http;//www.Californiacontrarian.com

The other day while reading our local paper I found myself wondering, “Am I a racist?” I do not think that I am, as I have contributed money to and mentored students at an Hispanic school in San Diego over the last several years.
Why would I ask myself that question? Let me explain.
In the ‘Local’ section, three stories caught my attention as two were featured stories on consecutive pages.
The first was under “Most Wanted” with headline that said, “Man Accused of Lewd Acts with Child.” Although I am usually not interested in articles with this type of headline, the picture of the accused, Bartoleme Rojas, 42, drew my attention. As I read on, it was noted that there was an outstanding  felony arrest warrant for Mr. Rojas and that he was “believed to be a transient in Poway.” This is a bit strange as Poway, California is not a town that I would think has a lot of “transients.” I immediately inferred that Mr. Rojas was probably an illegal . . . “a transient in Poway ??”
Racist or Realist?
The next article involved a documented gang member, Dionicio Torres, 24, who says that he was shooting at rival gang members who had been tagging a complex where he lived. Unfortunately one of the shots he fired killed an innocent bystander who happened to be driving by. This occurred in Escondido, California, a city north of San Diego that has a significant number of illegals living there. Is Mr. Torres an illegal? Should this thought have crossed my mind?
Racist or Realist?
The third article was about a trial of a man accused of purposely running down a police officer in Oceanside, California. Apparently in a taped conversation with an undercover officer and an informant in the jail after his arrest, Roberto Flores, 26, bragged that he did it, intended to do it, and wasn’t sorry about it. He also apparently stated that he targeted the police officer because he was law enforcement! I wondered, ” Is Mr. Flores, a legal resident of the U.S.?”
Racist or Realist?
We’re my suspicions about Mr. Torres and Mr. Flores prompted subconsciously by the prior reference to Mr. Rojas as “a transient in Poway?” Am I a Racist or a Realist?
Can those of us who live in California be Realists without being Racist?
Unfortunately, after the recent passage of California Senate Bill 54, the answer is “YES”!!

Choices. Life is all about choices. Other than who our parents are, each of us has made or will make a myriad of choices that determine how things turn out for the rest of his/her life. Yes, of course, some of the things that happen to each of us is beyond our control, but for the most part each of us controls his/her own destiny.
Do I study hard in high school or do I fool around a lot with my friends?
Do I go to college?
Which college do I go to and which major do I take?
Who do I marry?
Where should I live?
About ten years ago a friend of mine and his wife realized that unless an unknown rich uncle died very soon, it was going to be difficult, if not impossible, for them to afford to buy a house in Southern California. They had three kids and wanted them to grow up close to their grandparents. They had a difficult choice. They could stay in SoCal and rent a small place or they could move somewhere where housing was much more affordable. Yes, their potential new locale needed to have warm weather as each of them grew up in SoCal, and it needed to be west of the Mississippi so that getting back to visit the grandparents would be possible. Choices!
It was difficult, but they moved to Austin, Texas.

As I am sure that you all are well aware housing affordability in California is now even more of an issue than it was ten years ago. For the last 62 straight months home prices have increased in California, and in the last year prices have increased 6.3% in SoCal.
Recently a nurse who works in San Francisco bemoaned the fact that she has to drive 80 miles to and from work each day, “I find it very frustrating that I cannot afford to live close to my job.” Apparently, for whatever reason, she lives two hours from her job.
Choices!
According to the most recent U.S Census Bureau data (which for the first time included ‘cost of living’) California had the highest percentage of residents struggling to pay for the basic necessities, and the median price of a home is twice the national average.
This is a tailor-made situation for the politicians in Sacramento. From their perspective the only option to solve this problem is to throw money at it. (From their perspective the answer to almost anything is to throw taxpayers money at it.) The present options include a bond issue to pay for affordable housing and veteran housing and/or a $75 fee for some real estate transactions – again to provide money for affordable housing programs.

My question is: If housing is so unaffordable in California, and if about 20..4% of its population live under the poverty line, why don’t more of them move somewhere where housing is affordable? Of course, not all of those people who cannot afford to live in California can move, but a considerable number can. Why don’t they?
Choices!

Back when my brother and I were small kids we would oftentimes go over to Grandma and Grandpa Blair’s on Sundays. He was a mailman and she was a housewife living on the second floor in a middle class neighborhood on the northwest side of Chicago. One of the things that I remember was that in the back bedroom just off the kitchen there was a picture of an Indian male who Grandma Blair called, “Grandpa Moze.”  I did not think anything more about Grandpa Moze until recently and I asked my brother, “Who was Grandpa Moze and why was his picture hanging in the bedroom? Was he related to Grandma Blair? If so, how?”
My grandmother’s maiden name was Sargent, and my brother hypothesized that our great grandmother was a Native American who had a child fathered by an army sargent, and the picture in the back bedroom was that of my Grandma Blair’s grandfather (Grandpa Moze). If that is so, then both my brother and I have Native American heritage.
“How cool,” I said to my brother, “Maybe you could just give me an apropos nickname. Just call me, Tonto!”
Back in those days having some Indian, or as it is called today, Native American blood in your DNA was of no consequence, but today I might be recognized as a “minority” with Native American ancestry. If I played my cards right, maybe I could get a teaching position at Harvard as a minority. After you stop laughing, take note that one of our U.S.Senators while at U of Penn Law School put her name on a “minority Law teacher” list as a Native American. She subsequently became a Harvard law professor, and had been promoted as a Native American faculty member. She claims to have American Indian Heritage, specifically Cherokee heritage. She alleges that family stories are evidence for her Native American heritage. I wonder if she had a picture of her Indian great-great grandfather hanging in some bedroom? Thus far no corroborative evidence has emerged.
While her Native American roots may or may not be factual, it seems to me that this would be easy enough to document with a simple DNA test.
How simple? As simple as a saliva sample.
In fact her probable opponent in the 2018 Massachusetts senate race has challenged her to take a simple saliva DNA test in order to prove or disprove her Cherokee ancestry.
Now here’s where I get cynical . . . and perhaps realistic. I’ll  bet that Senator Warren already knows the results of her DNA test! How so? . . .  It would be quite easy to submit one’s saliva sample for DNA testing under an assumed name, for instance, “Princess-Summer-Fall-Winter-Spring.” If the results showed some Native American ancestry, then just repeat the same test, again with your own saliva, but this time under your real name, Elizabeth Warren, and make the results public.
How come Senator Warren has not made the results of her saliva test public?
How interesting!
So far, the best I can tell, Senator Warren and I have equivalent claims to our supposed Native American Heritage. I doubt that I will ever meet Elizabeth Warren, but if I do, I know what I will say to her, “Kimosabe; me Tonto, you Pocahontas; How.”

It was just confirmed that Toyota and Mazda are joining together to develop a $1.6 billion factory in the US. Whether President Trump has been instrumental in this decision is not known at this time, but this is certainly in keeping with his promise to generate more blue collar jobs in the USA. It is estimated that this combined venture will provide about 4000 new jobs.
Where will this new factory be built? I hoped in California.
Reportedly many states are in the running including Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Michigan. Where is California on this list? I hope that this list is not complete. How come the Golden State is not in the running for this pot of gold?
Could it be that California has historically never been much into the car-making business? No, in fact, that is far from the case. Whereas now Tesla has a plant in Northern California that provides about 6,000 jobs, in the past there have been multiple such auto-assembly factories in this state including: Long Beach Assembly (Ford, closed 1958), Ford Richmond Plant (closed 1989), Fremont Assembly (G.M., closed 1982), Maywood Assembly (Chrysler, closed 1971), Los Angeles Assembly (Ford, closed 1980), Oakland Assembly (Chevrolet, closed 1963), San Jose Assembly Plant ( Ford, closed 1983), South Gate Assembly ( Buick-Plymouth-Oldsmobile, closed 1982), Van Nuys Assembly (G.M., closed 1992), and TABC of Long Beach (Toyota subsidiary, closed 2004).
In addition to these lost blue collar jobs at these now closed factories, California has also lost white collar auto industry jobs when Nissan moved its headquarters to Tennessee in 2004, and most recently (2014) when Toyota relocated its headquarters from Torrance, California to Plano,Texas (3,000 jobs).
Wow! Why this auto industry abandonment of California? Certainly my first instinct is to blame the usual suspects – high wages, high taxes, high cost of living, increased regulations, making this state more business unfriendly by the day, etc.
However, Jim Lentz, CEO of Toyota, blamed the politicians in California when he recently said, “Here in Texas it’s always do what’s best for Texas. That was not the experience in California where there were truly two sides on most issues, and it was not necessarily what’s best for California. Here in Texas, you guys have the formula down.”
That formula used to be California’s, but it seems that the Democratic politicians have allowed other states to steal it from us. I surmise that the only way to regain that formula is to get rid of these politicians. One can only hope!

Now granted that I am usually up on all of the latest, but this could be my best scoop! I hear a rumor that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell had some very interesting comments when asked some questions concerning the spiraling attendance at some of the NFL games on November 26.
You probably will not see is anyplace else!!

Q: Commissioner, views of the stands in New Jersey at the Jets game against the Carolina Panthers taken just before kickoff show a significant number of empty seats. Do you have a comment?
A: I heard that there was a traffic jam before the game which delayed a a lot of fans from getting there on time!

Q: Commissioner, likewise views of the stands minutes before kickoff in Cincinnati in the game against the Cleveland Browns show a pretty significant number of empty seats. Any comment?
A: I heard that there was an even bigger unexpected traffic jam just outside the stadium in Cincinnati that day! This was possibly because of an unconfirmed report that some stop lights in Cincinnati were not functioning!

Q: Commissioner, pictures of the stands in Atlanta similarly showed a large number of empty seats. Any reason for this?
A: It is my understanding that there was a snafu at the various parking entrance gates that caused many fans to miss the kickoff!

Q: Commissioner, on the Internet, transmitted live, views of the stands ten minutes before kickoff in Indianapolis demonstrated a huge number of empty seats. Why was that?
A: Although unreported because of security concerns, there was a significant electrical grid problem, which spared the Internet. This caused chaos throughout Indiana. Obviously without power the fans had a lot of difficulty getting to the stadium on time, and a lot unfortunately just could not make it at all!

Q: Commissioner, the T.V ratings for the NFL games are down significantly this year. Is there any reason for this?
A: With global warming many T.V. viewers are now spending more time outside enjoying the warm fall days.

Q: Are you telling us that one million previous NFL viewers were outside enjoying the weather? Are you aware that these are stats for week 11 of this year as compared to last year?
A: Well of course not all of these one million viewers were outside enjoying the weather! Some of them were trapped in there house because their garage doors would not open because of the unreported power grid problem. Also note that because of this unreported power grid problem, a lot of avid NFL fans were not able to watch the games because their homes had no power and hence no working televisions.

Q: So let me get this straight, Commissioner. You do not think that these relatively empty NFL stadiums, and this dramatic decline in television viewership has anything to do with the NFL players kneeling for the National Anthem?
A: Of course, perhaps one or two previous fans, have chosen to boycott our product, but this boycotting B.S. is being vastly over-rated. Like I said before there are logical reasons to explain these apparent decreases.
However, please do not publicize this unreported power grid problem as it will only embolden our country’s enemies.
Thank you.

WOW!! Is this a scoop, or what?

Prior to a few days ago I had never heard of CFPB, and therefore was at a loss when CFPB was in the headlines. However, in the last few days the CFPB, which was created as part of the Dodd Frank Act of July, 2010, has been in the news quite a lot. So I decided to do a little investigating.
Before I actually started to become informed about the CFPB I saw a picture of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren (D,Ma), and Leandra English accompanied by a tweet by Nancy Pelosi which said, “Incredibly thankful for the determination of Leandra English, the rightful Acting Director of @CFPB # Defend CFPB.”
There were so many things here that I did not understand:
Who is Leandra English, and what is she so determined about?
What is the CFPB?
And finally what does the ‘#’ stand for or mean?
However one thing that I knew for sure – if a photo has Warren, Pelosi, and Schumer together with Leandra English – I would never buy a car from Ms. English!

The CFPB stands for Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It turns out that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren before she was elected to the Senate. Although it is possible that this “Bureau” was created with the best intentions, it was actually designed to act as an agency free of constitutional restraint. The director was appointed to a nonrevocable five year term and it was funded by Federal Reserve profits so that its budget could not be cut by Congress.
Every thing went along as probably envisioned by its creators until October 2016 when the D.C. Court of Appeals found that the structure of the CFPB was unconstitutional, and empowered the president to remove the agency’s director at will. The next chink in the armor of the CFPB came in November, 2016 when Donald Trump was elected. In December, 2016 a very long article was written by Richard Rubin, in the National Review. Mr. Rubin had worked as an attorney at CFPB, and basically he characterized it as an organization that would initially shake down companies into million dollar settlements. Then the CFPB would then redirect millions of dollars into pockets of firms connected to top-tier Democrats. Aha! Now I get the picture of the picture of Warren, Schumer, Pelosi, and Ms. English together, arm in arm.
To make a long story even longer, the outgoing partisan director of CFPB, Richard Cordray (a big bud of Elizabeth Warren) appointed Leandra English as the acting director before he left. Now perhaps the thought was that since any newly appointed director would have to undergo Senate confirmation first, that Ms. English would have months, if not years , as the Acting Director. However, President Trump outsmarted those that thought that they were so smart, by appointing Mike Mulvaney as the Acting Director of CFPB. A brilliant move as Mr. Mulvaney had already been confirmed by the Senate, albeit to a different position, and according to the D.C. Court of Appeals (2016), the President has the authority to name the director.
Mr. Mulvaney brought doughnuts to the CFPB on Monday morning, Nov. 27, 2017 and assumed his position as Acting Director of CFPB.
The Democrats, of course, filed suit to stop Mr. Mulvaney from assuming his rightful position. I say “of course” because the Democrats file suit every time President Trump does anything that they do not like!
Hallelujah!! This time a federal judge ruled in favor of the Constitution, and Ms. French is out, and Mr. Mulvaney is in.

“Love means never having to say you’re sorry” is a quote that we have all heard multiple times. It was initially popularized in the film adaptation of Erich Segal’s book, Love Story, in 1970. For you movie buffs that line was uttered twice in that film, and it is ranked #13 on the American Film Institute’s list of the best film quotes of all time.

For my son-in-law, Daniel, and those of you that are younger and perhaps not movie-goers, this line was also spoken in the movie’s clip on The Simpsons (Catch ‘Em If You Can), where Lisa retorts, “No it doesn’t!”

It is not a line that one would expect in a comedy, but since Barbara Striesand said this same line in the 1972 comedy film, What’s Up, Doc,” I think that it is apropos to quote this line when referring to the tragic comedy, better known as the Democratic Party.

As my regular readers are aware, the Democrats often do things which have a deleterious effect on the poorest among us, despite the fact that this is the group that they say they are helping. I do not yet know whether they are doing this purposely, or if they just cannot think beyond the next election.

And thus we have one of the favorites of the Democrats – the minimum wage, especially the minimum wage in California, and in San Francisco in particular. In San Francisco the minimum wage will go to $15 per hour in 2018. This wage mandate does not include the requirements for health care and paid leave. Last week I was in a McDonald’s in the Central Valley of California, and already there are kiosks that allow customers to place their own orders. Minimum wage jobs will be lost and will continue to be replaced by kiosks at McDonald’s, just as minimum wage jobs have been replaced by “self checkout” at grocery stores everywhere.

Recently the Harvard Business School and Mathmatica Policy Research economists found an increase in the closure rate of medium-rated restaurants associated with San Francisco’s rising minimum wage. Oops, more jobs lost! More people out of work!

So are the Democratic politicians saying to those who have lost their jobs (due to the increasing uses of kiosks and the closure of restaurants), “We are sorry. We miscalculated the real world effects of our minimum wage proposals.”? No, there will be no such apology as . . .

Being a Democrat means never having to say you’re sorry!!

As if following their destructive scrip, the Democratic politicians in California are mulling over various punitive measures against companies that use workplace robots, while meanwhile in the real world Amazon is in the process of deciding on a location for a new corporate site. Amazon uses a lot of automation, so when they decide to choose someplace other than California for this new job bonanza site, will the Democrats realize the errors of their ways and apologize?

No, as being a Democrat means never having to say you’re sorry!

Again with the risk of being redundant, the Democratic gas tax just went into effect in California. Of course common sense would dictate that this regressive tax would hurt those among us who can least afford to pay more for gasoline.Will these politicians say that they are sorry for mismanaging the maintaining of California’s infrastructure, and apologize for hurting the working poor with this new tax? I don’t think so as . . .

Being a Democrat means never having to say you’re sorry!

An recent article from the New York Times talks about election integrity.. It is a perfect example of liberal media favoritism. This article by Michael Wines whines about the pruning of the rolls of voters who have died, moved, or lost their eligibility. To me this pruning just sounds like common sense!

Do we want dead people voting? “Duh!”

Do we want people who have moved out of our state or our local district voting in state or local district elections? “Duh!”

If the law says that felons are ineligible to vote, do we want felons voting? . . . “No!” (despite what the Democratic ex-governor of Virginia thinks)

The argument on the “emotional, but non-thinking side” (i.e. the Democrats) is the classic example of “if you repeat something enough – over and over that people will believe that it is true” . . . even if there is no evidence of such.

Their argument goes like this according to Stuart Naifeh, a senior counsel at the voting rights group, Demos, “The goal here is not election integrity. It’s suppression and intimidation of voters.” Again say it often enough and people will actually believe that there is suppression and intimidation of the voters. Balderdash!!

As I have pointed out before, in Mexico in order to vote, you need a federal I.D. that not only has your name and your picture, but also a thumb print. I have yet to read or hear of anyone in Mexico alleging that this intimidates voters or suppresses voting. Maybe in Mexico they do not think that dead people voting is a good idea!! Maybe they think that not allowing dead people to vote preserves election integrity!

Of course, there are liberal judges, for example in Texas and in Ohio, who feel that it is their responsibility to defy common sense with this “intimidation-suppression” nonsense, and so these cases continue use to slog through the courts until hopefully the Supreme Court will actually rule that common sense should prevail.

When I think about this logically, I feel that each illegal vote that is cast potentially suppresses my legal vote, and that does not preserve election integrity!