SB 79 WON’T SOON HELP MANY CALIFORNIANS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS

FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
"SB 79 WON’T SOON HELP MANY CALIFORNIANS"

 

By far the most attention this in this fall’s state legislative session went to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to counteract a Texas move to convert Democratic House seats to Republican via a special redistricting election early in November.

 

But another new law just signed by Newsom will probably prove far more consequential for the future of California’s cities.

 

It’s called SB 79 and once it plays out, will leave many California skylines altered in the direction of population-dense high-rise buildings.

 

Yes, multi-unit apartment construction is down statewide this year from last year’s figures by about 20 percent (based on partial numbers for 2025), making 2024 building look like it may have been on steroids. That's largely because new apartments today need $4,000-$5,000 monthly to break even.

 

But SB 79 has the long-term potential to change things in the name of housing density that might help solve the state’s shortage. The problem is that it probably won’t do that, because the vast majority (about 70 percent) of units being built are to be rented or sold at market rates, rather than seeking occupancy as subsidized affordable housing. Given that more than half of all California renters pay upwards of 30 percent of income for housing, relatively few can afford what are called market rates. So thousands of units built in the last three years now lie vacant, while shortages persist elsewhere.

 

Here's what SB 79 sponsor Scott Wiener, a Democratic San Francisco state senator, aims to do: Create a series of mini-downtowns near major transit stops with up to nine-story buildings gradually dropping off in all directions into two-and-three story construction, often within current single-family areas nearby.

 

Because of resistance from rural lawmakers, the upzoning near transit hubs will only apply in eight urban counties. When big changes come, they will be in Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Santa Clara, Alameda, San Francisco, San Mateo and Sacramento counties.

 

Height limits will depend on just how much bus and light rail traffic a stop handles. But for the busiest stops (designated as “Tier 1”), no local government can limit heights to less than 75 feet for buildings within a quarter-mile of the stop.

 

No one knows how many of these buildings will actually rise over the next few years. If developers doubt they can make profits off market-rate units mixed with a lesser number of affordable ones, they won’t build very much. Many have such qualms due to the pricing problem. So the trouble with much new construction in California is that most Californians can’t afford to live in it.

 

Two places whose nature this law won’t change soon are Altadena and the Pacific Palisades district of Los Angeles, both decimated in last January’s firestorms. Unless transit agencies run major new routes through them, they will be exempt from the top heights. There are no such plans today. 

 

Then there’s the matter of pricing out many who now live near transit stops. As a general rule, these immediate areas are less attractive and less desirable than nearby single-family zones, so rents and prices are lower there. But tear down existing housing and replace it with more modern and expansive housing, and current residents could be priced out.

 

But when Democratic Assembly member Rick Zbur of West Los Angeles argued SB 79 would be destructive for existing lower-cost neighborhoods, he was laughed off, while the bill passed the state Senate with applause from most legislators present.

 

Also ignored were complaints that SB 79 removes any authority many existing homeowners have over their surroundings.

 

These kinds of reasons were behind the 8-5 vote by which the Los Angeles city council voted to oppose the measure. The council called for Los Angeles to be exempted because it already has a state-approved housing plan, with thousands of units underway.

 

But labor unions backed AB 79, pretty much all the Legislature needed as most Democratic legislators get a big slice of their campaign money from organized labor.

 

The upshot is that SB 79 will solve few immediate housing problems, while not helping the many Californians who will continue to find new housing priced beyond their means.

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

 

“DID HARRIS WRITE HERSELF OUT OF THE ’28 RACE?

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2025, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

 “DID HARRIS WRITE HERSELF OUT OF THE ’28 RACE?”

 

Two absolute essentials must accompany any candidate who seeks to make a serious run for president, or even lesser but still powerful jobs like governor or U.S. senator:

 

No one can make a serious run without serious funding. So multiple sources of big money are a must. So are major allies. Not only do they go on the road as surrogates at times, but they recruit other supporters, some of whom provide the first essential, big money.

 

For a candidate to alienate the most powerful individuals in their political party even before a race gets going seriously is an unheard-of no-no.

 

But that is what former Vice President Kamala Harris may have done in her campaign memoir 107 Days, published in a season when many candidates issue bland autobiographical tomes that purport to carry important messages aimed to draw millions of voters. Most don’t attract many voters, while also containing few important messages.

 

The new Harris book is different. It’s almost like a deliberate effort to alienate potential supporters and snub her nose at the money they might be capable of raising.

 

Take her complaint about Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who she briefly considered as her vice presidential running mate in 2024: He was initially reluctant or non-committal when she asked for his endorsement just after ex-President Joe Biden gave up the Democratic nomination for his office and handed it off to Harris.

 

Did Pritzker want a day or two to determine whether the party would accept Biden’s edict and quickly anoint Harris as the candidate? Did he want to be offered an incentive?

Both would have been reasonable responses to Harris’ quick ascension.

 

But his pace did not satisfy Harris, a fact now announced in print. So much for Pritzker’s support if Harris runs again in 2028.

 

And there’s her response to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, her fellow endorsee of former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, and her longtime supposed friend and stablemate (they’ve shared campaign consultants). 

 

She claims he didn’t take her first call after Biden dropped out, texting back “Hiking. Will call back.” He didn’t do that. So even though he did issue a full endorsement within hours, that was too slow for Harris, who apparently expects her colleagues to ask “how high” the moment she says “jump.”

 

If this sounds like minor byplay, that’s what it should have been. It probably wasn’t worth a mention in her book, or any other, but reflects an irritability that hasn’t worked well for any modern presidential candidate except Donald Trump. The rest have all tried to appear universally amiable.

 

Harris sprinkled other, similar, bon mots though her book. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, whom she considered for vice president, is “overly ambitious (and) confident,” Harris writes, and “would want to be in the room for every major decision.” Shouldn’t any veep want that?

 

Then there’s Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., and Biden’s transportation secretary. He would have been “too big a risk,” as she didn’t believe the electorate was prepared to back both a gay man (Buttigieg) and a black woman (herself) simultaneously. But she writes Buttigieg was actually her first choice for vice president, even though she picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. What now, if Walz is reelected next year?

 

If someone wanted to alienate powerful Democrats, it would be difficult to do it more thoroughly than Harris seems to have tried to do. Mark Kelly, senator from Arizona, “lacks political battle scars.” Does that mean he’s too popular, for he certainly has other kinds of scars as the steadfast, supportive husband of onetime assassination target Gabby Giffords.

 

All of which raises the question of whether Harris really wants to run for president again. Would she have criticized so many powerful Democrats if she were hungry for both their support and the further backing they could bring along in 2028?

 

Harris plainly didn’t want to be governor of California, or go through the rough campaign that she’d need to win that job. Now she’s also given voters plenty of reason to wonder how much she wants to be president.

 

    -30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

TRUMP GOES AFTER UCLA FIRST AND HARDEST BECAUSE IT’S A FAT TARGET

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2025 OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“TRUMP GOES AFTER UCLA FIRST AND HARDEST BECAUSE IT’S A FAT TARGET”

 

Go almost anywhere in the multiple medical centers of slogan-obsessed UCLA and you’ll see signs reading “It Begins With U” and “Innovating Patient Care since 1926,” bromides urging every employee from nurses to heart surgeons toward ever-better performances and ratings.

 

So far, the slogans have helped place UCLA’s medical centers first among Western hospitals in the U.S. News & World Report ratings, topping even famed institutions like Stanford University’s hospital, the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and UCLA’s sister medical centers in San Francisco, Sacramento and Irvine.

 

But UCLA now also places first in a far less desirable category: It is the university which President Trump seeks to dun the most in federal research and fine money, going after a total of $1.7 billion. That’s in keeping with Trump’s practice of attacking prominent targets, rarely secondary ones.

 

The $1.7 billion represents virtually all annual federal research money UCLA gets, sixth most in the country behind places like UC San Francisco, Michigan and Johns Hopkins, schools which had far less anti-Semitic activity during the 2023-24 school year. By contrast, UCLA sprouted anti-Israel encampments like mushrooms. So in many ways, UCLA was the largest target Trump could find, and his psychology suggests that’s why he singled it out.

 

Fully $500 million of the federal research money was to be taken from UCLA’s medical facilities and research before a judge the other day stopped the process at least temporarily on grounds the demands were made via form letters not listing any transgressions by researchers. The other $1.2 billion is a “fine” for allowing anti-Semitic camps and other anti-Jewish activities on the campus for weeks.

 

Totally ignored were petitions signed by hundreds of Jewish UCLA faculty noting the campus has seen no medically-linked anti-Semitism.

 

Trump’s administration more than any other appears struck with the central injustice of Gaza: Over 1,000 Israelis were murdered and kidnapped, but Israel somehow has been blamed for the entire conflict.

 

UCLA has been widely blasted ever since for its long tolerance of the campus encampments and concurrent interference with other students’ freedom of movement.

 

The overall University of California system says it will resist any federal penalties, a big commitment from this huge institution. Overall, UC campuses get about $17 billion per year from the federal government, including more than $9 billion for the care of Medicare and Medicaid patients and almost $9 billion in research funding.

 

It’s no wonder UCLA doctors show signs of insecurity from the standoff between school and government. “What’s going to happen to my family?” wondered one cardiologist while examining a patient. “Will I and my colleagues have to go somewhere else?” If they do, what happens to all those “Best in the West” awards and slogans?

 

What does America get for its research money? Early on, it got CT (computerized tomography) scans. More recently, there have been a wireless implantable brain device that partially restores vision in some of the blind; drug delivery systems that cross the blood/brain barrier to reach cancers in the central nervous system, and gene therapies for babies born without immune systems.

 

Should advances like these be lost to Donald Trump’s “war on California,” of which the attempted UCLA extortion is one part? 

 

So far, UCLA and the larger UC system appear to be resisting via a mix of lawsuits and compromise. The campus last month announced new protest rules at least partly matching federal demands. UCLA will allow pre-approved overnight events, but not in the campus center. It stopped far short of cutting off admissions of students with pro-Palestinian or anti-American views, as Trump demanded. The rules make clear that campus disruptions and blocking of building access will not be allowed.

   

All this meets many Trump demands.

 

Similar rules have not yet been applied to other UC campuses, including those in urban settings like UCSF and the UC San Francisco school of law.

 

Settlement talks reportedly involve 10 of the 24 members of UC’s Board of Regents, along with President James Milliken.

 

It’s an open question whether Trump appointees will make more demands. Further pressures figure to spur an increase in UC’s emphasis on lawsuits to uphold its rights.

 

Meanwhile, it’s all made the slogan “It starts with U” as good as obsolete, for no campus employee from nurse to specialized researcher did anything to provoke the crisis.

 

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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

WILDFIRE FUND LEADS INEVITABLY TO SMUG UTILITIES

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“WILDFIRE FUND LEADS INEVITABLY TO SMUG UTILITIES”

 

The tone has bordered on smug among executives of the Southern California Edison Co. ever since the Eaton Fire last January destroyed most of Altadena and some of neighboring Pasadena, consuming a total of about 9,400 structures and doing at least $27 billion worth of damage.

 

Edison has all but admitted some of its equipment sparked that fire, but somehow has acted as if it needs never even to worry about bankruptcy, the procedure its sister utility Pacific Gas & Electric Co. went through after its equipment sparked the fire that destroyed virtually all of Paradise in Butte County seven years ago.

 

Edison has even offered settlements to Eaton fire victims who lost homes: $900,000 in rebuilding money to owners of burnt typical 1,500-square-foot homes, plus a $200,000 reward for settling directly with the utility and more for pain and suffering. 

 

This move to defuse the myriad lawsuits against the utility is a first, made possible by the work Gov. Gavin Newsom, his legislative minions and his appointees to the state Public Utilities Commission did to protect PG&E and its fellow privately owned utilities from most liability when they cause fires in the future. Now Edison gets that protection.

 

The bailout mechanism invented by Newsom and friends in 2019 while consumer groups were advocating a breakup of PG&E, is known as the California Wildfire Fund. As part of the rescue, almost all customers of the three big private California utilities (San Diego Gas & Electric also benefits), now pay a $3 monthly surcharge on their bills to cover post-2019 fire damages caused by utilities. 

 

Even the $21 billion or so in the Wildfire Fund today might not be enough to cover all Edison’s prospective liabilities from the Eaton fire. So pending Newsom's expected signature, the Legislature this month agreed to extend the $3 monthly customer payments all across the state until 2045 rather than the previously scheduled 2035 expiration date.

 

That will up the Wildfire Fund $18 billion, half paid by Edison shareholders and half by customers.

 

Californians cannot blame President Trump for this, even if his firing thousands of Forest Service workers could help make this year’s fire season the most costly ever. This injustice sits squarely with Newsom, who appears unworried because the $3 fee is buried in most electric bills and rarely noticed by rate payers.

 

Myriad lawsuits from homeowners hit by the Eaton fire now charge Edison with failure to turn off the power to a transmission tower just above that fire’s generally accepted ignition point. The lawsuits claim Edison had ample warning of fire prone conditions, but still left the juice on. Those actions go away in cases where victims opt for Edison’s offers.

 

Final damage figures from the Eaton fire and the simultaneous Palisades fire are not certain and could almost double the current $27 billion estimate. Even if Edison’s payments are widely accepted, insurance companies would likely pay back much of that amount. Edison could also take a big drawdown from the Wildfire Fund, possibly leaving the fund broke.

 

All of which raises the question that dogged the original legislation creating the fund: Why are most California electric customers paying for damages caused by negligence or malfeasance from the state’s monopoly investor-owned utilities?

 

Customers did not cause the fires; in fact many are fire victims still trying to get fair settlements from their own insurance companies.

 

The upshot is that the swiftly and carelessly drawn legislation created solely to keep today’s companies in business despite self-made crises could prove both unfair to most consumers and inadequate to cover damages assessed to Edison and future perpetrators of other fires. 

 

Meanwhile, Edison’s chief executive Pedro Pizarro, when queried during the summer about prospects for an extension of the Wildfire Fund surcharge, correctly responded that “The governor’s office is engaged, as are our legislative leaders.” How smug could he sound?

 

The alternative could have been much simpler and more just: If proven negligent and/or careless, Edison and its utility brethren could have been forced into bankruptcy and then broken up, with cities, counties and the state picking up parts of the current infrastructure.

 

For if privately-owned utilities keep starting fires, why do they deserve their current monopolies, complete with billions yearly in guaranteed profits?

 

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

 

IF COVID-WRACKED BODIES STACK UP THIS YEAR, BLAME RFK Jr., TRUMP

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS

FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“IF COVID-WRACKED BODIES STACK UP THIS YEAR, BLAME RFK Jr., TRUMP”

 

As Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues making vaccines in general and COVID-19 inoculations in particular harder to get, it will become more and more clear that the blame for any resulting deaths lies with him and his boss, President Trump.

 

That also applies to the current outbreak of whooping cough (or pertussis), of which 10,082 cases were reported by the end of May, killing five infants. That led Kennedy’s top U.S. Senate critic, Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy, whose state had three times as many cases as last year, to call on him to encourage mass vaccinations for whooping cough. At this writing, Kennedy had not responded, and the outbreak was unabated.

 

It's important to make clear neither Trump nor Kennedy is responsible for the summertime measles death of a Los Angeles child infected when too young for vaccination and before either RFK Jr. or Trump took office.

 

Yet, there’s little doubt much of the blame in any future stackup of bodies dead from COVID-19 varieties will lie with Kennedy. For years, he was America’s foremost critic of vaccines of most types, from long-established preventives like the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) inoculations required for most schoolchildren to the newer COVID-19 antidotes.

 

We know New York City and parts of New Jersey experienced such high death tolls early in the COVID pandemic that hospitals and morgues used refrigerated trucks to store piled-up bodies. Images of mass burials on Hart Island near the Bronx also circulated widely during 2020 and 2021.

 

In that same year’s winter surge (the deadliest wave yet), hospitals in California, Arizona and Oregon also converted trucks into temporary morgues.

 

Now another round of COVID threatens, and we shall see how responsible the American public that elected Donald Trump president is willing to hold him and his political deal-making.

 

Just now, a new variety of COVID-19 – at least the fourth since the pandemic’s supposed end – proliferates across the nation, while Kennedy makes it continually more difficult for people to get protected by new forms of the vaccine.

 

As secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy names the committees that set the rules for this. He has systematically filled them with anti-vaccine cronies he calls “distinguished scientists.”

 

They’ve set rules making it almost impossible for anyone under 65 to get previously free vaccinations unless they tell a pharmacist they have some kind of underlying condition weakening their health.

 

Even some over-65s in California and other states have reported being forced to get COVID-shot prescriptions from physicians.

 

These are far higher barriers to inoculation than Americans faced as recently as last year, before RFK Jr. took over HHS.

 

Why blame Trump, too? For one thing, he put Kennedy where he is, part of a Trump/Kennedy political bargain sealed very publicly in August 2024.

 

That’s when Kennedy – until then a secondary presidential candidate – agreed to throw whatever support he had at the polls (it wasn’t much) behind Trump, often reported as an exchange for any cabinet job he desired.

 

Kennedy sorely wanted HHS. He has used it to the hilt, first lying about the extent of his anti-vaccine sentiments during Senate confirmation hearings and then acting on his true feelings after taking over the only federal job he ever wanted.

 

Trump knew he was suborning this deceit, saying later that “Everyone knows these (vaccines) work,” but still refusing to fire Kennedy even after most of Kennedy’s family begged him to. Who knows what written “pre-nup” may exist between the two men, restraining Trump from taking appropriate action?

 

Even senators who voted to confirm Kennedy as a cabinet member now loudly point out contradictions between his confirmation hearing testimony and his actions in office. “I would say effectively we are denying people vaccines,” said Cassidy, a doctor and the decisive vote to confirm Kennedy.

 

The bottom line: The direct line of responsibility for today’s rising positive results for COVID-19 and other once quiescent ailments like pertussis runs through both Kennedy and Trump. But no one knows if voters will hold either to account.

 

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

IT’S LESS OVERT, BUT TRUMP’S ‘WAR ON CALIFORNIA’ CARRIES ON

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“IT’S LESS OVERT, BUT TRUMP’S ‘WAR ON CALIFORNIA’ CARRIES ON”

 

It’s not exactly the 100 years war, but Donald Trump’s undeclared ‘War on California’ carries on this fall just as intently as ever before.

 

No, it’s not as obvious as when he defied the governor and several judges to send National Guard and Marine troops by the thousands to quell a riot that wasn’t.

 

It isn’t merely that the count of California lawsuits against him is higher today than at the same point in his first presidential term. In some cases, Trump lets other Republicans carry his water and in others he is harming California more than other states with his nationwide moves, including the tariffs he has (possibly illegally) imposed on California’s largest trade partners.

 

These things will not likely knock California off its pedestal as the world’s No. 4 economy, just ahead of India and just behind Germany. For one thing, the large amount of rebuilding construction that will soon follow last January’s Los Angeles County firestorms will keep the cost of goods created here higher than before, suggesting a potential move up in the worldwide economic rankings.

 

But make no mistake, through a wide series of moves, Trump is doing what he can to make life less pleasant, more expensive and even less truthful for Californians.

 

Start with the Clean Air Act, where Trump coerced every Republican in the House of Representatives to vote last spring for elimination of the California waiver in the Clean Air Act of 1970. That’s the provision that allowed this state to clean up its air (not completely, by far) through measures like catalytic converters and electric vehicles, pioneered here and often resented elsewhere. Such resentment was why 35 Democrats voted with the House GOP.

 

Trump tried for this repeatedly in his first term, but was voted out before he could finish, rendering moot any legal cases surrounding his effort. Now it will be up to Democrats in the Senate to stop this effort to dirty up California air.

 

There is also significant legal debate on this. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has stated that waivers like California’s are not subject to congressional review, suggesting Congress lacks the authority to overturn them. If this measure goes through, with a smirking Trump signing it, that issue would be decided by the courts.

 

But that’s only one move against California. Here are a few others (not the complete list):

 

n Termination of a study on guaranteed income. Trump halted a $9 million UC San Francisco clinical trial providing $500 monthly to 300 low-income Black young adults that aimed to learn whether this tactic can cut crime and homelessness.

 

n An executive order to Attorney General Pam Bondi to halt enforcement of state laws on climate change, explicitly challenging California’s cap-and-trade program that, among other things, produces electric and natural gas bill credits of about $50 per customer twice a year.

 

n Another order opening floodgates in two Central California reservoirs, supposedly aiming to address wildfire issues. But there were no fires near those reservoirs and none of the water reached any fire area, most of it flowing into depleted San Joaquin Valley aquifers.

 

n Trying to eliminate past California atrocities from the Smithsonian Institute and all other government-sponsored exhibits purporting to deal with all aspects of California history.

 

n Ignoring the bragging he voiced while visiting the January fire zones and again in an Oval Office meeting with Gov. Gavin Newsom – to provide quick federal aid to wildfire survivors. Reality is there has been no movement in Congress toward passing California’s request for $40 billion in fire aid.

 

Taken together, these moves compose an attack on California’s ability to control its own environment and fix its problems with tax money paid by this state’s citizens, who annually put far more into the federal treasury than they get back.

 

They would instead put this state on equal or even lesser footing than Republican-controlled states like West Virginia and Alabama, where smog and water safety issues have never been taken seriously, as they are here.

 

 

 

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

 

Suggested pullout quote: “These moves are major parts of an attack on California’s ability to control its own environment and fix its problems.”

 

WHO ARE THE REAL HYPOCRITES IN THE GERRYMANDERING FIGHT?

 CALIFORNIA FOCUS

FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2025, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“WHO ARE THE REAL HYPOCRITES IN THE GERRYMANDERING FIGHT?”

 

For the better part of 20 years, Republican politicians across the nation have taken advantage of whatever privileges their status as state legislators gave them to assure they would stay in office perpetually, or at least as long as they wanted.

 

This has all been done at the expense of both Democratic pols and the minority groups many of them represent in Congress thanks to districts they have drawn for themselves from Texas to Florida, West Virginia to the Dakotas.

 

The GOP operatives never felt the slightest embarrassment or compunction about what they were doing, no matter how many times courts forced them to alter their maps and return to square 1 in the gerrymandering wars.

 

That’s why it is utterly laughable for figures like Joel Coupal, head of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. or the newly elected Assemblyman Carl DeMaio, who runs a fund-raising operation titled “Reform California,” to toss around words like hypocrite and apostate when California Democrats try to turn the tables on them, for once.

 

This all began when the order came down from Donald Trump in the Oval Office to Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott, who despite his frequent toadying to the President nevertheless brags incessantly about what a political hotshot he is.

 

So when Trump essentially ordered Abbott early last summer to turn six minority congressional districts in the mostly minority Houston area into five white Republican districts and just one minority district, it was clearly meant as a tactic to assure continued Trump or Trumpist rule in the House of Representatives in perpetuity.

 

Never mind that the Constitution very plainly says congressional districts are to be drawn once every 10 years, just after the Census, and intended to last the full 10 years.

 

Democrats have stood still for this chicanery every time it’s been tried in the past. That’s likely why the GOP operatives who have pulled these trick plays so often in the past were taken aback when California Gov. Gavin Newsom, plainly running for president in 2028, decided to give them a piece of their own medicine.

 

Yes, California has a non-partisan state elections commission to draw its decennial borders. And that’s how it worked in 2021, the year after the last Census.

 

But Newsom realized that anything enacted by a California ballot initiative – as was the non-partisan election commission – can be undone by another initiative.

 

So he did the unprecedented: He decided to match Texas tit for tat, saying if you take away five Democratic districts in a 2026 election that figures to be extraordinarily tight, we’ll figure a way to get them back, right here in California.

 

Hence, the Legislature quickly approved a new map with five districts that figure to switch from red to blue, mostly in the eastern and southern parts of the state.

 

This didn’t sit too well with James Gallagher, the minority leader of the state Assembly. Gallagher had hoped to pick up one of the unknown number of changed seats due to come up after 2030. But James Gallagher, meet Jeff Stone.

 

Stone is a former Riverside County supervisor who devised another north-south split for California, this one intended to give the new eastern California state a couple more seats in Congress and two more Republican seats in the Senate. It was essentially the same things Gallagher wants to try now.

 

No shame on Stone’s part in this attempted manipulation. It didn’t work, just like all the other 40-plus state split schemes presented over the last half century.

 

Meanwhile, Newsom’s lone-wolf attempt to thwart Trump’s attempt at self-perpetuation is the only significant effort trying to stop the Republicans from cementing themselves into power for years, maybe decades, to come.

It appears to be the sort of tactic frustrated Democrats want their 2028 hopefuls to attempt. So even if Newsom’s effort fails, at least he will have tried, putting himself ahead of rivals like Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (heir to the Hyatt Hotels fortune) and Kentucky Gov. Andy Breshears. For now, at least, it gives Newsom a leg up on the rest of the Democratic field, although no one knows how long that advantage might last.

 

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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

NERVOUS TIME FOR SOME HISPANICS AT MANY CALIFORNIA COLLEGES -- AND NOT BECAUSE OF ICE

 CALIFORNIA FOCUS

FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2025, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
"NERVOUS TIME FOR SOME HISPANICS AT MANY CALIFORNIA COLLEGES -- AND NOT BECAUSE OF ICE”

 

As students headed back to school at California’s more than 200 college and university campuses, some had more reason than usual to be nervous.

 

For a federal program that – for a change – is not currently threatened for defunding by President Trump appears to be in trouble from a completely different source.

 

That’s the Hispanic Serving Institutions (HIS) grants given annually since 1995 to community colleges, four-year colleges and universities whose student bodies are 25 percent or more Latino. These have totaled more than $600 million for California campuses alone since the avent of the program.

 

With its huge populace of immigrants of varying legal status, California has gotten more than one-fourth of the money available under this plan, which lets campuses improve their student support programs from faculty instruction on how best to boost Hispanic students to added counseling for them, and student retention programs that keep both Hispanics and others in school when they might otherwise drop out.

 

Like Project Head Start for much younger folks, this is one of the great successes inaugurated or expanded during the Clinton Administration.

 

But the program is now under fire, and its survival is threatened in a day when the Trump administration has managed to eliminate many programs it labels as diversity, equity and inclusion because they are designed to help minority groups move up.

 

For sure, Hispanic students in California need some kind of help. Only 35 percent of all students in the K-12 grades met or exceeded grade-level standards in math and reading, with huge performance gaps between Latinos and Blacks at one end and whites and Asians on the other. White and Asian students had gaps averaging about 25 percentage points in performance on the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress during 2023-24, the last available full year for which figures are available.

 

The obvious need for something to lift up Hispanic students, who might otherwise be doomed to second-class citizenship, does not matter to the folks opposed to the HSI funding.

 

The current opposition comes from the state of Tennessee and a group called Students for Fair Admissions, which previously sued successfully forcing Harvard University to end affirmative action admissions. It argues the rules for getting HSI funding are as unconstitutional as favoring some racial groups over others in admissions.

 

A current federal lawsuit from Tennessee and the Fair Admissions group uses essentially the same arguments employed against Harvard’s former affirmative action plan. The main contention is that all colleges serving low-income students of any ethnicity ought to be eligible for grants now available only to HSIs.

 

Of course, the efforts for which the HSI funds are used at the 167 California schools that get them are also supposed to benefit all students, not just Latinos. No one is screening Asians out of counseling programs, for example, even if they are designed specifically to meet Hispanic needs and not others.

 

Because the lawsuit is pretty much in line with Trump administration goals and initiatives, and because it names the federal Department of Education and Secretary Linda McMahon as defendants, it’s uncertain the action will even be seriously contested. The administration can simply concede and Tennessee and its companion citizen group would win.

 

Those who favor that outcome, according to the EdSource information service, consider the 25 percent-plus Latino enrollment benchmark illegal because it does not let other institutions with lower Hispanic enrollments participate.

 

Right now, HSI funds go to five of the nine University of California undergraduate campuses, all but one of the California State University campuses and the majority of the state’s community colleges.

 

Since the lawsuit’s objective is not to eliminate the funds, but rather make them more widely available, it’s possible most of those schools will still be able to participate in whatever new programs HSI might morph into.

 

Still, it’s unsettling for the faculty and counseling staff now using the money mostly to serve Latinos, especially since no one knows whether campuses would put up some of their other funds to keep these activities going if they are ruled illegal. It’s also doubtful the Trump administration would do anything to uplift any minority, considering how many of their campus actions now seem aimed to push them down.

 

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Elias is author of the current book The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It, now available in an updated third edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com

STILL HOPE FOR A RETURN TO SANITY ON A.I.

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2025, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

 “STILL HOPE FOR A RETURN TO SANITY ON A.I.”

 

There were plenty of lousy votes taken during the summer’s congressional sessions, when President Trump’s omnibus “Big Beautiful Bill” eventually passed after numerous senators and House members obtained their various pounds of flesh from it.

 

Trump gave concessions to senators from Alaska, Wyoming and many other states in order to win continued tax cuts for billionaires, plus massive slashes in Medicaid and in funds for rural hospitals. Even Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson made an inexplicable vote: With 40 percent of residents of his Louisiana district on some form of Medicaid, he pushed hard for cuts in the program. Politicians have rarely made more suicidal-seeming efforts.

 

But in this mishmash of mistaken policy and misunderstanding, there was one extremely sane vote: The U.S. Senate voted 99-1 to kill a proposed 10-year ban on state-level regulation of artificial intelligence.

 

No, there will not soon be federal or worldwide regulations on A.I., but there is at least hope that some of the 50 state legislatures will do the right thing and make rules that protect humans from artificial intelligence turning malignant.

 

It has happened. Last fall, for example, a graduate student in Michigan was told “please die” by Google’s artificial chatbot Gemini. “This is for you, human,” Gemini told the student. “You are not special, you are not important and you are not needed. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe. Please die. Please.”

 

That’s an extremely human sentiment, reflecting anger and malevolence. It really does not matter what the student might have been having the chatbot do, there is no excuse for letting a human creation turn on a human in that way.

 

But so far, no state or nation has dared take the basic step to regulate A.I. (which can also function as robots) so that it cannot turn against its makers.

 

The idea for such regulation is nothing new. As far back as 1942, when America was at war with malevolent forces from Europe to East Asia and the Pacific, the scientist and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov saw this very danger coming and invented laws of robotics to prevent anything like the message that graduate student received or any actions that might follow up on the message itself.

 

In his short story “Runaround,” Asimov put forward three laws which would become staples in his future works, like the bestselling “Foundation” trilogy.

 

“The first law,” Asimov wrote, “is that a robot shall not harm a human or by inaction allow a human to come to harm. The second law is that a robot shall obey any instruction given to it by a human, and the third law is that a robot shall avoid actions or situations that could cause it to harm itself.”

 

So Asimov conceived independent-minded machines, much like many of today’s, without having his three laws imprinted upon them. Right now, no one knows whether these machines are secretly plotting to get rid of humans just like Gemini wanted its human graduate student eliminated.

 

This kind of threat was perceived early last year by more than 100 technology leaders, corporate CEOs and scientists who warned that “A.I. poses an existential threat to humanity.”

 

The notion that the Trump administration could put a prohibition on state regulation into a draft of its key legislation for this year shows officials and the president totally ignored warnings.

 

At the same time, major A.I. companies from Meta to Open A.I., makers of the ChatGPT function built into many of today’s computers, oppose any kind of regulation on what their machines’ capabilities should be. This represents pure human arrogance in assuming machines will never develop the sophistication to become a threat to our race.

 

But the Senate knew better. By a huge bipartisan majority, it clearly saw how fast A.I. is moving in precisely the potentially threatening manner anticipated by Asimov decades before A.I. actually existed.

 

At least, states still have the right to act on the wisdom of such visionaries, and hopefully prevent what could prove a fatal flaw for the entire human race.

 

 

 

 

    -30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

IRONY IN SACTO AS ENVIRONMENTALISTS DEEP SIX KEY ENVIRO BILL

 CALIFORNIA FOCUS

FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, AUGUST 29, 2025, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“IRONY IN SACTO AS ENVIRONMENTALISTS DEEP SIX KEY ENVIRO BILL”

 

There’s been deep irony in Sacramento this summer, as some normally environmentally oriented state senators deep-sixed what might have been the year’s most important potential new environmental law.

 

At issue was whether oil companies could be held liable for damage from future wildfires caused at least in part by climate change.

 

The state Senate Judiciary Committee vote on the measure came just two days after oil giant Chevron was held liable by a Louisiana jury for $744.6 million to restore damage to Louisiana’s coastal wetlands.

 

The case was the first of many pending against oil companies which have supposedly lied about whether their  policies led to land loss along that state’s coast, reaching east from the mouth of the Mississippi River.

 

Keeping alive the somewhat similar bill to allow for assessing damages after California fires would have required seven votes in committee, but it only got five, from Democrats Scott Wiener of San Francisco, Ben Allen of Santa Monica, John Laird of Santa Clara, Henry Stern of Los Angeles and Akilah Weber Pierson of La Mesa.

 

Several senators avoided going on the record directly against this bill by abstaining from voting on it, as good as a ‘no.’

 

The bill was strongly opposed by both business and labor groups, which contended it would substantially raise the cost of living in California. One study was presented by the California Center for Jobs and the Economy, a nominally non-partisan think tank founded by business interests that was established by the California Business Roundtable.

 

That study contended “Businesses facing massive litigation costs (like those assessed at least temporarily against Chevron) will pass expenses on to consumers.” That, it said, could raise gasoline costs to $7.38 per gallon and raise electric rates 65 percent for industrial users.

 

Wiener and environmentalists backing the bill could muster no solid evidence against this contention, so Democratic senators like Tom Umberg of Anaheim and Maria Elena Durazo of Los Angeles withheld their votes.

 

Meanwhile, the Environmental Voters of California argued that assessing oil companies for damage they indirectly cause would save enough in insurance premiums to make up for any other costs. The majority of the committee did not find that convincing.

 

Business interests were delighted by defeat of the bill (SB222). “I applaud the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who stood up for a more affordable California and voted down this unconstitutional measure,” said Kyla Christofferson Powell, president and CEO of the Justice Assn. of California, which does not disclose all its financial backers but has had past support from the California Assn. of Realtors.

 

Wiener and other supporters had hoped his bill would become a model for other states where oil companies have lied about effects of climate change.

 

Said Wiener, “Californians are paying a devastating price for the climate disasters that have and will continue to wreak havoc on our state.”

 

Noting that the January firestorms which devastated large parts of Los Angeles County occurred far outside normal fire seasons, Wiener added that “Tens of thousands of people in Southern California have lost their homes and large swaths of their community, and it happened in the middle of winter.”

 

He added that fires are not the only climate-related disasters afflicting California, saying mudslides and floods are also increasing.

 

Meanwhile, he insists, there is no mechanism here to charge those damages to the parties most responsible for them – including oil companies.

 

All this talk makes it completely certain a similar measure will be back before the Legislature next year. Said John Carmouche, lead plaintiff lawyer in the landmark Louisiana case, “No company is big enough to walk away scot-free.”

 

Carmouche, of course, did not participate in the negotiations that forced California consumers to pay $21 million into the state’s Wildfire Fund to cover still unassessed costs from fires caused by power company equipment. No, companies like Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric did not quite “walk away scot-free,” but they came close to achieving that corporate aim.

 

The bottom line: If next year’s outcome on the inevitable attempt at a similar bill is to be different, there will have to be more hard information on the savings a law like Wiener’s might bring.

 

 

 

 

 
-30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

MEASLES DEATHS IN CALIFORNIA: IT’S ONLY A QUESTION OF WHEN

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, AUGUST 26, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“MEASLES DEATHS IN CALIFORNIA: IT’S ONLY A QUESTION OF WHEN”

 

With more cases of measles already reported as of July in California than all of last year, it’s only a matter of time when one of the unvaccinated victims will die. And that will be a price the parents of that child will have paid for the election of Donald Trump as president.

 

Go back just one year, to last August, and you could see television pictures of Trump in the process of buying off the presidential candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in exchange for a promise to appoint RFK Jr. as secretary of Health and Human Services.

 

RFK Jr. was never about to be elected president, but Trump feared he might siphon off just enough votes in a few places to toss what looked like a too-close-to-call election over to Democrat Kamala Harris. So he bought off Kennedy, in plain language. This was no secret, as the two men staged a widely-covered news conference to announce their deal.

 

What’s happened since has been the inevitable consequence of making the nation’s leading anti-vaccination advocate the officer in charge of America’s vaccination program.

 

Measles are the first place where his presence has been felt in a major way. The measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) shot required for public school enrollment in many places – including California, with a few exceptions – is now downplayed officially by the federal Centers for Disease Control, the country’s authoritative source of public health expertise until Kennedy changed things there.

 

One result is that across America as of mid-June, there were 1,214 confirmed cases of measles with at least three deaths. The vast majority of victims was unvaccinated. This, from a disease that just a few years ago had been considered eradicated.

 

But that was before Kennedy began using his new bully pulpit for promoting the idea that the MMR vaccine could cause autism, a claim that medical experts writing in several peer-reviewed journals thoroughly debunked. That did not stop Kennedy from promoting the idea and appointing some of its advocates to national vaccine panels.

 

So far, California had seen just 16 measles cases this year as of midsummer, one more than all of last year. There have been no deaths here. All three of those were in the Texas panhandle and neighboring New Mexico, where more than half of the country’s measles cases have turned up.

 

But the California cases are very widespread, occurring in Fresno, Los Angeles, Orange, Placer, Riverside, Sacramento, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Tuolumne and Yolo counties, and in Long Beach, which has its own city health department.

 

The three deaths this year are the first in more than a decade. All the victims were unvaccinated, an increasing trend across the country as Kennedy promotes vaccine options.

 

One reason there may be many more California cases in the offing is that the Texas outbreak is a likely source of infection for people who travel there. Californians are less likely to be infected at home, because vaccination rates here top 96.5 percent among kindergarteners.

 

But children become infected easily if taken into an area that’s already affected because of low local vaccination rates like those where today’s outbreaks are most rampant.

 

Those rates are lower in areas where Trump’s electoral performance was highest, as in the Texas cases.

 

Said Dr. Erica Pan, director of the California Department of Public Health, “Today’s resurgence is a stark reminder what happens if we fail to follow the science and give in to political.”

 

And political posturing is what the nation is getting today from Kennedy and Trump, who downplay the importance of vaccines and question their safety, even for those like the MMR shots that have safely been in common use for decades.

 

 With Kennedy this summer replacing every previous member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee of Immunization Practices, no one knows what official government recommendations will look like a few months from now.

 

That’s the danger when the national public health is entrusted to a discredited vaccine skeptic as part of a blatantly political deal.

 

    -30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net.

BONTA BARELY MENTIONED, BUT HE’S THE ACTUAL NEW FRONTRUNNER FOR GUV

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, AUGUST 22, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

 BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“BONTA BARELY MENTIONED, BUT HE’S THE ACTUAL NEW FRONTRUNNER FOR GUV”

 

For many months, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta laid low in the 2026 run for California governor. He did this by insisting he would run for reelection if Kamala Harris opted to make the run for governor, which was the general expectation for her until July 30, when she stunned the political world by opting out of the campaign.

 

There’s no need for Bonta to lay low any longer, unless he sincerely doesn’t want the job. And in a wide but weak field, Bonta stands out as likely the strongest candidate.

 

“Kamala Harris would be a great governor,” Bonta said of a prospective Harris run early on.… “I would support her if she ran, I’ve always supported her in everything she’s done. She would be field‑clearing.”

 

Instead, Harris has now cleared the field for what proves to be the most openly competitive run for California governor in generations. It’s hard to remember a more open race in the modern era, when there always seems to have been an obvious successor waiting in the wings whenever a gubernatorial campaign came up.

 

But there is no such successor this time, no Gavin Newsom waiting for Jerry Brown to get out of the way, no Brown waiting for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s departure, no Schwarzenegger waiting to oust Gray Davis in a recall, to name just a few recent runs for governor.

 

It's hard to remember the achievements of the current crop of gubernatorial candidates. The first newly named frontrunner, former Orange County Congresswoman Katie Porter, was a tough questioner in Congress, but try to name a singular achievement. Real estate developer Rick Caruso, who lost a 2022 run for mayor of Los Angeles, seems more focused on criticizing the current mayor than running for governor. Former State Senate President Toni Atkins of San Diego’s top achievement seems to have been becoming that office’s first lesbian occupant.

 

There’s also former state controller Betty Yee, lacking a singular achievement, too. And there’s former Los Angeles Mayor and Assembly speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, whose achievements seem lost in the winds of time, because he’s been out of office raking in private payments for services so long.

 

Not to be forgotten is Xavier Becerra, once the elected attorney general of California and later a Joe Biden cabinet officer. He was President Trump’s prime legal antagonist during Trump’s first term, filing more than 100 lawsuits and great impeding the Trump agenda.

 

And there is Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, who has the usual non-memorable achievements of any recent lieutenant governor.

 

Among the Republicans, there is Steve Hilton, who is best known as a Fox News host, accompanied by Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, best known for his resistance to Covid 19 protections.

 

Which leaves Rob Bonta, the appointed and then elected attorney general who has been the point man in California’s efforts to resist some of the most egregious edicts of President Trump. Bonta, with more than 35 lawsuits filed so far against Trump measures, is ahead of the Becerra pace. And his aggressive demeanor in opposing Trump appears to be what California voters want.

 

That, at least, is what we can glean from the behavior of current Gov. Newsom, who puts on the most aggressive front he can in opposing Trump, presumably because that’s what he believes will best feed the preferences of his base. His latest move is to attempt a gerrymandering effort aimed to parry—at least – an effort by Texas Republicans to “steal” five currently Democratic Texas seats in Congress.

 

Bonta has not yet said much about running for governor, because he deeply believed Harris would do that job. But since she now says she will not, look for Bonta to take on a very active campaign role, just as he has lately been Trump’s leading legal antagonist.

 

He's fought Trump over the federal demands for welfare recipients’ IDs, and he’s fought firings at various federal departments. He’s fought against new voting instructions, and for offshore wind energy.

 

It’s hard to find an area where he has not stood against Trump, and if that kind of behavior is really what Californians want, expect him to become the front-runner very soon.

 

-30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net