trump administration's push to boost a cottage industry eager to sell trucks that run on rebuilt diesel engines. The trucks look new from the outside but are equipped with repurposed motors that, according to the Environmental Protection Agency's own experts, threaten to produce enough soot each year to cause up to 1,600 premature deaths.

President Trump's EPA has tried to justify the move by citing a privately funded study that claimed the trucks did not cause more pollution, but even the university that conducted the research has cast doubt on the findings.

Air regulators loathe the proposal to allow thousands more of the trucks on the roads. Most of the trucking industry feels the same. Even the White House budget office and several conservative allies of the administration are balking.

“We urge you to consider the adverse impact on the economy,” said a letter that the EPA recently disclosed from the Republican senators of Indiana, West Virginia and North Carolina. They warned EPA chief Scott Pruitt that the plan was ill-advised and disruptive to industry. Ten House Republicans agreed in their own letter, which warned the proposal was a potential job killer. “We respectfully ask that you carefully consider the negative impacts,” the GOP lawmakers wrote.

Yet the EPA is undeterred. Its crusade to lift an Obama-era ban on these heavily polluting vehicles known as “gliders” perseveres, largely at the behest of a small group of activists on the right and one generous political donor, Tennessee businessman Tommy Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald, who has met privately with Pruitt and who held a campaign event in 2016 for Trump at one of his facilities, says restricting the sale of the trucks and the kits to build them threatens 22,000 jobs.

Pruitt says the restrictions on the trucks were a misuse of Clean Air Act regulations.

In announcing the rollback, Pruitt's agency ignored its own findings about how much environmental damage the vehicles cause. Instead, it cited a new study from Tennessee Tech University that concluded, astonishingly, that the glider trucks were no more harmful to air quality than trucks with new engines. That study was bankrolled by Fitzgerald's business.

The results of the study came as a shock to experts at the EPA, and also to the engineering faculty at Tennessee Tech.

“Tennessee Tech has skills in some areas, but air pollution is an area we have never worked in,” said David Huddleston, an engineering professor at the university. “I thought, who on campus knows enough to actually even offer an opinion on that? We have one guy who has some expertise in emissions, but he wasn't even involved in this.”

The faculty would soon learn that the study was run by a university vice president who lacked any graduate-level engineering training, and that it was conducted at a Fitzgerald-owned facility. Tennessee Tech's president and Representative Diane Black (Republican-Tennessee) — who has accepted more than $200,000 in political donations from Fitzgerald, his companies and top employees — had lobbied Pruitt to embrace the research.

The Tennessee study quickly came under suspicion. Notes from discussions between EPA scientists and its authors revealed major flaws. The EPA scientists then updated their own tests of glider vehicles, which confirmed the trucks are substantially dirtier than newly manufactured trucks.

The head of Tennessee Tech's engineering department dismissed the study's key conclusion as a “far-fetched, scientifically implausible claim” by a research team that included “no qualified, credentialed engineer.” The faculty senate passed a resolution demanding the university revoke its support for the study and begin an investigation.

By late February, the university asked the EPA to stop using or referring to the study, pending its investigation. That investigation continues.

“The university takes the allegations of research misconduct seriously,” the school said in a statement to the Los Angeles Times. “Tennessee Tech is still in the process of following its internal procedures related to such matters.”

Despite Pruitt's earlier acknowledgment that the study factored into his decision to revisit the glider vehicle restrictions, an EPA spokesperson said in an email last week that “it played no role” in the action the EPA is now taking.

Two former EPA chiefs are skeptical. Christine Todd Whitman, who led the agency under George W. Bush, and Carol Browner, who led it under Bill Clinton, pointed out in a March letter to Pruitt that the industry's petition that prompted the EPA to act on glider trucks relied heavily on the now-disavowed study. They urged him to withdraw the proposal.

Fitzgerald's company is refusing to publicly release the full study, which it owns under its arrangement with the school. But it has cast itself as the victim.

“We did not expect to receive work product that some have characterized as ‘flawed and shoddy’ or ‘far-fetched and scientifically implausible’, and we certainly did not expect to be defamed by faculty members and administrators from the very institution that conducted the research,” a company lawyer wrote to university officials this year.

The company later demanded that four faculty members who have spoken out against the research and the company's involvement in it turn over any emails they wrote about the matter.

“It's a mess,” Huddleston said. “All these professors are trying to do is the right thing. And now they have had to go out and hire lawyers to protect themselves. It's sad.”

Representative Black recently told Nashville Public Radio that she had no regrets about using the study to try to help the glider business. She said glider manufacturers were in a noble “David and Goliath” battle with much larger trucking interests seeking to crush them.

But even some at the White House are chafing. Its budget office directed the EPA to undertake an extensive economic review that will hold things up for weeks and could reveal more legal vulnerabilities. The free-market think tank FreedomWorks has, in turn, started a campaign to pressure the White House to approve the EPA's plan promptly, without requiring the economic analysis.

It remains to be seen whether Pruitt will prevail. But if he succeeds, glider truck drivers could find themselves entering California at their own risk. Backers of the $25,000 penalties that the Assembly approved said they would expect to see them enforced, regardless of how the EPA proceeds. The bill appears likely to pass the state Senate and be signed into law.

Asked how it would confront that challenge, the agency demurred. “EPA has not yet taken a final action,” said the email from its press office, “and will not comment on hypothetical outcomes before the process is complete.”

__________________________________________________________________________

• 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.

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=3cc035cd-b0e5-41ce-a686-e43e01179a33

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

California has got it right.....fine those polluting truckies $25,000 a time.

The sort of truckies who drive polluting vehicles will all be dumb Trump supporters anyway, so slapping another $25,000 fine on them every time a cop in California sees them would most definitely be a good thing. Teach them a lesson being beeing stupid, mentally-retarded Trump supporters and being silly enough to enter California.

[aDjUsToR]

Your Trump obsession appears to have taken over your life. Did you know there is now quite cheap therapy counselling over the internet? 😁

[aDjUsToR]

Yes gleefully and spitefully slap a struggling truck driver with a 25,000 fine (no help for him/her), while splashing billions of other people's money on various harebrained and wasteful loony left schemes. That's loony left thinking in a "nut" shell.

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Hey, a truck driver can CHOOSE to not drive a stinking, polluting truck into California and instead do what other truckies do and drive a truck which complies with California's environmental laws. Nobody is forcing truckies to CHOOSE to drive non-compliant trucks over the state line into California. If a truck driver doesn't like California's laws, then fuck off and ply their trade elsewhere. The simple fact is that California used to have a HUGE pollution problem in their cities and they chose many years ago to do something about it after considerable pressure from the citizens of that state.

[Im2Sexy4MyPants]

California is a total failure

ITS BANKRUPT AND NEEDS TO STEAL MONEY FROM ITS PEOPLE TO PAY THEIR MASSIVE DEBTS

California is being ruined i mean run into the ground by stupid governor moonbat a dopy commie fuckwit
who has bankrupted the shithole so bad that their biggest export is people leaving because their taxes are as big as the moon



Not even Superman can save this California Bizarro Land that's because for California progressive means going down the shithole

The quicker they decide to exterminate all the commie scum the better off the whole planet will be lol

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

California is the 5th RICHEST economy in the entire world.

The states which voted for Trump are miles behind California in the economic stakes.

Kinda says it all about places which are full of stupid retards who voted for Trump, eh?

California should tell the rest of the USA to “go fuck themselves” and go it alone.

No more Trump-supporting maggots leeching off California's earnings would definitely be a good thing.

[Im2Sexy4MyPants]

Biggest Not richest you commie retard

its not the richest economy its one of the biggest ecomomys with 39 m people and the taxes are so high that the middle class are leaving in droves because they cant afford to live there
so its just a place for the rich libtard scum
you should look up and see how much debt they have and how many homeless people
the place is a drugged out shit hole

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

The federal tax take per capita from California is way, way ahead of any other state.

In other words, the rest of America is leeching off the earnings of Californians.

And with the exception of Texas (which is still way behind California), Trump-supporting states have the least federal tax takes per capita in America.

In other words, the Trump supporting states are the worst when it comes to leeching off California.

All the more reason for California to go it alone and tell the Trump supporting states to “go fuck themselves and suppor themselves!”

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Biggest Not richest you commie retard

its not the richest economy its one of the biggest ecomomys with 39 m people and the taxes are so high that the middle class are leaving in droves because they cant afford to live there
so its just a place for the rich libtard scum
you should look up and see how much debt they have and how many homeless people
the place is a drugged out shit hole

Trump supporting retards are free to CHOOSE to stay the fuck out of California and out of the business of Californians.

Let them support themselves instead of leeching & sponging off liberal states.

And only stupid rightie-voting crybabies are leaving California. Good riddance to them.

[Im2Sexy4MyPants]

Your new form of cock sucking communism has nothing to do with helping the poor workers i think it's
more about a gang of lefty thugs with a big government that lords over the people and steals all their money
its about rape,destruction,poor me, and control freakism right out of a holly wood wet dream
perfect for those stupid leftist brain dead cunts that need
a bullet through their tiny weak brains
to stop them crying to their climate change god who is really an idiot whos escaped from a mental hospital

message to all you stupid morons who are not really progressive at all
please do the world a favor and kill yourself because your life sucks
its to save the planet and stop the ice from melting and improve the gene pool.
 

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

The arsehole who is doing the most damage to American workers is Donald J. Trump.

He is shitting on the conditions of ordinary American workers big-time.

Trump is all about enriching himself and other rich-prick Americans at the expense of America workers.

[Im2Sexy4MyPants]

 You are like Hitler totally insane

You're having another trump orgasm again
you piss weak name calling twat
trumps rich blaa bla bla wank wank
get help you mad moron

maybe you need a new brain transplanted from a flea bitten rabid dog
then you can be trained to stop eating your own shit
and kiss trumps arse

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from the print edition of the Los Angeles Times…

California versus Trump in the courts: A score card

State Attorney General Xavier Becerra has sued the Trump administration 38 times.

By PATRICK McGREEVY | Monday, July 23, 2018


State Attorney General Xavier Becerra, center, has won 12 key rulings in the lawsuits he has filed against the U.S. federal administration of Donald J. Trump.
 — Photograph: Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press.

SACRAMENTO — California Attorney General Xavier Becerra has emerged as a leading national figure in what Democrats call their “resistance” to the Trump administration, filing a flurry of 38 lawsuits against the federal government in just the last year and a half.

The state's legal challenges have attacked federal actions on issues including immigration, the environment, the U.S. census, education, the internet, the rights of transgender people, and healthcare.

California's lawsuits claim Trump administration actions conflict with existing federal law, are overreaching of executive authority, fail to follow procedures for public input on rule changes or are based on whim without proper rationale.

So far, Becerra has won 12 key court rulings in the lawsuits he filed and lost on three. In other cases, the federal government reversed the policy challenged in lawsuits before a court could decide. Most of the legal cases are still awaiting a final determination by the courts.

Here's a rundown of the 38 legal actions filed by the state attorney general.

Immigration

California is home to an estimated quarter of the 11.1 million immigrants in the country illegally. Becerra, who describes himself as the “proud son of immigrants,” has targeted many of his lawsuits — nine so far — to challenge Trump's get-tough policy on immigration enforcement

Becerra sued over Trump's proposal to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, alleging it failed to comply with federal and state environmental laws, but a judge ruled against the state. More recently, Becerra went to court to challenge the federal policy of separating immigrants who enter the country illegally from their children, claiming it violates the due process rights of parents. That case is pending, although courts have ruled in other cases that children must be reunited with parents.

California also led a lawsuit against the Trump administration's decision to end a program that protects immigrants brought to the country illegally as children from deportation. The lawsuit argued that canceling the program violates the Constitution, and the courts issued a preliminary injunction.

One of Becerra's first lawsuits was over a Trump administration travel ban on immigrants from six countries with predominantly Muslim populations, claiming that the order represented unconstitutional religious discrimination. Judges in other cases put a freeze on the order. When Trump issued a revised travel ban, Becerra joined other states in suing again.

The Supreme Court last month upheld Trump's latest version of travel restrictions.

Becerra has also gone to court to oppose the Trump administration's attempt to place immigration enforcement conditions on certain public safety grants for law enforcement in cities that adopted so-called sanctuary laws that restrict cooperation with immigration agents. A request for a preliminary injunction was denied.

Other pending lawsuits sought to compel federal agencies to provide documents showing the rationale behind decisions to put conditions on grants to sanctuary cities, and to toughen enforcement of immigration laws.

When the administration proposed adding a question on citizenship to the 2020 U.S. census, Beccerra sued, claiming that the action was “arbitrary and capricious” and lacking proper rationale.

Healthcare

With three lawsuits, California led the effort to combat efforts by the Trump administration and others to roll back provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, known popularly as Obamacare.

Becerra won a preliminary injunction to block federal rules that allowed employers to deny women cost-free birth control that the state argued was guaranteed under the Affordable Care Act.

The state was not successful in suing the administration over its stopping cost-sharing reduction payments that states argued are required by the Affordable Care Act. A judge denied a request for an emergency injunction, but the state is seeking a summary judgment on the merits of its claims.

Becerra also led a coalition of 16 attorneys general in winning a court decision allowing them to be part of the opposition to an application by Texas and other states that are seeking to halt operation of the Affordable Care Act nationwide.


Wall prototypes along the U.S.-Mexico border in February. California has sued over the proposed wall. — Photograph: Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times.

Education

As the first person in his family to graduate from college, Becerra has said education is an important issue for him, and he has filed a trio of lawsuits to press his case. He sued the U.S. Department of Education challenging its decision to refrain from helping students obtain forgiveness of their loans in cases where they went to universities that engaged in fraud.

California filed a lawsuit against the Education Department claiming that it had failed to process debt-relief claims submitted by students who took out federal loans to attend for-profit colleges. In addition, Becerra went to court to ask that federal officials require for-profit schools to meet a standard of preparing students for “gainful employment in a recognized occupation.”

Environment

With California leading the move from coal and oil to cleaner energy sources, it is no surprise that the most lawsuits filed by the attorney general — 21 so far — have challenged Trump administration proposals to roll back environmental protections.

In May, Becerra led a coalition of 17 states in suing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency claiming that it had violated the federal Clean Air Act in rolling back a requirement that cars average nearly 55 miles per gallon by 2025. The case is still pending.

Last week, Becerra led a coalition of 16 states in suing the EPA to challenge its suspension of a mandate that most rebuilt diesel engines installed in heavy-duty trucks meet the same emissions standards applied to new engines.

California previously sued the EPA for delaying other rules aimed at reducing air pollution, winning a case that said the agency improperly failed to identify parts of the country that have not achieved smog-reduction goals. The state also won an injunction after the agency balked at regulating methane created by oil and gas operations on public lands.

Becerra is still awaiting a judgment on a lawsuit that challenged the administration over the repeal of restrictions on hydraulic fracturing oil extraction, known as fracking, on federal lands. A decision also has not been made yet on a state lawsuit that argued the EPA violated the Clean Air Act by repealing a requirement that major sources of air pollutants, including petroleum refineries, install equipment to minimize pollution.

The state also sued twice over delay in a federal rule requiring companies that extract oil, gas and coal to pay royalties to states. A judge has ruled in favor of the state's claim in one of the cases.

Becerra also went to court with other states to force the EPA to reverse its suspension of safeguards for agricultural workers, claiming that if workers are not given training and education on pesticides, they risk being harmed. The EPA later backed down and implemented the training.

The agency also reversed course when it was hit with a California lawsuit claiming that it had improperly delayed enforcement of an energy-efficiency standard for ceiling fans, and a court sided with Becerra in a lawsuit alleging the federal government had failed to enact energy standards for portable air conditioners and walk-in freezers.

Last month, Becerra sued the EPA, claiming that it had acted improperly in allowing companies to manufacture products with hydrofluorocarbons — a refrigerant that is a potent greenhouse gas. The case is pending.

Another legal challenge was filed against the EPA over its suspension of the 2015 Clean Water Rule aimed at protecting lakes and streams from pollutants. The court has not yet ruled in that case.

Before EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt resigned this month amid scandal, Becerra sued to force the release of documents the state believed would shed light on Pruitt's suspected conflicts of interest.

And when the U.S. Department of the Interior proposed to restart federal leases for coal mining, California sued and is awaiting a ruling.

California and other states went to court and won a challenge to the decision by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to delay increased penalties for automakers whose vehicles fail to comply with fuel-efficiency standards.

LGBTQ rights, net neutrality

Becerra joined transgender service members in suing to challenge Trump's ban on transgender people serving in the military. A preliminary injunction was granted that could affect a subsequent executive order limiting service.

He also took the Federal Communications Commission to court, challenging its action to repeal net-neutrality rules, arguing its action was over-reach. The case is pending.

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• Patrick McGreevy covers the California Legislature out of the Sacramento bureau. Since joining the Los Angeles Times in 1998, he has worked in the City Hall and San Fernando Valley bureaus, writing about subjects including Valley secession, LAPD reform and city government during the administrations of Mayors Richard Riordan, James Hahn and Antonio Villaraigosa. He is a native of San Diego and a graduate of San Jose State University.

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