California's fool's gold, Part 1

California is a great place to live, unless you consider your children your own responsibility or you consider your own income and property to belong to you.

If that's the case, you're in for a big shock when you decide to live there.

In California, the state often called the home of "fruits and nuts" – and you can take that any way you please – you find out very quickly that the state considers you, your family and everything you own, earn or inherit to belong to it. Whatever might be left after the legislative vultures pick the bones of your life, you can keep, at least until the feds get their chance to scavenge the remnants.

No exaggeration! While national conservative pundits wail that the man who is president hasn't come up with a budget for three years, has the highest deficit in history and still wants to get re-elected, California is precariously perched on the edge of financial ruin.

The budget isn't balanced, and the deficit is more than $22 billion. Gov. Jerry Brown estimated receipts would balance it all, but now the controller announced the actual figures: Revenue is down nearly $539 million, 10.3 percent below Brown's estimate.

In other words, Californians didn't earn enough to pay the taxes to give Jerry the money he and the Democrat legislature continue to spend as though it grows on trees.

Unemployment is above 11 percent, but that ignores parts of the state where it's more than 20 percent. In Colusa, it's 27 percent.

The housing market is in the dumps; demands on social services continue to rise even as the governor threatens to cut funding. But that's just a ploy this election year because Jerry wants taxes increased.

Not having the cojones to raise taxes legislatively, Jerry has it on the ballot so the people can raise their own taxes.

Cute, eh? If it works, he can never say he did it; voters did it to themselves!

Politicians are amazing. If they're not blaming the opposition for the problems they face, they devise ways to have someone else take the heat for doing the job they should have been doing all along, as elected representatives.

Speaking of elected representatives, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom just signed a contract to have a TV show on Al Gore's TV operation. Guess he doesn't have enough to do.

Jerry Brown was governor before. His nickname then is telling: Gov. Moonbeam.

This was the genius who decided California shouldn't have any more freeways so he, along with Adriana Gianturco, Transportation Department head, stopped new freeways and extensions of existing ones.

Their theory was: If we don't build them, people won't need them.

It might have been good for a children's fairytale, but it didn't work in a state with a good economy and booming population – and one wild about, and dependent on, wheels. Californians love their cars and trucks, and the economy is dependent on them.

But Jerry thought he knew better. He did his damage and was governor no more.

But he didn't quit politics – in the interim serving as mayor of Oakland and state attorney general, and now he's back, having convinced skeptical voters he was older and wiser.

Fools that they were.

He is older – and perhaps wiser in political savvy – but his liberal politics haven't changed.

California is a state that dictates what can and can't be taught in the public schools, and the politicians, unions and special interest groups have forced the gay agenda on all classes for all public school children.

Never forget, teachers unions are the strongest in the state, and Brown depends on their support and money.

The state has stolen parental rights in matters of "health," allowing children as young as 10 and 12 to get medical care, birth control and abortion referrals from school without parental notification. Cross-dressing boys are allowed in girl's locker rooms, and there are challenges to all-girl or boy teams.

Don't even ask about political correctness when it comes to patriotism or race or ethnicity or the rights of illegal aliens to benefit from all the perks of U.S. citizenship.

You want green? California is so green it will rot the core of the state's survival. The passage of AB 32 is the killer. It's the Global Warming Solutions Act, signed by former Gov. (the so-called Republican) Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It's spawned other bills, which essentially put the government in charge of virtually everything done in the state – from business operations and transportation and construction to how towns are allowed to grow and how much and what kind of housing they're required to have to land development and green space to how "green" individual houses must be and how people must control their carbon footprints.

It's happening right now, statewide, and the tragedy is that most Californians haven't the slightest idea of what's happening to them. When they find out, it'll likely be too late.

Living in California is like living in another world, and it is another world, one that's losing freedom.

People nationwide had better pay attention to what's happening here, because it's spreading everywhere like a cancer. It's begun, and when we're all inundated with it, the United States will be mortally changed, most likely, permanently.

America, wake up now, before it's too late.

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