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Laurie sounds awful, but in a DEI awful way.
You got that right. But as awful as she sounds, the real capper is her stance on taxes. She’s at the age and level where her compensation is substantial, both in gross income terms and in total compensation, per transparentcalifornia.com, she has averaged $300k annually for the last three years.
Her position on taxes is that she shouldn’t have to pay them because she doesn’t like how they are being used (remember, she’s former U. S. Army). Difficult to walk that Socialist/Republican line, I imagine.
Academics, including professors at the Stanford University School of Education (SUSE), have done a lot to damage the college readiness of American kids (particularly Californians).
I am very close to a SUSE (pronounced “Suzy”) PhD who is a diehard, committed Socialist and has so many personal challenges that she just can’t understand normal thinking. Quite literally the worst person I have ever met face to face, described in this Substack, if you are interested:
I wouldn’t leave my kids alone with her for five minutes. For quite some time, she was in charge of selecting books for secondary schools in a very large public school district.
Frankly, I’m not sure how she got into SUSE. She didn’t graduate from high school, scored on the 48th percentile on the math portion of the CBEST. She did undergrad work at a midlevel UC, has a correspondence Master’s from some school in Vermont, but she’s a lesbian registered Democrat civil servant (check, check aaaaand check), so after an interview with the department chair, she was accepted and started to wreak havoc molding young minds. Happily, she’s near retirement age.
Hard to see him win. Not a very likeable guy, as his failed presidential run indicated. It’s a very crowded field of experienced Democratic politicians with existing and deep support bases, his initial polling numbers are very poor (1% to 3%), he’s never held elective office, he’s a billionaire trying to buy a job supervising actual humans, voter fatigue with celebrity candidates, he has no governmental track record, and he has three real problems:
- At best, his messages overlap those of the other candidates.
- His key strong points (environment, climate, corporate justice) are secondary concerns in California right now. Most Californians are interested in a strong economy, low inflation, more affordable lives, public safety, low-cost energy, good schools and reduced homelessness. There’s no real reason to vote for him.
- He needs to build a support team from scratch when other experienced staff has already committed to other candidates.
We have normalized and protected incompetence. We stopped championing excellence and became skeptical of it as an elitist thing. We have cultivated a culture of entitlement that drives achievement lower and reward expectation higher. We have allowed people to bolster their profiles via grievance vs via competence. We have trained a generation in playing the DEI game, to the point of creating a trans identification fad that is only just now slowing down. In short, we have taken a community minded, Protestant work-ethic based, patriotic culture and sold it out for consumerism and stupidity. But it’s not my fault because I am oppressed and traumatized by the way you guys look at me.
AI is only going to accelerate that phenomenon. It pretends to be additive, but in reality, it is not particularly groundbreaking. It aggregates existing data quickly without much in the way of discerning that which is needed. AI does not, cannot, will not, invent, create, design or discover anything really critical. It can only summarize what has gone on before, and what’s worse, it will invent that which is not there. It hallucinates.
Dems will continue to run against Trump in the foreseeable future. It’s all they have.
My worry is that they will latch onto “Tax the Rich” as their core focal point. It was the only talking point that moved the needle for Harris, and she abandoned it — my guess is in response to the billionaires who funded her campaign.
Momdani and AOC don’t have those concerns, nor does Sanders. If they figure out that robbing Peter to pay Paul is their sole resonant talking point, they will ride the politics of envy until they drop.
“I’ve raised at least $50 million for the left,” recalls Evan Barker at The Free Press, but “on Tuesday, I voted for Donald Trump.”
How my party lost me, Dems must return to normalcy and other commentary | New York Post
But “the final straw was Oprah Winfrey’s tone-deaf speech” at the Dem convention: “A larger than life Hollywood billionaire” who “said nothing that spoke to the Americans who had once constituted the Democratic base.”
So, the incredible advantages for existing homeowners include:
- Property values may drop.
- Much taller, denser buildings than today with loss of views, sunlight and privacy and avoidance of setbacks, step-backs and open-space rules.
- Much weaker local control and neighborhood influence.
- No public approval process, no subjective design review, no broad discretionary decision, CEQA is bypassed, as is CEQA lawsuits.
- Single family homes are protected by anti-displacement rules, but usually for rent-controlled multifamily housing. It doesn’t protect single family homes or duplexes not under rent control.
- Density increase will be dramatic. Bill does not allow for added funding for parking, roads, schools, parks, sewers, water, policing or emergency services, or mitigation for parking, traffic congestion, noise or neighborhood services.
- Cities are explicitly restricted from imposing additional fees or inclusionary requirements because a project uses this law.
- So you’ll get more congestion, tougher parking crowding in schools, crowding in public facilities.
- Parking pressure that spills over into adjacent neighborhoods. I have that little happy, happy, joy-joy right now. Increased competition for curb parking, more circulation, more park and ride behavior.
- It allows cities to exclude some sites through a transit-oriented development alternative plan. So. some neighborhoods will become “dumping grounds” for density.
- It allows transit agencies to override local zoning on their own land.
- Very complex interaction of CA TOD rules, Local TOD alternative plans, MPO-created TOD maps with “rebuttal presumption of validity”, HCD oversight and potential attorney general enforcement.
- Potential for gentrification or other demographic shifts.
- Does not guarantee shadow studies, sun access protections, light or noise pollution abatement.
- Somewhat ironically, more traffic and more congestion. More service trucks, more late-night activity, more noise, more rooftop decks, less backyard privacy.
- Greater fire and safety risks.
- Homeowners can’t “opt out” through democracy, even if a majority of local voters wish to exempt themselves.
- Delayed/inevitable changes in unincorporated county areas.
- This is to affect all light rail stops, train stops, intersections of bus stops, major bus stops.
- Best bonus of all, property taxes — might increase. Awesome.
Senate Bill 79 – known as the Abundant and Affordable Homes Near Transit Act – supersedes local zoning rules to allow developers to create more housing around transit hubs. Last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it into law.
It takes effect on July 1, 2026. It affects the counties of Santa Clara, San Mateo, San Francisco, Alameda, Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Riverside. All the high-density counties.
Why is this happening? Matt Lewwis, a spokesperson for California YIMBY (one of SB79’s sponsors) says “If your home is close to a transit stop, you’re getting exclusive access to a publicly funded amenity that needs to be accessible to more people,” he said. “The only way to get that access is building more houses by transit stops.” In other words, you don’t have any say and the fact that you were there first is literally immaterial.
SB79 author Scott Wiener says his bill favors people over buildings when you prefer low zoning density. You’re basically racist if you’re against his bill.
Los Angeles desperately needs new housing. So why are its politicians still fighting SB79?
Now the Wall Street billionaires are fighting back by backing Elise Stefanik, a Republican in the New York state governor’s race.
Wall Street billionaires plot to cripple Mamdani over dinner at White House
Henry Kravis, Stephen Schwarzman, David Solomon, Jamie Dimon, Adena Friedman, Larry Fink, Jeffrey Speecher.
Newsom is the best positioned Democratic presidential candidate for 2028. Just ask Politico:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/11/15/gavin-newsom-interview-2028-frontrunner-00652362
This is a chart showing (a) how interest payments as a percentage of Federal revenue have grown over time and (b) how the growth of that percentage has accelerated.
Meaning we’re in vast fiscal trouble. There are too many needs, real and perceived, that the politicians want to fund, so they keep borrowing against the future. It’s going to crash at some point, and it’s already raised inflation to ridiculous heights.
Fiscal Year Interest Payments as % of Federal Revenue ~ 1991 ~ 8 % (interest cost reached high mark then) Peterson Foundation+2AAF+2 ~ 2008 ~ 9.6 % (interest payments ≈ $242 billion out of tax revenue ≈ $2.5 trillion) Wikipedia+1 ~ 2024-25 ~ 18–19 % (interest payments projected to be ~19% of revenues) AAF+2Trading Economics+2 And here comes Katie Wilson to fix all of it. It is uncharitable to say, but she looks like a low-watt bulb to me, same as Mamdani.
Meet the socialist Mamdani-style mayor just elected to run West Coast’s 5th largest city
GR, your wealth tax concept is about to get a real-world test.
A ballot initiative in California is being proposed by the healthcare workers union. A one-time, 5% tax on California’s 255 billionaires, solely on their wealth over $1 billion. Supporters say it could raise $100 billion and offset looming cuts to Medicaid.
Not surprisingly, Gavin Newsom is against it. Newsom’s team is launching a PAC called “Stop the Squeeze,” correctly terming it a “can of worms sliding down a slippery slope (two cliches at once, must be good) by taxing cars, houses, wheelbarrows and everything else.”
San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan is against it for the best reason (I think) stating that “I don’t know that people fully appreciate the vulnerability we face as a state when it comes to our revenue sources.” True that. 1/3rd of CA revenue comes from the Top 1%.
The California Campaign to Introduce a First-of-Its-Kind Billionaire’s Tax – WSJ
I take it back. Climate change is so critically important to Newsom that he acted as stand-in for the American president at the recent international climate leadership event, jetting down to Brazil which is 5,000 miles away from California.
Newsom sells out the US at latest hypocritical climate conference
California Republican Governor candidate is no fan of Newsom and cites the fact that half of California’s oil comes from environmentally fragile Amazon rain forests, including those in Brazil. He believes Newsom is a virtue-signaling climate hypocrite:
Wendy’s closing 300 stores. They closed 240 last year.
Wendy’s to close hundreds of US stores in bid to halt falling profit
