PRIMARY RESULTS BODE ILL FOR SWING DISTRICT DEMS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 29, 2024, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
        “PRIMARY RESULTS BODE ILL FOR SWING DISTRICT DEMS”

 

        It may have been because Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Adam Schiff spent big in this month’s primary election to make sure former Major League Baseball star Steve Garvey would be his opponent this fall.

 

        It may have been because of a general lack of interest and enthusiasm among Democratic voters in California for that election, which featured no serious contests for President and only one statewide ballot proposition.

 

        But one thing for sure: Democrats must do much better this fall than they did in the California primary if they expect to take any congressional seats from Republicans in their bid to win back control of the House of Representatives.

 

        National Democrats have said for months those districts are their key to winning back the Speaker’s gavel.

 

        But in so-called swing district after swing district, primary election results left Democratic candidates with large amounts of ground to make up if they want to overtake current Republican incumbents.

 

        Almost all these districts reside in Southern California and the Central Valley, with most of Northern California not looking up for grabs at all, not even where longtime incumbent Democrats are about to retire.

 

        For several years, Democrats have believed they can topple Republican David Valadao from his 22^nd district seat, mostly in Tulare and Kern counties. In the primary there, the serious contest was on the Democratic side, where former state Assemblyman Rudy Salas fought off a bid by state Sen. Melissa Hurtado for the right to a rematch with Valadao, who beat him two years ago.

 

        But Salas starts the runoff campaign at a disadvantage. He and Hurtado combined for just 44 percent of the primary vote, while Valadao and another Republican netted 55 percent. So the Democrat will need to attract 7 percent more votes in the fall than Democrats totaled this spring.

 

        It was worse for Democrats in the 27^th District, centered on Santa Clarita, where Republican Mike Garcia seeks a third term from a district with a Democratic registration advantage. Garcia got 56 percent of the primary vote, while November rival Democrat George Whitesides pulled in just 32 percent.

 

        Meanwhile, in Republican Michelle Steel’s 45^th district in Orange County, she took 56 percent of the vote to autumn Democratic rival Derek Tran’s paltry 16 percent.

 

Then there’s the 47^th District seat in another part of Orange County, held for six years by Democrat Katie Porter, a loser to Schiff and Garvey in the Senate run. Democratic Party officials backed state Sen. Dave Min against activist Joanna Weiss in the primary and he won a runoff slot, the two Democrats netting 45 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, Republican Scott Baugh and the No. 2 Republican drew a combined 47 percent.

 

Put it together and in virtually all the swing districts Democrats believe can give them control, they start the fall season at a disadvantage.

 

This does not outwardly faze Democratic officials, who mounted only a very light get-out-the-vote drive in the primary, saving their resources for the fall.

 

“Historically, the primary dynamic is not really predictive of general election outcomes in California,” said Dan Gottlieb, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Ultimately, there will be much more enthusiasm in the fall, when President Biden faces off again with Donald Trump. It’s that enthusiasm factor that brings out voters.”

 

He also said that because his party expects Schiff to have an easy time against Garvey in November, money that might otherwise have been spent on that race will wind up helping congressional candidates.

 

Democrats believe that while Schiff’s promoting Garvey in the primary to avoid facing off with Porter helped pump up the vote for down-ticket Republicans this spring, down-ticket Democrats expect to have far more resources later this year.

 

They will need that, plus a lot more enthusiasm than their voters showed this fall, to make up the margins Republicans enjoyed in those districts this spring. If they can’t summon these up and don’t add unexpected seats elsewhere, Democrats can expect Republicans to control the House for at least two more years.

 

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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

NIMBYS GETTING A BAD RAP

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MARCH 29, 2022 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

     “NIMBYS GETTING A BAD RAP”

 

        Rarely has a major group of Californians suffered a less deserved rash of insults and attacks than the myriad homeowners often described as “NIMBYs” – an acronym for folks who may favor new developments, but “not in my backyard.”

 

        NIMBYs have killed liquefied natural gas projects pushed by Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and Southern California Gas, thus saving California consumers billions of dollars in rates they otherwise would have paid for generations for unneeded and dangerous gas imports.

 

        They’ve prevented building prisons in urban areas, thus sending murderers, rapists, burglars and more to isolated areas where escapees are less likely to harm anyone than if they make off into crowded neighborhoods.

 

        They kept freeways from running through the greenest (and most expensive) residential parts of the state.

 

        Now they often fight placement of permanent supportive housing for the previously homeless in their areas, because those developments sometimes bring crime increases with them. They also have pushed cities and counties to clean up or wipe away encampments of the unhoused, often placed beneath freeway bridges.

 

        Their moves, whether flawed or beneficial for all law-abiding Californians, mostly drew invective and eventually spawned creation of a opposing group called California YIMBY (yes in my backyard), largely funded by developers who essentially want a license to build what they want, where they want, and never mind the cost to the mental or financial health of anyone living in the area.

 

        Nowhere have supposed NIMBYs taken more heat than in Berkeley today. In the wake of a court decision won by a homeowners group called “Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods,” the academically choice UC campus there claimed it would have to accept more than 3,000 fewer students for the next academic year than planned.

 

        In this dramatic town vs. gown dispute, the homeowner group won a ruling that some say will force the onetime flagship campus of UC (these days, UCLA is higher ranked and gets more applicants) to lower its planned enrollment.

 

        The residents essentially complained that adding thousands of enrollees could produce a new corps of homeless students or drive up rents in the area so high that current occupants might be forced out. They also griped that introducing thousands of new student residents into off-campus housing would create nightly noise problems for other residents.

 

        And, using a sometimes maligned law called the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), they won in California courts at every level.

 

        For this, they were labelled “reactionaries” and “backward” and “selfish” by some of the state’s largest newspapers and television stations.

 

        Meanwhile, after taking a closer look, something that perhaps should have been done before the neighborhood group went to court, the Berkeley campus concluded things would not be so drastic after all: It turns out a thousand or so of the new enrollees can take classes online wherever they live, others can wait six months and then enroll, and no one need be deprived of an education, as critics of the so-called NIMBYs all the way up to a dissenting state Supreme Court justice, had claimed.

 

        In fact, the folks labeled NIMBYs previously accepted many campus expansions, but resisted this one primarily because UC did not build new quarters for its new students. Yes, that was proposed, but the campus conveniently did not examine all the effects of its putative expansion on the area, and no construction was imminent in any case. The neighbors, then, are really being lambasted for a failure by campus officials to take care of needed business and preparation.

 

        But blasting NIMBYs is politically correct in this era, when YIMBY has claimed SB 9, a new law it helped push through the Legislature last year, would simply allow homeowners to make duplexes of their single-family homes. That’s untrue: The 2021 law actually allows at least six new units on virtually every current single-family lot in California.

 

        Politicians also find it convenient to blast what they call NIMBYism whenever their proposals are exposed as harmful to many Californians. Not surprisingly, dozens of today’s legislators, and the governor, have been major beneficiaries of campaign donations from developers and building trade unions who want to build anywhere they can.

 

        All of which means the current anti-NIMBY fashion is often hooey. Informed Californians must learn to see through it.

 

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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

LATINO VOTING DREAMS NOT COMING TRUE FOR BIG PARTIES

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 29, 2019, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

    “LATINO VOTING DREAMS NOT COMING TRUE FOR BIG PARTIES”

          Both Democrats and Republicans have long harbored big dreams about Latino voters. Now, as California gets set for its first seemingly influential presidential primary in decades, the dreams of both parties may not be coming true.

          Here are their high hopes: Democrats in California and elsewhere want Latino voting rates to climb ever higher on the assumption those voters will always lean their way and guarantee victories next year and beyond. Republicans dream that Latinos will eventually shift their way as more Hispanics move from the Roman Catholic church into evangelical Christian denominations that emphasize what are loosely known as “family values,” including opposition to abortion and a stress on heavy punishment for crimes.

          If there was ever a year when Democrats figured to see the percentage of Latino votes move strongly in their direction, it was 2018. In fact, Latino voting numbers were up both in California and nationally last fall, with more than 40 percent of eligible Hispanics casting ballots. Their added numbers aided in the Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives, especially in California, where Democrats flipped seven formerly Republican congressional districts.

          That increased turnout was in part the result of President Trump’s immigration policies, which led to detention of many asylum seekers and separating more than 5,000 children from their parents, a tactic judges later ruled illegal.

          But the proportions of Latinos voting Democratic and Republican remained pretty static, right about where they’ve been since the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, when Ronald Reagan ran first for California governor and then for President.

          Reagan always won about 36 percent of Hispanic votes, peaking at 39 percent in 1984 after bottoming out at 33 percent in his last run for governor in 1972.

          Last year, after Trump repeatedly called Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists, seizing on occasional major crimes by undocumented immigrants, 32 percent of Latinos voted Republican, according to Associated Press VoteCast data collected by the University of Chicago. That’s not much of a change in percentage over the last half century.

          Other surveys and exit polls had similar numbers for Latino voters.

          This disappointed Democrats and relieved Republicans, who have long feared they might face almost unanimous opposition from the nation’s fastest-growing ethnic group.

          As usual, the Republican Latino vote came largely from evangelicals who made up one-fourth of all Hispanic voters last fall and from military veterans who comprised 13 percent of Latino votes. There was some overlap between the two categories, but the final numbers suggest Republican support among these two groups came in at about 90 percent.

          That’s slightly higher than the proportion by which African-American voters – the single most reliable part of the Democratic voting coalition – usually votes that way.

          Frustrated Democrats can’t understand why more Latinos are not offended by Trump’s frequent Twitter tirades against immigrant “caravans” and his family separation policies. Their puzzlement grows when they see polls showing immigration is by far the most important issue among Hispanic voters.

          Some suggest Democrats should expend as much effort and money to win over the one-third of Latinos who persistently go Republican as they did while winning four formerly Republican congressional seats in Orange County last year.

          But Democrats have long taken Latino voters for granted. Meanwhile, Republicans want to maximize whatever Hispanic votes might be available to them. Example: Steve Frank, a longtime Republican activist, blogger and campaign manager based in Ventura County, suggested while running for GOP state chairman this winter that his party should stage vote-harvesting parties in evangelical churches everywhere in California, making sure their conservative-leaning congregants vote and that their ballots are collected and filed.

          But both parties may find their frustration continues indefinitely, because no tactic yet tried has caused Latino voting preferences to change much over the last 50 years, even while the number of Latinos voting has vastly increased. It all suggests that only something dramatic can ever break these longstanding voting habits and preferences.

         

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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

CORRUPTION CHARGES GETTING CLOSER TO GOVERNOR

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MARCH 29, 2016, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS   
    “CORRUPTION CHARGES GETTING CLOSER TO GOVERNOR”

          Gov. Jerry Brown has tried for many months to ignore the growing scent of corruption now afflicting his administration, instead pushing the worldwide battle against climate change even as he virtually ignored the world’s largest methane leak while it spewed greenhouse gases for months in his back yard.

          But serious conflict of interest allegations now reach directly into his office, targeting his chief of staff, Nancy McFadden, the top Sacramento official for Pacific Gas & Electric Co. for many years before she took a $1.04 million golden handshake in 2011 before rejoining Brown, for whom she worked in the 1970s. (The payment, essentially a bonus, is documented here: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1004980/000119312511038959/dex1018.htm).

          Not only did McFadden take PG&E’s money, but disclosure forms show she owned about $100,000 worth of PG&E stock and many potentially lucrative stock options through her early months back with Brown. During this time, she was allegedly a key part of the appointment process for new members of the state Public Utilities Commission, which regulates PG&E and other California utilities, a normal chief of staff function.

          There is no evidence McFadden recused herself from utility matters. This, of course, raises the question of whether her golden handshake was really a prepayment for future services.

          McFadden is now the subject of a formal complaint just filed by the Consumer Watchdog advocacy group with the state Fair Political Practices Commission, a panel very unlikely to act against the top aide to the man who appointed two of its members.

          Charges in the Consumer Watchdog complaint, filed under the Political Reform Act ironically sponsored by Brown during his first stint as governor in the 1970s, are sweeping and specific.

          McFadden, the group said, “…us(ed) her official position to influence governmental decisions in which she knew she had a financial interest. Her actions impacted the value of the PG&E stock options she held.” The filing goes on to say McFadden “was Gov. Brown’s point person on utility policy, utility legislation and political appointments to the PUC.”

          Brown Press Secretary Evan Westrup denied all this, calling the filing against McFadden “riddled with inaccuracies.” He added that “She was not vetting candidates for the PUC and did not play a role in the other decisions noted while she had the holdings referenced…” Brown did not speak about McFadden, just has he’s refused to talk about corruption allegations at the state Energy Commission and documented corruption at the PUC.

          But emails among the 70,000 obtained by San Bruno city officials after the 2010 PG&E gas pipeline explosion that killed eight people there indicate her old friends at PG&E believed she was involved.

          In early 2011, PG&E executive Brian Cherry – now under criminal investigation along with former PUC President Michael Peevey – advised someone seeking a high PUC post via email to get help from McFadden, whom he called “the backdoor route” to getting appointed.

          The pileup of ethical problems in Brown’s administration seems to grow every few weeks, with the McFadden charges merely the newest. They join obvious conflicts of interest and examples of cronyism exercised by the Energy Commission, exposed in this column in 2014. Add the proven collusion between Peevey and executives of Southern California Edison Co. in assessing consumers more than 70 percent of the cost of the 2012 failure of the San Onofre Nuclear Power Station, caused by an Edison blunder.

          Then see Brown’s almost total indifference to the massive methane leak at a Southern California Gas Co. storage facility near Porter Ranch in Los Angeles, when his sister Kathleen draws six figures yearly as a director of SoCal’s parent company. Her position alone should raise conflict-of-interest questions whenever Brown decides utility policy. The Porter Ranch leak spewed more greenhouse gases than many months of driving by all the cars in the Los Angeles Basin, but Brown said little about it.

          Taken together, it appears there could be a pattern of corruption at high levels of state government, and a consistent Brown practice of ignoring or condoning both corruption and safety lapses.

          But other episodes don’t reach as close to him as the charges against McFadden, his close aide and adviser.

    The bottom line: Brown wants to be remembered for solving California’s budget mess and aggressively fighting climate change. Right now he risks being remembered much more negatively. 

         
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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 

UTILITY REGULATORS CREATING A BANANA REPUBLIC?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 29, 2013 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
          “UTILITY REGULATORS CREATING A BANANA REPUBLIC?”

          Banana republics got their appellation during the 1920s, when dictators ruling countries like Honduras and Guatemala made decisions on the say-so of banana growing companies, strictly for the profit of those companies – and usually at the expense of the local citizenry.

          Now it is the California Public Utilities Commission that’s threatening to make a major area of state policy-making into a new variety of banana republic. For in decision after decision since former utility company chieftain Michael Peevey took over as its president in 2002, the commission has taken care of big utilities and power producers at the expense of ordinary citizens, called “ratepayers” in utility parlance.

          One odious example is the PUC’s order forcing customers to pay most of the bill for fixing the pipelines of California’s biggest natural gas company, hopefully ensuring there are no replays of the 2010 explosion that killed eight persons in San Bruno – even though Pacific Gas & Electric Co. took “responsibility” for the blast.

          Another was the decision to let a Spanish company build the 250-megawatt Mojave Solar power project near Barstow – far outside PG&E’s service area – to provide electricity for that company. At the hearing approving this project, strongly backed by Peevey, commissioners openly asserted that Mojave Solar electricity will cost at least double the price of kilowatts from gas-fired plants. PG&E will also profit: Money from its customers will build transmission lines to carry that energy to existing lines in the San Joaquin Valley, with PG&E guaranteed profits of about 12 percent per year for 40 years on whatever those lines cost.

          Now the commission is at it again, apparently about to make another decision detrimental to customers but a boon to power producers.

          This time it’s a “peaker” electric generating plant in San Diego, not far from the Mexican border tentatively due for an approval vote on March 21. As always, the Peevey-led commission has a pretext for approving this 300-megawatt natural gas-fired plant, which would operate only when other power plants don’t provide enough juice for the region. (One megawatt supplies at least 750 homes.)

          The pretext here is uncertainty over when – or if – the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station will restart. The problem is that the PUC’s own administrative law judge found no need for this new plant after a lengthy proceeding.

          “It is not reasonable…when there is no need for incremental local capacity until (at least) 2018…” said the administrative judge’s decision.

          One reason the plant is unneeded: By late summer, even without San Onofre, Southern California will have excess generating capacity of 30 percent, and Northern California nearly 40 percent excess. Three new gas-fired generating plants – all within 80 miles of San Onofre and with a total output close to San Onofre’s maximum 2,350 megawatts – are due to come online this summer.

          On reading the ALJ’s proposed decision and a similar one from fellow PUC Commissioner Mark Ferron, who supervised the PUC’s work on the case, former Southern California Edison Co. President Peevey asked the head of the state Energy Commission to back his claim that there is a pressing need for the new plant, to be named Pio Pico and to cost ratepayers $80 million to $90 million yearly over 20 years (about $30 per residential customer yearly).

          In a December email to a staffer, Energy Commission Chairman Robert Weisenmiller said “Peevey wants a letter from me.”

          Weisenmiller quickly sent one claiming Pio Pico is needed. The trouble is that during Energy Commission hearings in July in Chula Vista, that commission’s lawyer advised that “the (Energy) Commission doesn’t do a needs-based analysis in our – in our licensing process.” So there was no evidentiary basis for much of what Weisenmiller obligingly wrote to Peevey.

          Also during the Energy Commission hearings on Pio Pico, then-Energy Commissioner Carla Peterman declared – with no evidence to back her – that approval was justified because “we need to keep the lights on (with Pio Pico).”

          Former Rhodes Scholar Peterman is now a PUC commissioner, named to a six-year term by Gov. Jerry Brown in December. She at first recused herself from the PUC’s Pio Pico vote because she was involved with the plant’s environmental approval. But she now plans to vote.

          In an email, Peevey stopped short of explaining why he’s trying to overturn both Ferron and the administrative law judge on Pio Pico. “The PUC and other state agencies…work together on energy policy and implementation…,” he said. “The …Energy Commission some time ago approved…the Pio Pico facility… Weisenmiller told me he thought the plant was needed in San Diego, given the uncertainty surrounding…San Onofre… I told him to send the PUC a letter telling us why he thinks it is needed…”

          There is, thus, no evidence of any need, only conjecture, no facts. Which makes this look like another arbitrary PUC action benefiting big companies at the expense of customers, done in classic banana republic style.

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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

REALITY OF BUDGET CUTS STARTS TO HIT HOME

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MARCH 29, 2011, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“REALITY OF BUDGET CUTS STARTS TO HIT HOME”

Until this month, the impact of California’s impending budget cuts was purely theoretical. Sure, there have been warnings aplenty about cuts to schools, police, adult day care, prisons, Medi-Cal, state parks and much more. But actual cuts were believed to be a thing of the future, not likely to hit home until late summer, if then.

Forget that leisurely timetable. Cities, counties, school districts and other agencies that need to plan ahead have already begun slashing programs and spending to keep them in line with the reimbursements they would get under Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed budget-balancing plan.

That blueprint calls for a combination of spending cuts and an extension of a few existing taxes due to disappear July 1 unless voters opt in a special election to extend them. So far, no one has seriously considered all the state and local programs that would be cancelled if the tax extensions don’t come. And at mid-March, it was uncertain there will be any special election.

What’s already happened gives some idea of what else might come:

 The Fresno County’s sheriff’s office has laid off 75 workers, resulting primarily in early releases of prisoners from the county jail. The releases began last year and have accelerated in the last month, with most car thieves and burglars exiting jail within hours of being booked because Sheriff Margaret Mims’ new budget-dictated policy is to cut loose all those accused of non-violent property crimes until after they’re sentenced.

"Do I keep a car burglar or do I release a child molester?” she asked a reporter, noting that her budget today is 25 percent less than in 2007. “That's basically what we're down to and we have to keep the most violent and the most serious offenders in the jail space that we do have." Don’t even ask her what happens if she has to slash her budget more and still accept some prisoners currently housed in state prisons, a money-saving tactic that’s part of the Brown plan.

 Santa Cruz County has begun phasing out counseling services for “minor” drug offenders who get treatment under a program set up by the year-2000 Proposition 36. The county usually handles about 300 persons each year in the program, which offers treatment to drug offenders with less than three convictions.

“I think it’s a tragedy,” said Bill Manov, who leads that county’s drug abuse programs. “Evaluation studies conducted by UCLA show that Proposition 36 has saved taxpayers $2.50 (in jail and prison costs) for every $1 invested in treatment.”

If the county can’t offer treatment, many minor offenders will likely be imprisoned at much higher cost and with far less likelihood of staying sober in the long run.

 School districts are abandoning gifted and talented education (GATE) programs wholesale. That’s because while the state budget line for GATE remained fairly stable over the last two years, legislators in 2009 passed a little-noticed change as part of that year’s budget compromise: School districts now may divert GATE money to “any educational purpose” including closing budget deficits.

The result has been large cuts in GATE classes in cities as varied as San Jose, Oakland and Palm Springs.

These are just a few of the cuts already made, and even if some areas have not yet seen them, those kinds of program slashes will arrive everywhere soon.

Brown insists that voters should have a say before cuts go even deeper than they already have. So he castigates Republican legislators unwilling to go along with authorizing a vote before the 2009 tax extensions expire.

One lawmaker he singled out is state Sen. Tony Strickland, a conservative Republican who won election last year by fewer than 900 votes over liberal Democrat Hannah Beth Jackson in a district covering much of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.

“Budget cuts are hitting people in Mr. Strickland’s district hard, but he stood on the steps of the Capitol and called for double the cuts,” said Brown press secretary Gil Duran. “Schools in his district are already cutting days (five days in some districts, more in others) off the year due to big deficits. A vital police gang unit in Ventura has been forced to disband. It’s hard to see how deeper cuts to education, public safety and medical assistance to the most vulnerable will benefit the people of his district.”

But police, schools and other public service agencies are already drawing up contingency plans in case Brown is forced into a budget balanced solely by spending cuts. If they’re forced to put those plans into effect, it’s likely every person in California will feel at least some effects.

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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net