The Democratic controlled corporate media and their politicians are pointing their fingers at West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin as the reason why their radical agenda of Build Back Better, District of Columbia statehood, federalization of elections, and court packing is stalled in Congress. Manchin has (thankfully) been thinking twice about supporting the progressives’ agenda. In the 2020 Presidential election, former President Trump beat Joe Biden by almost 30 points in West Virginia at 68.6% to 29.7%. That overwhelming rejection of Biden’s agenda should be evidence enough of why Manchin is reluctant to embrace Build Back Better, because his own resident voters did not embrace it, and by a lot.

But now the ire of West Virginians for Biden has only increased, and exponentially so. The most recent poll results published by Civiqs here find that in the Mountain State today, only 18% approve of Joe Biden’s policies and a whopping 77% disapprove. In one year as President, Biden has managed to lose close to half of his feeble electoral support in the state. A Biden supporter in West Virginia is getting to look like a Republican in San Francisco.

It should be no wonder why Manchin has given pause on Capitol Hill. Manchin was re-elected in 2018 with less than a majority, just 49.6% of the vote. He knows his state, and the honorable requirement to navigate through legislation to reflect its values, when acting as a United States Senator.

So don’t blame Joe Manchin for your policy failures Biden fans! Point your finger at yourselves.

With a DA that will not prosecute, when arrested you are let free without cash bail and no way for law enforcement to find you, when cops are watching thefts occur but refuse to stop them, when stores are told to hire their own security force because the police are worthless, you know San Fran will be criminal heaven.  I can see the freeways from the mid west and back east clogged with criminals wanting to live the high life in San Fran—without worry of cops, punishment or arrest.

“One shoplifter in San Francisco admitted to his crimes during a news interview regarding a grocery store in the city ramping up security measures due to theft.

“I think that they’re not very good because I’ve personally been able to shoplift from here with relative ease,” the shoplifter, who declined to provide his name, told KPIX 5 of a Safeway in San Francisco’s Castro District.

The previously 24-hour Safeway cut store hours in October over “off the charts” shoplifting at the time.

The security measures for the grocery stores are expensive—the smaller shops will not be able to afford them and will close.  The chain stores will add the cost of theft and security to the price of a loaf of bread—making those in poverty even poorer.  Want to be a crime victim? Go to San Fran.

Emboldened SF shoplifter say stealing is easy, cites lax security as store takes drastic action

Emma Colton, Fox News,   12/7/21 

One shoplifter in San Francisco admitted to his crimes during a news interview regarding a grocery store in the city ramping up security measures due to theft.

“I think that they’re not very good because I’ve personally been able to shoplift from here with relative ease,” the shoplifter, who declined to provide his name, told KPIX 5 of a Safeway in San Francisco’s Castro District.

The previously 24-hour Safeway cut store hours in October over “off the charts” shoplifting at the time.

Now, the store is ramping up its security measures even more with automatic gates that close behind each shopper at the entrance and placing security guards both inside and outside the store.

“This Safeway is getting weirder and weirder,” one shopper said as he walked through newly installed security gates, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

“Honestly, I think it’s probably good that they did that cause there was a really bad shoplifting problem almost every single time I came here, there was some type of ruckus happening,” another shopper, Chris Mejia, told KPIX 5.

The store also added barriers to its self-checkout areas and closed off a side exit with a wall of water bottles.

“Lots of times there was people running and security following or trying to stop them,” added Mejia.

Safeway said in a statement to the media that the news measures are intended to halt “escalating theft.”

“Like other local businesses, we are working on ways to curtail escalating theft to ensure the wellbeing of our employees and to foster a welcoming environment for our customers. Their safety remains our top priority. These long-planned security improvements were implemented with those goals in mind,” Safeway said in a statement to KPIX 5.

Another shopper added that the crime has become so commonplace in the city, residents are “sort of used to it.”

“It’s obviously a pretty terrible issue. I think that now we’re sort of used to it. I live in Hayes Valley and the Walgreens there is the perfect example of shuttering. It’s a shame. I feel like the city has definitely changed a lot in the last year and a half,” another person, identified only as Lee, told the outlet.

San Francisco has been plagued by retail theft for months, which has escalated in recent weeks to smash-and-grab mobs targeting high-end retail establishments.

In one of the most high-profile incidents, at least 80 people wearing ski masks stormed a Nordstrom in Walnut Creek, located about 25 miles outside of SF, resulting in about $125,000 in stolen merchandise and damage to the store.

California Governor Gavin Newsom makes an appearance after the polls close on the recall election, at the California Democratic Party headquarters in Sacramento, California, U.S., September 14, 2021. REUTERS/Fred Greaves Reuters

The smash-and-grab robberies have been concentrated in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas, and have led to increased security at malls and California Highway Patrol increasing its presence along highways near shopping destinations.

“If people are breaking in, people stealing your property, they need to be arrested. Police need to arrest them. Prosecutors need to prosecute them. Judges need to hold people accountable for breaking the law,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said last week. “These are not victimless crimes, and I have no empathy for these criminal elements.”

64% say “No!” to California Governor Gavin Newsom approving a parole recommendation to give freedom to Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin Sirhan Sirhan in a new scientific poll of California’s likely voters just released this afternoon. Sirhan has been granted parole by a California board and now the panel’s decision faces a review that will require the Governor’s approval to be official.  However, California voters are overwhelmingly opposed to the Governor approving the parole board’s recommendation, according to the new poll released today.  64% oppose freedom for Sirhan, and less than 20% of likely voters support the parole board’s decision to approve his release.  The complete poll results may be downloaded here.  The methodology of the poll meets peer standards and can be downloaded here. 

The poll was commissioned by James V. Lacy, President of the U.S. Justice Foundation, and conducted by the respected national polling firm of McLaughlin and Associates, whose survey research clients have included former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.  The survey research was conducted over August 30-31, in Spanish and English by live interviewers using phone, cell and text formats.  The margin of error is +/- 4%. Another significant finding of the poll is that support for California’s death penalty law has increased since a similar question was asked last June.  At that time a McLaughlin and Associates poll found 47.8% of Californians were against abolishing the death penalty.  See poll results: https://usjf.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/CA-Statewide-Executive-Summary-6-8-21-1.pdf. However, according to the new poll released today using the same methodology and sample size, 52.7% of Californians support the death penalty law in California.  

Governor Newsom’s job performance approval stands at 52.7%, with 44.6% disapproving his job performance as Governor.

However, 51.7% of California’s likely voters think the state is headed in the wrong direction.

Commenting on the poll, James V. Lacy, a death penalty advocate said, “It would be political suicide for Gavin Newsom to free Sirhan Sirhan given these numbers.  Not approving the recommendation of the parole board would also be the right thing to do.”

Lacy added that McLaughlin and Associates has now conducted two reliable polls in a row this summer that make it clear there is significant, even majority support among California’s likely voters for the state’s death penalty laws, and this research “is solid and starkly contrasts with a seat-of-the-pants two question poll” released by U.C.Berkeley with the support of the Los Angeles Times last May.

A civil lawsuit I have filed against Gov. Gavin Newsom for overstepping his authority with a 2019 executive order that created a moratorium on the state’s death penalty, will now be heard by the Superior Court in Sacramento on August 31. The Judge will rule on mutual motions for summary adjudication filed by both myself and Newsom. I am represented in the case by litigator Chad Morgan. Newsom passed on being represented by the state Attorney General’s office and instead has hired the San Francisco-based national law firm of O’Melveny and Myers to represent him. The case has been ignored by almost all of the main-stream news media, including the Los Angeles Times which has written reports about the status of California’s death penalty law without mentioning the case, but the Orange County Register published a fair assessment of the lawsuit here: https://www.ocregister.com/2021/02/03/oc-man-files-lawsuit-against-gov-newsom-over-death-penalty-moratorium/https://www.ocregister.com/2021/02/03/oc-man-files-lawsuit-against-gov-newsom-over-death-penalty-moratorium/. After I filed the case, a retired former member of Ronald Reagan’s White House Counsel’s office sent me an email stating simply “Bravo – You are absolutely correct on the law.”

While the case is still pending, public disclosures and a news report now reveal that the Governor has accepted more than $700,000 from two major law firms to both create and defend his Executive Order.

Rather than relying on the Attorney General’s office, Newsom has received extensive free “behested” legal services, including $405,000 in legal services from the private law firm of Boies Schiller Flexner, to help him craft his “moratorium”, as well as an additional $305,385 from the law firm of O’Melveny and Myers to defend the alleged faulty Order in court, according to public disclosures.  While the Los Angeles-based O’Melveny and Myers has represented Newsom pro bono in the legal challenge to the Executive Order, it has also received at least $600,000 in state funds representing the Newsom Administration in other cases.

My lawsuit argues that Newsom did not have the power in 2019 to issue an Order to “across the board” halt the executions of the 700-plus inmates on California’s death row, or to withdraw the state’s lethal-injection protocol and dismantle the execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison. It requests a Declaratory Judgment that Newsom violated the law by exceeding his authority, that the lethal injection protocols be placed back in the Code of Regulations, and that the death chamber at San Quentin be restored to working condition.

As I told the Register, “The case is largely about violation of process, about violation of the constitutional separation of powers. (The governor) does not have the power to erase the death penalty, he does not have the power to dismantle the death chamber. He does have the power to grant reprieves, pardons or commutations,” Lacy said, “but he does not have the power to do that across the board.”

Instead, what he must do is examine each and every case he issuing a reprieve under, and take into consideration what happened to the victims, and the victims’ families, and be able to look at the survivors in the eye and justify in writing why their loved one’s murderer should be granted a reprieve from an impartial jury’s decision to sentence death.

When I think of the applicability of the death penalty in California, I think of 14 workers at the Department of Public Health in San Bernardino County who were murdered at a Christmas party in cold-blood by Farook and Malik, the terrorists. I also think of that little boy, Anthony Avalos, who was abused for years, tortured, and killed by his mother and her boyfriend. If Newsom is to have his way, the perpetrators of these crimes would never be sentenced to death, even after a fair trial and unanimous determination by an impartial jury that the death sentence under California law should be imposed. These sadnesses keep me focused on the real problem – Newsom imposing his own flawed value system to undermine and try to erase California’s long-standing and legal death penalty law. I am looking forward to a judicial resolution of my case late this summer.

Californian’s remain generally supportive of the death penalty law according to the most probative recent polling of the issue.  Early in June, the national polling firm of McLaughlin and Associates found 49% of Californians would vote No if a constitutional amendment to abolish the death penalty is placed on the ballot in 2022 by the Legislature, while 43.8% would vote Yes.  When voters are informed of issues that would be raised during a campaign to repeal the death penalty, opposition to repeal increases to a majority of 53.3% of voters saying No to abolishing California’s death penalty law, and support drops to just 40.5%.  See poll results: https://usjf.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/CA-Statewide-Executive-Summary-6-8-21-1.pdf.

As 2020 closes the editors at California Political Review wish all our readers a Happy New Year! We are so pleased to report that early this December our service at CPR achieved a major milestone and surpassed 10 million total Page views all time since we started publication in late 2011! We have also published over 81,000 comments by our readers, and have achieved a steady monthly readership in excess of 100,000 Page views per month, establishing CPR as a meaningful contributor to the distribution of commentary and news about California public policy. We thank you for your support and once again wish you health and prosperity in the New Year.

The results of California’s vote on statewide ballot propositions reveals a much more conservative voter when engaging in “direct democracy” then when voting for partisan candidate races. Joe Biden won more than 65% of the vote in the Golden State on election night, showing it to be among the “bluest” of “blue states.” Every one of California’s statewide elected officials are liberal Democrats. However, in this election, California voters stunningly rejected the recommendations of the state’s Democratic Party and its leaders, and big-spending labor unions, again and again. In one crushing blow, 58.4% to 41.5%, Californians voted in favor of Uber and Lyft and their drivers, by voting Yes on Proposition 22. The successful ballot measure will cut against the so-called “Assembly Bill 5,” an iconic labor union driven law in the state, and free drivers and the companies from the most onerous of California’s regulations and allow drivers to continue to consider themselves as “independent contractors.” The result is more flexibility for employment opportunities for Californians, and a blow for freedom and the so-called “gig” economy that will simply allow people who own cars and have free time to continue to make money on the side. It is a big loss for the labor unions and their allies in the State Legislature, whose game-plan is to expand as much as possible the state’s regulatory and taxing authority well beyond traditional labor relations and into other private and innovative enterprises. And it is a huge loss for the California Democratic Party.

California voters went even further in rejecting Democrat policy programs. They overwhelmingly rejected a measure, Proposition 21, that would diminish property rights and impose “rent control” on property owners, by 60% to 40%. Proposition 21 was vigorously supported by a “Who’s Who” of the state Democratic and liberal establishment including not only the official the Democratic Party, but also the ACLU, the United Auto Workers, Black Lives Matters Los Angeles, the SEIU, and the Los Angeles Times. Their collective strength could not convince voters to curtail property rights. Another measure, Proposition 23, to further regulate smaller dialysis clinics in a way that favored health care unions went down in total flames, losing 64% to 36%. An additional measure that would eliminate bail in California, favored once again by the Democratic Party and its’ criminal defense lawyer allies, and opposed by law enforcement organizations and the state Republican Party, lost 55.4% to 44.6%. And the Democrats biggest prize on the ballot, Proposition 15, a property tax hike focused on commercial real estate, was failing this morning with only 48.3% of the vote compared to 51.7% “no.”

California’s votes on ballot propositions included other cheer for positions taken by the state Republican Party. Voters rejected by a wide measure Proposition 16, which would have reinstated racial preferences in the state Constitution.

But what is really remarkable was how wrong the polling was on these measures and how those inaccurate polls may have been influenced by what I term “systemic liberal bias” in California’s institutions. These public polls offered no clues at all to the wholesale rejection of the Democrat’s ballot propositions in this election. For example, in late September the UC Berkeley Institute of Government Studies issued a press release on four of the statewide ballot measures, namely Props. 15, 16, 21 and 22. The Berkeley poll had the Proposition 15 tax hike leading by 15 points (it is losing by 3), Proposition 16 losing by 8 points (it won by 12 points), Proposition 21 “has voters split evenly” in the poll when it lost by almost 20 points on election day, and the big one, Proposition 22, favored by 3 points when it won on election day by about 17 points.

How could the Berkeley poll be so wildly wrong? Not just closely wrong, but unequivocally wrong! The pollsters might argue that it was predictive but “only at the time”. But the counter to that is the poll and press was released just a week and a half before active “early voting” started in the state. Logically, the polling clearly was NOT predictive, it was wrong. To what extent does the error factor evidence a bias? Pollsters will say the poll was not biased, or that perhaps there were technically adjustments that should have been made in the samples of voters. Yet if you look at the actual results of the four measures polled for the September 22 press release, the common denominator is a deep under count of the side of the initiative endorsed by the Republican party.

Berkeley did announce poll results again closer to the election for the period October 16-23 and they did adjust their numbers slightly in favor of what became the winning side, but they were still way off of the actual result and appear to again poll in bias in favor of the Democratic Party position. In this subsequent poll on Proposition 22, 46% were reported as “Yes”, 42% was reported as “No,” and 12% were “Undecided.” If one is to believe in the validity of this allegedly “unbiased” academic poll, one has to believe that 100% of the “Undecided” vote ended up voting “Yes” on Proposition 22, since on election day the Yes side grew by slightly more than the entire 12% “undecided” tally reported in the poll. No way that happened. The poll was wrong in the voting result. And again, being so wrong, I believe as a free American that the poll reveals what I call a “systemic liberal bias” in the polling.

The national polls were all wrong, the most notable being the NBC poll released just the Sunday before the election showing that Joe Biden held a 10 point lead over President Trump, and that Trump was receiving just 5% of the black vote. It is axiomatic that NBC’s polls, and most all other national polls, were like fairy tales – wishful thinking intended to influence the outcome. Even counting California’s huge vote for Joe Biden, his national margin over Trump is actually a couple hundred thousand votes less than Hillary Clinton’s total in 2016. In other words, Biden appears to have under-performed Hillary Clinton, and certainly did not beat Trump by ten points. ABC News counts 68,976,189 national votes for Biden this morning, compared to 66,260,459 for Trump. That is not a landslide for Biden at all. Rather than a 10 point lead as NBC broadcasted with corporate funds a few days before the election, the result is just a 2 point lead. And the anecdotal evidence is, win or lose, Trump will have won far more of the black vote than 5%. NBC, like Berkeley IGS, was way off. Perhaps intentionally so, because of “systemic liberal bias.”

The polling industry in the 2020 election in general has proven itself to not only be unreliable, but especially when it comes to California ballot measures, heavily biased in favor of the Democratic party – there can be no other conclusion.

California taxpayers, who already pay the highest state income tax in the nation, could soon pay billions of dollars in higher taxes – after voters cast their ballots this November.  

And the biggest tax increase on the November ballot might surprise you.  

In November, voters will consider local tax and bond measures with a staggering annual price tag of more than $16.6 billion, according to an analysis by California Political Review of more than 240 local tax and bond measures on the November ballot compiled by the California Taxpayers Association. That staggering figure exceeds Democrats’ high-profile efforts to undermine California’s landmark Proposition 13 by imposing a split-roll property tax.  

The biggest threat to taxpayers on the November ballot is at the local level, but as I caution in my book “Taxifornia,” most voters overlook the impact of local tax and bond measures. 

Local tax measures range in size from Measure O, an 8 percent hotel tax to generate between $2,000 to $10,000 for the city of Tulelake, to Measure RR, a $7 billion general obligation bond proposed by the Los Angeles Unified School District. Local governments say that higher taxes are needed as a one-time offset to avoid cuts to government services. More often than not, they go to pay for raises for high-paid government employees.  

In 2016, the city of Westminster demanded voters approve a one-cent sales tax increase to avoid drastic budget cuts. The following year, the City Council went on a spending spree: granting a half-million dollars in raises for management employees and giving a $3,000-cash bonus to every member of the city’s union workforce. Meanwhile, the city’s highest paid employee collected $392,794.95 in pay and benefits in 2019, according to Transparent California.  

Across the state, local taxpayer advocates are fighting back.  

“Just like the roads tax, library tax, fire tax and parks tax before it, Measure O reminds us once again that the Board of Supervisors cannot live within its means,” argues Daniel A. Drummond, executive director of the Sonoma County Taxpayers’ Association, who is fighting a quarter-cent sales tax increase in Sonoma County. 

“Either we continue to approve new sales tax increases every election cycle or we finally say enough is enough,” he concluded. 

According to the most recent Real Clear Politics average of major polls, President Donald Trump is far more popular than Speaker Nancy Pelosi. This highly unreported development is rather significant. According to Real Clear Politics, as of the end of March, Nancy Pelosi’s favorable rating stood at 37.7%, in comparison to Trump’s much higher favorability of 44.5%. That is a big difference in voter sentiment! Even worse for Pelosi, Real Clear Politics averages show that Pelosi has a HIGHER unfavorability rating than Trump, at 52.3%, compared to 51.3%. And on top of this, the gap between Pelosi’s favorability and unfavorability, a key indicator for political pros, is 14.6 points – more than twice that of Trump.

What accounts for Pelosi’s drop in favor? Well, a failed and reckless impeachment, which dominated her legislative agenda for the last year, must have played a role; in addition, her foot-dragging on getting the House of Representatives to approve the Coronavirus response and stimulus package, and then trying to stack the legislation with earmarks and irrelevant “Green New Deal” bells and whistles, while people are suffering, may also have had a negative affect on her popularity. However you attribute it, Nancy Pelosi is one of the most unpopular Speakers in history and currently one of the most unpopular politicians in Washington, D.C.