Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Gavin Newsom tweets in a manner that mirrors Trump’s tweets; Fox News calls it childish for a governor to tweet in such a way while not similarly criticizing the president of the United States. Ridiculous hypocrisy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lm2g9ZddYg
Trump used ICE for political purposes. This is not the action of a democracy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ku08PQqrvs
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/06/california-solar-funding-trump-00496922
“”Californians pay an additional 72.4 cents per gallon at the pump attributable to state and local taxes and fees, which is the highest in the nation,” according to the California Tax Foundation.”
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“”the state’s cap-and-trade program affects gasoline prices because it requires fuel suppliers to purchase permits that cover the greenhouse gases emitted when the fuel is burned. We estimate that this currently adds 23 cents per gallon to the price of gasoline.””
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“California has effectively walled its market off from fuel produced elsewhere. They write that, despite bordering other states from which fuel could theoretically flow to satisfy demand and lower prices, California policies have made the state an “island” because of “capacity constraints on California’s pipelines and the state’s stringent environmental fuel standards, which effectively require fuel to be refined in-state and limit the ability to import fuel from other regions.””
https://reason.com/2025/07/11/blame-california-politicians-for-the-states-sky-high-gasoline-prices/
“The law transferred wealth from workers who lost their jobs to those who didn’t.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/16/californias-minimum-wage-hike-cost-18000-fast-food-jobs-as-employment-ticked-up-in-other-states/
“In an ideal world, I control my property—but don’t get to tell other people what they can do with theirs provided they don’t intrude on my actual rights (as opposed to bogus ones that protect, say, my property values). As the late legal scholar Bernard Siegan explained, “There are very serious restrictions upon private property involved in zoning—where people, your neighbors, are telling you how you can use your land.””
https://reason.com/2025/07/18/conservatives-shouldnt-oppose-californias-potential-zoning-reforms/
“Without Newsom’s efforts, major CEQA reform would have died on the vine. Another late-breaking housing bill was under consideration as part of the budget, but not subject to Newsom’s ultimatum—but the Legislature caved in to union demands. The Sacramento Bee reports this bill was roughly based on another measure that “allows developers to bypass CEQA review if they agree to pay a certain minimum wage to construction workers.”
Mandating wage boosts drives up the cost of housing construction and weakens the usefulness of these deregulations, but it was an attempt to lessen the degree to which unions use CEQA to slow construction projects to extract concessions. Newsom’s failure to overcome union opposition here is a disappointment, but doesn’t tarnish an otherwise noteworthy effort.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/04/with-environmental-regulatory-reform-california-gov-gavin-newsom-finally-does-something-substantial/
“”In the fields, I would say 70% of the workers are gone,” she said in an interview. “If 70% of your workforce doesn’t show up, 70% of your crop doesn’t get picked and can go bad in one day. Most Americans don’t want to do this work. Most farmers here are barely breaking even. I fear this has created a tipping point where many will go bust.”
In the vast agricultural lands north of Los Angeles, stretching from Ventura County into the state’s central valley, two farmers, two field supervisors and four immigrant farmworkers told Reuters this month that the ICE raids have led a majority of workers to stop showing up.
That means crops are not being picked and fruit and vegetables are rotting at peak harvest time, they said.
One Mexican farm supervisor, who asked not to be named, was overseeing a field being prepared for planting strawberries last week. Usually he would have 300 workers, he said. On this day he had just 80. Another supervisor at a different farm said he usually has 80 workers in a field, but today just 17.
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“Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, said an estimated 80% of farmworkers in the U.S. were foreign-born, with nearly half of them in the country illegally. Losing them will cause price hikes for consumers, he said.
“This is bad for supply chains, bad for the agricultural industry,” Holtz-Eakin said.
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Trump conceded in a post on his Truth Social account this month that ICE raids on farm workers – and also hotel workers – were “taking very good, long-time workers away” from those sectors, “with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.”
Trump later told reporters, “Our farmers are being hurt badly. They have very good workers.” He added, “They’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be great.”
He pledged to issue an order to address the impact, but no policy change has yet been enacted.
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ICE operations in California’s farmland were scaring even those who are authorized, said Greg Tesch, who runs a farm in central California.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/immigration-raids-leave-crops-unharvested-100833841.html
“However the 9th Circuit ultimately comes down on that question, any decision addressing the legal merits of Newsom’s argument will amount to a rejection of the Trump administration’s alarming position that the president has the authority to deploy National Guard troops at will, even without pretending to meet statutory requirements or citing any facts to support his decision. That argument would transform the National Guard, today’s version of the state militia, into a federal force that the president can use at his discretion, without regard to constraints imposed by Congress or the 10th Amendment.”
https://reason.com/2025/06/18/trump-argues-that-he-can-take-over-a-states-national-guard-whenever-he-feels-like-it/
“California may have gone too far this time in nudging the industry to ever-higher sales of zero-emission vehicles. The rules would have required automakers to hit increasing percentages — 35 percent by model year 2026 and 68 percent by model year 2030 — before reaching 100 percent of new-car sales in 2035.
Maybe that would have worked if it were just about California. But a dozen other states are signed on to California’s targets, and they have been slower and less generous with incentives and EV charging infrastructure. Where California has more than a quarter of its new car sales coming from EVs, New Jersey is at 15 percent, and New York is under 12 percent”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/06/14/mary-nichols-trump-california-clean-car-air-rules-00344370