KEY PRIMARY ELECTION QUESTION: WHO WILL VOTE?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JUNE 7, 2016, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
          “KEY PRIMARY ELECTION QUESTION: WHO WILL VOTE?”

          The key questions in the today’s primary election (editors: sub “the June 7 primary” or “Tuesday’s primary,”for “today’s” here, depending on your run date) include not merely who will win in each major party and how many national convention delegates they might net, but also who will vote.

          That last question, in fact, might decide the answers to the first two. Before all his opponents dropped out, it seemed that to do well, Republican businessman Donald Trump needed votes from many, many thousands of Californians who don’t ordinarily go to the polls or fill out ballots in advance. The same for Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders on the Democratic side.

          Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, of course, already had the great majority of usual voters well in hand long before advance voting stations opened and absentee ballots went out in mid-May.

          But the outpouring of youthful voters aged between 18 and 25 for President Obama in 2008 and 2012 signals that both Trump and Sanders also have the potential to change the makeup of the California electorate.

          That electorate normally is dominated by older, white, college-educated, affluent, home-owning citizens. But as Trump campaigned across America this year, he drew support mostly from people who don’t fit all those categories: They may mostly be white, but they are not so likely to be college-educated, affluent or homeowners. Many have voted only sporadically, if ever, in the past. Sanders’ voters have often been a flip side of that: Well-educated, mostly white, but younger and neither affluent nor homeowners.

          The normal California electoral divide – the usual pattern of who votes and who does not – generally sees half of all adult U.S. citizens living here make the key decisions for the other half, who don’t vote but often gripe. The latter category tends to be younger, poorer, more Latino, renters and less likely to be college-educated than those who vote regularly.

          It’s a pattern almost guaranteed to arouse classist resentments, and that has been the essence of both the Trump and Sanders campaigns, as different as they are in many other ways.

          This is important stuff if only because the divides in attitudes and emotion between groups more likely to vote and those less likely are wider than ever before in the modern era, similar in some ways to ideological splits in pre-Civil War America – and look where that led.

          Here’s one divide, as determined in polling this spring by the Public Policy Institute of California: While likely voters are divided on whether government at all levels should do more to reduce gaps between rich and poor (51 percent believe government should do more, 44 percent disagree), fully 70 percent of non-voters say the government should do more. Views of Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, follow a similar pattern, with likely voters almost evenly split between approving it or not. Non-voters view the law favorably by a 55-36 percent margin. And those are only two of the differences.

          The irony here is that non-voters consistently want government to do more for them (69 percent said a higher minimum wage means a lot to them), but those same people do nothing to ensure that government will perform as they want.

          These findings raise a lot of questions, a key one being how to get more of the non-voters to cast ballots and actually try to put people who share their views into office.

          One way, suggested Democratic state Sen. Ben Allen of Santa Monica in a recent forum, would be to get more news coverage of government. But with virtually all Sacramento television news bureaus closed for economic reasons (political bureaus cost money, but no one ever bought advertising time because of them) and newspapers operating at bare-bones levels because of the industry’s slump, that doesn’t figure to happen soon.

          Another suggestion is better civic education in public schools. But try getting high school students to pay attention in government classes.

          That might leave it up to charismatic candidates to drive the vote and bring usual nonvoters to the polls. If Trump and Sanders do that in this election, they’ll have made at least one positive contribution.

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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

SENATE PRIMARY MAY PRODUCE A TOP-TWO SHOWCASE

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JUNE 3, 2016 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “SENATE PRIMARY MAY PRODUCE A TOP-TWO SHOWCASE”

          You can tell by the television ratings that few are interested in this contest: The two debates involving five candidates with the highest poll ratings among almost three-dozen aspirants to replace the retiring Democratic U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer drew among the smallest audiences of any political gabfests this year.

          One potential result could be the first really big showcase for the Top Two primary system.

If there’s one thing the presidential race demonstrates, it’s that politics are entertaining when charismatic candidates with media skills emerge, like longtime reality TV star Donald Trump. All debates he’s done were ratings bonanzas for the cable networks showing them. The same for verbal clashes involving Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders on the Democratic side.

          This contrasts starkly with the California senatorial debates. Which suits the longtime leader in the Senate race just fine. State Attorney General Kamala Harris, a Democrat who polled 27 percent of the likely primary vote when she declared for office more than a year ago, managed just a 2 percent gain to 29 percent in a Survey USA poll in early May, after her first encounter with rivals.

          Meanwhile, Orange County Democratic Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez was up from 8 points in the initial survey to 18 in the latest. Taken together, the three Republicans in the race – software entrepreneur Ron Unz and former GOP state chairmen George (Duf) Sundheim and Tom Del Becarro, pulled a mere 25 percent. Unless one or two of them drops out very soon, November could see its first California statewide race matching two persons from one party, a landmark made possible by the Top Two, or Jungle, primary system adopted via Proposition 14 in 2010.

          The main difference between the early May polling and last year’s was that undecided voters dropped to an abnormally high 30 percent or so from the ultra-high previous level of 48 percent. Like the TV ratings, these numbers show the race arouses little interest, perhaps because of the general assumption it will go to a Democrat in the end, ho-hum.

          For Harris, this means she has no need to spend much on maintaining her frontrunner status. Her state job – California government’s second most powerful elected office – makes her prominent enough that none of her challengers doubts she’ll make it to November.

          No one is quite so sure about Sanchez, running second in all surveys. One seeming outlier of a poll in mid-May had Sanchez with a mere 8 percent, just ahead of Unz, the purported Republican leader. But the methodology of that poll was not disclosed and its finding is so different from contemporaneous surveys that not many take it seriously.

          Should Sanchez make the runoff, this will soon cease being a ho-hummer. Her presence would set up the very kind of matchup Top Two intends: Two people from the same party, each far more appealing to voters in general than any candidate from the rival major party. But two people with vast contrasts in style, support and substance.

          Harris at times has demonstrated toughness as attorney general, as when she refused to go along with a preliminary national settlement of cases stemming from the mortgage crisis of 2008-2012 and won California victims of the banking scam far more than they’d have gotten under the original settlement.

          Sanchez, meanwhile, tells it exactly as she sees it, evidenced by her statement early this year that between 5 percent and 20 percent of Muslims worldwide want an ISIS-style caliphate to rule everywhere. Refusing to back down in the face of Islamophobia charges, Sanchez said her assessment is backed by both congressional testimony and conversations with Muslim leaders she has met as a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

          Sanchez also is less adamant on gun controls than Harris. And her base of support would be both among Latinos and in Southern California, while Harris would draw her strongest support in the Bay area, where she was formerly district attorney of San Francisco.

          Sanchez, then, might give Republican voters an alternative, a place to go if their party mates are eliminated, always a stated aim of Top Two. This could produce a more moderate, possibly even more conservative senator than California has seen in a generation.

          So while this race has not yet excited many, stay tuned and it just might.

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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

AT LONG LAST, SIGNS BROWN ACTING ON CORRUPTION

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MAY 31, 2016, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

          “AT LONG LAST, SIGNS BROWN ACTING ON CORRUPTION”

          For years as the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) spawned scandals, criminal allegations and physical disasters, Gov. Jerry Brown sat silent, uttering nary a critical word about the disgraced agency.

          He’s still not talking about ethical problems in his administration, including charges of cronyism and favoritism at the Energy Commission and documented lies both from state prison authorities and the group of agencies that threatened summer blackouts unless the leaky Southern California Gas Co. storage field at Aliso Canyon in northern Los Angeles reopens soon.

          But at least Brown and his appointees are at long last making some moves.

          Most prominent was a mid-May ruling from the PUC that reopened a scandal-plagued settlement dunning consumers about 70 percent of the $4.7 billion cost of closing the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in north San Diego County, wrecked in large part because of a blunder by its main owner, Southern California Edison.

          The settlement was outlined in a secret meeting in Poland between Edison officials and former PUC President Michael Peevey, under criminal investigation for his role.

          Two quieter actions could be important, too. Brown’s latest budget revision, for one, shows he has given up on the idea that the PUC problems will quietly go away without him doing anything, thus leaving him a legacy of balancing the state budget, promoting renewable energy and fighting climate change.

          Even Brown – or at least his budget writers – now admits the PUC has safety problems. It didn’t take a genius to see this, after the 2010 explosion of a Pacific Gas & Electric Co. natural gas pipeline that killed eight persons in San Bruno and destroyed dozens of homes. That was followed by the San Onofre shutdown.

Then came the months-long methane leak at Aliso Canyon. Brown in mid-May quietly signed a bill by Democratic state Sen. Fran Pavley of Los Angeles requiring each Aliso well to pass a battery of tests or be plugged before the field can reopen.

          Along with his budget proposal for a new safety division at the PUC, that made three significant moves in less than a week for Brown, who all but ignored these fronts for years.

          Put them together, and it’s clear Brown knows the state’s utilities have safety issues and his regulatory appointees have ethical ones. He’ll toss a little money at the safety problem. But not much.

In a state budget reaching above $120 billion, the governor proposes spending just shy of $1.7 million on 11 PUC staffers for a new Division of Safety Advocates (DSA).

          This outfit, the proposal says, would operate much like the present PUC Office of Ratepayer Advocates (ORA), tasked with keeping utility rates down. ORA has dismally failed at this, instead engaging in an elaborate dance where utilities demand hugely high rates, then let the PUC cut them back a little and brag about how much it  “saved” consumers. California utility rates end up among the three highest in the Lower 48 states.

          What might happen with the putative new DSA? Would it contribute to “compromises” that delay safety? Would it obfuscate lines of responsibility and help set up new criminal indictments like the one PG&E faces over San Bruno? Would DSA be a waste of money?

          For sure, the PUC has long possessed the ability to track how utilities spend infrastructure maintenance fees California customers have paid since the early 1950s. But the agency never did that.

          Also, does creation of a new division mean the governor and his appointees tacitly admit the abject failure of the existing PUC Safety & Enforcement Division?

          Amazingly, it wasn’t until 2014 -- well after both San Bruno and San Onofre – that the commission adopted a policy of continually assessing and reducing utility safety risks.

          The budget plan says the new DSA would “determine whether additional safety improvements are needed.” They plainly are.

          The bottom line: Sure, the PUC favors adding this office. It could provide a convenient fig leaf for commissioners to hide behind.

          While Brown’s three mid-May moves should be just the beginning of an ethical and safety cleanup, they do show that secure as he feels, with no need ever to run for office again, he can be forced to recognize a need for changes, even if he won’t talk about them.

         

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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, go to www.californiafocus.net

CHANGING OF STATE’S CONGRESSIONAL GUARD CONTINUES

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MAY 27, 2016 OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

  “CHANGING OF STATE’S CONGRESSIONAL GUARD CONTINUES”

          The inevitable generational changing of California’s political guard is sure to continue next month, but don’t expect much of a shift in the party makeup of the state’s 53-member House delegation, where Democrats now dominate by a 39-14 margin.

          Change began to move quickly two years ago when patriarchs in both parties retired, including past chairmen of major committees like Democrat Henry Waxman in coastal Los Angeles County, Republican Buck McKeon of Santa Clarita and Democrat George Miller of Contra Costa County.

          This year’s departures will include Democrat Lois Capps of Santa Barbara County and Monterey County Democrat Sam Farr. All were in their 70s when they announced they were leaving.

          There will still be plenty of seniority in the delegation, though, both in age and years of service, which means even more changes are likely two, four and six years from now.

          A lot of the age and experience now resides in the San Francisco Bay area, home to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, 76, and fellow Democrats Jackie Speier, 66; Anna Eshoo, 73, and Zoe Lofgren, 68. San Jose Democrat Mike Honda, 72, faces his second straight tough reelection battle this year, his political survival very much in doubt.

          Over in the Central Valley, Fresno’s Democratic veteran Jim Costa, 64, faces off a second time against well-funded Republican farmer Johnny Tacherra, who led Costa on election night two years ago. Costa narrowly survived that year on the strength of late absentee and provisional votes. A strong GOP turnout for presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in the Fresno area could mean the end of Costa’s 38-year political career.

  

          Further south, a succession clash is brewing in Orange County, where former Assemblyman and ex-county Republican Chairman Scott Baugh this spring began raising money for a 2018 campaign to succeed his old “friend,” longtime Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, 68, who promptly issued a statement denying any plans to retire that soon.

          Of all these seats, the one with the best chance to change parties this year belongs to Capps, who took over for her late husband Walter in 1998. The early favorite here is Santa Barbara Mayor Helene Schneider, a Democrat, but nine candidates are running and the race for the two November runoff slots seems wide open.

          Two other seats being vacated this year belong to Democrats Loretta Sanchez of Orange County and Janice Hahn of San Pedro. Sanchez seeks the retiring Barbara Boxer’s U.S. Senate seat, while Hahn wants a slot on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, where her father Kenneth served 40 years. There will be no party change in either district, though; both are solidly Democratic.

          But there could be a party change in the Sacramento area’s 7^th district, now represented by Democrat Ami Bera, an MD and the only Unitarian in Congress. Several Bera votes have angered left-leaning Democrats. If they desert him in November, Republican Sacramento County Sheriff Steve Jones could take this swing district.

          But the coastal district now represented by Farr looks safely Democratic, with Monterey County Deputy District Attorney Jimmy Panetta a heavy favorite. Panetta, 46, whose father represented the district many years before becoming Bill Clinton’s budget director and chief of staff, then CIA director and defense secretary for President Obama, staked his claim to the seat early and no other Democrat is seriously challenging.

          The upshot is that California’s congressional delegation will gain some youth this year, but could lose a bit of seniority. This won’t matter much unless Democrats somehow regain control of the House and give Pelosi a second term as Speaker.

          That looks unlikely, in large part because gerrymandering has made Republican dominance inevitable in much of the South, especially populous Texas.

          Still, the newcomers – almost all likely to be Democrats – from this year’s election and 2014 will be poised to give California renewed clout if and when Democrats ever regain control of Congress, something that’s improbable at least until 2022, when the next Census creates new political districts all across America.

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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

GOP IN DANGER OF BECOMING NO. 3 CHOICE IN STATE

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MAY 24, 2016, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
   “GOP IN DANGER OF BECOMING NO. 3 CHOICE IN STATE”

          Even before Californians at last start marking absentee ballots this month or begin to think about heading to the polls for the June 7 primary election, many onetime Republicans had already voted with their feet.

          Just over 400,000 of them, to be precise. That’s how many fewer Californians were registered as Republicans early this spring compared to eight years ago. By contrast, Democrats gained about 9,000 voters, while the no-party-preference category was up more than 520,000.

          And although about 850,000 new voters have registered in the last few months, unofficial reports indicate they predominantly signed up as Democrats or without party preference. How much of this was due to enthusiasm for presidential candidate Bernard Sanders is anyone’s guess.

But increasing numbers of Californians just won’t call themselves Republicans. Sure, many so-called independents will back GOP candidates: The California Field Poll, for example, shows about 40 percent will steadily vote Republican, with Democrats getting a slightly larger share and almost 20 percent of those with no stated party preference remaining true swing voters.

          In no way can that make up for the Democrats’ steadily increasing edge in the state, now a margin of almost 16 percent over the GOP.

          In fact, Republicans, with an all-time low of 27.6 percent of registered voters in their column in March, are suddenly in danger of becoming the third choice of California voters, behind Democrats and no-preference, which checked in this spring with 24 percent of registrants.

          Demographics explain much of the shift. Latinos now are the population plurality in California at about 38 percent of all residents. They and Asian-Americans form the two fastest-growing ethnic voter blocs. This means voters who physically go to the polls are less likely than ever to encounter black or white faces there, and more likely to see brown and ochre ones.

          With these demographics, all it takes to explain the GOP’s plight is a look at the party platform, readily available on the Ballotpedia website (https://ballotpedia.org/Republican_Party_of_California).

          In a state where the Latino plurality in every poll indicates it considers immigration amnesty the top issue, the GOP platform says, “We support devoting more resources to border control and increasing penalties for overstaying visas.” Not a word about enabling undocumented immigrants to seek citizenship or legalization.

          The same polls show women voters of all demographic groups care deeply about abortion choices and birth control. But state Republicans tell them they’re “the party that protects innocent life because we believe life begins at conception and ends at natural death.”

          Gun control is another popular cause in California, but the GOP calls for “elimination of waiting periods to purchase firearms…” And the party manifesto seems to proclaim it wants higher health care costs: “We support restricting Medicaid to restrict elective, medically unnecessary surgeries while increasing the compensation to doctors and hospitals for necessary surgeries and other treatments.” Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin might call whatever committee decides which surgeries to fund or not a “death panel.”

          It adds up to a party that’s seriously out of step with the majority of voters its candidates seek to represent.

          There’s a warning here for Democrats, too: Their legislators on both state and federal levels must continue backing causes popular with voters or they could become as passé as the GOP, now threatened with irrelevance.

          This trend began long before the current top two primary system arrived in 2010, allowing all voters to go for any candidate they like in primary elections other than those for president, regardless of party. In some ways, it has made party organizations almost irrelevant, as runoff elections often feature two candidates from the same party, with slightly different beliefs and priorities.

          Meanwhile, Republicans have not carried California in presidential election since 1988, after a 36-year stretch in which they only lost this state once, when Barry Goldwater ran in 1964. Democrats, despite strenuous efforts to sign up new voters, have not changed their share of the electorate by more than 2 percent in the last decade.

          Which means it’s no time for them to be smug, but it is high time for Republicans to realize they can no longer expect to remain significant so long as they insist on thumbing their noses at the attitudes of the vast majority of Californians.

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

LOUD TALK, BUT STATE PRIMARY AGAIN INSIGNIFICANT

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA FOCUS
  1720 OAK STREET, SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA 90405
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MAY 20, 2016 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

  “LOUD TALK, BUT STATE PRIMARY AGAIN INSIGNIFICANT”

There’s nothing like a nice fantasy to keep a person feeling warm at night, and a fantasy is what comforts Vermont’s Independent Sen. Bernard Sanders this month, as he insists it will make a big difference if he somehow ekes out a June 7 California primary win over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

But reality is that California win or not, Sanders has no chance for the Democratic presidential nomination, chiefly because of a party rule demanding proportional distribution of any state’s delegates to its nominating convention. Sanders says he’s “good at math,” and if so, he knows that even though he narrowly won Indiana and even if he takes 60 percent of the California vote (highly unlikely, say all the polls), Clinton’s effort here will still net more than the 150-odd delegates she still needs to clinch the nomination.

          This doesn’t even include delegates she’ll pick up in places like New Jersey, Oregon and West Virginia, which vote the same day or earlier.

          For awhile, it appeared there would be meaningful, fiery action here on the Republican side, where California has a mere 172 convention delegates, compared with the 546 going to the Democratic gathering. It only takes 1,237 GOP delegates to get nominated, while a Democrat needs 2,383. This could have made California far more important to the GOP.

          But then came Indiana and a clear-cut Donald Trump win that all but clinched the GOP nomination for him and forced his last remaining serious rival, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, to drop out.

There will still be plenty of rallies and loud talk in California, but not nearly as much emotion or spending as the state would have seen if Indiana had gone for Cruz and given him all 57 of its Republican delegates.

In that case, it wouldn’t matter that no one in either party seriously believes any Republican can win this state’s 55 electoral votes in November. That’s about one-fifth what it takes to get elected, just from one state, something that long gave a political foundation to Ronald Reagan, who never lost an election in California – before it became solidly Democratic.

          Another result of the Cruz dropout is that Reagan can now stop spinning in his hilltop grave above Simi Valley where he may somehow have heard one Republican after another violate his “11^th Commandment:” Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.

          Intramural insults became major sport among Republicans as they began some preliminary stumping in the Golden State before Cruz departed. There was former House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio opining at Stanford University that Cruz is “Lucifer in the flesh,” and a “miserable son of a b---h.” That amplified a bit on Trump’s seemingly constant hurling of the epithet “lyin’ Ted” at Cruz and his remark that Cruz “is a nasty guy and people don’t like him.”

          Cruz, son of a pastor, had jabbed back more subtly, claiming “I have never insulted Donald personally.” But he became more direct on his campaign’s last day, calling Trump a “serial philanderer” and a “pathological liar” and more, all during just one rant.

          So much for the 11^th Commandment.

          This all set up the most entertaining state convention in many years for beleaguered California Republicans, who have won no statewide elections in 10 years and finally got to see their first full-fledged “cattle call” in more than 20 years, as all national candidates remaining at the time made the scene.

          Cruz somehow hoped naming failed California Senate candidate Carly Fiorina (a million-vote loser to Barbara Boxer in 2010) as his vice presidential choice could help him enough here to force a multi-ballot national convention.  Anyone who remembers Fiorina’s hapless campaign had to chuckle over that.

          The bottom line: California’s primary is no longer even symbolically important, not even for Democrats who still say otherwise. It’s even less vital for the GOP.

          Which means that the political tail has wagged the dog once again, the decisive state this time being Indiana, with less than one-third the political convention delegates California has. It also means it’s high time for state legislators to make a permanent date change and give up on their 44-year-old fantasy that a June presidential primary will ever again mean much.

         

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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

NEW CHARGES OF CORRUPTION, LIES IN STATE GOVERNMENT

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MAY 17, 2016, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“NEW CHARGES OF CORRUPTION, LIES IN STATE GOVERNMENT”

          Speaking to a group of crime survivors in Sacramento the other day, Gov. Jerry Brown confessed a tough sentencing law he signed in the 1970s was a big mistake.

          “The problems I create, I can clean up,” Brown declared, pitching his latest plan to reduce sentences and ease paroles for many crimes.

          Even as he spoke, two new charges of lying and misuse of funds confronted Brown’s administration. So it’s legitimate to wonder whether he would generalize his statement to the many questionable acts his appointees have perpetrated in state government.

          While there are not yet indictments or convictions, collusion between the some members of the state Public Utilities Commission (PUC) and companies it regulates is well documented. So was cronyism and conflict of interest at the state Energy Commission, whose chairman Brown nevertheless reappointed. There were also admitted falsehoods from prison authorities over a longstanding claim that no seriously violent criminals have been sent to low-security fire camps.

          To this list, add two new charges. One sees the federal Interior Department’s inspector general investigating a whistleblower claim that as much as half a $60 million grant for improving fish habitats in and near the Delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers may have been misappropriated by the state Department of Water Resources. The question: Did Brown appointees spend that money preparing the environmental impact statement for Brown’s stalled Delta Tunnels project, which would send Northern California river water south via hyper-expensive tunnels?

          A second claim, by consumer advocates, alleges numerous lies in an April state report insisting there could be rolling blackouts this summer unless the leak-plagued Aliso Canyon natural gas storage field in northern Los Angeles reopens soon.

          This report was a joint project of the reputation-stained PUC and Energy Commission, along with the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power and the state’s electricity-allocating Independent Systems Operator. The paper was reportedly at least in part written by the Southern California Gas Co., eager to get its storage field back online, with money and gas once again flowing from it.

          The report claimed that without the stored gas, Southern California might not be able to fuel power plants at peak electric-use times this summer, thus provoking blackouts.

          Consumer advocate Bill Powers, a San Diego engineering consultant who helped kill several early-2000s plans to make California dependent on ultra-expensive imported liquefied natural gas (LNG), notes that peak gas use comes in winter, not summer. He said the highest gas use of the last 10 years came in winter 2008, when demand in Southern California reached 4.9 billion cubic feet (bcfd) per day. Even that quantity is well below the 5.7 bcfd available at all times from incoming pipelines and other storage fields in the region. But peak use in the summer has not gone above 3.7 bcfd in the last 10 years, meaning pipelines alone, with no storage fields, provide more than enough gas to satisfy all customers, including power plants.

          There is, then, no real threat of a blackout, leading Jamie Court, president of the Consumer Watchdog advocacy group, to call the state report “blackout blackmail.”

          The parallel is unmistakable with the Arnold Schwarzenegger-era push for LNG and its completely false threats of outages.

          All these ethical lapses have been or are being perpetrated by Brown’s administration. Yet, the governor says nothing about any of them, behaving as if he’s unaware of any problem (he’s not; first-hand accounts says he reads news reports on alleged wrongdoing in his administration) or hopes all these things will quietly go away and leave him a totally clean legacy.

          Repeated attempts to get Brown to address the allegations against his appointees or their documented transgressions have been rebuffed.

          Example: “We won’t be commenting on that,” was all his office would say on revelations of the $1.04 million gifted to Brown chief of staff Nancy McFadden and a “non-disparagement” agreement she signed to get the money when she left a top job at PG&E to become the governor’s closest aide.

          If Brown wants to clean up the multiple messes made by his appointees, he can. But he shows no signs of that, leaving open the question of whether Brown consciously backs those questionable acts or merely puts up with them.

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