On Parsing California Politics

14 November 2011 |permalink | email article

LAST week at a Politico event in San Francisco Democratic activist Christine Pelosi joined with Democratic strategist Chris Lehane, Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, along with Politico’s JimVandeHei and Mike Allen, in discussing California politics and what it might mean for the country. Schmidt, an MSNBC contributor. was the most compelling: “You need both parties to be healthy. The Republican Party is an ideological party. What the state needs is a reform party. We have no opposition party in this state…There’s no opposition to the status quo.”

Sheriff Baca and Jails

The idea that deputies accused of wrongdoing were transferred to the L.A. County jail system to keep them way from the public is ludicrous on its face. As the Los Angeles Times has reported other deputies were allowed to keep working after being convicted of crimes or found guilty of serious misconduct, according to confidential documents obtained by the newspaper. While no evidence has been found that punished deputies took part if such misconduct the cases offer a fresh window into how the Sheriff’s Department has long managed the jails. It offers fresh ammunition to critics who have demanded Sheriff Lee Baca use more experienced, better qualified deputies in the jails. He has ordered an end to transfers, tasking captains to take responsibility for their own problem employees. But Baca, unlike the late Sherman Block, does not evoke the same command presence, as evident in an independent jail commission being convened by the County Board of Supervisors.

Read ‘em and weep

“If you are interested in my view of what happened, it is very simple. It is that it was an accident.”—A bitter Richard Nixon, in his secret grand jury testimony in 1975, dismissing the attempt by his staff to figure out what had happened as the efforts of “amateurs” and “clowns.” Listening to other parts of the tape, he added, “I wonder what I had to drink that day.”

“I don’t understand how Richard Nixon could know so much about college football in 1969 and so little about Watergate in 1973.”—Joe Paterno, a Republican, on Nixon in June 1973. Nixon stated that the winner of the 1969 Texas-Arkansas game deserved to be the national champion. Penn State went under defeated, including an Orange Bowl victory.

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