A California county that faced a $91 million budget gap this year has approved a sweeping reparations plan for black residents, the first of its kind in the Golden State, that calls for major changes to housing, education, healthcare and criminal justice — while leaving the door open to cash payments.
The Alameda County Board of Supervisors voted 5-0 on June 30 to accept the comprehensive plan following more than two years of research and community engagement.
Throwing away an old pair of socks is a matter of the greatest imaginable complexity. It requires an extensive state plan, supervised by a nongovernmental organization that imposes mandatory payment obligations on the company that made the socks. The socks have to be safely discarded, and that requires extensive planning by a public-private partnership.
It is hard to overstate the hope that followed the fall of apartheid in South Africa in 1994. The newly elected African National Congress was well positioned to move the country into a new era of equality and prosperity for all citizens. South Africa not only had abundant natural resources at its disposal but also boasted a well-developed industrial economy and the continent’s top university system.
It’s midafternoon outside KIPP Academy of Opportunity, a charter school serving children in fifth through eighth grade on South Figueroa Street in residential Los Angeles. As children inside prepare for their futures, a young female struts by in high heels, wearing nothing but a bikini and a jacket.
“We’ll see some police officers roll by and some young women out here just prostituting. They’re walking right by, and the police drive right by them,” the school’s gun-toting security guard said. “It’s normal.”
Not for the squeamish
Last March, a makeshift drug factory exploded next to Los Angeles resident Juan Galicia’s craftsman-style home, built in 1910. The flames spread to his gas line, setting off a fire that destroyed the house and killed his three dogs — he tearfully shows me their picture. Had the accident happened an hour earlier, it would have killed one of his sons, as well. “I lived here 18 years and now it’s gone,” the 55-year-old father, an immigrant from El Salvador, tells me. The empty lot next door, he says, was occupied by homeless squatters who cooked methamphetamine there. “People occupy a place and the city does nothing,” he says.
The FBI had a mole inside Gov. Gavin Newsom’s political orbit before the agency’s corruption probe expanded into the governor and his wife, The Post has learned.
Democrat insider Alexis Podesta, 45, secretly recorded conversations during the criminal probe into Newsom’s then-chief of staff, Dana Williamson, 53, who pleaded guilty to federal fraud and tax charges in May, according to Williamson’s attorney.
h/t Mauser
By any measure, California is a failed state—and a national embarrassment.
Taxes? It has the highest income and gas taxes in the nation.
Roads? A Reason Foundation survey ranks it 49th among the states.
Mass flight? Between 250,000 and 350,000 more Californians leave the state than move in each year. Housing, gas, insurance, and electricity prices? The highest in the continental U.S.
Sounds like Canada under the Liberals.
Americans are used to handouts for favored groups. Affirmative action in university admissions, corporate “diversity” initiatives, and minority-owned contracting requirements direct opportunities, resources, and contracts to supposedly “oppressed” groups, such as women, Native Americans, blacks, and Hispanics.
In California, state Democrats have embraced another kind of favoritism: contracts for state-certified gay-owned businesses.
To be honest, I wouldn’t trust any one of these drug addicts to tell me the truth, but when the numbers start piling up and there is video evidence of people bribing homeless people to commit fraud on petitions by paying them to sign other people’s names, it’s obvious that election fraud is a thing in California.
If you are down on Skid Row, you can earn $2 by voting for Karen Bass.
If you vote for her twenty times in a row, you can earn enough to buy lunch. Whatever you do, don’t tell Spencer Pratt.
(TheVoiceofLA) pic.twitter.com/IMnugvdfVS
— Dr. Jebra Faushay (@JebraFaushay) June 10, 2026
Many Americans went to bed one week ago today presumably thinking Spencer Pratt was headed to the November runoff for Los Angeles mayor. After all, he was leading Socialist City Councilwoman Nithya Raman by thousands of votes on election night. But within a week, The Associated Press has called the race for Raman, after a wave of late-arriving mail-in ballots erased that deficit. Notably, Raman underperformed in her own city council district.
Spencer Pratt’s underdog campaign for Los Angeles mayor is now in limbo. After being in a solid second spot since Election Day Tuesday, Pratt fell to third place behind the two communists who teamed up to elbow the native Angeleno out of the race. As of this writing, Pratt’s second-place standing has been eclipsed by Nithya Raman, a far-left city councilwoman. Mayor Karen Bass has won more than 34.68% of the vote and the right to go to the November election and face the runner-up.
ans of outlaw country music will recall an old song called “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues,” which appeared on Waylon Jennings’s 1973 album Lonesome, On’ry, and Mean. Grok tells me that the original version of the song—a folk-pop version, written and performed by Danny O’Keefe and released the year before—was the “hit” version, but I’d be willing to bet that Waylon’s take is better remembered today.
In any case, the song, which is about loneliness, regret, fading youth, and feeling left behind, starts with the lyrics. “Everybody’s gone away / Said they’re movin’ to L.A. / Ain’t a soul I know around/everybody’s leaving town.”
The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department used helicopters to fly in ballots from vote centers across the region
“They're picking up ballots from 8 cities including Lancaster, Santa Clarita, Palmdale, Lakewood, Santa Monica, Van Nuys, Pomona, and Torrance. Once they arrive,… pic.twitter.com/9JN9lX4gFL
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) June 4, 2026
h/t Auntie Polly
The trial of a 29-year-old charged with sparking a wildfire that went on to become the deadly Palisades inferno, the most destructive blaze in Los Angeles history, is set to begin on Monday in a case that has gripped the city as Angelenos seek answers more than a year after the deadly fire.
Jonathan Rinderknecht, an occasional Uber driver, is accused of starting a small blaze on New Year’s Day 2025, later dubbed the Lachman fire. Although the Los Angeles fire department extinguished the fire on 2 January, it reignited five days later due to high winds and tinderbox conditions after burning undetected deep in the dry hillsides.
What’s the emptiest place on the West Coast, Messed Coast™ this week? It appears to be the election counting offices in California where navel-gazing vote counters are taking their sweet time to tell Californians if their vote for change has been diluted by Tom Steyer and Karen Bass ballot harvesters and vote “cure” experts. We have an update.
In the last decades of the 20th century, California reinvented a brash new capitalism that created new, more innovative archetypes. Today, some of those companies – Apple, Google and Facebook – are among the largest in the world, with assets greater than those of all but a few countries.
