CONVICTEDFELON34'S ATTEMPTED EXTORTION OF CALIFORNIA

ConvictedFelon34 once again proves that John Kelly was right when he said “Donald Trump is the most committed ignoramus I ever met.”

No matter how many times people try to explain reality to him, anything that conflicts with ConvictedFelon34's previous beliefs will go in one ear and out the other.

There’s a good example of that yesterday, regarding what DonnieDumbfuck saids must happen in Los Angeles and California in general in order for him to approve federal aid for recovery from the fires.

In answer to a reporter’s question of whether he would withhold disaster aid, he said:

“I want two things. Voter ID, and the water be released and come down into Los Angeles and throughout the state. Those are the two things. After that, I will be the greatest president that California ever has ever seen. I want the water to come down and come down to Los Angeles and also go out to all the farmland that's barren and dry.”

“You know, they have land that they say is the equivalent of the land in Iowa, which is about as good as there is anywhere on Earth. The problem is it's artificial because they artificially stop the water from going onto the land. So, I want two things. I want voter ID for the people of California. And they all want it. Right now, you don't have voter ID. People want to have voter identification. You want to have proof of citizenship. Ideally, you have one day voting. But I just want voter ID as a start. And I want the water to be released. And they're going to get a lot of help from the US.”

As usual Putz5347 is wrong. Under current California law you must be a California resident and US citizen, and attest to being one under penalty of perjury, and provide a form of ID such as driver’s license or passport that has been approved by the Secretary of State in order to register to vote.

Donnie wants to tie a voter ID requirement to federal aid to help California recover from devastating wildfires is the latest salvo in a feud over a law signed last year Governor Newsom.

The new state law bars local jurisdictions from requiring voter ID to cast a ballot and comes in response to the city of Huntington Beach instituting a requirement to present identification to vote in municipal elections, starting in 2026. Local residents had approved amending the city’s charter to add the voter ID requirement. Proponents of the state law argue that requiring identification at the polls is unnecessary because California residents must provide a driver’s license number, a California identification number or the last four digits of their Social Security number to register to vote in the first place.

Critics, including Elon Musk, argue that the new state law is aimed at encouraging voter fraud. “The reason is to cheat, obviously,” Musk said recently on Joe Rogan’s podcast about the state prohibition.

Fifteen states do not generally require voter ID at polls, including Nevada and Pennsylvania - two states won by President Trump, and he’s not complaining about their voting procedures.

DonnieDumbfuck’s attempt to condition disaster relief for California on changes to its voting laws represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the principles underpinning American democracy and federalism. Disaster relief is a federal responsibility meant to provide critical support to states in times of crisis, regardless of their political leanings or policy choices. Tying such relief to unrelated demands undermines impartial governance, setting a dangerous precedent where lifesaving aid becomes a bargaining chip for political gain.

The Supreme Court has ruled over and over again - including by the current conservative majority - that election oversight and administration is a power that rests with the states. As such, voting laws are a matter of state sovereignty. By attempting to dictate California’s election policies, ConvictedFelon34 not only intrudes on state authority but also disregards the constitutional separation of powers. His demands echo a pattern of using leverage for personal or political advantage, eroding public trust in federal leadership’s fairness and integrity. Such actions risk normalizing coercion in governance, undermining the democratic values that ensure fair and equal treatment for all states and citizens.

California is one of the big electoral prizes in every presidential election. Republican presidential candidates haven’t been relevant here since Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor, and if he hadn’t achieved that running in a recall and playing to his fame as a movie star, not his politcs as a Republican, he would have lost. The last Republican to win the governorship the normal way was Pete Wilson, and he was the one who screwed the Republicans forever with Prop 187 to take away all government services to undocumented immigrants, which prompted massive voter registration in the Latino community, which has never voted for a Republican since.

ConvictedFelon34 isn’t trying to make California a red state as much as he is trying to establish a precedent. If he can get California to change its voting laws in order to receive aid in this emergency, then he will be able to get every swing or blue state to do the same thing when they come to the federal government with a request for disaster aid.

Of course, California is not going to go for this scheme.

It isn’t up to Donnie Dumbfuck whether California gets wildfire relief or not. Congress will pass legislation appropriating the funds to California, and Democrats are absolutely refusing to vote for any wildfire aid bill that includes conditions like those that Trump suggested. And California Republicans in Congress are in complete agreement on this.

He will try to withhold aid to California, but the state has no obligation to negotiate with him or tp agree to any conditions that he may try to establish. The goal, just as it was when he tried to get the Senate to bend to his will on the government funding bill, is control.

He isn’t smart enough to destroy the Constitution, and he is too lazy to do the work required to be a fascist strongman. He is a wannabe oligarch who consistently needs his ego fed. The reality is he is a term-limited old man, and California is one of the largest economies in the world. The United States needs California more than California needs Donnie Dimbulb.

ConvictedFelon34 has repeatedly blamed Governor Newsom and other California leaders for the fires that devastated Los Angeles. He charged that the state’s Democrats have stubbornly refused to send enough water to Southern California to fight fires, which he attributed to their desire to protect the delta smelt, a threatened species of fish. But as he prepared a Friday visit to California, water experts in California said that his explanations in many cases were wrong or glossed over complex water dynamics. Southern California reservoirs were generally full of water at the start of the year, they noted. Problems in fighting the fires had other causes. The state’s water supply to Southern California had nothing to do with the fires that raged uncontrollably the night of January 7 and destroyed more than 10,000 structures. The problem was Santa Ana winds that raged at hurricane force, grounding the firefighting planes. This past Wednesday, when the Hughes fire broke out in Santa Ana conditions that were much more normal, the four big firebombers were able to knock the fire back within hours and contain it by the day following.

Donnie Dunce’s view of the situation could have very real consequences. He threatened on Wednesday to withhold federal relief funds if California does not send more of its water from the northern part of the state to its southern half. He also issued an executive order on his first day in office — titled “Putting People Over Fish” — that directed cabinet members to find ways within 90 days to reroute more water southward.

The order brings to the fore litigation and disputes as old as California itself around who deserves precious water in the state and how its liquid gold can best serve nearly 40 million residents along with its agricultural industry, fisheries and ecosystems.

Regarding his fact-free baloney about California water, the state pumps as much water now as it could under prior Trump-era policies.

The mountains along the spine of California - the Sierra Nevada and southern end of the Cascade Range - are an essential piece of the state’s water supply. The same storms that make Yosemite National Park a winter wonderland and create ski playgrounds near Lake Tahoe leave a snowpack that melts into streams and rivers by spring and summer.

While most of the state’s water originates and gets stored in Northern California, most of the state’s population lives in Southern California. And the water-intensive agricultural industry sits in the Central Valley, where rain is never enough to sustain each year’s crops.

“Look, Gavin’s got one thing he can do,” Donnie said in an interview on Wednesday with Sean Hannity. “He can release the water that comes from the north. There is massive amounts of water, rainwater and mountain water, that comes, too, with the snow, comes down as it melts, there’s so much water, they’re releasing it into the Pacific Ocean.” When he and other Republicans criticize California for sending water into the Pacific Ocean, they are referring to agreements that ensure the state sends enough freshwater downstream into Northern California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, where saltwater from the San Francisco Bay mixes with freshwater from rivers. The Delta is the largest estuary on the West Coast, one that is incredibly sensitive environmentally and politically because it sustains Central Valley agriculture. If the amount of freshwater necessary to sustain this ecosystem isn’t there, the entire Central Valley Project would be at risk.

Through the Delta, state and federal governments supply tap water to two-thirds of the state’s population and irrigation water to millions of acres of farms, with a labyrinth of levees, pumps and islands controlling the balance of saltwater and freshwater. How much water to pump through the Delta has been the source of water squabbles in the drought-prone state for decades, and in that fight, the most politicized target has been one of its tiniest inhabitants: the Delta Smelt , a humble-looking fish that exists only in California. After the fires began, Donnie Dumbass called it “an essentially worthless fish” that Governor Newsom wanted to protect.

Smelt were once plentiful in the Delta, playing an important role in the ecosystem by providing food to myriad species of fish and birds. They are now teetering on the brink of extinction; their protected status helps protect other native fish that also need some amount of freshwater flowing into the estuary. They are one of seven threatened or endangered species of fish in the Delta harmed by the degraded habitat caused by diverting too much water. They include steelhead trout, green sturgeon and two varieties of Chinook salmon. Other Chinook have fared so badly in recent years that the state’s salmon fishery has had to close for the last two years.

“There are a lot of different kinds of fish out there that need protection and need to be managed,” said Peter Moyle, professor emeritus at University of California, Davis, Center for Watershed Sciences. “The fish are going to disappear one at a time if we don’t take them into consideration.”

For decades, however, the smelt have come to represent one thing to many (Republican) farmers in the Central Valley: a competing demand on their supply of water for irrigation. In 2019 the first Donnie Dimbulb Maladministration went after the Delta Smelt, weakening protections for the fish, a move that was heralded as a win for farmers.

Donnie and the Central Valley farmers will never talk about endangered Chinook salmon or the closed salmon fishery or about green sturgeon. Why? Because people know what salmon and sturgeon are.

Even under the more restrictive rules that were in place until 2019, regulations that specifically related to delta smelt were responsible for no more than an average of 1.2 percent additional water flowing into San Francisco Bay.

“If he somehow manages to find a way to send more water south, his action will cause big problems with agriculture in the Delta and the northern half of the state,” Dr. Moyle said.

It is well documented that some firefighters in Pacific Palisades ran out of water on January 7, the night the fires tore through the neighborhood, their hoses running dry as they attempted to douse flames. Water pressure dropped, and the hydrants could not keep up with demand across the community to extinguish home after home. At the same time, one reservoir that can provide millions of gallons of water in Pacific Palisades had been emptied for repairs.

ConvictedFelon34 has used these examples to support his argument that California failed to supply Southern California with enough water. But neither problem was the result of water transfers from the north.

The municipal water system in Pacific Palisades, as in many American communities, was never built to sustain a fire against a wild land blaze that burned thousands of homes. The storage tanks and pumping systems designed to serve the hillside neighborhood simply could not keep pace that night. The biggest problem was that fierce winds grounded the planes and helicopters that typically get wildfires under control.

There was enough water in storage in Southern California to drown the fire-affected areas in 20 feet of water, but you couldn’t get it to those places. The state reservoirs that store water used by Southern Californians remain at or above 100 percent of their normal marks for this time of the year.

“The state reservoirs are at or near record highs, and the issues around the Endangered Species Act have been issues that have been litigated, adjudicated, politicized for as long as I’ve been alive,” Mr. Newsom said on Thursday, ahead of Mr. Trump’s visit. “They’re not novel to this administration. They go back to George H.W. Bush.”

The Pacific Northwest?

But The World’s Most Determined Ignoramus still believes in a water pipeline that does not exist. “Los Angeles has massive amounts of water available to it,” he said in a news conference on Tuesday. “All they have to do is turn the valve, and that’s the valve coming back from and down from the Pacific Northwest, where millions of gallons of water a week and a day, even, in many cases, pours into California, goes all through California down to Los Angeles. And they turned it off.” He then said that California leaders were diverting that water to the Pacific Ocean through a valve.

There is no valve controlling gushing amounts of water from the Pacific Northwest. The idea to create a pipeline from Oregon and Washington State has been proposed before by Californians, but building a system that could carry water over such long distances and across towering mountain ranges has long been viewed as exorbitantly expensive. Not to mention that officials in Washington State and Oregon would face political problems if they ever agreed to send their water south.

“It’s difficult to explain what he’s talking about because nobody knows what he’s talking about,” said John Buse, general counsel for the Center for Biological Diversity. “The idea of a valve and water will just flow is preposterous.”

Donnie has on multiple occasions described a past tour of Central Valley farms with former Representative Devin Nunes and other Republican members of Congress that seems to have influenced his beliefs. He has made clear that he wants more water to benefit farms in California.

“I looked at these vast areas of land and it looked like it was just burning,” he told Hannity on Wednesday. “It was dark, it was dry. And then there’d be a little patch, a little tiny patch of green, beautiful green. And I’d say, ‘How come all this land has these little patches?’ They said, ‘That’s all that we’re allowed to farm because we have no water.’ I said, ‘Are you having a drought?’ ‘No. They’ve turned off the water. They’ve turned off the spigot from up north in order to protect the delta smelt.’”

In the fight for democracy it’s vital that California refuse to negotiate anything with this moron. He can’t make it harder to vote here on his own, so he is trying to extort California into doing it for him.

If a week feels like a year already, it’s going to be a long four years. That’s Another Fine Mess needs your support as a paid subscriber so we can publish articles like this. It’s only $7/month or $70/year.

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