California Bans "Redskins" as a School Mascot

California is the first state to ban the mascot name "Redskins" in public schools.  Assemblyman Luis Alejo presented the bill, which was signed by Governor Brown this week.

Schools with the mascot name "Redskins" will have until January 2017 to change their mascot name and eradicate "Redskins" from school uniforms, buildings and other mentions.

According to the Lance Newspaper of Hollister, California, there are four California high schools using the "Redskins" name.  One of them, Gustine High School, has used the name for 80 years, and has the name implanted in the floor of their gym.  It will be an expensive proposition for them to change all school uniforms and redo the gym floor.

Tough buns.  The Nanny State of California knows best, and as usual, liberals find their greatest accomplishments in what they ban, forbid and suppress -- and not what they allow.  Government is force, and nowhere else in America is that premise better illustrated in California -- land of budding fascism and vanishing freedom.

It's Raining in California!

We're having a strong rain this morning in Northern California.  Wet staccato on the roof, streets shiny and wet, WATER.  We'll take it.

Whales Sighted Up Close and Personal: Moss Landing, CA May 12, 2013

I took the Mrs. Chomper to Phil's Fish Market restaurant, in Moss Landing, California, for Mother's Day.  Moss Landing is near Monterey, California; there's a beach behind Phil's, overlooking the Pacific Ocean.  While waiting to dine, we took a walk down to the beach and heard someone say "There's a whale over there."  A couple of folks began walking quickly in the direction of the alleged whale, so we decided to follow.

Whale's Flipper Protruding 

There was a whale all right.  One whale was frolicking about ten yards off the beach, occasionally raising a barnacle-encrusted flipper, exposing its back, spraying water from its spout.  It was the first time I had seen a whale.  I was surprised that a whale could come so close to the beach; it was probably of a smaller species, possible a humpback.

Whale's Dorsal Fin (Looks Shark-Like But It's a Whale)

Fortunately, I had brought my digital camera and captured some stills and video of the whales.  I posted a couple of stills above and will upload the video footage to YouTube later.

UPDATE:  Videos of my whale watching experience can be seen here and here.

Bankrupt California: The Model for Progressive Policies

A Typical California Road

Victor Davis Hanson is (like me) a Californian.  He discusses the state of California and its demise under unfettered leftism:  soaring energy prices, crumbling infrastructure, tides of illegal aliens, and managed my moonbats on steroids.  California is the perfect reverse barometer of sane fiscal policy and state government.  Hanson explains:

California may face the nation’s largest budget deficit at $16 billion. It may struggle with the nation’s second-highest unemployment rate at 10.6 percent. It will soon vote whether to levy the nation’s highest income and sales taxes, as if to encourage others to join the 2,000-plus high earners who are leaving the state each week. The new taxes will be our way of saying, “Good riddance.” And if California is home to one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients and the largest number of illegal aliens, it is nonetheless apparently happy and thus solidly for Obama, by a +24 percent margin in the latest Field poll. The unemployment rate in my hometown is 16 percent, the per capita income is $16,000 — and I haven’t seen a Romney sticker yet.

One of the greatest testaments to liberal lunacy is California's roads.  They are filled with potholes and cracks and are often a mosaic patchwork, the many cracks filled with poured asphalt, resulting in a giant spiderweb where a road should be.  I have often driven along California's road, bumping and jostling until I reach the state border between California and Nevada, or California and Oregon, or California and Arizona, where the roads magically transform into smooth, new stretches of freeways, absent the cracks and potholes.  My wife asks, "Why are the roads so bumpy?"  I reply, "California's broke.  They can't afford to fix the roads."

Yes, "progressives" everywhere should take a good long look at the perfect model of their political ambitions.  Progressivism not only doesn't work, it makes life substantially more difficult for those who live under its soft tyranny.

Read it all here.

California Gas Prices Approach $6 a Gallon

State Flower of California

California is a beautiful place made almost uninhabitable by the idiocy of liberalism.  Our state legislature is a motley mob of kooks, crazies and moonbats.  The state flower is a marijuana plant, the state bird is a lesbian, and the state motto is "That be some goooood sheeee-it!"

So it's not surprising that gas prices in the Golden State are approaching $6 a gallon in some places.  Why?  It's all because of the really stupid policies of the kooky left who run the state.  Psota, a California Republican and attorney, explains the factors that underlie the new high prices.

Basically, it's because California is just so environmentally high-minded, that they require certain additives to gasoline sold in the state.  Therefore, gas shortages can't be simply filled by bringing in gasoline from another state.  It might not have the required additives, like THP, pixie dust and hippie piss.

I'd leave the state but I can't afford the gas I need to leave.

California Legislature In Session

California Exodus (Cartoon)

California Here I Come Go!

Shut Up, Schwarzennegger

The big blowhard Arnold Schwarzenneger, who as Republican governor of California became a lap-dog for the far left Democrats, is now opining on what's wrong with the Republican Party.  According to this blowhard, who quickly sold out every Republican principle as soon as he got to Sacramento, the GOP is "rigidly ideological" and more wedded to dogma than finding solutions to problems.  Or so he says in the Los Angeles Times column "GOP, take down that small tent."

This isn't a new phenomenon.  Other failed Republicans, seeking to curry favor with the liberal media or the Democrat powers-that-be, begin to talk like Democrats.  They repeat Democrat talking points as if they were great insights and true wisdom.  Colin Powell is a case in point.  Both of them agree with Meghan McCain, a really airhead blonde and daughter of another failed Republican, John McCain:  in order for the GOP to win elections, it must become a carbon-copy of the Democrats.  I disagree.

Yes, Arnie, we are rigidly wedded to such dogma as balanced budgets, living within your means, being friendly to businesses and jobs and prosperity, and not chasing every really stupid far-left idea that comes down the pike -- like gay marriage, global warming, laws enforcing transgender equality, what Sacto considers a proper diet, and what propaganda should be included in school textbooks.  Really solving California's problems would include a major decrease in spending, reigning in the public sector unions who are strangling the state, lowering taxes and less red tape -- all of which you failed miserably to do.

So how are we faring after eight years of this counterfeit conservative?  The state is more socialist than ever, sinking in oceans of red ink, its economy is a basket case and the Golden State the laughing stock of the world.  So much for Arnie's openness, his willingness to be flexible on policy, his urgent need to bend over whenever the Democrats in Sacto asked him to.

I voted for Arnie twice, but it was a mistake.  After his second term, I decided I would never vote for him again for any office, any time.

So to your latest vanity piece, in which you pose and posture as some great man of enlightenment, I can only say this:

SHUT THE HELL UP, SCHWARZENNEGER.   Idiocy doesn't sound any better though an Austrian accent.

Glorious Fall

I love the fall season. The persimmons on my backyard tree are ripe and almost ready to pick. They need another couple of weeks or so.

CNN: "Businesses Fleeing California In Droves"

Gee, why am I not surprised?  CNN tells the story:

Companies are "disinvesting" in California at a rate five times greater than just two years ago, said Joseph Vranich, a business relocation expert based in Irvine. This includes leaving altogether, establishing divisions elsewhere or opting not to set up shop in California.

"There is a feeling that the state is not stable," Vranich said. "Sacramento can't get its act together...and that includes the governor, legislators and regulatory agencies that are running wild."

Yes, California is finding, like Greece and Ireland, that liberalism is ruinous to an economy.  You really can't have something for nothing; someone has to pay the price.

Of course, I presume the Commiefornians will be happy to see the evil corporations go elsewhere, taking their capitalists, their jobs and their tax payments elsewhere.  Then Commiefornia can once again become the natural paradise it longs to be, Gaia be praised.

I'd follow those businesses out of this Marxist fantasyland, but truth be told, I'm too long in the tooth to start over someplace else.   Egad, I do envy the outward bound, however.  Go East, young man, go East!

....

California Bill Will Protect Cross-Dressing in the Workplace

Assembly Bill 887 will protect cross-dressing in the California workplace.  Male employees can dress as a man one day and a woman the next, and  not be fired.   Opponents of the bill point out that such behavior will alienate customers and co-workers and debilitate workplace morale.  Proponents of the bill don't care about such things as economic success, they are too anxious to prove themselves champions of the downtrodden, and who is more downtrodden than a man in drag?

AB 887 has passed the California Assembly and now moves to the California Senate.

Brad Daucus, an attorney for the Pacific Justice Institute, opposes the bill, said:

This is about employers having to deal with employees who dress in a way that employers know will cost them either in terms of customers, employer morale, or employee operational efficiency.

One cannot help but wonder how a cross-dressing school teacher will impact the students he/she teaches, to come to school one day as a man, then as a woman on the next.  And he/she can't be fired for it.

Read it all here.

Public Sector Unions: a New Form of Tyranny

I have been arguing with pro-union bloodsuckers at YouTube, over a "Young Turks" video favoring unions and demanding the ouster of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

Most of the commenters there don't want to take me on, because frankly, their arguments are an embarrassment.  Those arguments are well summarized by the cartoon on the left.

Public Sector unions have a great deal going with the Democratic Party:  you support our exorbitant wages and benefits and we'll support you for election and re-election.  Further, we will use our members to picket, canvas and get out the vote, all in your favor.

Defeat of the public sector unions is an absolute necessity for the average taxpayer, to avoid being taxed to death.

Steve Malanga at City Journal, writing a year ago, describes how public sector unions have destroyed the state of California.  I found the article by researching a charge by one of the ignorant unionists at YouTube.  He argued that public sector unions in California are very weak and that's why the state if falling apart!  That's like saying a man dying of arsenic poisoning needs a bigger dose.

Malanga's article is called The Beholden State.  Do read it if you want to know how the public sector unions have destroyed the Golden State.