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'New California' Movement Wants To Create a 51st State (wqad.com)
PolygamousRanchKid, Ayano, and an anonymous reader all shared the same story. Tribune Media reports:
A group has launched a campaign to divide California into two states. It isn't the first attempt to split California, but unlike a failed campaign in 2016 to divide California into six states, the campaign to create New California would split the state into one made up of rural counties and another made up of coastal counties.
USA Today provides some context: Breaking up California remains no easy task: A formal secession means getting approval from both Congress and California's legislature itself. But that hasn't stopped folks from trying. Hundreds of times... Monday's declaration of "the State of New California" marked the latest in more than 200 long-shot efforts to split the Golden State. All so far have failed.
USA Today provides some context: Breaking up California remains no easy task: A formal secession means getting approval from both Congress and California's legislature itself. But that hasn't stopped folks from trying. Hundreds of times... Monday's declaration of "the State of New California" marked the latest in more than 200 long-shot efforts to split the Golden State. All so far have failed.
6 would be gerrymandering as fuck, the only parts in CA which are liberal are the cities, everyone else is just forced along for the ride.
The reality is that California is not quite so liberal as it might appear from the outside. Remember, it's the state that gave the country both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. It's just that, unless you're a universally-beloved, larger-than-life, action hero immigrant from Austria, the Republican *name* is political poison. Pete "How I hate the Hispanics; let me count the 187 ways." Wilson saw to that in the 1990s when he married the "R" on the ballot to a campaign of hate, discrimination, and bigotry against the state's fastest-growing demographic (I believe the word he was looking for afterward was: "oops".).
But at the end of the day, we *DID* vote to recall and depose a democratic governor in favor of a Republican not long ago at all. And Schwarzenegger handily accomplished much of his agenda and won re-election besides. We also keep re-electing DINOs like Pelosi and Feinstein to congress. And even here in San Francisco, the conservative candidate wins surprisingly (to outsiders, I guess) often. You simply have to ignore the stated party affiliations (Republican being a dirty word.) and compare-and-contrast the politics of the candidates themselves. Consider the mayoral office: Willie Brown and Gavin Newsom (Both the occupying the political right.) defeated Tom Ammiano and Matt Gonzalez (the leftists) in their respective mayoral elections. (Their first elections, that is. We do seem to have a tradition of rosters of only complete space-cases running against mayoral incumbents.). Ed Lee was no progressive and was considered by many to be another DINO. And in my own district for state senate, Scott Wiener (the conservative) defeated Jane Kim (the liberal) for the seat in Sacramento. It's just that both of them had to run as Democrats because, as seen to by Pete Wilson, running as a Republican is political death for anyone who'd not a cyborg sent back in time to kill Sarah and/or John Connor.
Imagine all the people...
Today no. In ten or twenty years, who knows? Three decades ago, California was a solidly red state that had Republican governors and voted Republican in nearly every presidential election. A few decades of demographic churn pulled it the other way. Who's to say a few more decades of demographic changes won't do the opposite. It's getting pretty damned expensive to live in much of California and people will move away. Are the people most likely to move because of housing prices likely to vote Democrat or Republican? Hard to say. Time will tell.
Ask Sweden or Norway or Denmark. Ask the French people if they like Paris the way it is now. How about London? Do you think the people of England like what their country is turning into?
The policies that are ruining Europe are exactly what the Democrats want to implement here in the United States. They would gladly flush away national sovereignty for the chance to recruit a permanent majority of poor constituents who will vote democrat.
I'm semi-retired, but my income is not that different from when I worked. My wife is still working, and her job here in California pays a lot better than her professorship at Rice University.
There is a lovely job market here in California. And the job market back in Houston is no longer what it once was. The energy sector jobs are not in boom mode any more. The thing that's keeping Houston afloat is the magnificent Medical Center, which is now the #1 industry in Houston.
Real estate is more expensive here in Cali, but we sold a place/bought a place, so it doesn't really figure into our expenses. Income tax is high here, but property taxes are much lower than in Texas. Food is much cheaper here (and much, much better). Gasoline is more expensive, but since we live a short bike ride from work and the beach, we drive a lot less. In Houston, you can't go three miles without getting on an expressway. The entire city of Houston is paved over with 12-lane highways that are poorly maintained. The unit price of utilities is more expensive in California, but since you don't have to heat or air condition anything, it doesn't matter. In Houston, you have to air condition 10 months out of the year (new houses in Houston don't even have windows that open).
So, you can live in beautiful place with beautiful weather or an ugly place with horrible weather. It's not that different economically.
Oh, and weed is legal here. And there's surfing.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Brown deserves much more credit than he's getting for instituting more grown-up government (temperamentally and fiscally) than we've had in the last few decades. What he's done financially for the state is frankly amazing.
That doesn't set aside the large poverty growth in rural California or the abuse of local governments (municipalities, water districts, and schools) by Sacramento. Much of the extra revenue Brown has generated came from simply keeping the money the state tax collector gathered on behalf of local governments.
The way the state government responded to the drought did not help. Brown accelerated the pattern of Sacramento seizing local resources and redistributing to the state, which necessarily means the population centers. This is a practice that Wilson and Arnold also encouraged, and something that probably needed to be done during the past few droughts. There are places in the state with ruined agricultural economies who are still paying off bonds for infrastructure they had to give up to the state.
The "statewide" infrastructure plans going back to before Wilson's years routinely ignore all of California north of the Bay Area, and that's continuing.It's a complete fabrication to say California's issue stems from a liberal government ignoring conservatives. Both sides have ignored the (liberal) areas of rural northern California, and that region is very reliably pro-independence.
So, I agree that Brown has done a very good job, that California's peculiar version of austerity seems to have worked, and that this doomed effort to split the state is clearly driven by some conservative agenda. However, it's a mistake (political, moral, human...) to simply ignore the people in the state with valid complaints about the way they are governed.
The second right-wing billionaire plan in three months to gerrymander the entire state of California. But who can blame the right? Gerrymandering is the one thing they know, and can do well. Cracking and packing is a right-wing way of life.
Last time it was an attempt to create two new right-wing states. Both schemes use the same strategy of packing the majority of the population of California into one nearly completely blue state, creating one (or two) slightly red majority states, but with a wealthy deep blue urban center captured at its edge like a hostage to pay the bills.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
"Money is being pulled out of these people's pockets to pay for things they do not support in any way, shape or form."
The same thing happens in red states to Liberals. Also, just so you understand how reality works, all taxes are this to somebody. I garuntee that you support taxes for some things and I also garuntee there's somebody out there that finds government funding of those things as bad.
"Taxation without representation?"
Conservatives in blue states are allowed to participate in their Democratic governance. What are you even getting at?
You just seem to want to make conservative minorities out as victims while not acknowledging it's the exact same thing for liberal minorities in Red states.
We have plenty of safe guards in this nation to prevent actual oppression of political minorities and having to pay more in taxes is not oppression. If that were the case I could just as easily make the point that virtually every Red state's failure to generate enough wealth so that they pay into the Fed at the very least what they get back is oppressing everyone in the nation. Aside from Texas, Red state governance has shown itself to be a failure at generating prosperity and they are a net drain on the nation's wealth.
Personally, I enjoy my Blue state standard of living and recognize that the taxes I pay help create that.
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