California learns the hard way about the ‘sustainability’ of its bat-brained ideas

When you rule a leftist one-party state, you can pretty much do anything. There are, after all, no checks nor balances, and you sure as heck don’t have to listen to cautionary warnings from the shut-out other side. Sustainability is for other people.

You leap before you look.

Which has led to what we see now — a state and its cities that have entangled themselves in so much red tape and restrictions they have economically strangled themselves and their citizens.

Instead of punishing other states with their travel and other restrictions, California has punished itself. Its blacklisted states have laughed in their faces and gone on their merry way in full state sovereignty, meaning, they have punished only themselves — which includes the self-own of raising their costs. Some of the costly greenie remodelings, meanwhile, have wrought havoc. So much for “sustainable.”

That’s forced some tail-between-the-legs reckonings from the state’s most progressive enclaves.

California’s legislature is reportedly poised to shut down its state travel ban on states that don’t mirror its radical LGBTQ+, abortion, and election policies, which was a feel-good restriction so expansive it banned business and travel with about half the country, 23 states.

According to Fox News:

A lawmaker in California is hoping to overturn the state’s ban on government funding for travel to states with laws they find discriminatory.

Since 2016, California has been steadily adding to its list of U.S. destinations barred from state-funded travel. The practice began in retaliation to North Carolina enacting a law requiring people to use the bathrooms that corresponded with their biological sex.

The City of San Francisco, which banned 30 states for political incorrectness, has so gummed up itself by its virtue-signal ban it is already lifting its monster restrictions in order to be able to do business with other cities that don’t cookie-cutter to its idea of governance.

According to CBS News:

San Francisco is repealing a ban on city-funded travel to 30 states that it says restrict abortion, voting and LGBTQ rights after determining the boycott is doing more harm than good.

The Board of Supervisors voted 7-4 on Tuesday to repeal a section of the city’s administrative code that prohibits staff from visiting and city departments from contracting with companies headquartered in the states, which include Texas, Florida and Ohio.

Meanwhile, in Culver City, on a different matter, we learn that greenie bike lanes, which took up more than half the city’s main expressways, are going into the dumpster of leftist virtue-signaling intentions, too.

According to KTLA:

Say goodbye to designated bike lanes in downtown Culver City.

By a vote of 3-2 this week, the Culver City Council voted to end a controversial program that created protected bike and bus lanes on Culver and Washington boulevards.

The project, dubbed Move Culver City, was launched in 2021 to encourage walking, cycling and public transit use through the 1.3-mile downtown Culver City corridor.

This case looks different from the other two, but it’s substantially the same: The greenie measure in Culver City took up half the roadspace, the California/San Francisco travel/business ban extended to half the country. One-party government is like a fat, overbearing Jabba the Hut — it likes to take up space.

What we learned from the articles on the state travel ban is that the largely black male San Diego State University men’s basketball team, which had a stellar season making it into the Final Four, had to scrounge up some kind of money for travel to Texas for their last match based on the state’s travel ban, which prohibited the state from any giving money to the players for travel to their big tournament. We learned that gay and lesbian businesses in states like Texas and Florida were out of luck on winning California contracts, leaving the state to deal with bids solely from politically correct states, lesbian or not. A study reckoned that San Francisco drove up its costs by 20% for the privilege of this virtue-signalling based on having fewer bids from less competitive contractors who met the threshhold for politically correct states.

The other problem was that the law was so obstructive and restrictive that waivers — hundreds of waivers — were granted, rendering the law largely meaningless. There may have been more exceptions to the rule than the rule itself.

There were also guys like Gavin Newsom, the leftist governor who signed off on this crap, who ignored the matter altogether, taking his vacay in Montana, one of the states on the blacklist, later claiming it was just personal travel. Sounds like a lot of baloney. If a state is so bad, so odious, so horrific that it must be banned for state business, explain why it was fine to travel there for personal business, Gavster. Bottom line: Leftists don’t obey the rules they put out to hamstring everyone else.

And of course, all of this banning garbage didn’t affect the states on the blacklist, which went on their merry way and didn’t adopt the California model. That’s some record they got there.

As for the bike lanes of Culver, the same sort of self-own nightmare engulfed them — their two biggest thruways — Washington Boulevard and Culver Boulevard, which cut through the city surrounded by mighty Los Angeles and draws huge crosstown traffic linking downtown L.A. with the airport, the beaches and the industrial cities such as El Segundo, all spillover from the 805 and the Santa Monica freeway (the 10), were effectively reduced to one lane roads apiece going each way, like this was some country-bumpkin backwater, which is unthinkable in a gargantuan city like Los Angeles. Unless they intended to block off the entire city, which would have created new problems elsewhere, that wasn’t going to work, no matter how green and virtuous they felt because of it. Bike lanes work on quieter streets, not the big crosstown expressways, but nobody debated that. They just wanted to go green.

Well, they got rid of that bad idea, too.

Leftists have amazing ways of entangling themselves like incompetent spiders in their own webs. None of them are contrite about it, based on the news reporting. There’s no soul-searching about the intelligence of extended government space-hogging and massive blacklists. They don’t think of those things as they barrel ahead into their own oblivion. Nobody talks about how ‘sustainable,’ let alone ‘wasteful’ their nonsense is. They just keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

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