Daily Freeman (Kingston, NY)

Sad state of California

- Michael Reagan Michael Reagan is syndicated by Cagle Cartoons.

You don’t want to live in my state. Sure, it’s beautiful. The weather is great. And most people who live here are nice, good, successful, talented, smart — except when it comes to politics and voting.

That’s when a majority of California­ns fall somewhere between crazy and suicidal.

For several decades the liberal Democrats that my fellow California­ns keep electing to state and local offices have done their best to turn our paradise into Hell for conservati­ves.

Everyone knows about our criminally high taxes, idiotic environmen­tal regulation­s, fiscal irresponsi­bility, unsolvable homeless problem and our Welcome Wagon policy toward illegal immigrants.

Lately we’ve created sanctuary cities and become a sanctuary state.

You’d think it couldn’t get worse out here on the Left Coast.

But the stupidity of our liberal politician­s is infinite, as the supervisor­s of Los Angeles County proved earlier this month when they approved a $550,000 pilot program to deal with the local homeless crisis.

Proposing a solution that could only have been dreamed up in La-La Land, the county wants to pay homeowners like me to let homeless people live in our backyards.

Not in colorful tents and sleeping bags, but in cozy new tiny houses or refurbishe­d garden sheds and converted garages.

I’m sure all of my goodhearte­d, Hillary-loving, BMW driving neighbors will sign up to make the county’s pilot program a big success.

Keeping a homeless person in your backyard like a pet is the kind of solution you get from government when you live in a oneparty state run by Democrats.

Unfortunat­ely, because of a dumb constituti­onal amendment approved by 53.7 percent of our voters in 2010, the future of Republican­s and conservati­ves out here looks grim.

Most people east of the Hollywood sign have never heard of California Propositio­n 14, a.k.a. the Top-Two Primaries Amendment, and have no idea how much damage it did to our state’s political system.

Prop 14 was an amendment that establishe­d a type of primary election in which all the candidates for a specific statewide office like governor or the U.S. Senate — whether they are Democrats, Republican­s, Libertaria­ns, Communists, etc. — are listed together on the same ballot.

The top two vote-getters — even if both are Democrats or Communists — are the only candidates that advance to the general election in the fall.

Opponents charged that Prop 14 was designed to limit voter choice, which it was.

They knew it would often result in two candidates from the same party facing off in general elections, which it has.

Given the Democrat Party’s large plurality in California, in the fall that we usually have two Democrats running for U.S. senator, two Democrats running for governor and two Democrats running for many U.S. House seats or state legislativ­e offices.

The politics of my beautiful state today are rigged, and Republican­s have become an endangered species.

A Republican’s vote no longer counts. The state GOP doesn’t really exist.

California’s only hope for a better future is that things will get so bad there’s a huge backlash that produces a political miracle in 2020 like the one that put Donald Trump in the White House.

It’s a long shot, but crazy things can happen in California.

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