We Are All Californians Now

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California is in the midst of a crippling four-year-old drought. Yet the state has built almost no major northern or central mountain reservoirs since the New Melones Dam of 1979. That added nearly 3 million acre-feet to the state’s storage reserves – a critical project that was almost canceled by endless environmental lawsuits and protests.

Although California has almost doubled in population since the dam’s construction, the state’s politicians apparently decided that completing more northern and Sierra Nevada water projects was passé. So the parched state now prays for rain and snow rather than building reservoirs to ensure that the next drought won’t shut us down.

Curiously, once controversial infrastructure projects such as the New Melones Dam are finished, few seem to complain about the life-saving water they provide the public in times of existential drought. California has taught the nation its unique hypocrisy. We have stopped the Keystone pipeline for now, but if it gets built eventually, few consumers will complain that it transfers oil at a low cost and with greater safety.

California has also schooled the nation on mutually exclusively goals. Its lax immigration policies have made for a rapidly expanding population, and yet it expects a sophisticated infrastructure that ensures plentiful, clean water – and dreams of a pristine, green, 19th-century paradise in a depopulated state.

California’s major north-south highways – the 99, 101 and I-5 “freeways” – often descend into deadly traffic quagmires. They were designed for a state of fewer than 20 million people, not one of more than 40 million. Recent national surveys have rated the state’s road system as nearly last in the nation.

Most people forget that California once all but invented the modern idea of a freeway. But instead of first ensuring motorists safe three-lane freeways, the state is embarking on a $68 billion high-speed rail project.

Californians excel at these postmodern solutions even as they ignore premodern problems. What advantage is gained by providing free iPads to California students if their basic reading and analytical skills are declining to below pre-Internet levels? California is busy mandating transgendered restrooms but is lax in guaranteeing that there will be water in their sinks and toilets.

In good California style, Houston-based NASA talks grandly about its new 21st-century space agendas, forgetting that it cannot even send its present astronauts into space on an American rocket. The fact that a prior generation built the powerful and sophisticated Saturn rockets does not mean that its more sophisticated children can send Americans into space without Russian help.

Government agencies such as the IRS, VA, GSA and NSA are bigger, richer and more self-promoting than ever before. But their huge budgets hardly ensure that they can fairly collect taxes, humanely tend to the needs of veterans, professionally monitor government property, or properly collect and distill intelligence.

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Oh, come on and say it. We’re ALL F*CKED. I reside in Kommieforniastan and I’m happy to say that Oregon is surpassing us in stupidity but I’ve got faith that our idiot Communists in Sack of Tomatoes will catch up any day now.

Unfortunately too many Californians are relocating to less expensive states and are spreading their social-engineering stupidity.

@upChuck.Liberals: Kommiefornians? I thought they were Gayfornians. Well, ok let’s give them 50-50. They have an absolutely unlimited water supply and won’t use it. They’d rather give some Dimocrats billions of dollars to build a train system that will never be used. What a bunch of weenies.

Curt the Keystone XL pipeline is going to end at a deepwater port so that North American oil can be exported to the world market. Right now that Canadian oil can only go to our midwest oil refiners AND they can buy it at a 30% discount because we are the only customers.