FAULCONER LOOKS LIKE MAIN GOP HOPE FOR A BREAKTHROUGH

 CALIFORNIA FOCUS

FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MARCH 2, 2021, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “FAULCONER LOOKS LIKE MAIN GOP HOPE FOR A BREAKTHROUGH”

 

          The last time San Diego elected a moderate Republican mayor with strong potential for appealing to voters statewide, it was Pete Wilson, a onetime state assemblyman who later won election to the U.S. Senate and two terms as governor.

 

          Now, while Californians think about possibly recalling Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, there’s San Diego’s recently termed-out ex-Mayor Kevin Faulconer, who figures to be on both the recall’s list of possible replacement governors and the state’s June 2022 primary ballot.

 

Faulconer hopes to take a page from the playbooks of both Wilson and ex-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Like Wilson, he’s busily purveying a message of moderation and effectiveness. Like Schwarzenegger, he hopes a recall can propel him to the next level of politics.

 

        With Faulconer as mayor, San Diego was the largest American city with a Republican governor. Now, the other major GOP figure planning to be on the recall list, John Cox, has devoted the recall season’s first major TV commercial to blasting Faulconer. Cox, a big loser to Newsom in 2018, knows who is his main threat this time.

 

          Faulconer has sometimes sought to downplay his Republican identity in this state where the GOP label has lately meant certain defeat for anyone seeking statewide office other than the movie muscleman Schwarzenegger.

 

          Some Republicans hope Faulconer can rescue them, giving California a Republican very different from the hugely unpopular (in California) President Trump.

 

          But Faulconer sometimes makes moves that belie his image as a moderate.

 

          One came in January, when he endorsed former U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa to replace the disgraced and resigned San Diego Republican Duncan Hunter in a Mexican-border congressional seat. Issa, hardly a moderate, “retired” in 2018 from his former seat in north San Diego County when the district became too liberal for him to expect reelection. The Hunter district leans far more to the right.

 

          Faulconer took some risk in endorsing Issa, a persistent harrasser of ex-President Barack Obama while Issa chaired the House Government Operations Committee through much of the last decade.

 

          Then there was an appearance by Trump on Fox News last June, just after Faulconer visited the Oval Office. “(Faulconer) was just in my office, great guy,” Trump said. “He came up to thank me for having done the (border) wall because it’s made such a difference. He said it’s like day and night; he said people (had been) flowing across and now nobody can come in.”

 

          Faulconer quickly denied saying any of that, his office claiming he and Trump discussed only a trade deal. For sure, Newsom can use the Fox News tape against him, and never mind Faulconer’s denial.

 

          But Faulconer hopes to win over more voters with another move than he might lose with any of that.

 

          Besides his own campaign, he plans to sponsor a statewide ballot initiative on the homeless issue aimed for the 2022 election, claiming San Diego has had more success on this than other large cities.

 

          Faulconer wants the still-unwritten measure to make it easier for cities and counties to “encourage” homeless individuals to accept psychological treatment and shelter beds. He also wants to roll back some laws like the winning Propositions 47 and 57, which reduced penalties for drug use and crimes like thefts and car burglaries valued under $950.

 

          “California has lost its way on homelessness,” he said in a speech. “We have to speak the truth about what causes homelessness (referring to drug addiction and mental illness, as well as high rents and home prices).”

 

          Faulconer said San Diego cut homelessness after a hepatitis outbreak by sending nurses and paramedics to “every riverbed, canyon and street corner, vaccinated more than 100,000 persons, sanitized streets and built four bridge shelters.”

 

          That dropped his city’s homeless count by 9 percent in 2019, Faulconer said, the only significant city in California with any reduction.

 

          Faulconer’s stances on many things almost replicate Schwarzenegger’s, and Schwarzenegger remains the only Republican elected statewide since 1998. But he was a famed movie star and Faulconer is neither famous nor an actor.

 

          So the jury remains out on the mayor’s statewide political viability. But so far, despite Cox’s claim to the contrary, the state GOP has no better hope.

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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

TRUMP IGNORES CALIFORNIA, UNLIKE PREDECESSORS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 2, 2018, OR THEREAFTER
  

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“TRUMP IGNORES CALIFORNIA, UNLIKE PREDECESSORS”

When devastating wildfires whipped through both Northern and Southern California last fall, state requests for emergency declarations that would open federal purse strings to assist in paying for firefighting, cleanup and recovery were almost immediate.

          But President Trump took almost a month to approve each request, far longer than for similar declarations after deadly hurricanes struck places like Texas and Florida.

          It’s not supposed to be like that. It’s almost as if California were less American than Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory where Hurricane Maria earlier in the year did billions in damage. At least Trump went to Puerto Rico, even though he offended much of the populace by tossing rolls of paper towels to victims whose homes had been destroyed, acting as if paper would be a big help.

          So California gets less presidential attention these days than Puerto Rico. Maybe that’s because Puerto Rico didn’t vote against The Donald by a 3.5 million vote margin, as California did.

          But California still pays more taxes into the federal kitty than any other state. It still receives far less back in federal spending than it pays in. So it’s no wonder Californians feel entitled to plenty of federal help when disasters strike.

          Contrast the Trump reaction – he said virtually nothing about the wildfires in California, but took post-hurricane helicopter tours over parts of Texas and Florida – with what happened after the significant California earthquakes of 1989 and 1994. In both those years – one with a Republican president and one with a Democrat in office – help arrived quickly. The Federal Emergency Management Agency set up offices in affected areas within less than two weeks, distributing recovery funds to both individual victims and local governments.

Trump’s performance may stem from his apparent obsession with 2016 election results. He won both Texas and Florida, but California provided all the votes needed to deprive him of a popular vote victory.

          While President, Trump often visits his properties in Florida, New Jersey and elsewhere, but has yet to make an appearance at his golf club on California’s Palos Verdes Peninsula.

          Maybe that’s because the attorneys general of those other states haven’t filed dozens of lawsuits trying to negate his executive orders, nor have their legislatures passed laws defying his stated priorities, as California’s did when it made the entire state a sanctuary for most illegal immigrants.

          For sure, California hasn’t precisely endeared itself to Trump, who was here plenty during his years as a television celebrity.

          Meanwhile, Trump has flown over California on his way to foreign stops in Asia. But his steady absence from America’s biggest population center contrasts sharply with every President since the advent of air travel.

          Harry Truman flew to San Francisco less than three months after ascending to the presidency upon Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death in 1945. Dwight Eisenhower arrived here during his 13^th month in the White House, getting in some golf in the Palm Springs area to which he later retired. John Kennedy was nominated for the nation’s highest office in the old Los Angeles Sports Arena and returned to Southern California often, for walks on the beach and reported trysts with Marilyn Monroe and others.

          Lyndon Johnson spoke at the dedication of UC Irvine less than a year after becoming President, and Gerald Ford was often here, while Richard Nixon made San Clemente his home. Bill Clinton visited so often he might as well have been a resident, while even the often-confused George H.W. Bush came here several times, once declaring how happy he was to be in “North California.”

          Ronald Reagan actually did live here, hosting many foreign dignitaries at his ranch in Santa Barbara County, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth among them. Both Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama made this state their fund-raising base.

          But Trump ignores California whenever he can, even though he has described the state as “out of control.” By which he means, out of his control, at least to a large extent.

          Trump’s absence doesn’t matter much except when he promotes policies that affect California in ways he doesn’t understand because he pays it so little heed, and in times of emergency when the federal aid California is sometimes entitled to can be crucial.

         

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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

WHY SHOULD IMMIGRATION STATUS AFFECT A TRANSPLANT?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 2, 2012, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“WHY SHOULD IMMIGRATION STATUS AFFECT A TRANSPLANT?”

Let’s make one thing clear: Even if Jesus Navarro doesn’t get the kidney transplant he was about to receive when doctors at the University of California-San Francisco Medical Center discovered his undocumented immigration status last month, his death probably is not imminent.

Insurance would continue covering dialysis treatments for him costing more than $100,000 per year for at least several more years. With help from blood-cleansing artificial kidney dialysis machines, patients average more than eight years survival, but with the equivalent of barely 15 percent of normal kidney function. Only about one-fourth of those under 50, however, feel well enough to work full-time.

So some protests that have cast the debate over Navarro’s celebrated case in terms of immediate life and death have been slightly off the mark. The real issues are fairness, morality, finances and the Hippocratic Oath sworn by all physicians. For the 35-year-old Navarro, a Mexican native who has lived in this country 16 years and worked for a Berkeley steel foundry the last 14, the question always was whether he will have to continue feeling only marginally healthy and being tethered regularly to a machine or can regain his health and freedom of movement.

The transplant Navarro could get would cost his insurance company somewhat less than one year of dialysis. After getting it, he would go an indefinite, but probably long, period of needing immunosuppressant drugs to keep his new kidney functioning. Until recently, the drugs presented huge financial obstacles for the poor or the uninsured, but key formulations like cyclosporine, tacrolimus, mycophenolate mophetin and prednisone all are now available as generics at much reduced costs.

(Full disclosure: columnist Thomas Elias received a kidney transplant from a live donor in 1997, after undergoing dialysis for a substantial time.)

That means much of the objection initially presented by UCSF financial officers never held water. “UCSF’s policy for financial clearance requires candidates to present evidence of adequate and stable insurance coverage or other financial sources necessary to sustain follow-up care long after transplant surgery,” said a statement from Reece Fawley, executive director of transplantation. UCSF has since backtracked a bit, saying it will perform the transplant after all, once it is certain Navarro’s insurance will remain in effect afterward.

In checking the financial abilities of potential organ recipients, UCSF is like all other transplant centers. But many individuals receive transplants with far less assured insurance coverage than what’s available to Navarro – at least 18 months of eligibility for Cobra coverage from the health insurance he held for the 14 years before an immigration check cost him his job. He currently pays $1,100 monthly for that coverage.

“Even if his insurance ran out, he’s covered by the union for 18 months,” Oakland City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente, who also is international vice president of the Glass, Molders, Pottery, Plastics, and Allied Workers International Union, told a reporter. “He has a willing donor (his also-undocumented wife), he has private health care. This has been ridiculous.”

In fact, many transplant recipients have far less certainty of health coverage than Navarro, whose insurance could continue even if he were deported.

So a transplant would be good for Navarro, regardless of where he might live, and would save his insurance carrier hundreds of thousands of dollars. It also would not “rob” any U.S. citizen of a donated organ, thus mollifying most anti-illegal immigrant activists.

Then there’s the issue of fairness. In conversations with hundreds of transplant recipients of many ethnicities, none has reported to this column any queries about immigration status. Why, then, should it ever have been an issue for Navarro? And there’s the fact that while illegal immigrants nationally donate about 2.5 percent of all transplanted organs each year, they receive fewer than 1 percent of all transplants. Given that inequity, simple fairness dictates that doctors should perform the needed twin surgeries on Navarro and his wife, a well-matched donor.

There’s also the Hippocratic Oath taken by all doctors, which says, “I will prevent disease whenever I can…” That oath implies a willingness to help all comers, regardless of background or life circumstance. It’s one reason doctors give emergency treatment to murderers and rapists when needed. It’s why convicts have received organ transplants. And it’s one reason Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh was allowed into this country last month for urgent medical care even though many of his countrymen hold him responsible for thousands of killings. How moral would it be to deny Navarro care while giving it to violent criminals and Saleh?

So the alleged moral, financial and medical reasons raised when Navarro’s transplant was delayed could never stand up to careful examination. Which makes the real question this: While UCSF may now deny immigration status was ever an issue here, why did UCSF doctors and administrators ever allow immigration status to become relevant in this case?

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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

KEEP INITIATIVE PETITION SIGNATURES PRIVATE

CALIFORNIA FOCUS\
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MARCH 2, 2010, OR THEREAFTER

THOMAS D. ELIAS
“KEEP INITIATIVE PETITION SIGNATURES PRIVATE”

Openness in government is almost always a good thing. That’s why there are few more popular laws in California than the 1950s-era Ralph M. Brown Act, which requires almost all meetings of city councils, public district boards, county supervisors and the Legislature to be open to the public, even when they are only casual get-togethers of a few members.

A strong argument can even be made for opening up sessions where boards and city councils discuss legal or personnel matters, meetings that are now closed in virtually every corner of the state. After all, these meetings can involve spending taxpayer dollars as much as any public session about a zoning ordinance or a legislative bill.

But nothing in the Brown Act ever suggested eliminating the secret ballot. Even in a time when huge numbers of voters cast absentee ballots, great pains are taken to keep each voter’s preferences private.

Into this arena last fall came the opponents of the 2008 Proposition 8, which ended the brief practice of allowing same-sex marriage in California.
It wasn’t enough for many gay-rights advocates to have access to lists of every donor of $100 or more to the Proposition 8 campaign – posted on the Web site of the secretary of state’s office. They demanded lists of everyone who signed the petitions that qualified the measure for the ballot.

So far, they have not gotten those names, and it’s probably a good thing.

For signing an initiative petition is not like contributing money toward passage of the same measure. It’s a far more casual act, often done in the rush of a shopping expedition where citizens are likely to be confronted by paid petition circulators who all but demand signatures. These folks often carry multiple petitions, and a voter might not have any idea what he or she has just signed.

The companies hired by initiative advocates to get the petition signatures needed to put a measure on the ballot know this. So, very likely, did the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court when they refused last fall to require Washington state authorities to open lists of petition signers.

The argument is sometimes made that if lists of registered voters are public records, so too should be the names of petition signers. But those are very different matters and comparing them is like comparing apples and bananas. Even if a voter is a registered member of a particular political party, no one can be sure how he or she voted. So there can’t be retaliation targeted at voters just because they’re registered.

Not so for petition signers. Once those lists are made public, the signers would be on record forever as favoring a particular cause. People who donate significantly to political candidates and ballot measures know their names will be made public; petition signers do not.

And make no mistake, there can be significant consequences when activists know which side of an issue a person has taken. When gay marriage advocates learned last year that the director of the Los Angeles Film Festival had contributed $1,500 – a relatively small sum in politics – toward passage of Proposition 8, he was forced to resign. A boycott followed release of the information that the manager of one restaurant had contributed $100 to the same cause.

It can be fairly argued that those two and other donors were fair game, because they knew – or should have known – there would be a public record of their donations.

But there is no such notice when signing a petition. If there were, chances are petition circulators would have a much harder time getting signatures.

Advocates of making petition signer names and addresses public deny any intent to intimidate anyone. But who knows how such information might be used? The potential for misuse is at least as great as with names of campaign donors.

“Citizens approach petitions more thoughtfully once they realize they are signing public documents,” says the co-head of KnowThyNeighbor.org, the national anti-gay marriage group seeking to make petition signatures public.

His statement may be true, but it also implies the possibility of intimidation, suggesting that signatures might not be so forthcoming if voters knew they might be fired or picketed just for scrawling their names.

Plainly, this could lead to fewer ballot propositions going before the voters, something a lot of so-called good-government groups and academics already say they want.

But it would limit both the ideas voters are allowed to consider and the freedom they now feel to back causes they like. Those are both bad possibilities, which makes keeping petition signatures private once they’re submitted almost as important as ensuring the privacy of actual ballots.

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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