SB 51: the California politics thread

I definitely agree

don’t know about other places but what I’ve seen is stores have been very restrictive and restaurants have not been open at all, even for outdoor dining. that seems like a lockdown to me

Facing possible recall, Newsom comes under fire from Democrats over COVID-19 response https://t.co/OhA8aLHLrQ

— Saba Hamedy (@saba_h) February 1, 2021

Is there anybody good waiting in the wings? I don't know much about Kounalakis or Weber.

I don't think the recall will be successful.

almost certainly not his governorship is a disaster for him if his goal is to move to national politics.

this seems like an extremely bad idea https://laist.com/2021/02/01/head-scratching_over_newsoms_choice_of_blue_shield_to_lead_vaccination_push.php

the UK is going to be finished vaccinating people by the time some tech bros are cashing the check newsom has to write after this blue shield nonsense fails.

Targets scorecards 🎯 on 2 February

Based on 7-day 1st doses average (399,055):

✅15M by 15 Feb (1 day early on 14/02)
✅32M by 15 Apr (17 days early on 29/03)
✅53M by Sept (123 days early on 21/05)

All targets predicted to be achieved ahead of time 👍#vaccine pic.twitter.com/7G8xJYXooo

— UK COVID-19 Vaccine Tracker (@VaccineStatusUK) February 2, 2021

You know, like many SF ilxors I was a Gonzalez voter. Newsom has never been a details guy, and details are needed here.

But you know, this recall is more than bullshit.

Here's one thing in Newsom's corner: with Big Tech booming, so are CA state coffers. In an economy that's crushing many states, CA is flush. Newsom deserves no credit for this of course, but I bet it helps.

If Newsom deserves credit for tech stocks inflating state income tax receipts when he happens to be governor, he also deserves credit for the fact that local governments in California are going bust which is destroying the services people actually care about and vote on.

there are a lot of reasons that local governments are having budget problems ... one of the biggest wears a badge and is racist

Right but if we’re giving the governor credit for stuff he doesn’t deserve credit for, then we have to realise the electorate are also going to blame him for stuff he doesn’t deserve the blame for.

(Also pretty easy to make a case that he does deserve blame for city budgets when he runs the state and had countless opportunities to show leadership on prop 13 reform. That would have allowed them to depend on something other than sales and business taxes which go down when everyone is hibernating.)

oh ha i wasn't really giving him credit for anything tbh though he could be doing way worse than he is. Honestly, the one thing that would be immediately useful is the huge fucking mess that is the EDD and unemployment. I did notice that he's taking a page from the federal textbook and proposing $600 stimulus payments to people who got the CA Earned Income Credit on their most recently filed taxes (2019 taxes probably). ... I'm not complaining really, I wouldn't mind getting another $600

Also in terms of policy and money, the state now has a penalty for not having health insurance (basically modeled on the Federal one that got cancelled), and it would be NAGL if people who lost coverage due to being laid off because of Covid, had to pay a tax penalty for not having health insurance. That would be another thing he could do that's feasible.

Good points both.

My big concern is that Newsom ends up doing something more flashy than useful in response to this. Hopefully he realizes he has options and deploys helpful ones.

This thread is giving me vivid flashbacks of rolling blackouts & Cruz Bustamante.

the EDD situation is AFAICT 100% his responsibility

https://newrepublic.com/article/161212/gavin-newsom-covid-california-recall

Just an incredible story in @latimes about nightmare facing state’s UI workers

Endless nights; completely overwhelmed; stretched to the breaking point.

3K workers answering 3 million calls a week

1,590 employees of California’s UI system have quithttps://t.co/XJjj2S9XyQ

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) February 13, 2021

jfc what a fuck up

https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2021/02/13/california-democrats-scramble-to-fight-recall-and-close-ranks-1363311

xp - omg seriously - we have more people eligible for unemployment and collecting benefits than the entire populations of some 1st world countries. All I gotta say is "at least we're not Texas"

Gonna be close (see thread)

BREAKING: We have an OFFICIAL recall update. Proponents submitted 370,000 raw signatures Jan-Feb to get them to 670K total valid

— Jeremy B. White, cat attorney JD (@JeremyBWhite) February 20, 2021

the Gavin Newsom recall effort is bullshit

makes me doubt your other posts caek

He only has himself to blame if he gets recalled. He’s terrible at all aspects of his job. But I don’t support the recall.

He has presided over the collapse of the CA DMV and EDD, and the almost total failure of the California Democratic Party’s ballot measure agenda at the state level in 2020. He is bad at his job as executive and leader of the party.

If he gets recalled none of this will be why, and the person who replaces him will be worse. But he’ll deserve it.

"He has presided over the collapse of the CA DMV and EDD and the almost total failure of the California Democratic Party’s ballot measure agenda at the state level in 2020. He is bad at his job as executive and leader of the party."

don't agree with any of that

Dan S u are wrong as usual, caek otm also as usual

don't think caek is otm, but ok

don't agree with any of that

as a former San Franciscan, I still have that 20+ year old grudge against Gavin from the 2000 mayoral race, but honestly -- he just had the bad luck to be governor for Covid and all these things that are going wrong/went wrong, wouldn't have gone well for anyone in that office -- people would have moved to recall whatever governor -- except for maybe Jerry Brown had he been in office -- they would've just said, dude you're old, retire now.

I do wonder if Jerry Brown is sitting in his very stylish home these days and thinking, "For once, this is not my problem"

don't know about EDD but how has the DMV collapsed? they still renewed my license and registration this past year. I can't make an appointment to get my Real ID, but at this point who gives a fuck

don't agree with any of that

...

don't know about EDD

?

I too am unaware of this collapse of the DMV -- I think everything dealing with to open or to not re-open public schools is more of a big deal to people

i don't hold most of the the covid stuff against him (although tbh the french laundry stuff can go in the "he only has himself to blame" pile), but no other state's EDD's collapsed this year AFAICT and he is the executive responsible for that.

granted the DMV problems pre-date newsom, but he hasn't fixed them (he fired the leadership after the 2019 audit so he appears to have tried and failed), but he's on record as saying this:

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom called the wait times a disgrace Wednesday in a meeting with The Times’ editorial board, adding that the next governor deserves to be recalled if he doesn’t fix the DMV. Newsom, who is a candidate for that job himself, is right that it will be the job of the governor, since it seems the Legislature isn’t up to the task.

so yeah.

agreed xp. the public school stuff (and general covid libertarian stuff) is helping the broadly right wing recall movement, along with the usual rubbish about "high taxes".

but his failure to successfully implement democratic priorities or do the executive basics competently is why he has so little help fighting the recall so far. i realize i'm a broken record on this, and i'm not surprised if people don't click all these links i post, but here's a long article about exactly that: https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2021/02/13/california-democrats-scramble-to-fight-recall-and-close-ranks-1363311.

read that opinion piece in the LA Times about Su's ineptitude as head of the EDD

su was secretary of labor, not director of EDD.

but that notwithstanding, newsom appointed su and retained her in her post through all this, never taking any action. if she was that inept (no idea) then that's on newsom.

the EDD director was not fired. she retired with benefits at the end of last year after no one fired her.

i don't know whether the director of the EDD reports to secretary of labor or directly to newsom, but newsom is morally and practically responsible for failures of the executive branch. if that's not true, someone should tell him.

EDD could barely keep up in normal times. As noted above there are all kinds of reasons to dislike Newsom but hanging EDD on him is up there with recalling Chesa Boudin for despoiling the crime-free paradise that SF was before he took office.

I do wonder if Jerry Brown is sitting in his very stylish home these days and thinking, "For once, this is not my problem"

before the election he said literally said "good luck, baby" to whoever his successor was

EDD could barely keep up in normal times.

i dunno. i have had PFL twice. once before covid and once last summer. before covid they paid out on time. last summer the EDD payments were delayed by 3 months. so from a sample of 1, they could keep up in normal times.

in any case...

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-01-26/edd-audit-california-unemployment-benefits-unprepared

a shock recession isn't his fault. EDD's lack of preparation for that possibility is not *totally* his fault (although tbh he's been #2 of the executive branch for 10 years, so it kind of is, in the same way it's not crazy to hold stuff that happened under obama against biden).

but whatever he's done to fix it is demonstrably not enough, and letting the director and secretary of labor retire and fail upwards respectively is to me a sign he's not doing enough.

i doubt Jerry is envying current Oakland mayor, Libby Schaaf right now either ...

the big Rental Assistance Program is on its way ... who knows whether it will be implemented well or whether it will be the mess that is the EDD rn

Jerry Brown was on KQED radio a few weeks ago but I was too busy to listen to it, I do wonder what he said.

I also think the recall is stupid and I also don't think it will succeed, because R's will run more than one person and I don't think any Dems will run against Newsom. But I agree that Newsom brought this on himself and he didnt do himself any favors by not having normal press conferences for much of this year and releasing major announcements of things on Tik Tok.

Only 3.7% or 4,264 of recorded address changes in five Bay Area counties went out of state, suggesting "exodus" is mostly hype. 72% stayed in Bay Area: https://t.co/xYrBfWnimS w/ @susieneilson

(USPS excluded batches from one zip code to another of 10 or less) pic.twitter.com/twAegdAdsA

— Roland Li (@rolandlisf) March 1, 2021

Also, the boys' acne masks were not blackface, which is also reassuring

@caek, some anecdotal data:

A friend of mine went to the largest UHaul yard in SF a week ago to reserve a truck for yesterday for an intracity move and was told by the manager that their truck inventory is ~10% of normal and that it is taking them about 5-6 weeks to get the trucks back to SF.

huh. i wonder if that's the winter weather rather than a covid exodus

anecdotal also but I only know one person (well, family) that have moved out of the bay area in the past year (they moved to Seattle)

Winter weather this past weekend was ~72F across the state so if you are to believe the USPS analysis that 72% of SF relocations were within the bay area it has to be something else (not ruling out Uhaul's internal inefficiencies haha).

i can imagine weather in the central US impacting something like uhaul in california, no shade on uhaul. whether it's enough to explain what you heard i dunno.

I have had zero good friends move out of SF during the past year (okay, a couple expecting a baby who went to the east bay to get a larger place.)

My spiteful guess is that there's a big split between recent tech transplants living in SoMA/FiDi, who bailed, vs people who actually like living in SF.