How sincere was his subsequent apology following the very public spanking he received after the San Francisco Chronicle broke the news that he’d broken the rules?
And why does our governor hang out with a lobbyist who is trying to influence him on behalf of clients?
As question number two suggests, the governor — once he was caught — did apologize. (This puts him into a different category than, say, Donald Trump. But that’s a pretty low bar.)
The governor explained, after getting caught, that though he knows he was wrong, at least the dinner was outside. Perhaps it was, but the party began inside.
EXCLUSIVE: We've obtained photos of Governor Gavin Newsom at the Napa dinner party he's in hot water over. The photos call into question just how outdoors the dinner was. A witness who took photos tells us his group was so loud, the sliding doors had to be closed. 10pm on @FOXLApic.twitter.com/gtOVEwa864
On July 2, I posted that Governor Newsom’s quick action in mid-March to impose a statewide shelter-in-place order (following early action by Bay Area counties) “cast California’s political leadership in a good light and protected Californians before the virus had gotten out of control,” but that the guv’s subsequent actions cast doubt on his pledge to base his decisions on science and public health data.
Now we learn that Newsom has one standard for the public and another for himself and his friends. And apparently we can say the same thing about the leadership of the California Medical Association.
It has been confounding to live in Los Angeles County, which leads California with coronavirus cases and deaths, and trying to follow sensible steps (wearing masks, social distancing, avoiding gatherings — and being painfully separated from family and friends), while rates of infection, hospitalizations, and deaths increased because obviously so many people are flouting these sensible steps.
The political elite in California, by the way, is overwhelmingly Democratic. These folks are committed — just ask them — to science, equality, social justice, and (of course) public health.
By the way, entrees at the French Laundry are $350 each. That’s a cool $700 for the Newsoms. Of course we don’t know what wine they had. And I couldn’t say if dessert was extra. Was there a cake?
▪ This morning’s Los Angeles Times reports on public health officials’ guarded optimism that a surging coronavirus may be poised to recede (“California desperate for signs of a turnaround after stunning coronavirus setbacks”). Hope, as much as reason, appears to ground their views. And though there are numerous positive signs, the coronavirus still has the upper hand.
The impact of coronavirus has fallen most heavily on essential workers, residents in institutional settings (nursing homes, prisons), and people of color.
David Glosser is a retired neuropsychologist and passionate Trump critic who has publicly decried Miller for his anti-immigrant policies, and he contends that Trump’s initial “lack of a response” to the coronavirus crisis led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans who might have otherwise survived. In an interview, he says, “With the death of my mother, I’m angry and outraged at [Miller] directly and the administration he has devoted his energy to supporting.”
Mrs. Glosser was living in a Los Angeles area assisted living facility. Los Angeles County, with a population exceeding 10 million, has more coronavirus cases than any other county in the country. Long term care facilities (as noted above) have been especially hard hit in the county and the state.
Here’s where I went wrong: I never imagined that a president would use unconfirmed puppets like acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf and his deputy, Ken Cuccinelli, to terrorize our own citizens in our own country. Our goal then had been to protect our own people, not hurt them, not harm them, not hunt them down on the streets of Portland or any other city. There was no protection built into this bill to stop a power-hungry president from misusing a powerful federal police force, hidden in disparate agencies, controlled by one agency head — the thought never even occurred to me.
No one in 2002 could have predicted Donald Trump’s 2016 election. What about the general possibility of presidential malfeasance or misconduct at some point in the future? Apparently that had “never even occurred” to the former senator, who now asserts, “When we write laws, we must think harder about how they might be misused.” Nine of her Senate colleagues thought things through. (The act passed 90-9, with one senator absent.)
I’m not an impartial critic of the decision to shove scores of agencies under an unwieldy DHS umbrella. I was with the senators (all Democrats, though not all liberals) who voted Nay. I even object to the authoritarian name of the agency. And, yes, Senator Boxer, it was a mistake to pass a bill with “no protection built into” it that places limits on presidential authority.
But the nation was still stunned by the 9-11 attacks, George W. Bush was basking in public approval, and it was easier to justify a Yea vote (and not think too hard about how the law might be misused), than a Nay.
But I don’t buy Boxer’s logic. She notes that Trump has “little regard for the letter of the law or executive restraint.” If we grant this, however, and we’ve been paying attention to Trump’s increasingly egregious conduct, and we’ve seen all his enablers, including Bill Barr (whom she doesn’t mention), doing Trump’s bidding — fussing over legislative detail, or even casting a no vote (in my view) doesn’t prevent Trump’s reckless, unconstitutional decision in 2020 to send federal agents in unmarked military uniforms to Portland to incite and assault Americans protesting in the streets.
Legislative protections only work when political actors accept democratic norms, respect Constitutional authority, and embrace the rule of law. We’ve left that station long ago.
▪ Democrats (including me) often decry the mindless partisanship of Republicans. But sometimes partisanship leads Democrats astray. The election of Alex Villanueva as Sheriff of solid blue Los Angeles County is a case in point (as I’ve related in a previous post).
Long story short: he ran as a Democrat for a nonpartisan office in a year (2018) when Democrats were focused on sending a message to Donald Trump. He defeated Sheriff Jim McDonnell, a former Republican (who had re-registered as an independent). Democratic clubs across the county and the county Democratic Party managed not to notice that Villanueva’s primary source of support was from a deputies’ union that opposed Sheriff McDonnell’s campaign to bring accountability to the agency and rid it of bad cops. (Don’t things look different from the perspective of 2020.) Nor were Democratic groups daunted by the absence of experienced leadership from Villanueva on any issues that Democrats ought to care about.
The new Sheriff has been wrangling with the County Board of Supervisors ever since taking office. The LA Times reports on the latest controversy this morning (“Sheriff’s sexist slur and accusations of ‘blood money’ ramp up feud with L.A. County supervisors”). In a dispute with board chair Hilda Solis he invoked La Malinche (“a name used to demean a woman as a traitor or sellout. It refers to a historical figure in Mexican culture who was the interpreter and slave of the Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés and became a symbol of betrayal for facilitating the conquest of the Aztec empire”).
On Saturday, Paul Thornton, the letters editor, commented (in introducing additional letters):
“The four letters published July 23 reflected that unanimity, and I thought that such a one-sided presentation of opinions would provoke at least a few readers who agreed with Trader Joe’s expression of cultural sensitivity to write us. Instead, the letters had the opposite effect….
I am Chinese and a fifth-generation American. My father’s name was Ming, and he always got a chuckle out of seeing “Trader Ming” in the grocery store’s Fearless Flyer newsletter.
Kudos to the young woman who saw a problem and took action. However, I would like to respectfully suggest that there are many problems more worthy of her time and energy.
A few weeks ago, an online petition was launched calling on us to “remove racist packaging from [our] products.” Following were inaccurate reports that the petition prompted us to take action. We want to be clear: we disagree that any of these labels are racist. We do not make decisions based on petitions.
We make decisions based on what customers purchase, as well as the feedback we receive from our customers and Crew Members. If we feel there is need for change, we do not hesitate to take action.
. . .
Recently we have heard from many customers reaffirming that these name variations are largely viewed in exactly the way they were intended—as an attempt to have fun with our product marketing. We continue our ongoing evaluation, and those products that resonate with our customers and sell well will remain on our shelves.]
(Image: Governor Gavin Newsom speaks in Stockton as seen on KTLA5.)
Gavin Newsom’s impact during his eight years as Lieutenant Governor didn’t convince me to vote for him in California’s 2018 Democratic Primary. But, watching him in the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic made a believer out of me. I was impressed by his timely, decisive actions in shutting down California before most of the country’s governors had any idea what was about to hit them.
More recently, as I suggested in my last post, the governor has stumbled.
Friday morning on NRP, Steve Inskeep interviewed Dr. Emily Landon, a University of Chicago epidemiologist, who has been advising the governor of Illinois. She offered an account of Illinois’ success in acting “early on” – with a March 21 stay-at-home order that prevented the situation that developed in New York and the Northeast. Because of this success, Illinois is about to enter phase four – with more reopenings, including restaurants for indoor dining, gyms, the lakefront path, and – soon – beaches. As she explained:
Certainly, these are still risky activities. There’s still more infection than we want to be having. But if people are following the rules, keeping distance, wearing their mask – if we can keep doing those things, then it should be safe enough for us to go back to doing some of these things that we used to enjoy before the pandemic.
Inskeep responds that there are “some similarities between Illinois and California,” and notes that after California’s reopening, the virus has now returned with a vengeance, resulting in a second shutdown. Dr. Landon acknowledges that this is a cautionary tale. She says that “we need to understand better what’s happened in California,” but expresses confidence in the path Illinois is taking. She explains that
with respiratory viruses and with infection in general, there’s kind of a tipping point that happens where every case is able to spread to one or more other people on average. Then you have to do some very drastic things, like a stay-at-home order or really closing down a lot of public buildings and activities. So I don’t know exactly what’s putting California back into this situation. But I do know that if they do the same things that they did before, that it should be successful in curbing the spread of the virus.
Inskeep then turns to Dr. Ali Khan (at the University of Nebraska), who weighs in skeptically about the course Illinois is following. He points to data showing the number of cases in Illinois is increasing (from 550 in mid-June to 800) and suggests that the opening up is likely to bring further increases. (The Washington Post reported 912 cases in Illinois on July 3.) Dr. Khan continues:
But let me talk about what we’re seeing here – is this is now being shifted. And I’ve seen this now – multiple places are shifting the blame to individuals not doing what they’re supposed to be doing. I’ve not heard one person talk about test and trace. And so if you’re going to reopen, what are you doing to get cases down to zero? So no metrics. How much – you know, how soon does it take to isolate somebody? How many contacts are people following? How many cases are from contact list. So no, we cannot go back to what we did before successfully because we were not a success before because we had failed to do test and trace.
So there’s four elements of getting this disease under control. So yes, one is the community component which, is, where you mask. Social distance. And wash your hands. That’s just one component. And it’s not the primary component. The primary component is the state and the localities and the national responsibility to get cases down. Test and trace. Add that to leadership. And then add that to dropping deaths with dexamethasone. Those are the four things we need to do to become a success, just like Europe and countries like New Zealand that have eliminated the disease. So they have zero cases. And China has two cases in 1.4 billion people. We can do this in America.
I was impressed, early on, not only by Gavin Newsom, but by Los Angeles city and county officials. When officials at all three levels moved to reopen, however, I wasn’t in the least tempted to eat indoors at a restaurant or visit a hair salon, much less to attend a film at a movie theater or drop by a neighborhood bar. Granted, at age 70, I have reason to be more conscientious about maintaining physical distance and wearing a mask, than younger people do; and unlike governors, mayors, and county supervisors, I have no leadership responsibility for the welfare of the community (not public health, not economic well-being). But (based on everything I’ve learned by reading about this virus), these reopenings seemed rushed to me. And, earlier this week, both city and county testing facilities had run out of appointments. While in California, as in much of the nation, there isn’t enough testing, this month the state has halted efforts to increase testing.
Dr. Landon’s emphasis on individual choices — “… if people are following the rules, keeping distance, wearing their mask – if we can keep doing those things …” and if people “do the same things that they did before …” – is a shaky foundation to rely on. We need to lean instead on safe, sound public policies (beyond injunctions concerning individual behavior). As Dr. Kahn notes, the other elements of a sound plan – including testing and tracing – have been neglected.
Color me highly skeptical that Illinois will escape the same flareups that most states are experiencing. Illinois, like other states before it, is reopening before gaining the upper hand on the coronavirus.
Until we gain the upper hand, reopening with the hope that the virus will somehow disappear is foolhardy.
Post Script: To put our individual choices in perspective, the Washington Post did a Q and A: “How Fauci and 5 other experts handle masking, haircuts, doctor’s appointments and more.” I’ll note that all six were in sync with me on two questions at the top of my list: All of them went grocery shopping (wearing masks and keeping their distance) and none of the six were willing to eat inside a restaurant.
(Image: Photo of Il Capriccio on Vermont, July 4.)
Seven counties in the San Francisco Bay Area issued “sweeping shelter-in-place” orders on March 16. Reaction was predictable: “Public health experts praised the region’s action, while residents, business owners and workers were divided. Some welcomed the restrictions as necessary for the common good, while others feared they could threaten jobs and livelihoods, doing more harm than the virus itself.”
Of course the United States’ primary policy failures have been at the national level. While this crisis cried out for national leadership, Trump has steadfastly refused to take on the challenge. That left 50 state governors (plus leaders in D.C., Puerto Rico, and Guam) on their own. If that patchwork of policy responses – and the inevitable counterproductive competition among states for PPE and other resources to fight the pandemic – were not challenging enough, Trump told his base that reports of the pandemic were overblown, “fake news” generated by the mainstream media; he rejected wearing facial coverings as signals of disapproval of him; and criticized governors who imposed social distancing restrictions. Thus, simple, sensible measures to defeat the virus have been met with resistance every step of the way – in blue states and red states alike.
Republican men, who are particularly in thrall of Trump, are most likely to spurn sound guidance (when the President spurns it), but other folks (and not just Trump fans) have been misled by the mixed messages communicated by the President of the United States, his administration, his campaign, and a host of media enablers (led by Fox News Channel).
For a few weeks it appeared that states, individually and in concert, were on track to defeat this virus. The absence of national leadership and a unifying message, the refusal to marshal resources and coordinate a response across the country, and Trump’s deliberate undermining of governors determined to protect public health have defeated us. This calamity has starkly revealed Donald Trump’s unfitness for the office he holds. He is incapable of performing his job and declines to try.
While other countries have found a great measure of success, the United States will be wrestling with coronavirus for the rest of Trump’s first term – and well beyond.
Changing police culture
For many weeks across the country we’ve seen protests seeking to end pervasive discrimination based on race, with a special focus on law enforcement practices and policies that put Black men, especially, and Black women in harm’s way. Especially since 911, many police forces have leaned toward militarization, which clashes with more collaborative models of community policing.
Obviously, this problem isn’t confined to red states. The Los Angeles Police Department has a history of both militaristic and racially biased law enforcement. In 1965 (Watts) and again in 1992 (Rodney King), Black neighborhoods, sparked by anger over policing in the city, erupted in violence. While neighborhoods didn’t burn after the O.J. Simpson acquittal (1995), Black reaction to the verdict was undoubtedly influenced by LAPD Officer Mark Fuhrman’s taped interviews featuring racial slurs, tales of police brutality, and boasts of planting evidence.
LAPD circa 2020 is more than a generation removed from Daryl Gates’ department. We have seen significant changes since then. But there are still police shootings of unarmed suspects, including mentally ill individuals, and during street protests following George Floyd’s murder, there were numerous instances of police conduct that resembled the meting out of ‘street justice’ or torrents of uncontrolled anger, rather than disciplined law enforcement.
In full-page ads, which ran in the Los Angeles Times, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Washington Post, the San Jose Police Officers Association, the San Francisco Police Officer Association, and the Los Angeles Police Protective League calling for police reforms: “No words can convey our collective disgust and sorrow for the murder of George Floyd,” said the statement, continuing, “We have an obligation as a profession and as human beings to express our sorrow by taking action.”
“The CHIEF! Never sell out and back the troops!” said a Facebook post by Los Angeles Police Protective League board member Jamie McBride. The message accompanied a video of Daryl F. Gates, a former LAPD chief who ran a department plagued by excessive force and brutal relations with communities of color.
That kind of defiant pose has become a trademark for McBride over a 30-year career in the Los Angeles Police Department and six years on the board of the powerful union, which uses campaign donations to influence city elections. The Police Protective League puts McBride in front of the news media to signal that rank-and-file officers have had enough of the city’s left-leaning political leadership.
The veteran detective exudes the swagger and tribal brio of the old-school LAPD. He was a street cop with a disproportionate number of on-duty shootings and an investigator who fought management discipline (including his own) and won, and he remains a sometime actor who plays street thugs and tough cops in movies and on television.
His frequent and public Facebook posts yearn for a bygone era when the LAPD wasn’t under attack by what old-timers view as a cadre of timid chiefs, desk-bound geeks and opportunistic politicians.
Of officers like McBride, Rice added: “That’s the kind of policing they enjoy. That’s what they live for. … What the protesters are saying is: ‘Time’s up for that. It’s over.’ The consent of the governed for that kind of policing is done.”
McBride said that the video shows an earlier era of policing but that he acknowledges a need for change. “We as a department have instituted hundreds of reforms, yet there is more we can do,” he said.
The phrase, “hundreds of reforms,” is a tell, suggesting that it’s time to consider something more fundamental than a checklist of ‘reforms’ to eliminate us-against-them policing. Although Los Angeles is hardly ready to defund the police, the City Council just voted to cut $150 million from the police budget.
Supporters of Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles, who have proposed cuts of 90 to 100% of police funding, derided the action:
“That is literally pocket change,” said Rebecca Kessler, a resident of Van Nuys who called in to the council this week. “It’s a slap in the face. You need to defund the police, take way more money, put way more money into these programs.”
LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa reached his goal of increasing the size of LAPD to 10,000 officers in 2013. That’s not that many cops for the sprawling city of Los Angeles. At the time, I regarded this as sound policy. With today’s budget cut, the force will eventually fall to 9,757.
When the troubled city of Camden, New Jersey disbanded its police department in 2013, and reconstituted it as a county agency, it saved money (by withdrawing from a union contract) and the force grew from 250 to 400. That’s a model I might have endorsed a month ago – staffing up and retraining.
Last year CAHOOTS handled 20% of 911 calls in Eugene and the neighboring city of Springfield. Denver and Olympia, Washington have embraced a similar model.
In Los Angeles many 911 calls involve mental health crises, substance abuse, homeless individuals — often nonviolent situations. There is no compelling reason for armed police officers to respond to these calls. Further, the police are receptive to an approach that designates another responder.
“We have gone from asking the police to be part of the solution, to being the only solution for problems they should not be called on to solve in the first place,” wrote the authors of the Los Angeles City Council that directed city staffers to look to Eugene for answers.
In 1974, John Searle made an observation in a classroom about this sentence: ‘This room would look good in blue.’ He noted that the import of the sentence could differ from speaker to speaker. So, for instance, the words constituted a simple declarative sentence when spoken by a casual observer to a friend, while the same sentence could function as an imperative – Paint it blue – if spoken by the homeowner to a contractor.
I was reminded of this lecture when reading Bonnie Honig’s comments about an exchange on Fox News (which I quoted yesterday):
Jesse Watters: The President’s spitballing and he’s asking questions. ‘Would it be possible to maybe target the virus through a cure using certain ingredients and using sunlight?‘ You didn’t believe the President was putting anyone in danger, did you?
Dr. Deborah Birx: No. He gets new information. He likes to talk that through out loud. And really have that dialogue. And so that’s what dialogue he was having. I think he just saw the information at the time, immediately before the press conference. And he was still digesting that information.
It was easy enough to take the good doctor’s suggestion – that Trump was just digesting the information when he commented on bleach and light – at face value. But, Honig illustrates why this is wrong.
Trump isn’t just riffing aloud. He is demanding public praise for his intelligence from a distinguished authority whose job depends on Trump’s goodwill. Honig (“Spitballing in a pandemic”) [emphasis added]:
Dr. Birx … tried to explain it all away on Fox News, and what she said rings true: “When he gets new information he likes to talk that through out loud and really have that dialogue and so that’s what dialogue he’s having.” The issue, she implies, is not the musing: that is his process. The issue is that it happened in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But Trump knew that. He mused publicly because he hoped to give us all a peek behind the scenes. He has ideas and his people take them seriously! See? And who knows? He himself might come up with the cure!
. . .
What we saw on Thursday in the briefing room is what is going on behind the scenes: his advisors indulge Trump’s bright ideas and take them seriously. “I just had a thought. Look into it.” He did not say it like it was an order. On Thursday, his tone was inveigling, whispery. He was impersonating what he imagines it looks like to have an idea. Buttressed by power and smothered in noblesse oblige, however, his “thought” was really a command: act like it’s a good idea. — Yessir, we will.
2. That’s bracing
In California, declaration of an emergency results in an extraordinarily broad expansion of a governor’s power, in this case, Gavin Newsom’s:
On April 12, I referenced election expert Richard Hasen’s fear that Republican-controlled state legislatures, in purple states (or red ones that could flip to Biden), could cancel the November 3 election and allocate the state’s electoral votes to Trump. The U.S. Supreme Court noted in Bush v. Gore that state legislatures possess this authority under the Constitution.
Last week, in a review of Joe Biden’s warning that Trump could try to cancel the election, Ed Kilgore noted that in fact the Florida legislature – in 2000 (when Bush v. Gore was before SCOTUS) – filed a brief asserting the authority to throw out the election results and direct all of the state’s electoral votes to Bush. The five Republican men who comprised the Court’s 5-4 majority in the case rendered this move unnecessary to give the election to George W. Bush.
In the aftermath of the Court’s unsigned 5-4 ruling overturning a lower court’s extension of time to count ballots in Wisconsin’s recent election in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Nina Totenberg commented that “in a voting case, Chief Justice Roberts assuredly would have played a pivotal role.” Roberts has been deeply involved in voting rights cases dating to 1982, when as a staffer to Ronald Reagan, he worked (unsuccessfully) to narrow the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Later, as Chief Justice, he succeeded in gutting provisions of the law. Regarding the Wisconsin case, she observed:
4. The Grim Reaper aka the Majority Leader of the United States Senate
Mitch McConnell was on conservative talk radio last week. He made news by suggesting that he thought, rather than provide funding for states facing unprecedented financial burdens fighting the coronavirus, that he would prefer to see the states declare bankruptcy.
I would certainly be in favor of allowing states to use the bankruptcy route. It saves some cities. And there’s no good reason for it not to be available. My guess is their first choice would be for the federal government to borrow money from future generations to send it down to them now so they don’t have to do that. That’s not something I’m going to be in favor of.
And:
“I said yesterday we’re going to push the pause button here, because I think this whole business of additional assistance for state and local governments needs to be thoroughly evaluated. You raised yourself the important issue of what states have done, many of them have done to themselves with their pension programs. There’s not going to be any desire on the Republican side to bail out state pensions by borrowing money from future generations.”
Let me go back to my self-proclaimed Grim Reaper, Senator McConnell for another second. He represents the State of Kentucky, okay? When it comes to fairness, New York State puts much more money into the federal pot than it takes out, okay. At the end of the year, we put in $116 billion more than we take out, okay? His state, the State of Kentucky, takes out 148 billion more than they put in, okay.
As I have observed repeatedly in this blog, Mitch McConnell’s M.O. is to exacerbate partisanship at every opportunity. Humanity? Decency? Not among McConnell’s priorities.
I learned from David Frum that Republican proposals to encourage state bankruptcies date back more than a decade. The idea, which Frum sketches, is this: rich blue states impose higher taxes, and spend more on social programs (including, incidentally, generous public employee pensions), than Republicans like. Yet many wealthy Republicans – the GOP donor class – live in blue states. Moreover, Mitch McConnell’s biggest donors are not from Kentucky: they too live, work, and pay taxes in blue states. If Congress (when Republicans are in charge), and the federal courts (which are being stacked with right wing ideologues), could impose a bankruptcy process on the blue states, then those rich Republicans living in California, New York, and other wealth-generating states where Democrats reliably get elected, could see their taxes go down.
And if that meant that public employee pensions could be gutted, then Republicans would be smiting the most well-organized Democratic constituency – public employee unions – in the country.
Governor Andrew Cuomo’s comments (characterizing McConnell’s suggestion as “one of the saddest, really dumb ideas of all time”), asserted that state bankruptcies would wreak havoc on markets worldwide, wrecking the economy. Actually not (as Frum explains): Republican proposals to permit state bankruptcies would ensure that big money interests get paid; it’s the labor unions that would lose. And Democrats.
Frum observes:
A federal bankruptcy process for state finances could thus enable wealthy individuals and interest groups in rich states to leverage their clout in the anti-majoritarian federal system to reverse political defeats in the more majoritarian political systems of big, rich states like California, New York, and Illinois.
In other words, in a country where more than half the population only elects 18 of 100 Senators; where the Electoral College reflects this disparity; and where boundaries for Congressional Districts (because of demographics related to cities and state of the art gerrymandering) make Democratic votes less potent than Republican votes, Democratic majorities may still rule within the states. But If Republicans in Washington could change federal law (and shape federal court rulings) as proposed, then a national minority could crush majorities within the big blue states. California, New York, Illinois, and others would cease to enjoy majority rule.
Yet another Republican plan for extinguishing responsive democratic government. Here’s hoping Mitch McConnell is deposed as Majority Leader after November 3.
