SB 51: the California politics thread

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.

oh there are a lot of people moving -- but it seems like (anecdotally) most are just moving to other places in California, mostly due to size and price.

On the way to take the kids to the playground, I passed a neighbor loading up two big moving trucks.

"Where y'all going?"

"Back to Michigan"

"Ah good luck"

(they were a couple that were on buses 2-3+ hours a day to work a couple area codes away)

anyways, take that Louis DeJoy & your change of address analysis!!!11 #harddataisgooddata

my backyard neighbors moved to Tahoe, I think to give themselves and their toddler some respite from the pandemic. They put their condominium up for sale months ago but don’t think it has sold yet.

I know having a child changes everything, but they have a great outdoor space and my guess is that they will want to move back as things return to normal

no measurable rain in socal in february and only 40% of the usual rainfall total since july. not looking forward to fire season this year. fix your hvac, stock up on furnace filters for the year, windows that seal, etc. before the summer rush.

There were some out of season 40-50mph gusts last week as well, fire "season" might soon be all year long in SoCal.

Some neighbors of my GF with small children are moving back to Washington D.C... but they seemed like half-hearted Californians anyway. They mostly stayed home and looked at their computers, which is likely what they'll do back east. I'd ask them if they'd visited Napa, Sonoma, the beach, San Francisco, pretty much anywhere: "No! that sounds fun! We'll have to go check those out!" after three years.

Could be the kids thing. I like to think that if I had kids, I wouldn't completely stop doing things outside the house, but a lot of people seem to.

my guess is that's not a "half-hearted californian" thing so much as a "half-hearted raising kids anywhere other than maybe half a dozen major cities on the east coast" thing.

parenting in DC/NYC/philly/boston is very different to parenting basically anywhere else in the US. if you're not into formally seeking out fun things to do, the outdoors, and driving kids to everything then i can easily imagine that difference being a negative.

SF is maybe the only city i'd put in this bucket outside the NE, and it obviously that has its own challenges if you have kids (i.e. $$$$).

I think they actually owned a home in DC (renting on the Peninsula) and had family back there to help them with the toddlers. He came out for a tech job, she found one, and then Covid allowed them to move back there and keep the jobs.

All of which I completely understand; they just seemed very cloistered in CA, even before the pandemic.

speaking from experience, it's pretty easy to end up cloistered if you're from a city and you have kids in the suburbs (which is what most of CA, including the cities, for the purposes of my point).

Which may well be behind the whole mythical "California Exodus"; I doubt it includes many CA natives or longtime residents.. it's probably mainly people who've moved here fairly recently. The San Francisco Chronicle recently profiled some techbro douche who moved here four years ago and had had enough: "Things have gotten so bad," perhaps not realizing that SF has been a really scruffy city since about 1851.

those people are young/white/rich so they get written about.

but people are leaving california from LA and orange counties at twice the rate per capita they're leaving from SF or alameda counties.

seems like it's mostly a mixture of the white conservatives with families (e.g. https://calmatters.org/economy/2020/09/anti-california-dream-moving-industry/) and young CA natives who can't afford to live near their parents.

as a group, “CA natives or longtime residents” have greater housing security/affordability than recent arrivals. but sure, it’s fun to point and laugh when more recent arrivals can’t get a foothold.

as a group, “CA natives or longtime residents” have greater housing security/affordability than recent arrivals.

uh, that is not a good generalization ... unless by "recent arrivals" you are referring to immigrants, refugees, and homeless people

maybe if you modify that to "white" CA natives or longtime residents ...