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Bullitt wrote:Hilarious! Most of the CA produce comes from Mexico, and they are worried about me bringing something from Texas?

BTW, I was rear-ended on US101 while I was going 65 mph. Hit by a van, two Middle Eastern guys. I wonder if they had a dirty bomb in the van.

What olafpfj said. You can't dawdle if you want to survive on the 101.

Seriously though, how bad was it? Significant damage, or just a tap and a little traded paint?

Bullitt wrote:I crossed the border today. There is actually a border checkpoint at Blythe, CA on I-10. It's like I am entering a whole other country. I was asked at the border if I was bringing in fruit or vegetables. what the heck? Neither NM or AZ had these checkpoints. They did not ask about guns.

Those are INS/Customs checkpoints, but they also check for (among other things) fruit with contaminating parasites from being brought into California where they can attack the California grown fruit crops - particularly fruit flies. They've been doing that for at least 40 years now. There are similar stations on the westbound I-40 outside of Needles, on the northbound I-15 north of Escondido, and the northbound I-5 south of San Clemente.

Purplehood wrote:I lived for years in Orange County, San Diego and 29 Palms area. You have my condolences.

With the exception of my college years (UTEP/TAMU) and 3-4 years living in NYC, I lived my entire life in southern California before moving here for good in 2006.

California sucks. Period. Yes, it has great weather. Yes, it has beautiful geography (which is the only thing I miss about California). But also is a terrible place to live if you cannot afford to get yourself a good job along the central coast, or like my mother, to own a multi-million dollar home on the cliffs overlooking the ocean with beachfront below, north of Malibu. California is overrun with people who fancy themselves to be social engineers, who have no problem forcing you to live under unconstitutional laws, penalizing small businesses, and requiring high taxes to support entitlements for the shiftless, and supporting out of control public employees unions, etc., etc., ad nauseum. The 9th Circuit court is a joke.

And, it isn't just the bay area and Los Angeles that are liberal enclaves, like nitrogen erroneously reports. Look at voting patterns in San Bernardino. I have an aunt who lives in Santa Maria whom I love dearly, and who calls herself a Republican, and who is politically indistinguishable from Barbara Boxer. Boxer is a known idiot and a vacuous twit. How anybody can have common cause with her is beyond me, but I have yet to meet a serious thinker who takes Boxer seriously.

The population of California is 36,961,664. The population of Los Angeles County — not just the city, but the county, which is overwhelmingly liberal — is 9,862,049. The counties making up the "bay area" are, from north to south, Sonoma, Napa, Solano, Marin, Contra Costa, Alameda, San Francisco, and San Mateo, with Santa Clara County almost qualifying. The aggregate population of those counties (Santa Clara excluded) is 5,331,839. Santa Clara County, which is also a liberal county, is another 1,784,642. Add in San Bernardino County which also votes liberal, and you have another 2,017,673 people.

That makes a total of 18,996,203 voters, or a tad more than 50% from just 11 of the state's 58 counties. Many of the state's more rural counties have been trending toward the liberal also, particularly along the coast. This map image (below) shows the national red/purple/blue distribution going into the 2008 elections (source):

As you can see, along the coast, where the bulk of the state's population resides, they trend extremely toward the (liberal) democrat. The rather large areas of red elsewhere in the state are significant because almost nobody lives there!!!.

California is a broken state, and it isn't going to get any better until it it collapses in on itself, and it is forced to reform itself. If I was a billionaire and could afford anything I wanted, you couldn't get me to move back there. They are stupid and refuse to learn. Instead, they keep digging themselves a deeper and deeper hole. Well, you can't fix stupid, and stupid should hurt. Apparently, it doesn't hurt enough there to make them wake up and realize what they've done to themselves.

nitrogen wrote:You can always get a CCW anywhere in california, as long as you want to bribe the sheriff. Going rate 10 years ago was about a $10,000 donation to the sheriff's re-election fund (Alameda county, at least)

You say that like it's a good thing. And yet, it is a direct result of a liberal-dominated political landscape. I hate the place.

Bullitt wrote:I am moving to California (don't get me started)...

Why not? The great state of Texas concluded that you are sane enough to be issued a carry permit, and now you want to prove to the state of Texas that they were wrong?



Sorry. I moved here from California in 2006. You couldn't pay me enough to move back.