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Friday, March 12, 2021

My Two Cents on the Newsom Recall Effort

Thank you, Gustavo Arellano! (Gustavo is the fellow who once helmed the Orange County Register's nationally-syndicated "Ask A Mexican" column, and is now with the Los Angeles Times).  Full text below!:
Recalling California’s Wild and Crazy and Crowded 2003 Gubernatorial Recall 
By GUSTAVO ARELLANO - COLUMNIST MARCH 12, 2021 5 AM PT
About eight years ago, Sacramento resident Marc Valdez threw a most unusual party. He invited a band of brothers and sisters of different political stripes. Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens. Independents, American Independents, and even people from something called the Natural Law Party. 
The only thing that bonded the guests was their role in California’s crazy election season of 2003, when voters booted out Gov. Gray Davis in a historic recall. You wouldn’t recognize the names of the people who showed up at this shindig. But you’d remember some of the others who crashed Davis’ party to pop his political balloon: Gary Coleman, Larry Flynt, Arianna Huffington or some of the 132 other D-list celebrities and randos who ran to replace the unpopular governor.
The eventual winner, of course, was Arnold Schwarzenegger. Cheryl Bly-Chester, who attended Valdez’s party, got the most votes among his guests. She finished 17th overall — a mere 4.19 million votes behind the “Terminator.” 
But their brush with history nevertheless makes these most anonymous of recall alumni an important voice today as current Gov. Gavin Newsom faces his own reckoning. (Or would that be a recall-ning?) Anti-Newsom activists want to channel the populist winds of 2003 that Valdez, Bly-Chester and others kite-surfed and send Newsom off to his political Bermuda Triangle.
So you might think that these folks would understand and sympathize with the anger that voters have toward a governor accused of gross negligence during hard times. They’re a great California slice of political, geographic and ethnic diversity. But when I rang up five of them, not a single one supported the recall.
“I support Newsom 100%,” said Valdez, a Democrat. “The people who are most active against Newsom are the same people who invited over their relatives for Thanksgiving, so they’re trying to burn off their guilt by burning a witch or two.”
“If it wasn’t for COVID, it wouldn’t happen,” said Darin Price, who ran as one of two Natural Law Party candidates in the Davis recall. “He’s being as thoughtful as anyone could be. The bar should be fairly high for recall, but it’s not here.”
“I respect the more than 2 million people who have signed [the recall petition] for exercising their constitutional right,” said Badi Badiozamani, a San Diego author and declared independent. He declined to say whether he was one of them, saying he was “divorced from politics.”
“We think Newsom has a lot of holes,” said C.T. Weber, a Peace and Freedom Party member then and now. “But we’re against it for the racist right-wing reasons that its supporters are putting out there.”
“I don’t think that he’s doing a great job as governor, but I’m not signing it,” said Bly-Chester, an El Dorado County planning commissioner who said “the Republican Party left me” in 2016 and is now “decline to state.” “This [recall] election won’t mean anything.”
Yes, this is a small — scratch that — teeny, tiny sample from the legions that joined the 2003 race like it was the L.A. Marathon. But it’s an important one, and one to which I can relate. 
I covered the recall as a cub reporter, and voted yes then. I think I picked billboard legend Angelyne as governor. Or was it the comedian Gallagher? Anyways, I found Davis ineffectual and weak and found no reason to support him or oppose his recall. Even his most ardent defenders mustered up all the enthusiasm of someone replacing their car brakes.
That change-in-the-air feeling isn’t blowing across the Golden State the way it did in 2003. Newsom’s critics despise him — a not-insignificant part of the California electorate. But Democratic leaders will vocally stand by their well-coiffed man. If we continue to reopen and get as close to normal as we ever can by the fall — which seems increasingly likely, thank God — only Republicans will still care about kicking him out.
Successful recalls are born from widespread, bipartisan frustration, not from a dying political party that has relied on cataclysms to win statewide elections in California for the past generation.
“Everything bad was personified in Gray Davis,” Badiozamani said. “He was not a charismatic person, whereas Newsom is. And Gray was seen as a bureaucrat, whereas Newsom is handsome and presentable, which can help.” “He’s not doing the worst,” said Bly-Chester, while adding that his “almost arbitrary” decisions mean “he’s not the governor for a large portion of the state.”
“In 2001 you had Gray Davis wasn’t taking action when action was clearly needed,” Valdez said. “Today, the story on Newsom is that he’s been too aggressive with the lockdown and quarantines. But a lot of people think it’s good to have the California governor having enough power to look some of these rich people in the face say, ‘No, you’ve got to close.’ No one supported Davis doing nothing.”
“It’s just the right wing,” Weber said. “Now, it’s pretty much a super-Democratic state.” 
And yes, Newsom’s maskless dinner at the uber-elite French Laundry looked bad because it was bad. But we just survived four years of a president who makes Newsom look like Mister Rogers in the personal responsibility department.
Successful recalls need to get people like me. I’m no fan of Newsom’s ham-fisted governance during our pandemic year — but it’s far better than the hands-off approach most of his critics would have favored. And most of the people I know who can’t stand Newsom hate the Republican Party even more. It’s a zero-sum game with no nuances — the opposite of how 2003 felt.
That hyper-partisan reality is another reason that Bly-Chester, Badiozamani and Valdez don’t look forward to a potential, and at this point increasingly likely, recall vote. While the world treated them and their fellow rivals as a circus of fools when they joined the recall race in 2003, they saw it as a beautiful expression of American democracy, one that just doesn’t exist today.
“We [minor candidates] had to band together in order to make our voices heard,” Valdez said. He ran back then because he believed “nobody was in charge anymore” and wanted to do something about it. “We had, in many cases, nothing in common. Now, it’s just a different situation, different time.”
Bly-Chester remembered when dozens of candidates met before a Bay Area news conference to figure out how to get media members to take them seriously. 
“We identified one person from every party,” she said. “We each had a line to say for an official statement and did it. All across party lines. It felt really good.”
Likelihood of that happening today? The sad truth: About as high as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Tulare) holding hands and singing “We Are the World.”

High-Incidence and Low-Incidence Countries

Looks like the Covid-19 pandemic is beginning to resolve itself into high-incidence and low-incidence countries, with the United States slowly joining the latter:

A Bit of Hardball

Get the vote suppressors where they work:
The Hancock County Board of Commissioners voted 4-0 Wednesday to ask Rep. Barry Fleming (R-Harlem) to resign as county attorney after pressure from citizens opposed to his work on proposed voting law changes.
Fleming is currently the House Special Committee on Election Integrity Chairman and primary sponsor of HB 531, a 66-page voting omnibus that would make sweeping changes to voting in Georgia, including limiting access to drop boxes and curbing larger counties' ability to offer a full slate of weekend voting.
Hancock has one of the highest proportions of Black voters in the country and has been the center of several voting controversies in recent years, including an episode in 2015 when a fifth of the voters in Sparta — all Black — had their voter registrations challenged.
One of those was Johnny Thornton, a retired DEA agent who lives and works on a catfish farm.
...Thornton said opposition to Fleming's involvement as county attorney has been building for weeks, and he hopes other lawmakers take note of the national conversation about voting rights.
"We might not be taking a lot of money out of his pocket, but it's sure going to embarrass the hell out of him to say your a** has been fired," he said. "That type of leverage will make some of these other state representatives in some of these rural towns say, 'Wait a minute.'"

Police Response

I was surprised. First, a cop came to take my statement. He was a dog person. I liked his nickname for Jasper: Cujo. Then a police CSI unit came to the house to get a picture of my back’s all-but-invisible bruise from the rock thrown by the local bike-riding teens. The police are doing what they can to establish a record of the teens’ activities. The best of luck to the cops!

Clingy Dog

Best year ever for the dogs:

This has been their favorite year.

Posted by Marc Valdez on Thursday, March 11, 2021

The Pain Of Having To Walk Away

Harder to deal with Southern Baptists than ever:
Moore’s outsize influence and role in teaching the Bible have always made some evangelical power brokers uneasy, because of their belief only men should be allowed to preach.
But Moore was above reproach, supporting Southern Baptist teaching that limits the office of pastor to men alone and cheerleading for the missions and evangelistic work that the denomination holds dear.
“She has been a stalwart for the Word of God, never compromising,” former Lifeway Christian Resources President Thom Rainer said in 2015, during a celebration at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center in Nashville that honored 20 years of partnership between the Southern Baptist publishing house and Moore.
“And when all is said and done, the impact of Beth Moore can only be measured in eternity’s grasp.”
Then along came Donald Trump.
Moore’s criticism of the 45th president’s abusive behavior toward women and her advocacy for sexual abuse victims turned her from a beloved icon to a pariah in the denomination she loved all her life.
“Wake up, Sleepers, to what women have dealt with all along in environments of gross entitlement & power,” Moore once wrote about Trump, riffing on a passage from the New Testament Book of Ephesians.
Because of her opposition to Trump and her outspokenness in confronting sexism and nationalism in the evangelical world, Moore has been labeled as “liberal” and “woke” and even as being a heretic for daring to give a message during a Sunday morning church service. 
Finally, Moore had had enough. She told Religion News Service in an interview Friday (March 5) that she is “no longer a Southern Baptist.”

Awfully Quiet Out There

Silent spring after all:
Listening is an art that we should practice because it does two things. It makes us shut up and it makes us open up. We stop listening just to the songs of “me, me, me”. When we set aside our own stories, it opens us up so we can listen to the stories of other beings. It’s a skill of empathy, isn’t it? Listening to other people’s stories and other creatures’ sounds is a way of understanding the world from their point of view. It’s a moral training.
When it comes to understanding what we hear, Rachel Carson, who wrote Silent Spring, and cared so much about bird song, took pains to tell us that it doesn’t matter if we know the names of what we see. That comes later. But the first thing that has to happen is love.
So I’m not so concerned about knowing which bird is calling. I’m surrounded by people who could do that in a majestic way. My husband can identify birds by their call. My neighbor can. I think it’s a beautiful skill that I don’t have.
But I do have the ability to catch a song. To hear it, which isn’t nothing. It can catch my attention and I can seek it out and I can listen to it. Knowing its name — maybe that’s not so important as knowing its tune.

Tuesday, March 09, 2021

Teens Causing Trouble

Some young, male teens (most were African-American, but one or two may have been Hispanic, and all were maybe age 13 or 14) on three or four bikes rolled up behind my dog Jasper and myself as we were walking eastbound on the northern sidewalk of Yale St., just west of 21st St. about 5:35 p.m. on March 8th. I heard menacing words directed at my dog - something of the order "Fuck that dog." Someone threw a rock and hit my back. I’m not hurt - it was just a small rock - but there might be a minor bruise at the impact point. I was more surprised than anything. I stopped as the bike riders rolled past, giving my dog and I hard stares. They crossed 21st St. and continued rolling eastbound on X St. - Broadway Alley. This group of teens appears to be the same group of teens caught on video causing trouble elsewhere in Curtis Park over the last week, as reported on Nextdoor, Curtis Park.

Monday, March 08, 2021

Two Interviews

I had an interview with LA Times California columnist Gustavo Arellano (formerly the syndicated "Ask a Mexican" columnist with the Orange County Register) regarding my opinion about the upcoming gubernatorial recall campaign against Gavin Newsom. (I strongly support Newsom and have no intention of running again.) Looking forward to seeing that in the LA Times soon! Also had an interview with the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, regarding my presentation on Salvador Dali's influence on "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul." Looks like I will make a Zoom presentation to them on May 27th.