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Thursday, October 8, 2026

October 04, 2026 7:29 AM

California Dems Face $20B to $30B Deficit. Guess What They Spent on Illegal Aliens? — *AP Photo/Nell Redmond*

Democrats in California spent more than $10 billion on illegal alien benefits in one fiscal year, which explains the massive budget deficit they face for the new fiscal year — and the one they already tried to ignore.

As of the start of this year, California Democrats were looking at about an $18 billion budget deficit for 2026 to 2027. They have since fudged their numbers to try and cover up the deficit, because Democrats never reduce their spending even if they are out of money. Pasadena Now a year ago reported that Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D-Calif.) budget involved about $21 billion of borrowing.

On October 3 of this year, Courthouse News Service reported that Newsom estimates a $3 billion budget shortfall for the new fiscal year, the Legislative Analyst’s Office projects $18 billion, and after this year, the budget shortfalls could be between $30 billion and $35 billion. In short, California is broke.

And why is California broke? Well, there are many reasons. But a major reason is the egregious spending of American taxpayers’ money on illegal aliens. Democrats get more unpopular in California all the time, which is why Steve Hilton has had such strong poll numbers for a Republican in the state. Democrats plan to stay in power thanks to illegal aliens, hence their reluctance to clean out voter rolls, just as they want to hire illegal aliens at cheaper rates instead of hiring Americans. And also, of course, Democrats plan to transform our culture for the worse by importing large numbers of Third Worlders.

The California Post on September 23 published the staggering number for Dems’ spending on criminal foreigners:

California runs the nation's largest welfare system, devoting more than $180 billion annually to food, health care and other programs… In theory, these programs are supposed to help struggling Californians. In reality, many serve large numbers of illegal immigrants. Today, California oversees a shadow welfare system that allows noncitizens to receive health care, rental assistance, college grants tax credits and even smartphones on the taxpayers' dime… In total, California taxpayers spent at least $11 billion subsidizing illegal immigrants in the last fiscal year.

Democrats redistribute Americans’ money to illegal aliens, the illegal aliens illegally vote for Democrats, and everyone in that circle of fraud is happy. No wonder California Democrats want a billionaire tax. And no wonder they are furious at federal crackdowns on illegal aliens.

If Democrats would stop spending such exorbitant amounts of taxpayer money on illegal aliens, they wouldn’t be nearly so broke as they are. But Democrats would just prefer to borrow more money and keep right on spending.

https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2026/10/04/california-dems-face-18b-deficit-guess-what-they-spent-on-illegal-aliens-n4957938?utm_source=pjmediavip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm

ICE Arrests Illegal Alien Who Crippled Federal Officer

ICE Arrests Illegal Alien Who Crippled Federal Officer

Catherine Salgado Follow @CatSalgado32

The Department of Homeland Security has finally nabbed an illegal alien who previously rammed and partially incapacitated an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer.

Democrats will go on and on sobbing about illegal aliens who are injured while fleeing or fighting federal immigration officers, such as violent criminal Wilber Garces-Perez. In fact, Democrats will riot or bring lawsuits over such injuries. But for some reason, when lefty activists or illegal aliens severely injure DHS agents, Democrats either ignore the injuries or defend the people who inflicted them. The complaints about illegal aliens were never stemming from humanitarian compassion. Democrats will only be sorry that Jesus Israel Garcia Cobarruvias did not indefinitely evade arrest for his assault on ICE.

You can see the picture of Garcia Cobarruvias below. Federal officers particularly wanted to arrest him because on August 31, he weaponized his vehicle to ram it into ICE officers, injuring one and also damaging a federal government vehicle. He then fled the scene.

Garcia Cobarruvias’s vehicular assault, which potentially counts as assault with a deadly weapon, injured the officer enough that he cannot at the present time walk without assistance.

ICE did not clarify if this injury is permanent or not. But unfortunately, the likelihood is that this officer lost his career and will not be able to work in the field where he previously worked. If the injury is not temporary, his whole life will change.

DHS Homeland Security Investigations tracked down Garcia Cobarruvias and arrested him September 17. Just as he had the first time federal officers tried to arrest him, Garcia Cobarruvias refused to cooperate with commands that agents gave him. Eventually, they had to remove him from his vehicle forcibly in order to arrest him.

ICE clarified that authorities have already removed Garcia Cobarruvias from the United States three times. Yes, that’s right, he has entered the United States illegally at least four times. His lengthy rap sheet includes convictions for domestic violence, burglary, and obstruction. In other words, he is habitually violent and vile.

This is exactly the sort of scum whom Democrats want in our country.

https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2026/10/04/ice-arrests-illegal-alien-who-crippled-federal-officer-n4957939?utm_source=pjmediavip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm

The Economist Doesn't Seem to Know What a Dictator Is

The Economist Doesn't Seem to Know What a Dictator Is

Sarah Anderson Follow @SarahDownSouth

The Economist Doesn't Seem to Know What a Dictator Is — *AP Photo/Alex Brandon*

Here's your daily lesson in "you can't hate the media enough."

If you're not familiar with The Economist, it's a British news site. Some call it a magazine. Apparently, it prefers the term "newspaper."

When you google it, you get the following description: "Fact-checked journalism — In-depth global analysis and opinion, with full digital access, podcasts, and more. The Economist is independent journalism for independent thinking."

I don't know who is checking these facts, but it got one label very wrong this week.

On September 24, it published an article on El Salvador with the headline: The dictator’s laboratory: Nayib Bukele is pushing AI hard.

The "dictator," of course, being Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele.

But many people have taken note of the fact that back in July, the outlet published an article called: Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega scraps elections.

Why on earth is the man who is elected freely and fairly in a country where he is beloved called "dictator," while the one who literally stood up this summer and said "no more elections ever" called a "president?"

As Bukele posted on X: "Hahaha you left some article in your propaganda 😘"

Now, before I go any further, I do want to point out that the writer does call Ortega a dictator in the article. So there's that. But here's something I've learned working in this business: Most people only read the headlines. Most people only see the social media post with the word "dictator" and respond, react, or re-post. Framing one man as a dictator and another as a president in your headlines is a choice.

In Ortega's Nicaragua, political opposition is jailed for merely speaking out. People are banned from celebrating religious holidays. People are fleeing the country because there is little freedom. Ortega made his wife, Rosario Murillo, his "co-president," and had his family dynasty written into the constitution so that only it can rule. On Friday, the Organization of American States (OAS) announced that its member states had "agreed on a concrete process to pursue diplomatic engagement, assess progress, and determine further action" in support "of democracy in Nicaragua and the rights of the Nicaraguan people."

Nearly every country in the Americas doesn't come together because it fears that the people of El Salvador have lost their rights.

Quite the opposite. The country is one of the United States' top allies in the region, and a member of the Shield of the Americas. Bukele was elected in 2019 and again in 2024 with something like 85% of the vote, which was verified. His organic approval rating hovers somewhere above 80% in every single poll; even his opposition will confess that. The only thing he "bans" is criminal activity, as any country should. He's building the economy and changing the education system, and giving the Salvadoran people a chance at a good life. People who left are literally returning home. I've even talked to some people from the U.S. lately who are moving there. What he has done with El Salvador was part of the beginning of the whole "rightward swing" in Latin America.

Bukele calls himself the "world’s coolest dictator" as a joke, to troll the lefties who like to label him as such. Apparently, The Economist didn't understand the punchline.

The Cambridge Dictionary describes a dictator as "a leader who has complete power in a country and has not been elected by the people."

I will concede there are some who believe Bukele does have too much power. But I will also point to the fact that the stories that they use to prove this often lack a lot of nuance. I've written about that at length over the past two years, so I won't get into it here. More often than not, it's a case of U.S. and European journalists looking at a very broken country through their spoiled, elitist lenses.

The Salvadoran people have the final say, and this is what they want.

The people in Nicaragua have no say at all.

https://pjmedia.com/sarah-anderson/2026/10/04/the-economist-doesnt-seem-to-know-what-a-dictator-is-n4957923?utm_source=pjmediavip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm

Wednesday, October 7, 2026

Report on CA's Response to Devastating LA Fires Is In, and It's Even Worse Than You Thought

Report on CA's Response to Devastating LA Fires Is In, and It's Even Worse Than You Thought

Bob Hoge Follow @Bob_Hoge_CA

Gavin Newsom ordered a study of the governmental response to the devastating fires that destroyed entire neighborhoods in Pacific Palisades and Altadena in January 2005, and that report has now landed. (See: A RedState Photo Odyssey: The Devastation of the Pacific Palisades Is America's Wake-Up Call.)

It reveals an epic record of communications failures, incompetence, and a leadership vacuum of monumental proportions.

A damning new Palisades Fire report stops short of blaming any one person or agency, but found Los Angeles sent firefighters home despite dangerous winds, while some residents didn’t get an evacuation alert until 40 to 90 minutes after homes began burning.
The bombshell 724-page fire incident analysis was released Friday, nearly 21 months after the January 2025 fire tore through Pacific Palisades, a coastal LA neighborhood, and killed 12 people.
It says the destruction “was the result of multiple interconnected factors rather than any single decision, event, or system failure.” Still, the Los Angeles Fire Department takes the hardest hits.

The report was delivered by UL Research Institute’s Fire Safety Research Institute.

RedState alum Kira Davis noted at the time that all she really wanted was information:

Responders were simply slow to get the information out:

The delay in warning residents is one of the report’s starkest findings.
Some residents closest to where the fire started didn’t get an evacuation alert until roughly 40 to 90 minutes after homes had already begun burning, investigators found.
At 10:46 a.m., 16 minutes after the fire was reported, a fire helicopter radioed that flames would hit homes “within minutes.” By the time an LAFD assistant chief radioed for an “evacuation all the way down to PCH” ,Pacific Coast Highway, at 11:29 a.m., spot fires were already burning on both sides of a main road out of the neighborhood, according to the report.
The city’s first evacuation order didn’t go out until 12:09 p.m.

Meanwhile, Mayor Karen Bass was famously attending a presidential inauguration in Ghana when the fires broke out, despite having been extensively warned about the dangerous conditions (extremely high winds combined with a heat wave):

🔥 When questioned about the Palisades Fire, @KarenBassLA said 2 interesting things:
1. Likened being in Ghana 🇬🇭 to being out of town when a relative gets sick. In this case, a dozen people DIED & 2 cities got nuked. Not the same.
2. Blamed Palisades Fire on “climate change,” failing to acknowledge the arsonist.
Also made excuses about brush clearance, blaming the state. Conveniently did NOT mention the fact that her firefighting water reservoir was (and REMAINS) EMPTY!!!!!!

Not only that, but she deflected accountability and threw her fire chief under the bus:

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who ousted then-Fire Chief Kristin Crowley weeks after the fire, said the report “confirms much of what we already knew.”
“That is why I put in place new leadership at the Los Angeles Fire Department,” Bass said in a statement to The Post.

The report reveals a massive system that hadn’t planned for a conflagration of this size and was ill-prepared for it, even though wildfires and weather anomalies have been features of California for thousands of years. The frustrating part? Since it was such a systemwide failure, it’s extremely difficult to assign blame:

No single failure explains the devastation of the Palisades and Eaton fires that burned through Los Angeles County in January 2025, a new report concludes. Instead, the blazes exposed weaknesses across a system never designed to combat a wind-driven conflagration that spread from structure to structure at sweeping scale…
As a result, the report, which completes an analysis of some of the most deadly, destructive and costly fires in state history, raises a harder question: If responsibility is spread across an entire system, who is responsible for fixing it?

That being said, RedState has reported extensively on some of the unacceptable mistakes made by state and local leadership: a key reservoir above the Palisades was left empty, fire hydrants didn’t work, the LAFD was as focused on DEI and LGBTQ issues as they were on fighting fires, the State Parks Department was accused of prioritizing an endangered plant over putting out the Lachman fire — the blaze that later rekindled into the Palisades Fire — the LAFD pre-deployed only limited extra crews to avoid overtime payments, and many observers have long contended that the state’s environmentalist-pushed brush control policies are unsafe.

In short, one can only conclude that this is not a well-run, efficient city, county or state. Nobody is coming out looking good. The best we can hope for is that officials have learned their lesson and are preparing a whole lot harder for the next incident, which isn’t a question of if — it’s a question of when.

It's today's California, though, so don't hold your breath. Remember, this and so much more is the "progressive experiment" that Newsom, Harris, Pelosi et al. want to roll out nationwide. If we let it happen, we're doomed.

https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2026/10/03/review-of-californias-response-to-devastating-la-fires-is-in-and-its-even-worse-than-you-thought-n2207694?utm_source=rsmorningbriefingvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

Thursday, October 8, 2026

California Dems Face $20B to $30B Deficit. Guess What They Spent on Illegal Aliens?

ICE Arrests Illegal Alien Who Crippled Federal Officer

The Economist Doesn't Seem to Know What a Dictator Is

Wednesday, October 7, 2026

Report on CA's Response to Devastating LA Fires Is In, and It's Even Worse Than You Thought