FROM SPANISH grandees and padres, to gold-rushers, to the Joads, to the Clampetts, to Mexican and Asian migrants today, generations (real and fictional) have walked, ridden, and flown to the Promised Land known as California.
The state is also spiritual home to the Houston Chronicle editorial board, the ideal place up to which Texas regularly fails to measure.
Today, for instance, our local nannies harrumphed about trans fats in restaurants. A couple of libs in the Texas legislature are pushing a new law to outlaw that substance in those venues, and the Chronicle is all for it.
Fine. It's another waste of perfectly good paper and ink, as so many Chronicle editorials are. Texas is not about to loose packs of fat-sniffing bureaucrats and herds of tort lawyers to harass Texas taquerias and burger joints.
But where do such ideas come from anyway?
Well, graf 5 has the answer:
California is so far the only state to ban [trans fats] in restaurants and bakeries . . . .
That got me to thinking. How often have our locals used California as a model for Texas? Answer: More than I can count. Here are a few that I found in a hurry. Trust me: There are many others.
With the bipartisan example of Obama and Schwarzenegger as inspiration, this session Texas legislators should vote to give Texans the same right to cleaner, more fuel-efficient vehicles. (1/30)
Responding to an appeal by California's Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, President Barack Obama indicated he will remove Bush administration barriers that prevented states from imposing tougher auto fuel-efficiency and emission standards than the federal government. (1/27) [The editorial incanted California seven times.]
Looking to the future, the Los Angeles Police Department is testing technology that would electronically disable the ignition system of a vehicle fleeing from an officer . . . . They are [read The department is] also testing a tracking device that could be fired at the vehicle. (12/25)
In fact, a California study found, the gibberish that passes for insurance policies actually undermines health coverage. (2/27)
Infatuation with the left coast may also help explain the Chronicle's fixation on Hollywood. The paper has advocated for funding to attact more Californians to Texas to make movies (12/18) and counseled the Screen Actors Guild not to strike (12/29).
The editorial board's lexicon also reeks of, like, "holistic nurturing," "partnering" with government, and other Californianisms.
Some editorials don't explicitly mention the Golden State but do preach the virtues of the California state of mind: a generalized bias in favor of (hat tip to the Gipper) taxing everything that moves, regulating everything that keeps moving, and subsidizing everything that stops moving (which is why every other editorial seems to "advocate for funding").
This reflects what Victor Davis Hanson has called "the screwed-up . . . California mentality . . . that wants everything now and in perfection, but has not a clue how to pay for it, or a care about the nebulous distant, but evil 'they' who are to provide for it."
The newspaper's uncritical support for the global warming hypothesis also carries a whiff of California-style religious fundamentalism.
Even the Chronicle's sloppy wet kiss for Barack Obama (1/24: a wife! two daughters! a mother-in-law! maybe a dog!) was ostensibly about the cover of Ms., an irrelevant low-circulation magazine said to be published in Beverly Hills.
Well, here's a news flash for the Chronicle: Nirvana is stone cold broke. The state has the highest state income tax in America and the highest state sales tax in America. California's plan for dealing with its own pending bankruptcy is to hike both.
This is perfect backwards thinking. Direct taxes and the implicit taxes embedded in the state's oppressive regulatory regime have deadened the economy, raised the cost of living, and created a public sector too large to control. People are leaving in droves. Raising taxes will exacerbate the local depression, drive prices even higher, and keep the corpulent state Leviathan well-fed and healthy, even as businesses and family budgets fail.
The Chronicle kinda, sorta knows this. Having nothing better to write about on Christmas Day, the board noted that Texas is actually growing faster than California.
With the current recession putting less of a bite on Texas than other parts of the country, the Lone Star state remains a magnet of opportunity for fellow Americans.
The latest U.S. Census Bureau estimates reveal that more than 140,000 people from other states moved here in the 12 months preceding July. Combined with in-state population growth and international immigration, that adds up to more than 483,000 new Texans in that span. In terms of population growth, that makes us number one in the nation, ahead of California by more than 100,000. . . .
But things are far worse for California than the Chronicle quite let on. Yes, the state grew, but the growth came from foreign immigrants, many quite poor, many quite illegal. As measured by migration to and from other states, California has been a big loser since the 1990s. Many who pull up stakes are wealthy, high-income workers, investors, and innovators. They awoke one day to the fact that they could instantly increase their net incomes by moving to, say, Nevada.
And by the way, what was on our door post that caused the recession to pass over Texas? The Chronicle cannot bring itself to ponder this question. To do so might naturally suggest that our state deserves credit for doing something -- most things, in fact -- better than California. And that just couldn't be true, could it? It was easier for the Chronicle to handle this issue in a passive-aggressive manner by suggesting that the recession deserves credit for choosing to skip Texas.
The Chronicle doesn't like Texas all that much, but loves California. The newspaper's editorialists would cheerfully inflict on its readers the very policies, profligant and unwise, that have humiliated California and ruined the lives of many Californians.
No home. No jobs. No prospects. But, hey, no worries about trans fats.
California, here I come?
No, no, no, no, no!
"God bless Texas!"
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The Economist offers this unhappy postscript: California is a good marker for the direction of the party that now controls the White House and both houses of Congess:
The Californication of the Democratic Party carries all sorts of risks. The most obvious is that California has the most dysfunctional politics in the country. The Golden State has one of the highest unemployment rates in America, at 9.3%, thanks to its high taxes, its unions, its anti-business climate and its gigantic housing bubble. Some 100,000 people have fled the state each year since the early 2000s. [Actually since the 1990s, though in smaller numbers back then.] . . .
The biggest risk is overreach. Many California liberals are as far to the left on cultural issues as the southern Republicans were to the right. Many of them also draw their support from two groups that have limited appeal to the rest of the country, particularly to the "bitter" voters that Mr. Obama had such trouble wooing in November[:] the fabulously rich and public-sector activists.
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Why no links? Because finding old articles with the Chronicle's search engine is sometimes next to impossible, even with extraordinarily detailed search queries. Look'em up yourself.
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Unca D has mentioned California a time or two or three or four before. Stay tuned for more.
UPDATE: Thanks for the link from the invaluable Lose an Eye.
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