SB 51: the California politics thread

considering the software they sell is basically a spreadsheet/database combo from the 90s, their research team is also bizarrely good at AI/ML, which is one of their reasons their involvement with CBP is unnerving.

I've used a few Salesforce databases in my job and basically a spreadsheet/database combo from the 90s seems about accurate. tbf there was a huge need/demand for this, so their success is not really much of a surprise.

Also it’s a federal election so off topic but it’s interesting because of the top two primary so: the congressional election where I live is between jimmy Gomez (democrat) and a Green Party guy. I believe this is the only two candidate congressional election involving the greens in the country. Based on the lawn signs and the number of times they’ve canvassed our home, the Green Party guy is going to run away with it. (He won’t. He’ll lose by like 40 points.)

I can't believe I am actually going to vote for Gavin Newsom for the first time in like 20 years? ... like I actually voted against him for Lt. Gov. because I hated him so much as SF Mayor and before that as appointed stooge to Willie Brown on the Board of Supes ...

otoh I'm kinda cool with Jerry Brown as governor, and I kinda hated him as mayor,

and actually a lot of the current bullshit in Oakland can kinda be laid at his feet, though not really. Like I don't think any one person can be held responsible for the incompetence, venality, and obstructionist idiocy that is a lot of Oakland government: the people that don't have to run for office, so they can be pretty much awful and stupid with few repercussions to their careers.

There's some new local version of Howard Jarvis Taxpayers sending out mailers to Oakland addresses arguing against voting for various property tax measures on principle.

Oh yeah, Yes on Measure Y -- extending Just Cause protection to people that live in duplexes and triplexes (as opposed to currently where it's like 4+ units)

yeah latimes had a lot of dirt on newsom a few months ago but he was still one of the favorites

i'm still registered to vote but i'm not in the country anymore, but i would vote for newsom

I'm with sarahell on the mixed feelings about Newsom. He is a guy who I *really* don't like or trust, even when a lot of his policy prescriptions and positions line up with mine. He's just a fucking slimeball that wants to be president really badly. Dunno if I will bother voting for him, he's almost certain to be the winner anyway.

i remember being a local blogger about 10 or so years ago and my fave thing was comparing him to Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman

I think he is also a big fan of Huey Lewis & the News iirc

I can't hate him, he stepped forward to support same-sex marriage at a time when most of the rest of the country was charging in the other direction

comparing him to Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman

yeah you weren't alone in this the similarity is just too eerie

he stepped forward to support same-sex marriage at a time when most of the rest of the country was charging in the other direction when it was most politically advantageous to him personally, handed the GOP a wedge-issue that helped get Dubya re-elected, resulted in the passage of Prop 8 in California actually *banning* gay marriage, and did not actually result in any valid gay marriages

fixed

that whole charade was nauseating, grandstanding at his worst. He knew he didn't have a legal leg to stand on and did it for the purposes of benefiting no one but himself.

xp - even when in practice it was preaching to the choir and a high profile distraction from his pro-development/pro-corporate policies?

^^^

he has a history of this grandstanding, like when he wanted to improve the health of poor & working class San Franciscans by banning cigarette sales from chain stores with pharmacies -- that pretty much affected nothing except the ability to buy fairly low-priced cigarettes at Walgreen's stores. ... as opposed to walking a block or less to a liquor store and buying cigarettes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55cG7EytB7M

omg I pulled up this video to show how fuckin obnoxious he was at the time and the closed captioning is wild

**APPLAUSE BY HOMOSEXUALS**

xp the conversation it started was a huge push forward for gay rights

i don't think he literally tried to feed a cat to an ATM tho

the conversation it started was a huge push forward for gay rights

he didn't start it - Alaska and Arizona already had gay marriage rulings on the books - he just made the splashiest (and emptiest) show about it. which is his modus operandi.

xp Dan -- I'm not saying he's evil incarnate, just that it was a self-serving move. And it is often super useful to be reminded that in the central SF Bay Area, one lives in kinda a political bubble and that there is certain hair-splitting we do here, some more-progressive-than-thou type stuff, that looks ridiculous to most other Americans

Oh yeah, and Oakland has a mayoral election ...

Alaska and Arizona, come on. This *was* a big push forward.

Bush had already given his SOTU pressing for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. Massachusetts was on track to start allowing marriages in May of that year. A backlash was going to happen in 2004. And Prop 8 was a direct response to the California Supreme Court recognizing marriage rights in 2008

agree that it was a partly self-serving move, but it was also a very good thing

yeah, on paper he has done all the right things, but you read into the details of his life and he is a total slimeball

thing is, how else would you vote if not on what he has done and the positives more or less outweigh the negatives

i feel like this single payer healthcare program was hyped a lot in california, but like it's crazy when you do the math

i'm not against it though

on paper he has done all the right things

not when he was mayor! he did a lot of not-right things

as mayor his sponsorship of Prop N (Care not Cash) was very controversial

yeah, i know what you mean

i guess i should say given the options

I agree that policy-wise I'm compelled to vote for him, more or less. At the same time, I absolutely hate watching him talk and prior to our current scandal-goalpost-moving POS chief exec I would have assumed Newsom was a lock for doing something scandalously unethical/illegal that would tank his career. I guess we're going to find out soon enough.

Well when the alternative is John Cox...

i was listening to an interview with scott weiner and he mentioned that brown had vetoed the 4am last call thing but he would bring it back next year and didn't expect any problems with newsom on that issue. there was then a weird moment where the interviewer and weiner acknowledged that yes, newsom is a known partier.

a friend of mine/former journalist wrote a semi-autobiographical novel that briefly features an obvious Newsom character riding around in a limo drinking champagne, doing blow and engaging in bisexual hijinks

"That, in turn, should be the opening line of your novel.

god damn i need a voter guide who tf are all these yahoo local judges speaking in code

i forget, are you in LA?

sandy eggo

city of

ah i cannot help you.

anyone reading this in LA:

superior court #4: sauceda on the grounds that the other guy is endorsed by the police unions.

#16: hunter. michel's husband is an NRA lawyer and her son is called Colt and her dog is called Heston. also michel is endorsed by the LAT which in court elections seems to indicate a "nice little beach community" type.

#60: hancock. ex public defender (rather than prosecutor) and woman.

no news here for anyone local, but prop c goes national

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/technology/san-francisco-taxes-homeless.html

i didn't know this though:

In 2012, San Francisco also adjusted its tax code by switching from a payroll tax to a gross receipts tax, a change that favored the tech industry, which spends extravagantly to recruit top engineers.

superior court #4: sauceda on the grounds that the other guy is endorsed by the police unions

i definitely voted against the guy that said "proud to be law enforcement's choice"

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-road-map-thurmond-tuck-schools-charters-unions-20181021-story.html

I am going to ask an extremely ignorant question: what is the billionaire obsession with charter schools? an untapped market?

i think it's the standard "free enterprise" thing that appeals to business people, like public schools are hamstrung by all these government regulations, what if we could "disrupt" that and do more or less what we want but still get the same government funding that the public schools do?

yeah it's total bullshit

i endorse these endorsements

https://lawebsitedotnet.wordpress.com/

rich people also send their kids to private schools so they dgaf about using charters as a lab for their dumb theories. they're not affected.

Weird new republican ad buy

A plane crashed onto the 101 Freeway in Agoura Hills on Tuesday afternoon, authorities said. https://t.co/L09NSqhq3k pic.twitter.com/dXHLoY4aKB

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) October 23, 2018

would sign a prop that seized all assets of a rich warplane flying asshole that fucks up everybody's commute

Opposition to PROP 10

Officials

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), 2018 gubernatorial candidate[47]
John Cox (R), 2018 gubernatorial candidate[47]

Parties

California Republican Party[48]

When did Gavin Newsom disappoint you first?

I betcha nobody here remembers Brittanie Mountz.

lol who could forget

I actually remember Newsom's Gay Marriage Gambit as a pretty savvy move to consolidate the city behind him after a divisive election (and I definitely didn't vote for him in that one).

But he will not be as competent as Brown, that's for sure. Hopefully it will be enough.

I betcha nobody here remembers Brittanie Mountz.

― Jersey Al (Albert R. Broccoli), Tuesday, October 23, 2018 6:04 PM (yesterday)

oh I remember! she had the best name, the jokes wrote themselves

voting for steyer too, but what a weak slate. almost as depressing as LA mayor

From the outside, the jungle primary seems like it has more pitfalls than benefits. In the same way nonpartisan districting commissions do in super-polarized partisan warfare. Nice ideas ill-suited to the moment.

it’s almost unreal how bad the gov and LA mayor races are, they come off like the last several presidential elections in microcosm. Esp LA mayor.

I'm confused about the LA mayor's race. Don't progressives like Nithya Raman? I don't understand what's going on in that race at all, it seems like there are a lot of complicated issues

I think she's tied with Bass and both of them barely lead Prattdaddy

oh you're right, Raman seems like she's in a dead heat most recently. I am behind

I'm voting at the last minute, and handing my ballot in to my neighborhood voting place at the Norwegian Seaman's Church in SF on Tuesday

Those last day votes probably won't get counted until days later, given the plodding (but fair) counting in our state

I thought they don't count any votes until the close of polls time (8 pm Tuesday)?

Xp — will probably hold my nose/cross my fingers and vote for Steyer … locally we just have yet another parcel tax on the ballot, which I will vote for, because at least it’s not another sales tax increase.

SF has more exciting shit to vote for.

Yeah Pelosi's seat (most of SF) has been quite a lively race. Either one of the three will be basically OK with me. There's stuff I don't like about all three.

I voted for Katie Porter, mostly because I was tired of Steyer's ad onslaught

I'm sick of it too but I did wind up voting for him

I also just saw somewhere that polling for the billionaire tax was at 60% yes.

Re: the counting, we probably won't really know anything for sure for a couple of days because there don't seem to be any landslides in the state or local elections.

I voted for the LA sales tax increase. not the biggest sales tax fan, but it was endorsed by LADSA and the state can use the funds

Not looking forward to having to vote for increasing sales taxes in the bay to support mass transit. Shouldn't businesses with RTO policies be footing more of this bill? Why not drivers via a gas tax or registration fee bump??!

Yeah I can't answer the tradeoff of sales tax vs gas tax/registration fees for this, but I'm not sure that targeting companies with RTO policies is quite right.

There's a huge set of folks at the lower end of the economic ladder that have to work in person and rely in public transit. I don't think asking their employers to shoulder the burden is fair.

For me, I rely on public transit although I could drive. If way more people commuted like me, it would probably be beneficial broadly for a number of reasons.

I voted for all the tax increases, didn't think too much about it

As sarahell mentioned, we have a parcel tax on the Oakland ballot... I voted for it just because the NO side was so annoying and duplicitous

for Nancy Pelosi's seat in congress I voted for Scott Wiener. He is an incredibly thoughtful and hard-working state senator who has kind of ruled the state senate in the last couple of years authoring many bills. Connie Chan is a progressive SF supervisor who is actually in favor of no progress at all and seems to have no interest in national politics, and Chakrabarti, well...

for Nancy Pelosi's seat in congress I voted for Scott Wiener. He is an incredibly thoughtful and hard-working state senator who has kind of ruled the state senate in the last couple of years authoring many bills. Connie Chan is a progressive SF supervisor who is actually in favor of no progress at all and seems to have no interest in national politics, and Chakrabarti, well...

how did that post twice?

Mods are trying to figure out what's going on with the dupe posts

not the biggest sales tax fan

one of the greatest varieties of taxes

Chakrabarti really didn't manage to get very many votes in SF. I think the AOC non-endorsement helped kill his chances.

Yeah his whole thing seemed like vaporware. Chan's election night party was at the El Rio essentially a short block away from me so last night was pretty noisy when I was going to sleep.

not a great set of preliminary results for LA/state

seems insane to me we're going to be stuck with bass

has she sucked? I haven't paid that much attention. being mayor of LA seems like a completely doomed job

she def sucks from most Angelenos i know, but obv my pals are hard left etc

The battle for second in the primary race for Los Angeles mayor tightened even more on Saturday, with Councilmember Nithya Raman trailing former reality TV star Spencer Pratt by about 7,500 votes, the latest election results show.

Incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, who NBC News projected will advance to the November runoff on election night, was still in the lead with 34.81% of the vote, according to data from the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk. Pratt had 27.32%, while Raman was a little more than 1 point behind with 26.21%.

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/la-mayoral-race-raman-pratt/3900764/

Last update I’d seen was with 71% in and Pratt had 28.2 to Raman’s 24.9.

Raman now in 2nd. I wonder if Pratt will jump on Trump's "rigged vote" train.