Tag: california

California’s Self-Inflicted Squeeze

Energy Island

Long time readers may recall the many articles we wrote over many years highlighting the madness of California planners and policymakers. We were born and raised in the land of fruits and nuts and lived and worked there for over four decades.

About four years ago, we made our California exodus. At the time, we thought our coverage of the Golden State’s self-destruction would continue. We still have family and friends there who we visit from time to time. But, as we’ve found, without a front row seat to the big show we’re less inclined to gawk at the insanity. Articles on California have diminished to a slow trickle.

Today, however, following a recent conversation with a friend and California resident, we aim our sights at our former home state. Once again, California delivers a rich example of what happens when central planning outweighs economic reality. Here the specific example involves extreme intervention in oil and gas markets.

Policymakers in Sacramento, over many decades, have operated under the assumption that if petroleum production, refining capacity, and fuel consumption were made sufficiently difficult and expensive, the market would rapidly transition to their preferred alternatives. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) has been the principal vehicle for implementing this vision through increasingly stringent fuel regulations, emissions mandates, low-carbon fuel standards, permitting requirements, and compliance costs imposed upon refiners operating within the state.

Yet the result has not been the energy transition that was promised. Instead, California has become increasingly dependent on foreign suppliers for products it once produced itself. This trend is particularly problematic because California is effectively an energy island. Unlike much of the United States, California lacks extensive pipeline connections to the major refining centers along the Gulf Coast.

The state also requires unique fuel formulations that relatively few refineries outside California are equipped to produce. Consequently, California’s fuel market functions largely as a self-contained system. When local refining capacity disappears, replacement supplies cannot simply be redirected from Texas or Louisiana with the turn of a valve.

Keep reading

O’Keefe Media Group Catches California Election Fraud Again: Election Petition Worker Offers Cash for Fake Signature

The O’Keefe Media Group on Tuesday released undercover video of California election petition workers offering cash for a fake signature.

“Alright, so the name you’re gonna write is gonna be Timothy Adams,” the election worker said.

“I’m gonna give you a name, write it down, I’ll give you two bucks,” they said.

Earlier this year, James O’Keefe and his team of journalists went undercover on Skid Row in Los Angeles, posing as homeless people.

‘Petitioners’ told the undercover journalists that they are paid between $7-$10 per signature. Some of them earn up to $1,000 per day.

“California NGOs Encourage Fake Addresses To Homeless People To Sign Petitions & Register Voters, A State & Federal Felony. Footage Shows 28 Instances Of Cash Changing Hands For Ballot Signatures & Voter Registration Forms,” they said.

“Many of the petitioners had no understanding of the petitions’ purpose they were advertising. Circulators also instructed individuals to use fake addresses. “Oh, you can just fake an address.”” OMG reported.

“Weingart Center, which received hundreds of millions in public funding, is on tape directing people to where the fraudulent petitioners are located, and directing homeless individuals to petitioners & coaching plausible deniability,” OMG said.

O’Keefe Media Group reporters encountered “28 instances of petitioners offering cash, cigarettes, and marijuana for signatures on petitions.”

“See they say ignorance is no excuse for the law. But a lot of times, I have to say ‘I didn’t know, I had no idea,’” a Weingart Center employee told the undercover journalist.

Keep reading

FIGHT THE OLIGARCHY? Rep. Ro Khanna Reportedly Lives in a Luxury Home With a Four-Story Elevator, Owns Three Private Golf Courses

Rep. Ro Khanna of California is part of the leftist coalition that is supposedly all about fighting the oligarchy. He’s just doing it from the comfort of a luxury home with a multi-floor elevator, while driving an SUV that cost about $200,000.

This is no different than Bernie Sanders flying private jets all over the country as he demands that we ‘tax the rich’ more than we already are. Of AOC driving a Tesla, as she complains about Elon Musk.

They all love to complain about the evils of wealth. Except their own, naturally.

Check out this eye-popping report from the Washington Free Beacon:

‘Ro’ Me the Money! How Progressive Class Warrior Ro Khanna Lives Like the Oligarchs He ‘Fights,’ With In-Home Elevator, $190K Range Rover, and Family-Owned Golf Courses.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) has emerged as a potential contender for the Democratic presidential nomination while denouncing the ultra-rich who “hoard wealth and engage in financial speculation.” But the progressive, Silicon Valley congressman and his family live a life of staggering luxury, fueled by dynastic wealth they did not earn and protected by the same thicket of trusts, anonymous corporations, and foundations that Khanna condemns.

Khanna lives in a $6 million, 8,000-square-foot luxury home with a four-story elevator and so much premium marble that even the two laundry rooms have marble counters. The Northwest Washington, D.C., home is now for sale, as the Khanna family prepares to move to an even larger, more expensive house a few miles away in the Northern Virginia suburbs.

Khanna’s two children, who are minors, have large ownership shares in three private golf clubs, a significant stake in a $65 billion wealth management firm, and investments in hedge funds that focus on distressed debt, of which Khanna has been critical. Khanna’s wife drives a $190,000 Range Rover she was so displeased with that she sued the dealer.

A Washington Free Beacon investigation into Khanna’s finances finds that the progressive truthteller’s lifestyle is funded by his wife, Ritu Ahuja Khanna, an heiress to her father’s Cleveland auto parts fortune.

Anyone surprised?

Keep reading

Newsom Scrubs ‘$100 Million’ Slippery Slope From National ‘Billionaire Tax’ Pitch – And He’s Coming After Inheritance Too

California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) on Friday called for a national tax on billionaires. Except, in the original version, it was anyone with a net worth of at least $100 million – as quoted by multiple outlets, citing a post from Newsom’s Substack account. 

As originally reported by Politico:

His plan to address the country’s yawning wealth gap includes “a true minimum tax on billionaires and those with a net worth of $100 million” and creating a national public equity fund to give all Americans a stake in the economic gains created by artificial intelligence companies. 

The post now reads:

“So here is what I support: A national billionaires’ tax. A true minimum tax on billionaires — a modern Buffett Rule — that ensures the people at the very top pay at least the tax rate their own workers pay.”

Bitch please. 

Newsom also wants to tax inheritance – writing “We also need to rewrite our inheritance rules. Over the next twenty years, this country will live through the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in human history, with roughly $124 trillion changing hands. If we do not act, that transfer of wealth among the ultra-wealthy will lock in a permanent American aristocracy of inherited wealth, with all the political consequences the founders warned us about.”

Notice he cites the massive wealth transfer, but not the level of inheritance he’s targeting – as most slippery slopes begin.

Keep reading

California’s Voting System is Designed to Prevent Detection and Prosecution of Election Fraud

The recent Los Angeles mayoral primary placed California’s election mechanics under an unforgiving light. On election night Spencer Pratt held a clear path to the runoff against Karen Bass. Late mail ballots then arrived in batches that favored Nithya Raman so heavily that she overtook Pratt and finished with a 3,113-vote lead. NBC Los Angeles recorded one Friday update in which Raman received twice as many votes as Pratt, followed by continued narrowing on Saturday and the final overtaking on Sunday. Bass’s share stayed roughly stable at 34.68 percent while Raman climbed to 27.12 percent and Pratt fell to 26.69 percent. Observers noted that the arithmetic required for Raman to erase Pratt’s lead demanded an unusually large share of the remaining ballots, a distribution bordering on a mathematical impossibility under normal variation. The early leader’s margin collapsed only after the delayed counting of mail ballots from skidrow voters that California law permits counties to process for up to thirty days after election day.

This sequence did not occur in a vacuum. It unfolded inside a system built since 2020 on a series of deliberate policy choices. Assembly Bill 37 made permanent the practice of mailing a live ballot and return envelope to every registered voter before every election. In the 2024 general election California reported 22,595,659 registered voters and 13,034,378 mail ballots that were ultimately counted. That left roughly 9.56 million ballot packets that were printed, mailed, and never returned as counted votes. Those packets move through ordinary mail, apartment mailrooms, and forwarding addresses that may be years out of date. California law allows any person to return a completed ballot so long as the person is not paid on a per-ballot basis. The sole front-end control is a signature comparison performed on the identification envelope.

That comparison rests on standards that deliberately favor acceptance. Senate Bill 503 instructs officials to begin with the presumption that the signature is the voter’s own, to accept similar characteristics rather than an exact match, and to reject only when two officials determine beyond a reasonable doubt that the signature differs in multiple, significant, and obvious respects. No witness attestation is required. No photograph or other documentary identification is demanded at the point of return. If a question arises, the cure process allows the voter or a third party to submit a replacement signature by mail, email, fax, or other remote means, and some cure signatures may update the voter’s record for future elections. Once the envelope is accepted, the ballot is separated from it to protect secrecy. From that moment forward, any error or impropriety in the acceptance decision cannot be corrected without destroying the secret-ballot guarantee.

Keep reading

California’s $20 Million Attempt To Silence Medical Speech

In a trial set to begin June 24, California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta is asking a court to do something that should alarm every American, regardless of where they stand on abortion: punish nonprofit organizations with ruinous fines for speaking about a lawful medical treatment.

The target is not fraud. These charities offer their services for free.

It is not patient harm. There is no evidence of any patient being harmed.

It is not even illegal conduct. The underlying treatment remains perfectly legal.

The target is speech.

Heartbeat International and Real Options are pro-life nonprofits that provide information and care to women who first take the abortion drug but regret that choice and want to continue their pregnancies. California wants to impose penalties approaching $20 million because these charities have dared to tell women that another option may exist.

Twenty million dollars. That number alone should tell us what this case is really about.

No reasonable observer can believe that bankrupting charities is a proportionate response to truthful and non-misleading statements about a free service designed to help a woman exercise her constitutional right to continue her pregnancy. This is not consumer protection. It is political warfare conducted through the machinery of a government that wishes to silence speech it does not like.

What’s most remarkable is what California cannot prove.

After years of investigation, subpoenas, discovery, and litigation, the attorney general has failed to identify a single woman harmed by APR treatment. Not one. No parade of victims. No evidence of widespread deception. He set up a website practically begging for complaints and still could not muster a single woman claiming she was misled or harmed.

Instead, seven women have publicly shared the stories of how Heartbeat International and Real Options helped them successfully reverse their abortions. Three mothers are slated to testify from the stand about their joy at reversing their unwanted abortions.

Still, the state asks the court to punish the very charities who helped these women continue their wanted pregnancies simply because government lawyers disagree with their viewpoint on the scientific evidence regarding APR.

That is a dangerous precedent.

Scientific disagreement is not fraud. If it were, much of modern medicine would not exist. Medical consensus is not handed down from on high. It evolves. Researchers debate. Physicians challenge prevailing views. Studies are published, criticized, replicated, and revised.

The proper response to disputed science is more debate, more research, and more evidence – not government censorship backed by eight-figure penalties.

Yet that is precisely what California seeks.

Keep reading

Newsom urges a national ‘billionaires’ tax’ while fighting one in California

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who is considering a run for president as he approaches the end of his term, called for a national “billionaires’ tax” on Friday even as he fights another proposal targeting the wealthy in his home state.

Newsom also said the U.S. government should own a stake in artificial intelligence companies. His proposals, outlined in a Substack post, aligns him with the Democratic Party’s populist left, and he argued that urgent changes are needed to prevent the elite concentration of wealth and power from undermining democracy.

“It’s time for an economic reset for America,” Newsom wrote.

The governor announced his agenda a day after an influential health care union in California pledged to go forward with a ballot measure that would impose a one-time 5% tax on the assets of billionaires living in the state as of Jan. 1, 2026.

Newsom opposes that measure, as do many of the liberal interest groups that typically favor higher taxes. They fear it would drive billionaires out of California, eroding the state’s tax base over the long term for a one-time influx of cash. A technology mecca, California has more billionaires than any other state — a few hundred, by some estimates.

“You may not be able to pick up and move to Texas or Florida to shelter your income from taxation, but I promise you that billionaires can, and do,” Newsom wrote. “Wealth is movable, and it shops for the state with the lowest taxes. The fight belongs at the federal level, where this broken system was created in the first place.”

Keep reading

Trump DOJ to California: Drop the Glock Ban or Get Sued

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon advised Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and California AG Rob Bonta on Wednesday to drop their Glock ban or face a lawsuit.

Dhillon posted to X: “Today, I notified Newsom and Bonta to drop the unconstitutional restrictions on law-abiding citizens’ rights to purchase legal firearms before the ban goes into effect, or we will sue. Stay tuned!”

Breitbart News reported that Newsom signed California’s Glock ban into law on October 10, 2025. It is set to take effect on July 1, 2026.

The ban was sponsored by Democrat lawmakers and fashioned as a response to the use of “Glock switches,” which are already illegal. “Glock switches” are federally prohibited plastic pieces that can be affixed to the rear of a Glock slide to make the pistol shoot full auto.

Such switches are wildly popular with gangs and street criminals — therefore California Democrats are banning new sales of one of the most popular handguns ever made, the Glock pistol.

On May 12, 2025, Breitbart News pointed to the language of the Glock ban legislation, noting that Democrats secured passage of the ban by labeling Glocks as “machinegun-convertible pistol[s].”

Newsom and Bonta are now on notice that the DOJ will take action if they allow the ban to go into effect.

Keep reading

“Did They Screw Pratt?” – Trump Goes Off on California’s Rigged Elections, Reveals How Steve Hilton Beat the Cheat

President Trump on Tuesday went off on California’s rigged elections while delivering remarks in Macungie, Pennsylvania, saying Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt got cheated and that California gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton only won his race because the feds intervened. 

Trump responded to Pratt’s sham election earlier this month, saying, “Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost,” noting his massive 40,000 vote lead on election night. “3rd World Nation. Rigged Elections!” Trump continued. Trump has also said that Hilton only won because “there was too much heat on ’em” after robbing Pratt.

Trump was questioning California’s shady election rules, highlighting the law that a poll worker can be thrown in jail for a voting rights violation if they ask a voter to see their ID. And a voter’s identification “does not have to contain the voter’s address or be issued by a government agency,” according to the California Secretary of State’s office.

“How dare you ask me for my citizenship? Do you know in California, if you ask that question to a voter, you are criminally liable. In other words, they can put you in jail if you say, ‘Sir, you have proof of citizenship?’ They put you in jail if they ask that question. You’re not allowed to ask that,” Trump told the crowd. “Did you know that? It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen going on.”

Trump then went off on how they “screwed” Pratt. “It looked like he was going to win, or certainly be in the runoff, and then I started hearing rumors as the days went by, days and days went by, that Pratt is fading, he’s fading, I said they rigged the election,” Trump said. “And then lo and behold, he didn’t qualify, even though he was so far up.”

Trump further revealed that Trump-Endorsed California gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton “was definitely going to lose” until the US Attorney called the election offices and opened an investigation into the fraud. “About an hour after the call,” Trump said, they announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Hilton has won!”

“The election is totally rigged. California is totally rigged, all mail-in ballots, it’s a disgrace. We got to pass the Save America Act, okay?” Trump told the crowd.

Keep reading

California-Based Biden Judge Issues Nationwide Block on ICE’s Policy of Arresting Illegals at Courthouses

A federal judge on Tuesday issued a nationwide block on ICE’s policy of arresting illegal aliens at courthouses.

California-based US District Judge Casey Pitts, a Biden appointee, ruled that ICE cannot detain illegal aliens at immigration courts.

The Supreme Court previously ruled that federal district courts lack the statutory authority to issue nationwide injunctions.

However, Judge Pitts says he was able to issue a nationwide injunction in this case because the plaintiffs satisfied the requirements for class certification.

In January 2025, President Trump signed an executive order called “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.”

“It is the policy of the United States to faithfully execute the immigration laws against all inadmissible and removable aliens, particularly those aliens who threaten the safety or security of the American people. Further, it is the policy of the United States to achieve the total and efficient enforcement of those laws, including through lawful incentives and detention capabilities,” Trump said in his executive order.

Judge Pitts vacated the Trump Administration’s policy targeting illegal aliens at courthouses.

“For 80 years, Congress has commanded federal agencies to think before they act,” Judge Pitts wrote in a 70-page opinion. “That instruction—codified in the Administrative Procedures Act—does not require an agency to make the choice that a reviewing court might deem preferable.”

“Because the record before the Court demonstrates that ICE and EOIR failed to provide reasoned explanations for their actions, the Court concludes that each of the challenged policies is arbitrary and capricious in contravention of the APA,” the judge said.

This is the second time Judge Pitts has blocked the Trump Administration from making arrests at immigration courthouses.

Earlier this year, Judge Pitts blocked ICE from making arrests in his district in the Northern District of California.

Keep reading