I Don’t Feel Sorry for Californians Anymore

I used to feel sorry for Californians, myself included. I felt sorry for them because, with the exception of a couple of years in the early eighties, our beautiful state had been hijacked by the brain-dead Democrats who had been running things in Sacramento for more than four decades. These otherwise unemployables have been uniformly choosing the wrong tax and spend and governance and regulatory policies for even longer than I've lived here (34 years).

They have taken the best public educational system and trashed it. From what was on a par with any public school education in America just a generation ago, we have to now feel lucky there's a Louisiana, a Mississippi and an Alabama, or California would rank last out of the 50 states.

Every survey of business leaders over the past several years ranks California in the bottom two or three states in terms of friendliness to business formation and operation. Maybe that's why so few choose to now relocate or open branch operations here.

Our income taxes are the third-highest in America. Our sales taxes are fourth highest in the nation. Public employee and cop and fire unions are so gargantuan they're strangling our cities and our state with an unfunded pension bomb that's ready to explode in our collective faces. It's to the point that we now work for them, not the other way around. How was that allowed to happen?

Our roads and bridges infrastructure is decaying before our very eyes. Our once-vaunted Central Valley agriculture, which has produced more than 10% of all fruits and veggies in the nation for decades, is now a depression-era dustbowl because some commie pinko weenie in a black robe shut off their water in favor of the Delta Smelt. What's that, you ask? It's a little Anchovy-sized fish that this judge preferred over suffering, drought-stricken, jobless people. So it lives, they die.

San Francisco won't let the ROTC into its schools, prohibits the military from filming commercials inside county limits and won't stop aggressive panhandling, but it will prevent its citizens from buying pets because they might abandon them. And now, San Fran has just passed legislation to prevent McDonald's from selling Happy Meals because they're deemed by the calorie police to be unhealthful. Amazing.

And these same liberal policies have turned Los Angeles into a third world-caliber toilet inhabited by illegal aliens and fourth-generation welfare recipients, sucking up our tax dollars like a Hoover vacuum cleaner on steroids.

So why do I no longer feel sorry for Californians? Because they absolutely refuse to change it. The election just concluded gave Golden Staters one more chance to fix some of our problems and prevent a few others. And what did you do, California? You blew it, big time. You reelected Jerry Brown, a guy who earned the moniker "Moonbeam" when he was the Guv in the seventies. He appointed Rose Bird as Chief Justice of the state Supreme Court. She overturned 62 death penalty cases, every single one that came before her, including the Manson Family killers. He signed the legislation that permitted collective bargaining for public employee unions, which now threatens our State's very economic existence. He vehemently opposed Proposition 13 until it passed, at which time he decided to support it. Flip-Flopper? You decide. After he termed out he ran for and was elected Mayor of Oakland. He was so successful in this job the state was forced to take over their school system. And, he managed to also double their murder rate (one could argue he might have been even more successful if he'd have tripled it!) Then, as our illustrious Attorney General, he refused to defend Proposition 8 in the courts even though he was obligated by law and his oath to do so. And I don't care what you think about gay marriages. Prop. 8 made it illegal and good old 'Jer had a duty to defend us, the citizens of California against it, despite his personal views on the subject. The Attorney General, nor any sworn official, does not have the right to pick and choose the laws they wish to support. A pox on his house. And now, Jerry Brown will now likely live out his life without ever having had a private-sector job. Imagine. You get kicked out of the Jesuit seminary and then feed at the public trough for the rest of your liberal little, otherwise unprepossessing life. Astounding.

Then there's Barbara Boxer. You reelected her, too. After three terms in Washington, during which she earned the lowest possible rankings as to effectiveness, you sent her back for another six years. She's never had a real job either. Never met a payroll. Never signed a check on its face. Knows nothing about job creation. What she does know is that partial birth abortion is the preferred method. Oh, and she knows how to spend our money. She voted for tax increases 258 times during her ho-hum tenure. Even her home-town newspaper refused to endorse her, saying she was an ineffective and ineffectual senator and should be put out to pasture. And you decided to send her back. Either of Jerry's or Bab's opponents would have been preferable to these preening elite losers, but you decided differently.

Now let's talk the measures. You failed to pass Prop. 19, the pot legalization measure. That was surprising to me, because I assume everyone here had to be high on weed to have voted the way they did.

You voted down Prop. 23, our last and best hope to derail AB32, the Global Warming Solutions Act, which Schwarzenwhoozits signed into law in 2006. That's the one whereby California decided to fix the world's climate problem all by itself, by rolling back greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, representing a 40% reduction. Of course, the experts say doing that would be impossible without taking every single car and truck off the road, but hey, nothing appears impossible to those nice folks in Sacto. And maybe the commute will get shorter once all the cars and trucks are gone. So, AB32 kicks in on January 1, 2011, and the next sound you'll hear will be the doors slamming shut on U-Haul trucks as businesses prepare to vacate Caleeeforneea. And they'll take at least 1,000,000 jobs with them. And your electric bill will double or triple after they go. The only ones left will be Starbucks baristas selling lattes to sign twirlers. I've said before and I say again, if you believe that carbon dioxide, that stuff plants breathe and you exhale, is a greenhouse gas, please stop exhaling.

And Prop. 25? Yep, it passed. That's the one that lets those Sacto lifers pass a budget with a vote of 50% plus one. No more 2/3rds supermajority needed. So the Dems can now pass a budget without a single Republican vote. You think taxes may go up? I do. And often. Why, I ask, do we even need a Republican party anymore? Truth is, we don't. That single-party parliamentary-style deal has worked so well in other countries, we should now formalize it for California. You know, like Cuba, and North Korea, and China and Russia. We're well on our way.

So, California, I no longer feel sorry for you. You did it to yourselves. You have turned our California into Greece, and now you've wasted your last, best chance to correct it before our Ship of State hits the rocks. We've finally reached the tipping point. That's where the statist, big government-loving weenies and the hand-out welfare crowd are able to vote themselves stuff at the expense of those few remaining folks who actually produce in our society. I still feel sorry for myself, for my family and for my friends. But I don't feel sorry for the rest of you who made this sorry likelihood possible. I hope you're happy with yourselves.

By the way, if you take a look at the red-blue map after it was updated following the election, which shows a sliver of blue along each coast and most of the remainder of our country in a bright, bright, all-American victory red, you'll have to ask; could it be salt air that's causing all this liberal craziness?