Imagine if a candidate for, say, the California Assembly appeared at a political event and delivered the following remarks:
“No to kosher meat. No to yarmulkes. No to celebrating Easter. No, no, no.”
He, or she, would be roundly — and rightly — criticized for their bigotry and raw prejudice.
Recently, at a candidates forum outside Dallas, Larry Brock expressed the following sentiments as part of a lengthy disquisition on the Muslim faith.
“We should ban the burqa, the hijab, the abaya, the niqab,” said the candidate for state representative, referring to the coverings worn by some Muslim women. “No to halal meat. No to celebrating Ramadan. No, no, no.”
For many Texas Republicans running in the March 3 primary, Islamophobia has become a central portion of their election plank, as a longtime political lance — illegal immigration — has grown dull around its edges.
Aaron Reitz, a candidate for attorney general, aired an ad accusing politicians of importing “millions of Muslims into our country.”
“The result?” he says, with a tough-guy glower. “More terrorism, more crime. And they even want their own illegal cities in Texas to impose sharia law.” (More on that in a moment.)
One of his opponents, Republican Rep. Chip Roy — co-founder of the “Sharia-Free America Caucus” — has called for amending the Texas Constitution to protect the state’s tender soil from Islamification by “radical Marxists.”
In the fierce GOP race for U.S. Senate, incumbent John Cornyn — facing a potentially career-ending challenge from state Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton — has aired one TV spot accusing his fellow Republican of being “soft on radical Islam” and another describing radical Islam “as a bloodthirsty ideology.”
Paxton countered by calling Cornyn’s assertions a desperate attack “that can’t erase the fact that he helped radical Islamic Afghans invade Texas,” a reference to a visa program that allowed people who helped U.S. forces — in other words friends and allies — to come to America after being carefully screened.
In just the latest instance, Democrats are calling for the censure of Florida Republican Rep. Randy Fine after he wrote Sunday on X: “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” He’s since doubled down by posting several images of dogs with the words “Don’t tread on me.”
In Texas, the venom starts at the top with Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who’s waltzing toward reelection to an unprecedented fourth term.
Not to be out-demagogued, Bo French, a candidate for Texas Railroad Commission, called on President Trump to round up and deport every Muslim in America. (French, the former Tarrant County GOP chair, gained notoriety last year for posting an online poll asking, “Who is a bigger threat to America?” The choice: Jews or Muslims.)
Much of the Republican hysteria has focused on a proposed real estate development in a corn- and hayfield 40 miles east of Dallas.
The master-planned community of about 1,000 homes, known as EPIC City, was initiated by the East Plano Islamic Center to serve as a Muslim-centered community for the region’s growing number of worshipers. (Of course, anyone could choose to live there, regardless of their religious faith.)
Paxton said he would investigate the proposed development as a “potentially illegal ‘Sharia City.’ ” The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development last week jumped in with its own investigation — a move Abbott hailed — after the Justice Department quietly closed a probe into the project, saying developers agreed to abide by federal fair housing laws. That investigation came at the behest of Cornyn.
The rampant resurgence of anti-Muslim sentiment hardly seems coincidental.
What’s more, cracking down on immigration no longer brings together Republicans the way it once did.
General support for Trump’s get-tough policies surpasses 80% among Texas Republicans, said Henson, who’s spent nearly two decades sampling public opinion in the state. But support falls dramatically, into roughly the high-40s to mid-50s, when it comes to specifics such as arresting people at church, or seizing them when they make required court appearances.
“Republicans need to find something else that taps into those cultural-identity issues” and unifies and animates the GOP base, said Henson.
In short, the fearmongers need a new scapegoat.
Muslims are about 2% of the adult population in Texas, according to the Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study, completed in 2024. That works out to estimates ranging from 300,000 to 500,000 residents in a state of nearly 32 million residents.
Not a huge number.
But enough for heedless politicians hell-bent on getting themselves elected, even if it means tearing down a whole group of people in the process.
Los Angeles city officials may be empowered to remove homeless encampments from hillside areas at severe risk of fire, even without the property owner’s permission, under a proposal that the City Council moved forward on Tuesday.
The proposal would allow the city to remove hazardous materials, including homeless encampments, from private property in hillside areas in “Very High Fire Severity Zones,” including in the Santa Monica and Verdugo Mountains.
By an 11-3 vote, the council directed the city attorney to draft changes to the municipal code, which the council will then vote on at a later date.
“Prevention [of fires] is the most cost-effective tool we have,” said Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, who sponsored the proposal. “When we are in imminent threat of wildfires, especially as it relates to or is exacerbated by these types of encampments, we have a duty to act.”
Rubbish fires, many related to homeless encampments, have skyrocketed over the last several years, according to Los Angeles Fire Department data. Rodriguez said there have been five wildfires in her northeast San Fernando Valley district since she took office in 2017, though none was caused by an encampment.
Between 2018 and 2024, about 33% of all fires in the city, and more than 40% of rubbish fires, involved homeless Angelenos, according to the LAFD.
Rodriguez said the city is often left flat-footed when encampments pop up on hillsides and property owners don’t help address the issue.
“If a private property owner is not responsive, it puts the rest of the hillside community under threat,” Rodriguez said in an interview.
Rodriguez’s motion said it’s often difficult for city departments, including police and fire, to get permission from property owners to enter.
“It can take weeks to determine property ownership and to obtain the necessary signoffs from property owners to access the property, causing unnecessary delays and increasing the risk for a serious fire and threats to public safety,” the motion reads.
Some council members argued that while they agreed with the intent of the proposal, some details needed to be addressed.
Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez — who voted against the proposal — said he was concerned that homeless people would end up getting shuffled around the city.
“What I don’t want to see is this being used as a tool to push homeless folks from one side of the street to the other side of the street,” he said before casting his vote.
Soto-Martínez said he wouldn’t vote for the proposal until the city developed a definition of what a fire hazard is.
Councilmember Ysabel Jurado also voted against the proposal, saying she wanted the council to do more research before changing the municipal code.
Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez was the third “no” vote.
WASHINGTON — President Bush marked Black History Month Saturday with a promise to deliver big funding increases to black colleges “even in a time of recession and war.”
Bush, who won less than 10% of the black vote in the 2000 election but has seen his popularity soar since the Sept. 11 attacks, used his weekly radio address to urge Americans to “reflect on the contributions of African Americans.”
Bush sought to assure black leaders he would not renege on a promise to increase funding for historically black colleges and Latino-serving institutions by 30% by 2005.
He also touted the education reforms enacted last month to help narrow the achievement gap between low-income students and their wealthier counterparts. “We have come far, and we have a way yet to go,” Bush said.
“Today we are fighting for freedom in a new way and on new battlefields. And we continue to press for equal opportunity for every American here at home. We want every American to be educated up to his or her full potential,” Bush said.
According to some polls, Bush’s support from blacks more than doubled after the Sept. 11 attacks. Eager to hold on to these gains, the White House has stepped up its outreach to black leaders.
But Bush has come under fire from Democrats, including prominent black lawmakers, for proposing deep cuts in job training and other domestic programs in his fiscal 2003 budget in order to fund more tax cuts and the biggest military buildup in two decades. The 2003 fiscal year begins Oct. 1.
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), in the Democrats’ weekly radio address, said Congress will “stand shoulder to shoulder” with Bush to fight terrorism, but he blasted Bush’s proposed budget for bringing back deficits.
“Part of national security is economic security,” Conrad said. “The problem with the president’s budget is that his plan will return us to deficit spending–not just today, but for years to come.”
Comparing Bush’s budget to collapsed energy giant Enron Corp., Conrad accused Bush of making “the Enron mistake: underestimating our debt and endangering retirement benefits.”
Many Democrats charge that the $1.35-trillion, 10-year tax cut Bush pushed through Congress last year was too costly, imperiling the Social Security retirement program and the Medicare health care program for the elderly as the baby boom generation nears retirement.
The Bush administration defended its proposed cutbacks as part of an effort to shift federal resources away from what the White House deemed wasteful programs.
WASHINGTON — In a simple ceremony attended by their families and a few well-known friends, Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum and former Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr. were married Saturday, the first time two people who served in the Senate have ever tied the knot.
“She was beautiful, he was handsome, and they were happy,” said former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, who attended the wedding with his wife, Honey, at St. Alban’s Church in Washington.
The bride, 64, who is retiring in a few weeks after serving three Senate terms from Kansas, wore a dark purple dress just below knee length, accented by rolled pearls. Baker, 71, who served three Senate terms from Tennessee ending in 1985, wore a navy blue suit, white shirt, and navy tie with small yellow dots.
Viewed through the glass outer doors of the church, the couple clasped hands before the ceremony and then walked together down the aisle of the stone church, which is adjacent to the huge National Cathedral.
The 15-minute ceremony before 80 guests was performed by former Sen. John Danforth of Missouri, an ordained Episcopal priest, and the Rev. Martha Anne Fairchild, a Presbyterian minister from Baker’s hometown of Huntsville, Tenn.
The matron of honor was Kassebaum’s daughter, Linda Johnson. Baker’s son Darek was best man.
After sealing their marriage with a kiss and greeting guests, the newlyweds came outside in a steady, cold rain to talk to reporters. Kassebaum said she wasn’t nervous, but Baker felt a little differently.
“I’ve been nervous for days,” he said.
Aside from their families, guests at the wedding included former First Lady Barbara Bush, former Kansas Sen. Bob Dole and his wife, Elizabeth, former ambassador Robert S. Strauss and former Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger.
The couple planned a honeymoon, but wouldn’t reveal where they will go.
SACRAMENTO — After months of partisan warfare and weeks of hard-nosed bargaining, Gov. Pete Wilson signed into law a historic reform package Monday transforming welfare in California into a program that provides only temporary aid to the poor and requires work in return for assistance.
With legislative leaders standing at his elbow, the Republican governor formally set into motion revolutionary changes in the welfare law that will affect 2.3 million people, mostly women and children, who depend on government assistance for the basic necessities of life.
“This was not an easy task, but in the end the effort produced a solution based on very sound and very equitable principles,” Wilson said. “From now on public assistance in California will be temporary, it will be a transition, it will be strictly time-limited.”
The new program, named CalWORKS and slated to take effect Jan. 1, 1998, will limit to 24 months the time that current recipients can be on aid. It also will provide community service positions for those who reach that limit and cannot find work, require recipients to participate in job searches and job training, and penalize those who refuse to accept a valid job offer.
Mirroring a federal welfare reform act passed almost exactly a year ago, the program sets a five-year lifetime limit for adults to receive aid, but at the same time it obligates the state to make massive investments in job training and child care to ease their movement into the work force.
In the first year alone, state officials estimate that $1.3 billion will be spent on child care and $530 million on employment.
Because of the investments in child care and training, the $7-billion-plus welfare program initially will not produce savings. And, in the first year, the legislative analyst estimates that welfare spending will increase by $223 million.
But the program–designed to comply with the new federal law–is expected to significantly reduce welfare rolls in the next five years and result in cost reductions.
“In a vibrant economy that creates jobs and enables entry-level workers to climb the ladder of success,” Wilson said, “we have a duty to encourage [welfare recipients] to escape from dependency to the independence and dignity of work.”
Smiling legislative leaders, many of whom only a week ago were exchanging barbs with the governor, praised the reform package as an example of compromise at its best.
“Today we put behind us politics and enacted a bipartisan welfare reform plan,” said Assembly Speaker Cruz Bustamante (D-Fresno). “CalWORKS is a tough and fair plan that makes welfare what those of us in the middle have always thought it should be–temporary help to let families get back on their feet.”
Senate President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward) said the high-level bargaining between legislators and the governor had forced them to find a middle ground that “appropriately combines the doctrines of personal responsibility, market discipline and humanitarian efforts to help those who are needy.”
But amid the enthusiasm, he sounded a cautionary note, warning that the real test of their compromise would come at the county level, where the reforms would have to be implemented in the next few years.
“We hope [these] efforts will survive the next economic downturn,” he said.
Left undone in the reform package, said Sen. Mike Thompson (D-St. Helena), one of the authors of the legislation, was any attempt to create the low-level jobs that welfare recipients will need if they are to leave welfare.
Even California’s current robust economy, he said, does not produce hundreds of thousands of jobs that will be needed in the coming years to provide employment for recipients who move out of the welfare system.
“I am struck by the fact,” said Assemblyman Roy Ashburn (R-Bakersfield), “that while this seems like the end, it is really but the beginning.”
In recognition of the new responsibilities that the law places on counties, Wilson flew later in the day to Los Angeles County, which has a welfare population that is larger than the entire populations of more than half the states.
“We have a lot riding on the success of this program,” said County Board of Supervisors Chairman Zev Yaroslavsky. “We have to place tens of thousands of people into jobs in the coming weeks and months, but it can be done.”
Calling the new reform act a “testament to what happens when both parties try to find out what they have in common,” Yaroslavsky said passage of the act should not be considered a belittlement of welfare recipients.
“People who are on public assistance should not all be painted with one negative brush,” he said. “Most of the people we have on public assistance today want to work. They are productive and talented. They just need a chance and, given a chance, they will perform.”
Herman Mancera, a single father of two who appeared at the news conference with Wilson and Yaroslavsky, said that, after receiving assistance for four years, he had been able to move into a job program sponsored by United Airlines for welfare recipients.
“It feels great being able to be part of the work force again,” Mancera said.
HARRISBURG, Pa. — A federal judge in Pennsylvania on Saturday threw out a lawsuit filed by President Trump’s campaign, dismissing its challenges to the battleground state’s poll-watching law and the campaign’s efforts to limit how mail-in ballots can be collected and which of them can be counted.
Elements of the ruling by U.S. District Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan could be appealed by Trump’s campaign, with just over three weeks to go until election day in a state hotly contested by Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
The lawsuit was opposed by Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration, the state Democratic Party, the League of Women Voters, the NAACP’s Pennsylvania office and other allied groups.
“The court’s decision today affirms what we’ve long known, that Pennsylvania’s elections are safe, secure and accurate, and residents can vote on Nov. 3 with confidence that their votes will be counted and their voices heard,” Wolf’s office said in a statement.
“The ruling is a complete rejection of the continued misinformation about voter fraud and corruption and those who seek to sow chaos and discord ahead of the upcoming election,” the statement added.
However, Trump’s campaign indicated in a statement that it would appeal and looked forward to a quick decision “that will further protect Pennsylvania voters from the Democrats’ radical voting system.”
The lawsuit is one of many partisan battles being fought in the state Legislature and the courts over mail-in voting amid the prospect that a presidential election result could be delayed for days by a drawn-out vote count in Pennsylvania.
In this case, Trump’s campaign wanted the court to bar counties from collecting mail ballots using drop boxes or mobile sites that are not “staffed, secured and employed consistently within and across all 67 of Pennsylvania’s counties.”
More than 20 counties — including Philadelphia and most other heavily populated Democratic-leaning counties — have told the state elections office that they plan to use drop boxes and satellite election offices to help collect mail-in ballots.
Trump’s campaign also wanted the court to free county election officials to disqualify mail-in ballots where the voter’s signature may not match their signature on file and to remove a county residency requirement for poll watchers.
In guidance last month, Wolf’s top elections official told counties that state law does not require or permit them to reject a mail-in ballot solely over a perceived signature inconsistency.
The Trump campaign had asked Ranjan to declare that guidance unconstitutional and to block counties from following it.
In throwing out the case, Ranjan wrote that the Trump campaign could not prove its central claim that election fraud in Pennsylvania threatened to cost Trump the election and that adopting the changes the campaign sought would remove that threat.
“While plaintiffs may not need to prove actual voter fraud, they must at least prove that such fraud is ‘certainly impending,’” Ranjan wrote. “They haven’t met that burden. At most, they have pieced together a sequence of uncertain assumptions.”
Ranjan also cited decisions in recent days by the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in hot-button election cases, saying he should not second-guess decisions by state lawmakers and election officials.
The decision comes as Trump claims he can’t lose the state unless Democrats cheat, and, as he did in the 2016 campaign, suggests that the Democratic bastion of Philadelphia needs to be watched closely for election fraud.
Democrats counter that Trump is running on a conspiracy theory of election fraud because he cannot win on his own record of fraud and mismanagement.
WASHINGTON — The death of liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg could allow legal conservatives to take full control of the Supreme Court for a decade or more, imposing a historic shift to the right with vast implications for U.S. jurisprudence and society at large.
A conservative court could use its majority to overturn Roe vs. Wade, which guarantees a woman’s right to abortion, and strike down Obamacare and its promise of health insurance for millions, including those with preexisting conditions.
A more conservative court would be likely to strike down affirmative action laws and many current gun control regulations, possibly including laws in California that limit the carrying of firearms in public or restrict the sale of semiautomatic rifles.
After decades of frequent 5-4 decisions that kept a relative balance in major court rulings, a decisive 6-3 conservative majority also could stand in the way of future progressive legislation from Congress.
President Trump said Saturday he expects to nominate a new justice in the coming week to succeed Ginsburg and he indicated it would be another woman. He predicted the necessary Senate hearings and confirmation vote will go “very quickly,” although he did not offer a timeline.
If Democrats score big wins in November and capture the Senate, they are likely to press ahead in Congress with proposals to expand social programs and put new taxes and regulation on corporations and the wealthy.
But even if passed into law, those measures will face legal challenges from the right.
In the past, it was often said the future of the Supreme Court depended on the outcome of the presidential election. The winner of White House would have four years to fill vacant seats on the court.
But in this presidential election year, conservatives could win a lock on the high court for a generation even if Trump is soundly defeated by Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
The outcome will turn on whether Senate Republicans will march in line behind Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to confirm a conservative jurist by the end of the year. That’s far from certain, but Trump is hoping to make it a reality.
The high court now has five Republican appointees who lean right, and none appears likely to retire anytime soon. The youngest, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, is 53, and the eldest, Justice Clarence Thomas, is 72.
Liberals breathed easier this summer when Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who is 65, joined with Ginsburg and the court’s other liberals to strike down a Louisiana abortion law, to block Trump’s repeal of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program for young immigrants known as “Dreamers,” and to uphold rights for LGBTQ employees.
In doing so, the chief justice sent the message that he wanted to steer the court on a middle course and avoid a sharp turn to the right.
That meant the retirement of moderate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy in July 2018, and the Senate confirmation three months later of the more conservative Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, 55, have had little impact on the court’s direction so far.
But if Trump can replace the liberal Ginsburg with a solidly conservative jurist in her 40s, the court would have five reliably conservative votes without the chief justice.
That would cast doubt on the future of Roe vs. Wade, the abortion ruling that has been a target of the conservative legal movement since the 1980s.
At least half a dozen Republican-led states have adopted laws to ban some or nearly all abortions, hoping to force the more conservative Supreme Court to reconsider its precedent.
So far those laws have been struck down or put on hold. But that could change at any time.
Trump has also put dozens of new conservatives on U.S. appeals courts, including in the South and the Midwest. If one of those courts were to uphold a state abortion ban, it would send the issue to the Supreme Court and force the justices to decide whether to uphold or strike down the right to abortion.
Ginsburg’s death has also raised new doubts about the future of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, the most far-reaching social legislation in a generation. The high court’s conservatives fell one vote short in 2012 of striking down the law.
On Nov. 10, a week after the election, the justices are scheduled to hear a constitutional challenge to the healthcare law that was widely seen as a long shot.
A conservative judge in Texas and a 2-1 appeals court ruling in New Orleans adopted the notion that the entire law may be voided as unconstitutional because Congress in 2017 voted to eliminate the penalty for not having insurance.
This was seen as a victory by conservatives, including Trump, because it effectively ended the much disputed “mandate” to have insurance.
The challengers, including Trump’s lawyers, argue that the mandate was crucial to the law and that all of it — including the protections for people with preexisting conditions — must fall with it.
The case is called California vs. Texas because California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra is leading the blue states’ defense of the law. The Trump administration has taken the side of the red-state challengers led by Texas.
Until Friday, that challenge looked highly doubtful, since Chief Justice Roberts and the four liberal justices had voted twice to uphold the law.
But Ginsburg’s death could lead to a 4-4 split, which would have the effect of upholding the lower-court ruling.
A more conservative court likely would also target some gun control laws.
For the last decade, the high court has said that Americans have a right to keep a gun at home for self-defense, but the justices have refused to go further and hear 2nd Amendment challenges to laws in California and elsewhere that limit the carrying of firearms in public or restrict the sale of semiautomatic rifles.
Four of the conservative justices have signaled they would like to hear challenges to those laws, but Roberts has balked.
A strengthened conservative court could also put in jeopardy affirmative action policies in colleges and universities nationwide. This comes as California voters weigh Proposition 16 and decide whether to repeal the state’s 1996 ban on affirmative action.
Roberts has long believed the government may not use race as a factor for awarding benefits or making other decisions, including the drawing of electoral districts. He has not won a majority for that view, however.
In 2016, shortly after Justice Antonin Scalia died, Kennedy joined with the liberal justices to uphold an affirmative action policy at the University of Texas.
That defeat did not end the battle. The same challengers who sued Texas launched a lawsuit against Harvard University alleging its admissions office regularly discriminates against Asian American applicants.
Regardless of the outcome in the federal courts in Boston, that case will be appealed to the Supreme Court, giving the court’s conservatives another opportunity to strike down affirmative action.
Harry C. Boyte is director of the Humphrey Institute’s Commonwealth Project to increase citizen participation and co-author of “Citizen Action and the New American Populism” (Temple, 1986)
Jesse Jackson’s overwhelming victory in the recent Michigan Democratic primary may well have “blown the minds of party leaders,” as Dan Rather put it on the evening news. But it clearly didn’t do much for their understanding. Party professionals and political pundits continued to use words like “weird” and “wacky” to describe Jackson’s growing support. In fact, Jesse Jackson represents a vintage American phenomenon consistently overlooked and misunderstood by the experts: He is an authentic populist. His appeal is far broader–and different–than can be summed up in labels like “liberal” or “left wing.”
Put simply, as his message has matured this year, Jackson combines protests against what is happening with a positive and hopeful vision of what America can become. “Populism” is a term that has been much bandied about this election season, used to cover everything from Richard Gephardt’s call to “get tough” with trade competitors to Albert Gore’s declaration that he “stands with working men and women.” Populism as a fashionable label means “us against them,” the little guy against the big shots.
But Jesse Jackson’s populism is far from simple-minded complaint. The first Populists were black and white farmers who made an alliance in the 1880s to save rural communities and their ways of life from the stranglehold of banks, railroads and merchants. Like theirs, Jackson’s protest goes to the heart of what America stands as a society. Drawing on the rich black church tradition that has always had the pathetic prophetic capacity to point to the clash between American ideals and realities, Jackson speaks to people’s anxiety that America has begun to abandon crucial, defining values.
Here, his challenge to the violence of drugs and unemployment is reinforced by his campaign itself, a low-budget “people’s alternative” to politics as the marketing of slickly packaged personalities. When Jackson says his victories represent “flesh and blood” winning out over “money and computers,” he connects not only with people who have been economically left behind in the Reagan years. His message also resonates with millions who worry that local communities and ordinary citizens are endangered by a high-tech culture that idolizes the rich and famous.
Further, Jackson, like the first Populists, does not simply protest. He also issues an empowering call for responsibility. In the face of a good deal of initial resistance from some black groups, Jackson this election season has preached that the preeminent issue today is not racism, but economic justice that calls for corporations to be accountable for actions that affect workers and the community welfare. He calls upon black and white youths to take positive action against drugs and teen-age pregnancy. He challenges his audiences to act to overcome racial hostility. Moreover, Jackson emphasizes not only increased personal responsibility but also the need for a renewed sense of collective economic responsibility as well.
The Populists of the 1880s and 1890s envisioned a “cooperative commonwealth” in which private property would be seen as a civic obligation and where citizens would commonly assume responsibility for the foundations of economic life like basic utilities, transportation and communication systems. This tradition continued in the 20th Century, in the arguments of Presidents like Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, that property is a “public trust” beholden to the commonwealth.
Jackson stands clearly in this tradition. His cause for “economic power-sharing” and “reinvestment in America” are given specific meaning in his proposals to repair America’s basic economic infrastructure. Indeed he has been the only candidate to date to talk about what the National Council on Public Works Improvement recently documented in its report to Congress and the President: Our roads and waste facilities and waterways and other essential foundations have been gravely jeopardized in recent years by a spirit of neglect and careless “privatization”.
Thus Jackson’s populism points out a widespread uneasiness about what’s wrong today and offers some concrete and constructive things to do about it. Whatever the outcome of the nominating process, he has broken fresh ground and revitalized an old vibrant tradition. American politics will never be the same.
Ian Choudri, CEO of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, was arrested Feb. 4 at his home on suspicion of domestic battery. He took an administrative leave on Tuesday, Feb. 17.
SACRAMENTO — The head of California’s High-Speed Rail Authority took a voluntary leave Tuesday after news reports circulated about his recent arrest on suspicion of domestic battery against a spouse.
Ian Choudri was arrested Feb. 4 at his Folsom home in the 500 block of Borges Court.
The rail authority said in a statement Tuesday that Choudri agreed to take a temporary leave to allow its board of directors and the California State Transportation Agency to review and assess the situation.
Choudri’s attorney said Monday that the Sacramento County district attorney’s office declined to file charges in the case. Police were called to Choudri’s home by a third party, Choudri’s attorney told The Times.
“This matter is over and no further action will be taken,” said Allen Sawyer, who is representing Choudri.
The district attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Choudri is among the highest-paid state employees in California, having earned $563,000 last year, according to payroll records obtained by The Times from the state controller’s office.
The High-Speed Rail Authority did not answer a question about whether Choudri would receive pay during his absence.
The board of directors is scheduled to meet next on March 4.
The day before his arrest, Choudri had appeared with Gov. Gavin Newsom in Kern County to announce the completion of a 150-acre facility that would serve as a hub for construction of the high-speed rail project in the San Joaquin Valley.
California’s grand vision for a bullet train, originally to connect San Francisco to Los Angeles, has become a flash point in national politics.
President Trump and Republicans have seized on the billions of dollars in cost overruns and slow progress to cast the project as a Democratic boondoggle and waste of taxpayer money.
Newsom, eager to show some advancement before he leaves office, has refocused construction on building a segment from Merced to Bakersfield. His office said earlier this month that 119 miles were under construction and 58 structures, including bridges, overpasses and viaducts, have been completed.
The California High-Speed Rail Authority’s Board of Directors approved Choudri as chief executive in August 2024. Newsom praised the decision and commended his more than 30 years of experience in the transportation sector.
Choudri replaced former CEO Brian Kelly, who retired. Choudri joined the agency from HNTB Corp., an infrastructure design firm where he previously held the position of senior vice president.
Choudri did not respond to requests for comment. Newsom’s office directed questions to the High-Speed Rail Authority.
During Stephen Colbert’s Monday night monologue on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” he carried on per usual, introducing the Late Show Band and his guest Jennifer Garner. He then posed the question, “You know who is not one of my guests tonight?”
The late-night host was meant to have Texas state representative James Talarico on the show. But he said on air that he was “told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast.”
He continued on to explain the FCC’s new guidance for equal time rules under its Chairman Brendan Carr. The rules require broadcasters who feature political candidates to provide the same time to their rivals, if requested. Typically, news content, daytime and late-night talk shows have been excluded from these regulations, as it’s been an informal tradition for presidential candidates to make their rounds on various late-night shows.
But the FCC under Carr, who has made no secret of his intention to carry out an agenda that is aligned with President Trump’s wishes, has questioned whether late-night and daytime talk shows deserve an exemption from the equal-time rules for broadcast stations using the public airwaves. Many legal and media experts have said a stricter application of the rule would be hard to enforce and could stifle free speech
“Let’s just call this what it is. Donald Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV, because all Trump does is watch TV,” said Colbert Monday night.
Earlier this year, ABC’s “The View” featured Talarico, as well as his main rival and fellow Democrat Jasmine Crockett. Talarico is currently facing off with Crockett and Ahmad Hassan in the Democratic primary for one of Texas’ two seats in the U.S. Senate. The FCC is also reportedly investigating his appearance on “The View.”
Experts consider the equal time rule to be antiquated, designed for a time when consumers were limited to a handful of TV channels and a dozen radio stations if they lived in a big city. The emergence of cable, podcasts and streaming audio and video platforms — none of which are subject to FCC restrictions in terms of content — have greatly diminished traditional broadcast media’s dominance in the marketplace. Carr has previously suggested that if TV hosts want to include political candidates in their programming, they can do it — just not on broadcast TV.
Colbert said he was taking Carr’s “advice” and revealed that his entire interview with Talarico was instead uploaded on YouTube. During the interview, Talarico calls out the Republican Party for initially running against “cancel culture.”
“Now they are trying to control what we watch, what we say, what we read. And this is the most dangerous kind of cancel culture, the kind that comes from the top,” said Talarico. “They went after ‘The View’ because I went on there. They went after Jimmy Kimmel for telling a joke they didn’t like. They went after you for telling the truth about Paramount’s bribe to Donald Trump.”
“The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” is leaving the air come May, signaling the end of CBS’s longstanding relationship with the late-night talk show. Its cancellation was a “purely financial decision,” according to CBS. But it also came at a time when Paramount Global, which owns CBS, was seeking regulatory approval from the Trump administration to sell itself to Skydance Media. The merger was finalized in August.
L.A. Times staff writer Stephen Battaglio contributed to this report.
The information cycle in Venezuela following Maduro’s capture by the US on January 3rd has moved at a stunning pace. In just weeks, the discussion of an amnesty law, the release of political prisoners, including high-profile figures such as Juan Pablo Guanipa, or the closure of El Helicoide have generated a steady stream of headlines that suggest plenty of movement.
Yet in Venezuela’s political history, first glances rarely tell the full story. A closer look reveals the traps embedded within those headlines: “liberations” that are in fact conditional releases, an amnesty bill that excludes many political prisoners and leaves key demands unmet, and the looming threat of new detentions, materialized in Guanipa’s re-arrest less than twelve hours after his release.
These gestures are not improvised. Since January 3rd, the leadership now headed by Delcy Rodríguez has invested heavily in projecting moderation and pragmatism abroad, positioning itself as the most viable partner for stability.
In that effort, the regime has often benefited, sometimes unintentionally, from the structure of international reporting itself. Part of this dynamic stems from the regime’s tight control over access, including restrictions on foreign correspondents and selective granting of exclusive interviews to chosen outlets. But it is also structural. In a polarized and fast-paced media environment, initial announcements often receive more attention than their aftermath, making it harder to trace how events unfold within the broader structure of power.
The regime understands this dynamic, and operates within it.
Confuse and conquer
What connects these episodes is not coincidence, but method. The regime frequently generates overlapping announcements, partial concessions, and selective gestures that make it difficult to follow the full sequence of events.
Over time, the regime’s leadership has learned that generating visible actions works. These actions do not need to be structural or transformative, they simply need to be striking enough to become discrete headline events. Once reported, the action itself becomes the story, while the broader context and sequencing often fade from view.
This dynamic is particularly visible in the management of the opposition. The regime has fostered divisions through multiple mechanisms, weakening cohesive action while presenting itself as conciliatory. The current National Assembly, for instance, includes figures labeled as opposition lawmakers despite significant opacity surrounding the electoral processes that brought them there, allowing the regime to project pluralism.
Shortened contextual memory, where events are reported but patterns are not continuously revisited, ultimately works to the regime’s advantage.
Similarly, dialogue initiatives involving individuals described as “moderate” opposition leaders are framed as evidence of a political opening, even when those actors lack a clear or broad mandate. In contrast, María Corina Machado and others who decline to participate are often portrayed as “radical”, not necessarily because of ideological extremism, but because they refuse to legitimize mechanisms that function primarily to buy time and reinforce the regime’s image.
The amnesty bill seems to show the same dynamic: it not only leaves many political prisoners out, but also risks fracturing victims’ groups by rewarding accommodation and penalizing refusal. However, once the “amnesty” headline circulates, the broader exclusions become secondary, and from the regime’s perspective, the immediate narrative gain may already be sufficient.
This tactic operates within a broader structural reality. Venezuela is politically complex and has been in crisis for decades. For international media outlets managing multiple global crises, sustained contextualization is difficult. Shortened contextual memory, where events are reported but patterns are not continuously revisited, ultimately works to the regime’s advantage.
Bias and competing agendas
International coverage has long interpreted Venezuela through familiar frameworks—authoritarianism, sanctions, polarization—rather than through the specific institutional degradation that defines the regime. This does not imply sympathy for the government. It simply flattens the crisis. When Venezuela is treated as another authoritarian state negotiating political transitions, the depth of institutional collapse and the entanglement of state power with coercive and illicit structures often receive less attention.
After January 3rd, this dynamic became more visible. Coverage focused heavily on the legality and geopolitical implications of Maduro’s capture, with comparatively less emphasis on the regime’s documented record of abuses. In a strongly polarized media climate, scrutiny of US actions often eclipsed scrutiny of the regime itself. That asymmetry contributed to a subtle relativization of the regime’s trajectory.
Separately, competing priorities within Washington shaped the policy debate and media coverage around Venezuela. Some actors emphasized engagement and economic opportunity, particularly regarding oil, presenting gestures such as prisoner releases as signs of rapid progress. President Trump echoed that framing, stating that political prisoners were being released at a rapid rate, at a time when Foro Penal had documented roughly 250 releases out of more than 800 detainees, most under restrictive conditions.
Differences in tone do not necessarily create media bias, but contribute to a fragmented narrative environment in which signals of progress and signals of caution circulate simultaneously.
Others adopted a more cautious position. During his deposition before the Senate, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated that Delcy Rodríguez’s leadership would be judged not on rhetoric but on actions, stressing that pace, conditions, and follow-through mattered.
These differences in tone do not necessarily create media bias, but contribute to a fragmented narrative environment in which signals of progress and signals of caution circulate simultaneously. That fragmentation has at times extended to portrayals of opposition figures themselves. Reports citing unnamed US officials have described frustrations with María Corina Machado’s positioning, implicitly framing her stance as complicating broader strategy. When unnamed officials are cited to express frustrations, rather than to disclose substantive policy shifts, the line between reporting and narrative shaping becomes blurred.
Judging by actions, and what follows
Rubio’s standard to judge by actions is reasonable. But in Venezuela, actions cannot be read in isolation. A release, a meeting, or a legislative proposal may be factual. Yet without context, timing, sequencing, and what unfolds around them, tactical adjustments can resemble structural change.
The case of Juan Pablo Guanipa makes this tension visible. His release contributed to the narrative of progress. The quick re-detention that came hours later disrupted it. The regime does not want mass mobilization in the streets, yet it also needs to project moderation abroad. When Guanipa mobilized, he forced the regime to choose between sustaining its international image and reasserting control at home, and it chose control.
Moments like this strip the strategy bare. There is no calibrated messaging capable of reconciling a re-arrest with claims of normalization. No sequencing trick can disguise it. While the regime can often manage headlines through partial gestures, episodes like Guanipa’s expose the underlying logic too clearly to blur.
That is also where the agency of Venezuelans becomes visible. When citizens and opposition figures test the boundaries of controlled concessions, they reveal whether those gestures signal transformation or merely delay. If the regime responds with repression, the narrative of change collapses. In that sense, the limits of the illusion are not determined only by media framing, but by how far Venezuelans are willing to push against it.
In Venezuela, actions do matter, but only when understood within their full context. Without that context, they risk becoming headlines that obscure more than they clarify.
PHILADELPHIA — In the first one-on-one debate of the 1988 Democratic presidential campaign, front-runner Michael S. Dukakis and his sole remaining adversary, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, both contended Friday night that it was too soon to discuss whether Dukakis should ask Jackson to be his running mate.
But the fact that the subject came up several times during the hourlong televised encounter, in advance of Tuesday’s presidential primary here in the Keystone State, reflected the degree to which Gov. Dukakis’ victory in the contest is widely considered all but assured. At the same time, the questions about Jackson’s becoming the first black to run on the national ticket of a major party were a measure of the impact the civil rights leader has had on the Democratic campaign.
‘Are You Interested?’
For their own differing reasons–Jackson because he is unwilling to have his presidential candidacy written off and Dukakis because he is leery of overconfidence–both men sought to dismiss the idea. Nevertheless, Dukakis twice during the debate leaned over to Jackson when the subject of the vice presidency was raised and asked: “Are you interested?”
While his comments brought laughter, as they were intended to, they also will inevitably fan speculation about what is certain to become the preoccupation of the two candidates and other Democratic leaders until the Atlanta convention in July is concluded.
When he was asked if he would accept an offer from Dukakis, Jackson said: “It’s a bit premature to be giving out coronation roses for the governor and taps for me.”
Jackson asserted that he and Dukakis were really in a “neck-and-neck contest,” contending that he trailed the governor by only about 170,000 votes after weeks of campaigning and made plain that he was not prepared to call it quits.
Pride of Accomplishment
“We’re sitting here side by side,” Jackson said of himself and Dukakis at one point, signaling not only his pride at what he had accomplished but his determination to press on. “But we’re not equal because I’ve come from furthest back to get here.”
And when Dukakis was asked about his ability to run well in the South, as a Northeastern governor, Jackson interjected: “With Mike Dukakis on my ticket we will win the South.”
Dukakis, when asked if he would choose Jackson to be his running mate, said: “My job right now is to work hard to win this nomination, and it is by no means won.”
In their first encounter since last Tuesday’s New York primary effectively eliminated Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore Jr. from the race and significantly fattened Dukakis’ lead in the race for delegates, both candidates aimed most of their shots past each other at the Reagan Administration and at the presumptive Republican standard-bearer, Vice President George Bush.
Thus when he was questioned about his plans to expand industry in Pennsylvania and other states that are in worse economic shape than his own Massachusetts, Dukakis criticized Reagan for threatening to veto the trade bill passed Thursday by the House because of its provision requiring a 60-day advance notice of plant shutdowns or layoffs.
Hits Reagan on Terrorism
And he also used a question on terrorism to condemn the Reagan Administration for trying to trade arms to Iran in the hope of gaining the release of U.S. hostages as “the worst possible thing we could have done.”
And Jackson attacked the Reagan Administration for its dealings with Panamanian strongman Manuel A. Noriega, whom he denounced as a drug dealer, and for what he charged was its general ineffectiveness in combatting drugs.
In one of the rare occasions that either of the two Democrats challenged each other, Jackson pressed Dukakis on whether the governor would apply his terrorist policy to South Africa after Dukakis said he would never negotiate with terrorists, even to save the lives of hostages and also said that if necessary he would order military strikes against terrorist base camps and support bases in other countries.
“If we are serious about international terrorism,” Dukakis said, the United States might have to launch such strikes. “I think a President who is serious about this,” Dukakis said, “can work with our allies and the international community to mount a very serious effort against terrorism.”
Questioned on South Africa
Jackson then contended that South Africa had committed aggression against several of the “front-line” African states on its borders and, declaring that such tactics amounted to “state terrorism,” asked Dukakis what his response would be.
Dukakis said he would be “very tough” on South Africa and would impose economic sanctions against that country but refused to say whether he would take military action.
Jackson also subtly needled Dukakis after the governor took credit for the prosperity in Massachusetts, which he referred to as “an economic miracle.”
Jackson noted that Dukakis and Massachusetts had the advantage of substantial federal investment and said that Democratic Gov. Robert P. Casey of Pennsylvania, who was in attendance at the debate sponsored by the state Democratic Party, “could have a boom too” under similar conditions.
Nithya Raman began her political career by defeating a well-funded incumbent with deep ties to the Democratic Party establishment.
Raman, an urban planner who was running to shake up the status quo, became the first person to oust a sitting councilmember in 17 years, stunning the Los Angeles political establishment with her defeat of David Ryu in 2020.
Now, with her surprise, last-minute entry into the mayor’s race, the 44-year-old Silver Lake resident is hoping to defeat another incumbent, Karen Bass, by expanding on the formula that led to her first upset victory.
“I was an outsider when I first ran, and I think I’ll be an outsider in this race,” Raman said after filing her candidate paperwork on Feb. 7, hours before the deadline.
But after six years at City Hall, Raman is no longer an outsider. She has her own record, which is in many ways intertwined with the mayor’s, particularly on homelessness, an issue the onetime allies have worked closely together to remedy.
As a City Council member, Raman, whose previous campaigns were backed by Democratic Socialists of America Los Angeles, has sometimes walked a political tightrope, exasperating her progressive base on issues like policing. Last week, she said that the LAPD must not shrink further — a substantial evolution from her “defund the police” declaration during her first run for council.
She has also frustrated some on the left by calling for changes to the city’s “mansion tax,” which she backed in 2022 but which she now says is getting in the way of much-needed development.
Raman shook up a mayoral race that was devoid of high-powered challengers after former L.A. schools Supt. Austin Beutner dropped out and L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath and billionaire developer Rick Caruso decided not to run.
“Nithya has shown that she can get votes. She’s going to be competitive,” said Bill Carrick, a longtime Democratic political consultant who worked on campaigns for former Mayors Eric Garcetti, James Hahn and Richard Riordan.
But her late entry will make it more difficult to get endorsements and raise money. With three months before ballots are mailed for the June 2 primary, she will have to work at double speed to build a campaign infrastructure and tap into bases that have helped her win before, from Hollywood supporters to DSA members and pro-housing advocates from the YIMBY — Yes in My Backyard — movement.
She has already missed DSA’s endorsement season. And last week, nine of her 14 City Council colleagues reiterated their endorsements of Bass, including another progressive council member, Hugo Soto-Martínez, who said he was “caught off-guard” by Raman’s “last-minute maneuver.”
Raman, who had also endorsed Bass, will have to combat hard feelings among some L.A. politicos who feel that her entry into the race is a betrayal of a mayor who helped her win reelection in 2024.
Raman has said that her decision to run was driven in part by her frustration with city leaders’ inability to get the basics right, such as fixing streetlights and paving streets.
Since launching her campaign, Raman has also joined a chorus of Angelenos criticizing Bass’ handling of the catastrophic Palisades fire, saying the city must be better prepared for major emergencies.
As the dust settles on her unexpected candidacy, political observers are assessing Raman’s prospects — both her strengths and the obstacles that stand between her and the mayor’s office.
Bass campaign spokesperson Douglas Herman declined to comment. A Raman campaign spokesperson, Jeff Millman, also declined to comment.
To win, Ryu said, Raman must tap into the strengths that helped propel her to victory in the past, including her prowess with social media.
“She couldn’t speak in front of crowds at the beginning. She was super nervous,” Ryu said. “But oh my God, her social media team, the production value of her videos. It’s a science.”
Raman’s 2020 campaign will be hard to replicate. That year, the council race focused not just on local policy but also on national issues such as #MeToo and the police murder of George Floyd, Ryu said. Big-name politicians weighed in, with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders endorsing Raman and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton endorsing Ryu.
The most important difference, Ryu said, is that Raman can no longer plausibly position herself as an outsider.
“Now there’s a record. It’s easy when you’re the activist fighting the system. But when you’re in there, you realize it’s a zero-sum game,” he said. “Do you want to trim trees and fix potholes or build housing? Sometimes that is the brutal reality.”
In the coming months, Raman will have to reach beyond her district, which stretches from Silver Lake to Reseda, introducing herself and her record to voters across the city. She began a media blitz in her first week as a candidate, doing interviews with NBC4, KNX News and The Times.
Her main goal should be to make it to the November runoff, said Mike Trujillo, a Democratic political consultant.
If no candidate among the roughly 40 running for mayor wins more than 50% of the vote in the June 2 primary, the top two finishers will move to the runoff.
A runoff would allow Raman a fresh start, with each candidate starting a new round of fundraising and pitching themselves to voters in a one-on-one contest.
“If it’s Nithya and Mayor Bass, they would both start at zero,” Trujillo said. “For a challenger, that is a godsend.”
That leaves political watchers doing the math of how the mayor and the councilmember could get to the runoff, and which candidates might block their way.
After Bass and Raman, the three biggest figures in the race are Spencer Pratt, Rae Huang and Adam Miller.
Pratt is a registered Republican whose house burned down in the Palisades fire. He has been sharply critical of the mayor’s handling of the fire and has gained traction with national Republicans, including allies of President Trump.
Of the more than 2 million registered voters in the city of Los Angeles, just under 15% were Republicans as of December 2025.
Mike Murphy, a Republican political consultant, thinks Pratt could get 19% to 21% of the vote, with a ceiling in the mid to high 20s.
“Not liking Karen does not make you a Republican,” Murphy said.
On the other side of the spectrum, community organizer Rae Huang has been running an unabashedly leftist campaign, calling for free buses and the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Huang has not been endorsed by DSA’s Los Angeles chapter, but she is a member of the organization.
In 2022, leftist Gina Viola won nearly 7% of the vote in the primary.
Trujillo, the Democratic consultant, said the other wild card is Adam Miller, the tech entrepreneur who has waded into the fight against homelessness. Miller could spend a significant amount of his own fortune in the race — as Caruso did against Bass in 2022.
If Pratt and Huang combine to take 25% and Miller can take somewhere in the 20% range, then Raman and Bass would have to worry about not making the runoff.
“Suddenly, you have a three-way jump ball,” Trujillo said.
Despite having more name recognition than some of her opponents, Raman will need to raise significant funds in a short time.
“My hope is that money will flow,” said Dave Rand, a land use attorney active on housing issues who supports Raman.
Rand said that developers and people in the YIMBY movement will support Raman, who has been a strong advocate for building more housing in Los Angeles.
Mott Smith, a developer and Raman supporter, said he believes fellow developers who know Raman will “gladly” contribute to her campaign.
Smith said he is concerned about Angelenos associating Raman with DSA, which could turn off more moderate voters.
“She will win if Los Angeles gets to know the pragmatic, solutions-oriented Nithya, as opposed to the cartoon image that one paints when they hear she is the latest of the DSA candidates to run for office here,” he said.
Connor Cipolla, an Eaton wildfire survivor, last year praised Southern California Edison’s plan of burying more than 60 miles of electric lines in Altadena as it rebuilds to reduce the risk of fire.
Then he learned he would have to pay $20,000 to $40,000 to connect his home, which was damaged by smoke and ash, to Edison’s new underground line. A nearby neighbor received an estimate for $30,000, he said.
“Residents are so angry,” Cipolla said. “We were completely blindsided.”
Other residents have tracked the wooden stakes Edison workers put up, showing where crews will dig. They’ve found dozens of places where deep trenches are planned under oak and pine trees that survived the fire. In addition to the added costs they face, they fear many trees will die as crews cut their roots.
“The damage is being done now and it’s irreversible,” homeowner Robert Steller said, pointing Maiden Lane to where an Edison crew was working.
For a week, Steller, who lost his home in the fire, parked his Toyota 4Runner over a recently dug trench. He said he was trying to block Edison’s crew from burying a large transformer between two towering deodar cedar trees. The work would “be downright fatal” to the decades-old trees, he said.
Altadena resident Robert Steller stands in front of his Toyota 4Runner that he parked strategically to prevent a Southern California Edison crew from digging too close to two towering cedar trees.
(Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times)
The buried lines are an upgrade that will make Altadena’s electrical grid safer and more reliable, Edison says, and it also will lower the risk that the company would have to black out Altadena neighborhoods during dangerous Santa Ana winds to prevent fires.
Brandon Tolentino, an Edison vice president, said the company was trying to find government or charity funding to help homeowners pay to connect to the buried lines. In the meantime, he said, Edison decided to allow owners of homes that survived the fire to keep their overhead connections until financial help was available.
Tolentino added that the company planned meetings to listen to residents’ concerns, including about the trees. He said crews were trained to stop work when they find tree roots and switch from using a backhoe to digging by hand to protect them.
“We’re minimizing the impact on the trees as we [put lines] underground or do any work in Altadena,” he said.
Although placing cables underground is a fire prevention measure, consumer advocates point out it’s not the most cost-effective step Edison can take to reduce the risk.
Undergrounding electric wires can cost more than $6 million per mile, according to the state Public Utilities Commission, far more than building overhead wires.
Because utility shareholders put up part of the money needed to pay for burying the lines, the expensive work means they will earn more profit. Last year, the commission agreed Edison investors could earn an annual return of 10.03% on that money.
Edison said in April it would spend as much as $925 million to underground and rebuild its grid in Altadena and Malibu, where the Palisades fire caused devastation. That amount of construction spending will earn Edison and its shareholders more than $70 million in profit before taxes — an amount billed to electric customers — in the first year, according to calculations by Mark Ellis, the former chief economist for Sempra, the parent company of Southern California Gas and San Diego Gas & Electric.
That annual return will continue over the decades while slowly decreasing each year as the assets are depreciated, Ellis said.
“They’re making a nice profit on this,” he said.
Tolentino said the company wasn’t doing the work to profit.
“The primary reason for undergrounding is the wildfire mitigation,” he said. “Our focus is supporting the community as they rebuild.”
It’s unclear if the Eaton fire would have been less disastrous if Altadena’s neighborhood power lines had been buried. The blaze ignited under Edison’s towering transmission lines that run down the mountainside in Eaton Canyon. Those lines carry bulk power through Edison’s territory. The power lines being put underground are the smaller distribution lines, which carry power to homes.
A power line outside the home of Altadena resident Connor Cipolla.
(Ronaldo Bolanos/Los Angeles Times)
The investigation into the fire’s cause has not yet been released. Edison says a leading theory is that one of the Eaton Canyon transmission lines, which hadn’t carried power for 50 years, might have briefly reenergized, sparking the blaze. The fire killed 19 people and destroyed more than 9,000 homes, businesses and other structures.
Edison said it has no plans to bury those transmission lines.
The high cost of undergrounding has become a contentious issue in Sacramento because, under state rules, most or all of it is billed to all customers of the utility.
Before the Eaton fire, Edison won praise from consumer advocates by installing insulated overhead wires that sharply cut the risk of the lines sparking a fire for a fraction of the cost. Since 2019, the company has installed more than 6,800 miles of the insulated wires.
“A dollar spent reconductoring with covered conductor provides … over four times as much value in wildfire risk mitigation as a dollar spent on underground conversion,” Edison said in testimony before the utilities commission in 2018.
By comparison, Pacific Gas & Electric has relied more on undergrounding its lines to reduce the risk of fire, pushing up customer utility bills. Now Edison has shifted to follow PG&E’s example.
Mark Toney, executive director of the the Utility Reform Network, a consumer group in San Francisco, said his staff estimates Edison spends $4 million per mile to underground wires compared with $800,000 per mile for installing insulated lines.
By burying more lines, customer bills and Edison’s profits could soar, Toney said.
“Five times the cost is equal to five times the profit,” he said.
Last spring, Pedro Pizarro, chief executive of Edison International, told Gov. Gavin Newsom about the company’s undergrounding plans in a letter. Pizarro wrote that rules at the utility commission would require Altadena and Malibu homeowners to pay to underground the electric wire from their property line to the panel on their house. He estimated it would cost $8,000 to $10,000 for each home.
Residents who need to dig long trenches may pay far more than that, said Cipolla, who is a member of the Altadena Town Council.
An oak tree stands tall in an area impacted by the Eaton fires. Homeowners worry such trees could be at risk in the undergrounding work.
(Ronaldo Bolanos/Los Angeles Times)
Last week, Cipolla showed a reporter the electrical panel on the back of his house, which is many yards away from where he needs to connect to Edison’s line. The company also initially wanted him to dig up the driveway he poured seven years ago, he said. Edison later agreed to a location that avoids the driveway.
Tolentino said Edison’s crews were working with homeowners concerned about the company’s planned locations for the buried lines.
“We understand it is a big cost and we’re looking at different sources to help them,” he said.
At the same time, some residents are fuming that, despite the undergrounding work, most of the town’s neighborhoods still will have overhead telecommunications lines. In other areas of the state, the telecommunications companies have worked with the electric utilities to bury all the lines, eliminating the visual clutter.
So far, the telecom companies have agreed to underground only a fraction of their lines in Altadena, Tolentino said.
Cipolla said Edison executives told him they eventually plan to chop off the top of new utility poles the company installed after the fire, leaving the lower portion that holds the telecom lines.
“There is no beautification aspect to it whatsoever,” Cipolla said.
As for the trees, Steller and other residents are asking Edison to adjust its construction map to avoid digging near those that remain after the fire. Altadena lost more than half of its tree cover in the blaze and as crews cleared lots of debris.
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1.A pedestrian walks past Christmas Tree lane in Altadena. Christmas Tree Lane was officially listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1990.2.A “We Love Altadena” sign hangs from a shrub on Christmas Tree Lane.3.Parts of a chopped down tree rest on a street curb in Altadena.
Wynne Wilson, a fire survivor and co-founder of Altadena Green, pointed out that the lot across the street from the giant cedar trees on Maiden Lane has no vegetation, making it a better place for Edison’s transformer.
“This is needless,” Wilson said. “People are dealing with so much. Is Edison thinking we won’t fight over this?”
Carolyn Hove, raising her voice to be heard over the crew operating a jackhammer in front of her home, asked: “How much more are we supposed to go through?”
Hove said she doesn’t blame the crews of subcontractors the utility hired, but Edison’s management.
“It’s bad enough our community was decimated by a fire Edison started,” she said. “We’re still very traumatized, and then to have this happen.”
Warner Bros. Discovery is cracking open the door to allow spurned bidder, Paramount Skydance, to make its case — but Warner’s board still maintains its preference for Netflix’s competing proposal.
Warner’s move to reopen talks comes after weeks of pressure from Paramount, which submitted an enhanced offer to buy Warner last week. Paramount’s willingness to increase its offer late in the auction attracted the attention of some Warner investors.
On Tuesday, Warner Bros. Discovery responded with a letter to Paramount Chairman David Ellison and others on Paramount’s board, giving the group seven days to “clarify your proposal.”
“We seek your best and final proposal,” Warner board members wrote. Warner set a Feb. 23 deadline for Paramount to comply.
The closely watched sale of the century-old Warner Bros., known for “Batman,” “The Big Bang Theory,” “Casablanca,” and HBO, the home of “Game of Thrones” and “Succession,” is expected to reshape Hollywood.
The flurry of activity comes as Warner Bros. Discovery and Netflix are seeking to enter the home stretch of the auction. Warner separately issued its proxy and set a special March 20 meeting of its shareholders to decide the company’s fate.
Warner Bros. Discovery is recommending that its stockholders approve the $82.7-billion Netflix deal.
“We continue to believe the Netflix merger is in the best interests of WBD shareholders due to the tremendous value it provides, our clear path to achieve regulatory approval and the transaction’s protections for shareholders against downside risk,” Warner Chairman Samuel A. Di Piazza, Jr., said in a Tuesday statement.
Still, the maneuver essentially reopens the talks.
Warner Bros. is creating an opportunity for Paramount to sway Warner board members, which could perhaps prompt Netflix to raise its $27.75 a share offer for Warner’s Burbank-based studios, vast library of programming, HBO and streaming service HBO Max.
Netflix is not interested in buying Warner Bros. Discovery’s basic cable channels, including CNN, TBS, HGTV and Animal Planet, which are set to be spun off to a stand-alone company later this year.
In contrast, Paramount wants to buy the entire company and has offered more than $30 a share.
Last week, Paramount sweetened its bid for Warner, adding a $2.8-billion “break fee” that Warner would have to pay Netflix if the company pulled the plug on that deal. Paramount also said it would pay Warner investors a “ticking fee” of 25 cents a share for every quarter after Jan. 1 that the deal does not close.
“While we have tried to be as constructive as possible in formulating these solutions, several of these items would benefit from collaborative discussion to finalize,” Paramount said last week as it angled for a chance to make its case. “We will work with you to refine these solutions to ensure they address any and all of your concerns.”
Netflix agreed to give Warner Bros. Discovery a temporary waiver from its merger agreement to allow Warner Bros. Discovery to reengage with Paramount, which lost the bidding war on Dec. 4.
“We granted WBD a narrow seven-day waiver of certain obligations under our merger agreement to allow them to engage with PSKY to fully and finally resolve this matter,” Netflix said Tuesday in a statement. “This does not change the fact that we have the only signed, board-recommended agreement with WBD, and ours is the only certain path to delivering value to WBD’s stockholders.”
Netflix has matching rights for any improved Paramount offer. The company renewed its confidence in its deal and its prospect to win regulatory approval.
“PSKY has repeatedly mischaracterized the regulatory review process by suggesting its proposal will sail through, misleading WBD stockholders about the real risk of their regulatory challenges around the world,” Netflix said in its statement. “WBD stockholders should not be misled into thinking that PSKY has an easier or faster path to regulatory approval – it does not.”
Warner Bros. Discovery acknowledged that Paramount’s recent modification “addresses some of the concerns that WBD had identified several months ago,” according to the letter to Paramount.
But Warner Bros. Discovery added Paramount’s offer “still contains many of the unfavorable terms and conditions that were in the draft agreements … and twice unanimously rejected by our Board,” Warner Bros. Discovery said.
Warner’s board told Paramount it will “welcome the opportunity to engage” during the seven-day negotiation period.
Paramount has been pursuing the prized assets since last September.
“Every step of the way, we have provided PSKY with clear direction on the deficiencies in their offers and opportunities to address them,” Warner Chief Executive David Zaslav said in a statement. “We are engaging with PSKY now to determine whether they can deliver an actionable, binding proposal that provides superior value and certainty for WBD shareholders.”
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a child of Southern segregation who rose to national prominence as a powerful voice for Black economic and racial equality, has died.
Jackson, who had battled the neurodegenerative condition progressive supranuclear palsy for more than a decade, died at home surrounded by family. His daughter, Santita Jackson, confirmed his death with the Associated Press. He was 84. Jackson was originally diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2017 before the PSP diagnosis was confirmed in April.
Handsome and dynamic, an orator with a flair for memorable rhyme, Jackson was the first Black candidate for president to attract a major following, declaring in 1984 that “our time has come” and drawing about 3.5 million votes in Democratic primaries — roughly 1 in 5 of those cast.
Four years later, using the slogan “Keep hope alive,” he ran again, winning 7 million votes, second only to the eventual nominee, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis. His hourlong speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention brought many delegates to tears and provided the gathering’s emotional high point.
Rev. Jesse Jackson and his wife, Jacqueline, acknowledge the cheers of delegates and supporters before his emotional speech to the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta on July 20, 1988.
(John Duricka / Associated Press)
“Every one of these funny labels they put on you, those of you who are watching this broadcast tonight in the projects, on the corners — I understand,” he said. “Call you outcast, low down, you can’t make it, you’re nothing, you’re from nobody, subclass, underclass; when you see Jesse Jackson, when my name goes in nomination, your name goes in nomination.”
For nearly a generation, from the 1970s into the 1990s, that ability to absorb the insults and rejection suffered by Black Americans and transmute them into a defiant rhetoric of success made Jackson the most prominent Black figure in the country. Both beneficiary and victim of white America’s longstanding insistence on having one media-anointed leader serve as the spokesman for tens of millions of Black citizens, he drew adulation and jeers but consistently held the spotlight.
Supporters greeted his speeches with chants of “Run, Jesse, run.” Opponents tracked every misstep, from audits of his grants in the 1970s to his use of the anti-Jewish slur “Hymietown” to refer to New York City during the 1984 campaign, to the disclosure, in 2001, that he had fathered a daughter in an extramarital affair.
As he dominated center stage, the thundering chorus of his speeches — “I am … somebody” — inspired his followers even as it sometimes sounded like a painful plea.
Jackson’s thirst for attention began in childhood. Born out of wedlock on Oct. 8, 1941, he often stood at the gate of his father’s home in Greenville, S.C., watching with envy as his half-brothers played, before returning to the home he shared with his mother, Helen Burns, and grandmother, Mathilda.
During high school, his father, Noah Robinson, a former professional boxer, would sometimes go to the football field to watch Jesse play. If he played well, Noah would sometimes tell others, “That’s one of mine.” For the most part, however, until Jesse was famous, he shunned his son, who was later adopted by the man his mother married, Charles Jackson.
It was his grandmother, known as Tibby, who encouraged Jackson’s ambition. A domestic in stringently segregated Greenville, Tibby brought home books and magazines, such as National Geographic, that her white employers’ children had discarded.
“Couldn’t read a word herself but she’d bring them back for me, you know, these cultural things used by the wealthy and refined,” Jackson once said. “All she knew was, their sons read those books. So I ought to read them too. She never stopped dreaming for me.”
Her dreams propelled Jackson toward college — as did a need to avenge the childhood taunts that echoed in his head. An honors student, he turned down a contract to pitch for the Chicago White Sox to accept a football scholarship to the University of Illinois.
At Christmas break, he came home with a list of books. A librarian at the McBee Avenue Colored Branch referred him to the white library downtown and called ahead to clear the way. When he entered the main library, two police officers stood at the loan desk. A librarian told him it would take at least six days to get the books from the shelves. When he offered to get them himself, the officers told him to leave.
“I just stared up at that ‘Greenville Public Library’ and tears came to my eyes,” Jackson told a biographer, Marshall Frady.
That summer, 1960, Jackson came home and led a sit-in at the library, his arrest a first taste of civil disobedience. In the fall, he transferred to North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro. There he became the star quarterback and participated in the beginnings of the sit-ins that became a signature part of the civil rights movement led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
“It wasn’t a matter of Gandhi or Dr. King then,” he said of the library sit-in, “it was just my own private pride and self-respect.”
With his height and his oratorical flourishes, Jackson was a charismatic figure who led protests in Greensboro. Once, during a demonstration outside a cafeteria, as police were about to arrest the demonstrators, Jackson suggested they kneel and recite the Lord’s Prayer.
“Police all took off their caps and bowed their heads,” he said. “Can’t arrest folks prayin’.”
Then he led the demonstrators in “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
“They stopped, put their hands over their heart,” Jackson said. “Can’t arrest folks singing the national anthem.”
After half an hour, he recalled, “we got tired and let ’em arrest us.”
Elected student body president, Jackson graduated in 1963. A grant from the Rockefeller Fund for Theological Education brought him to the Chicago Theological Seminary, where he hoped to find a venue for social activism.
That summer, Jackson traveled to Washington, where he heard King deliver his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Two years later, he and a group of college buddies piled into vans to drive south for King’s Selma-to-Montgomery march. He met King there, and early the next year, King asked Jackson to head his Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Operation Breadbasket in Chicago. The goal was to win economic gains for Black people with a combination of consumer boycotts and negotiated settlements.
At 24, Jackson was the youngest of King’s aides. Operating out of a hole-in-the-wall office at SCLC’s South Side headquarters, he began by organizing preachers, arranging for them to urge their congregations on Easter to boycott products made by a local dairy that employed no Black workers.
During the following week, Country Delight lost more than half a million dollars in revenue. Within days, the company offered a deal: 44 jobs for Black workers. Without waiting for a boycott, other dairy companies called with offers, too.
King soon asked Jackson to be the national director of Operation Breadbasket. Jackson hesitated — the job required him to leave the seminary six months short of graduation. Jackson recounted in his autobiography that King told him, “Come with me full time and you’ll learn more theology in six months than you would in six years at the seminary.” He earned his ordination several years later.
In 1968, Jesse Jackson stands to the left of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., where King was assassinated the next day.
(Charles Kelly / Associated Press )
In April 1968, Jackson joined King in Memphis, where the civil rights leader had decided to stand with striking Black sanitation workers. Few of King’s staff supported the effort, worrying that the strike — and the planned Poor People’s Campaign in Washington — distracted from the main goal of attaining voting and political rights for Black Americans.
During a planning meeting, King blew up at his aides, including Jackson. “If you’re so interested in doing your own thing, that you can’t do what this organization is structured to do, if you want to carve out your own niche in society, go ahead,” King yelled at Jackson, according to the latter’s account. “But for God’s sake, don’t bother me!”
The next day, standing below the balcony of the Lorraine Motel where the team was staying in Memphis, King yelled down at Jackson in joviality, as if to mitigate the outburst, inviting him to dinner.
Within moments, shots rang out. Jackson later said he ran upstairs and caught King’s head as he lay dying. Andrew Young, a King aide who later became U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told Frady that he doubted Jackson had cradled King’s head, but that they all had rushed to the scene and all had gotten blood on their clothes.
But if all of them were touched by King’s blood, only Jackson wore his gore-stained olive turtleneck for days, sleeping and grieving in it, wearing it on NBC’s “Today Show” and before the Chicago City Council. In dramatizing the moment to his own benefit, Jackson provoked hostility from King’s widow and others in the movement’s leadership that lasted decades.
Richard Hatcher, the first Black mayor of Gary, Ind., and a Jackson supporter, recalled that once Jackson decided to run for president, the campaign thought it had the backing of the Black leadership.
“Big mistake. Big mistake,” Hatcher said. “Over the following months, every time things seemed to get going, here would come a statement from Atlanta, from Andy [Young] or Joe Lowery or Mrs. King, ‘We don’t think this is a good idea at all.’“
As Jackson’s media prominence grew — including a cover photo on Time magazine in 1970 — tensions erupted between Jackson and SCLC, in part because of the sloppy bookkeeping that became a Jackson characteristic. In late 1971, SCLC’s board suspended Jackson for “administrative impropriety” and “repeated violation of organization discipline.” Jackson resigned, saying, “I need air. I must have room to grow.”
Rev. Jesse Jackson raises a clenched fist from a police van after he and 11 others from Operation Breadbasket were arrested during a sit-in at the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co., offices in New York City on Feb. 2, 1971. The organization, part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, has been protesting A&P’s alleged discrimination against blacks.
(MARTY LEDERHANDLER / Associated Press)
Calling a dozen Black celebrities to New York’s Commodore Hotel, Jackson formed his own organization. Originally called People United to Save Humanity — the presumptuous title was soon changed to People United to Serve Humanity — PUSH became his pulpit. Like Operation Breadbasket, its goal was to boost minority employment and ownership.
Jackson traveled the country preaching self-esteem and self-discipline. Thousands of youngsters took pledges to say no to drugs, turn off their television sets, study. They became the core of his voter registration drives, the inspiration for the “I am somebody” chant that would define his public ministry.
As with Operation Breadbasket, Jackson used PUSH to hold corporate America to account. In 1982, for example, he launched a boycott of Anheuser-Busch with the slogan “this Bud’s a dud.”
“We spend approximately $800 million with them [annually]. Yet, out of 950 wholesale distributorships, only one is Black-owned,” Jackson said.
Shortly thereafter, Anheuser-Busch contributed $10,000 to Jackson’s Citizenship Education Fund, contributed more than $500,000 to the Rainbow PUSH coalition, and established a $10-million fund to help minorities buy distributorships.
In 1998, 16 years later, the River North beer distributorship in Chicago was purchased by two of Jackson’s sons, Yusef and Jonathan. (Jackson’s eldest son, Jesse Jackson Jr., won election to Congress from Chicago in 1995, but resigned and was convicted of fraud in 2013 for misuse of campaign funds. Jackson and his wife, Jacqueline, also had two daughters, Jacqueline and Santita. A third daughter, Ashley Laverne Jackson, was the child of his relationship with a PUSH staff member, Karin Stanford.)
Critics called the PUSH campaigns elaborate shakedowns. Others, like Jeffrey Campbell, president of Burger King when Jackson opened negotiations in 1983, found the encounter with Jackson and his rhetoric of economic empowerment inspiring.
“Before they came in, my view was that we ought to fight them, that this guy Jackson was a monster, and I had the backing of my bosses to walk out if necessary,” Campbell told the Los Angeles Times in 1987. But Campbell said he quickly changed his mind.
“He got to me very quickly, without me realizing it, when he started talking about fairness. He would say: What is fair? Blacks give you 15% of your business — isn’t it fair that you give 15% of your business, your jobs, your purchases back to the Black community, the Black businesses?
“That little seed began to grow in the back of my mind,” Campbell said. “It was the right question to ask me.”
How Jackson handled money gave critics additional openings. Between 1972 and 1988, PUSH and its affiliates attracted more than $17 million in federal grants and private contributions. After many audits, the Justice Department sought $1.2 million in repayments, citing poor recordkeeping and a lack of documentation.
Jackson gave little thought to such issues. “I am a tree-shaker, not a jelly-maker,” he would often say.
Management held little interest for him. But politics was a different matter.
From the moment he began urging and registering Black Americans to vote, Jackson found his milieu. He used PUSH resources to staff get-out-the-vote drives that helped elect Hatcher in Gary, Kenneth Gibson in Newark, N.J., and Carl Stokes in Cleveland.
In those days, he also advocated participating in both parties, what he called “a balance of power.” In 1972, he claimed he had registered 40,000 Black voters to support Illinois’ white Republican senator, Charles Percy.
That same year, at the Democratic convention in Miami, Jackson unseated Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s 58-member Illinois delegation and replaced it with a “rainbow” of his own, even though he had never voted in a Democratic primary. Liberal Democrats who despised Daley as a corrupt big-city boss hailed Jackson as a hero.
In the decade to come, Jackson basked in celebrity and international travel, including a controversial meeting with Yasser Arafat. Jackson met the then-leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1979 when he traveled to Syria to free U.S. pilot Robert Goodman, who’d been shot down while on a bombing mission. By the time Jackson declared his 1984 presidential campaign, he had burnished his foreign policy credentials.
At the convention that year in San Francisco, he predicted that in an era of Reaganomics, a Rainbow Coalition of ethnic and religious identities could retake the White House.
“We must leave the racial battleground and come to economic common ground and moral higher ground,” he said in a memorable speech.
“America, our time has come. We come from disgrace to amazing grace. Our time has come,” he said. “Give me your tired, give me your poor, your huddled masses who yearn to breathe free and come November, there will be a change, because our time has come.” Delegates roared to their feet.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a candidate for the democratic nomination for President, works the crowd from onstage following a speech at the Cincinnati Convention center, Friday, April 13, 1984.
(Al Behrman / Associated Press)
But they did not nominate him. Nor did the convention of 1988. Addressing Black ministers in Los Angeles in 1995, the hurt still showed as Jackson railed at the injustice of beating Al Gore in the presidential primaries, only to watch as he was tapped by Bill Clinton to be his running mate in 1992.
“In 1988, I beat him in Iowa, a state 98% white; he said it was ’cause of liberals and farmers. So I beat him in New Hampshire; he said it was ’cause he was off campaigning in the South. So I beat him in the South on Super Tuesday; he said Dukakis had split his support. I beat him then in Illinois, in Michigan; he said he wasn’t really trying. I beat him then in New York; said he ran out of money. But now, here I am this afternoon, talking to y’all in this church in South Central L.A. — and he’s vice president of the United States.”
To many of his Democratic opponents, however, Jackson’s “rainbow coalition” symbolized not common ground, but the party’s devolution into a collection of identity caucuses whose narrow causes doomed them to defeat. In 1992, many of those critics gathered around Clinton as he formulated his “New Democrat” campaign. Clinton soon used Jackson as a foil.
The occasion came when Jackson invited rap singer and activist Sister Souljah to a political event featuring the Arkansas governor. In an interview, Souljah had wondered why after all the animus of white people toward Black people, it was unacceptable for Black people to kill whites. Clinton, instead of delivering the usual liberal-candidate-seeks-Black-votes hominy, lashed out at her words.
The moment bought Clinton a priceless image of willingness to speak truth to the party’s interest groups but came at the price of Jackson’s rage.
“I can maybe work with him, but I know now who he is, what he is. There’s nothin’ he won’t do,” Jackson said to Frady. “He’s immune to shame.”
By then, however, Jackson’s prominence had already begun to wane. Indeed, the role of race leader, itself, had started to disappear. The civil rights revolution in which Jackson had figured so prominently had allowed a new and more diverse generation of Black elected officials, corporate executives and public figures to flourish. Their success eroded his singular platform.
Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., right, laughs after saying goodbye to Rev. Jesse Jackson, reflected left, after Obama addressed the Rainbow PUSH Coalition’s annual conference breakfast in Rosemont, Ill. on June 4, 2007
(harles Rex Arbogast / Associated Press)
Jackson continued to travel, agitate, protest, but the spotlight had moved on. He dreamed that Jesse Jr. might one day win the office he had pursued. When, instead, another Black Democrat from Chicago, Barack Obama, headed toward the Democratic nomination in 2008, Jackson’s frustration spilled into public with a vulgar criticism of Obama caught on microphone.
In Obama’s White House, he suffered what for him might have been the severest penalty — being ignored.
Yet to those who had seen him in his prime, his image remained indelible.
“When they write the history of this campaign,” then-New York Gov. Mario Cuomo said after the 1984 contest, “the longest chapter will be on Jackson. The man didn’t have two cents. He didn’t have one television or radio ad. And look what he did.”
Jackson is survived by his wife, Jacqueline, and six children, Jesse Jr., Yusef, Jonathan, Jacqueline, Santita and Ashley.
the Rev. Jesse Jackson speaks at the League of United Latin American Citizens convention Friday, June 30, 2006, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)
LANSING, Mich — In a stunning victory that gave a major boost to his presidential candidacy, the Rev. Jesse Jackson overwhelmed Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis Saturday in the Michigan Democratic presidential caucuses.
Running strongly in white and black areas, Jackson got nearly twice as many popular votes as Dukakis, and also appeared to be winning considerably more delegates than Dukakis, based on the popular vote in the 18 congressional districts.
With 85% of the vote in, Jackson had 101,037 votes or 54% of the total, to 53,041 votes or 28% for Dukakis.
Missouri Rep. Richard A. Gephardt, who had said he had to win in Michigan to remain a strong candidate, was running a distant third with 23,732 or 13%. Aides said he would meet today with family and advisers before announcing whether he will pull out of the race and run for reelection to Congress.
Simon and Gore Trail
Far behind were Sens. Paul Simon of Illinois and Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee with about 2% of the vote each. Neither had campaigned hard in Michigan.
Preliminary calculations by the Associated Press gave Jackson 61 national convention delegates, Dukakis 43, Gephardt 22, and 12 undecided among the 138 at stake in Michigan.
These results tightened the overall delegate race a bit. By the AP count, Dukakis had 596.55, Jackson had 584.55, Gore had 362.8, Gephardt 178, Simon 171.5, and 371.6 were uncommitted. To win the nomination, a candidate needs 2,082 delegates.
Jackson, meanwhile, was already about 200,000 popular votes ahead of Dukakis nationally before his big triumph Saturday.
It was a big victory for Jackson–who finished third here in 1984–because this was the party’s first test in a major industrial state in which no favorite son was on the ballot.
And it dealt a blow to Dukakis’ recent argument that he was moving inevitably toward the Democratic nomination with his steady accumulation of delegates. Eleven days ago, he had finished third in Illinois behind favorite sons Simon and Jackson.
“This is the first major test where everyone was on the visiting team,” said Joel Ferguson, chairman of Jackson’s Michigan campaign. “No one was on his home turf.”
“You cannot minimize or denigrate Jackson’s victory in Michigan, and anyone who does is missing what is going on out there,” said Los Angeles attorney Mickey Kantor, a longtime adviser to many Democratic candidates.
“Jesse Jackson has proved that if you have a message and a natural constituency it makes a great deal of difference,” added Kantor, who has provided informal advice to the Gore campaign.
Dukakis had hoped in Michigan to have the edge in delegates–and declare that a victory–because 90 of the 138 delegates are apportioned by congressional district, and the governor expected Jackson’s strength to be largely confined to two predominantly black districts in Detroit.
Won 10 of 18 Districts
Instead, Jackson won the popular vote in 10 of the 18 districts, many of them with a low percentage of blacks.
For all of Jackson’s surprising statewide strength, it was the black vote–particularly in Detroit–that gave him his landslide. More than 42% of Jackson’s total vote came in the two majority black districts. And blacks apparently turned out strongly in other districts.
Jackson defied conventional wisdom on two counts here: He ran well all over the state and he won despite what party officials considered a high turnout–about 200,000 caucus-goers.
The reasoning before today was that a high turnout would benefit Dukakis because much of it would be whites newly attracted to the process. But clearly Jackson won many of those whites.
Wins University Towns
Jackson won the majority-white congressional districts containing the cities of Saginaw, Flint, Pontiac, Lansing, Kalamazoo and Muskegon. He also won in the university towns of Ann Arbor (University of Michigan) and East Lansing (Michigan State).
In the congressional district that includes the city of Flint and its heavily unionized auto plants, Jackson beat Dukakis by more than 2 to 1, an indication that many workers were remembering that Jackson had stood with strikers and the unemployed in a number of areas around the country.
But Jackson also did respectably in middle and upper Michigan, areas with few blacks and union members.
“We felt if we took Jesse around the state and people heard what he had to say, we would win,” said Ferguson.
Picking Front-Runner
Then, in a reference to a statement by Democratic National Chairman Paul G. Kirk Jr. that the party should soon unite behind a front-runner, Ferguson added:
“If we are going to get behind a consensus front-runner, that means we ought to get behind Jesse Jackson.”
As the outcome became clear Saturday evening, Dukakis acknowledged that it was Jackson’s night.
“It looks as if Rev. Jackson has won the popular vote in Michigan,” the Massachusetts governor said late Saturday in Milwaukee, where he was already campaigning for Wisconsin’s April 5 primary. “I congratulate Jesse on this. He’s run a good campaign, an exciting campaign.”
‘Nothing Inevitable’
When asked about his own prospects for winning the nomination, Dukakis said: “There’s nothing inevitable about anything in American politics.
“It’s a marathon,” he said. “We’re really only at the midpoint. I don’t think I did very well in Michigan today. I did reasonably well, but I don’t think I did spectacularly well.”
Dukakis’ national political coordinator, Alice Travis, took a more strategic approach to the Michigan result, attempting to portray the race now as one between a Democrat who could be elected in November, Dukakis, and one who she and others do not think could be elected, Jackson.
‘A Two-Man Race’
“It’s a two-man race,” Travis said in Lansing as the returns came in. “Only two candidates are running national campaigns. We’ve always said first or second place would be good in Michigan and we’ve gotten a lot of delegates around the state.”
But the best face Dukakis could put on the Michigan result was that it apparently eliminated Gephardt as a serious candidate, leaving only Gore as a serious white alternative to Dukakis.
Gephardt, who had tried to restart his presidential campaign in Michigan, planned to meet with family and advisers today before announcing whether he will pull out of the race and run for reelection to Congress, aides said.
“He’s going to go home (to Washington), meet with his family Sunday and look at the numbers,” campaign press secretary Ali Webb said. “He’ll have something to say Monday.”
Bitter Medicine
Speaking in Milwaukee Saturday night, Gephardt appeared resigned to the inevitable, and spoke of his campaign in the past tense.
“My campaign has had its successes and its setbacks,” he said. “But at heart, our greatest victory has been to call the Democratic Party back to its essential role as an agent of fundamental change.”
Tuesday is the deadline for Gephardt to file as a candidate for reelection to Congress from Missouri. Although aides said he could file for reelection and remain a candidate for President, his showing in Michigan increased the chances he will drop out of the presidential contest.
Staff writers Robert A. Rosenblatt in Lansing and Robert Shogan in Milwaukee contributed to this story.
WASHINGTON — Since a government raid near Waco, Tex., turned into a fiery disaster two years ago, Atty. Gen. Janet Reno has steadfastly defended her decision to storm the besieged compound of the Branch Davidian religious sect and cited a need to rescue the 24 children inside from unsafe and worsening conditions.
But as the episode becomes the focus of renewed attention in the nation’s capital and beyond, fresh questions are centering on certain tactics used by federal agents–specifically the firing of hundreds of rounds of a military-style tear gas into the camp–that may themselves have endangered the children.
At 6:02 a.m. on April 19, 1993, following a 51-day standoff, FBI agents in military tanks advanced from siege lines around the Branch Davidian compound and fired volleys of CS gas inside the buildings to immobilize the heavily armed occupants.
The wooden structures were filled with the gas over the next six hours before the building erupted into flames, leaving more than 80 people dead, including all of the children. Before giving the order to advance, Reno said, she was assured by military experts that CS gas would cause no serious harm or permanent damage to the children of the besieged cult members.
However, it is now clear that medical literature and manufacturers’ warnings available at the time dispute that conclusion.
CS gas is potentially so hazardous when applied in confined spaces that California prison guards are cautioned against using it in the cells of unruly inmates. A Sherman Oaks company suspended sales of CS to the Israeli government in 1988 at the same time Amnesty International linked the gas to the deaths of Palestinians in homes and other buildings in the occupied territories.
Although adults can withstand CS exposure by wearing gas masks, and the Branch Davidian compound was well stocked with military equipment, no masks were available to properly fit children.
“All of those young children who breathed that gas for hours and didn’t have masks would have been in intensive care if they had survived,” said Dr. Alan A. Stone, a Harvard University professor of law and psychiatry who was chosen by the Justice Department to review its performance at Waco and only recently began to speak out. “This seems so clear and apparent that it’s hard for me to imagine how the attorney general, who I have great respect for, could have OKd this.”
The official cause of death for the children, whose bodies were badly burned in the blaze, could not be determined. Smoke inhalation was a leading possibility. However, autopsy records also show that some of the victim’s bodies contained cyanide, a chemical emitted when CS gas–and other substances such as plastic–are heated in a fire. Many of the toddlers and infants may have been overcome by the gas before they died, some experts believe.
In contrast, a government specialist in riot-control agents who requested anonymity said scientific studies indicate that it would be “almost virtually impossible” for large quantities of CS to severely injure any of the Davidians, including the 17 children under age 10. And Justice Department officials say they doubt that many, if any, Davidians breathed significant amounts of CS because of strong winds that whipped through large holes knocked in the building by tank-mounted battering rams to insert the gas.
*
Controversy surrounding the Branch Davidian incident has been fanned by the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, the second anniversary of the Waco blaze. The leading suspect in the fatal attack on the federal building, Timothy J. McVeigh, reportedly considered the Waco siege an example of government’s intention to crush individual liberties, particularly the right to bear arms.
He is not alone. Some conservatives and civil libertarians question whether the full story of the government’s actions at Waco has come to light. At least two congressional committees plan to hold hearings into the Branch Davidian incident this summer.
Officials at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which conducted the initial raid at Waco to serve search warrants related to weapons violations, maintain they have learned painful lessons from their mistakes and adopted changes to ensure they are not repeated.
But the Justice Department has denied being at fault, instead blaming the loss of life solely on Branch Davidian leader David Koresh, who was suspected of stockpiling illegal weapons.
“There is much to be angry about when we talk about Waco, and the government’s conduct is not the reason,” Reno told a gathering of federal law enforcement officers this month. “David Koresh is the reason.”
Henry Ruth, a former federal prosecutor who served on the independent board that reviewed the ATF’s actions, said he found the Justice Department’s review of Waco full of glowing appraisals.
“That is appalling to me when children die in a fire and there is a precedent for it,” said Ruth, citing the five children who burned to death in 1985 when authorities dropped a bomb on the MOVE community building in West Philadelphia. “When they don’t learn their lessons, are children going to die the next time?”
The FBI was called in on Feb. 28, 1993, to resolve an exceedingly difficult situation at the Branch Davidians’ compound after the ATF raid there went awry. As ATF agents stormed the compound, armed cult members opened fire, killing four officers and five Branch Davidian members. After negotiating a cease-fire with Koresh, the FBI decided that its principal goal was gaining the release of the children inside, according to the Justice Department review of the incident.
Koresh sent out 21 children and 14 adults through March 23. But the releases stopped, and he showed no willingness to surrender.
*
As weeks passed, the uncertainty about the outcome began to mount. The FBI’s longest previous standoff had lasted four days. When the Waco encounter entered its second month, the situation became more “dangerous” because of the difficulty in maintaining security around such a large area and because the FBI’s hostage rescue team was exhausted and in need of retraining, Reno said. The FBI had no backup unit.
On the 22nd day, FBI officials recommended using tear gas to clear the compound. Three weeks later, on April 12, the attorney general was briefed on the FBI’s proposal to use CS gas.
In meetings with military experts, Reno was reassured that the plan to drive out the Branch Davidians with gradual applications of CS gas was safe. They referred to cases of children who had completely recovered within hours of being exposed to CS with no long-term effects.
Reno spent more time weighing the merits of the gassing strategy than any other issue at Waco, said Justice Department spokesman Carl Stern. Among those she consulted was Harry Salem, a toxicologist at the Army’s Chemical and Biological Defense Command.
Reno was advised that although no laboratory tests measuring the effects of CS gas on children had been performed, “anecdotal evidence was convincing” that there would be no permanent injury, according to the Justice Department report. “The military personnel made Reno feel more confident with the concept of tear gas, as opposed to the original concept in her mind of ‘gassing,’ ” the report said.
Salem declined to be interviewed. In written responses to questions submitted by The Times, Salem wrote that CS can be used indoors as long as safety ratios are not exceeded. Achieving lethal concentrations of CS, Salem wrote, would be “extremely difficult.”
After the Waco standoff’s fiery end, Stone, one of the experts retained by the Justice Department to examine what happened, specifically requested the briefing materials Salem provided to Reno. Stone said he was furnished a copy of a 1971 report by the British government that advocated CS as a crowd-control agent in open-air settings.
“There was nothing the attorney general was given in her material and nothing I was ever given which addressed the problem of CS gas in a closed space,” Stone said.
Stone issued a scathing 33-page report in November, 1993, which the Justice Department declined to make available, that criticized the decision to deploy CS gas. In the Justice Department report, Stone wrote, there is no mention during Reno’s deliberations that young children do not have the lung capacity to use gas masks.
“I find it hard to accept a deliberate plan to insert CS gas . . . in a building with so many children,” Stone wrote. “It certainly makes it more difficult to believe that the health and safety of the children was our primary concern.”
Reno has discounted Stone’s criticism, saying he lacks expertise in the field of toxicology.
The danger of applying CS in enclosed spaces is spelled out in an array of medical literature and manufacturers’ reports, including the Army’s guidelines on civil disturbances. Army Field Manual FM 19-15, published in 1985, warns that CS “is not to be used in buildings, near hospitals or in areas where lingering contamination could cause problems.”
Kelly Donahue, spokeswoman for Federal Laboratories Inc., which produces CS gas, said the chemical is designed for use in a large, open area. “If you were to shoot too much in a building or enclosed area, you could suffocate individuals.”
*
CS takes its name from two scientists, B.B. Corson and R.W. Stoughton, who invented it in 1928. The chemical, ortho-chlorobenzal malononitrile, is considered a “super tear gas” because it works instantly, causing burning eyes, coughing, breathing difficulty, stinging skin and vomiting. Though it is commonly referred to as a tear gas, CS is actually a white crystal that looks like talcum powder. In 1959, the Army adopted CS as its standard riot-control agent, and the chemical was used extensively in the Vietnam War.
The widespread use of CS by South Korea on hundreds of thousands of civilians in 1987 was researched by the Physicians for Human Rights group. After discovering that civilians suffered serious acute illnesses, sometimes with permanent injury, the group called for banning the use of CS on humans.
“Exposure to high concentrations of tear gas in small, enclosed spaces for 10 minutes is potentially lethal, particularly to infants and children. . . ,” the organization concluded.
High levels of CS exposure have led to heart failure and death in adults, according to a 1989 report in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. The principal author of the study, Dr. Howard Hu of Harvard University Medical School, said he would have strongly recommended against firing CS into the Branch Davidian compound if there was any chance the occupants would remain inside.
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In the days leading up to the assault, FBI officials told the attorney general they planned to introduce the CS gradually over two or three days. They hoped to force the Davidians out the front door by using gas at opposite ends of the compound.
But the tear-gas raid on April 19 was anything but gradual.
Within minutes of the initial delivery of two bottles of CS, the Davidians fired automatic weapons at the military armored vehicle, according to the Justice Department report. Two M-60 tanks and four Bradley fighting vehicles responded by launching an all-out assault on all areas of the building. Under the plan approved by Reno, the FBI was authorized to escalate the gassing operation if the tanks encountered resistance.
By 6:31 a.m., half an hour after the mission began, the entire building had been filled with CS. The rest of the morning, the FBI continued to deliver gas volleys through all openings of the residential structure to increase the pressure on the occupants.
The attack was so rapid that the tanks quickly exhausted the supply of tear-gas canisters that was to last for several days. At 7:45 a.m., senior FBI officials requested additional rounds of CS from field offices around the country. By the time the final gas volleys were fired at 11:40 a.m., the Bradley tanks had fired at least 300 rounds at the building and the M-60 combat vehicles had made six gas injections.
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Clive Doyle was inside the chapel when an M-60 tank burst through the front door spraying CS and as additional so-called ferret rounds from the Bradley vehicles landed through the windows. While most Davidians in the chapel had gas masks, Doyle said, they only worked for about half an hour before the filters started to fail. He said there were screams as the gas burned the skin of some people and left others gasping.
“The ferret rounds were almost like rockets,” said Doyle, 54, who lived at the compound off and on for nearly three decades and was acquitted of all charges at the Branch Davidian trial last year.
“They crashed through windows, came whistling past your head and embedded themselves in the wall,” he said. “You could hear them hissing once they broke open. We were praying to God that somehow we would be delivered.”
Doyle said there was “no doubt” the gas poured into an aboveground concrete bunker where the women and children had retreated. The 20-by-21-foot bunker, which had been used as a locked vault and food cooler, was waist-deep in stored ammunition.
“The children had no protection from [the gas] being sprayed because there were no windows or major holes,” Doyle said. “I can imagine it was agonizing for them without gas masks and being in a cul-de-sac part of the building with no wind.”
FBI officials offered a contrasting view. They say that any suggestion that CS could have worked its way through rooms into the bunker is highly improbable.
“They probably would not have had to don gas masks or shed one tear from the CS that would have entered that bunker,” said the government specialist on tear gas.
The charred remains of children, including at least 10 who were younger than 3, were found in the bunker along with 13 women, seven men and a fetus. Coroner’s investigators determined that mothers put wet blankets around the children and held them in their arms before they died.
Given the large quantities of CS pumped into the building, it would have been very difficult for children to have walked out to safety, as envisioned by the FBI plan, some experts say.
“The kids would never have made it,” said George F. Uhlig, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and professor of chemistry at the College of Eastern Utah who has researched the use of CS at Waco. “Eventually you pump in enough gas and you exclude breathing.”
An arson investigation team compiled by the Texas State Rangers found that the ensuing fire that engulfed the compound was deliberately set by one or more people inside the building. The team concluded that the fire was not caused or spread by any chemicals used in the gassing operation.
It is unclear how many Davidians inhaled the CS gas, according to the Justice Department report. The passage of at least an hour between the last gas attacks and the end of the fire would have allowed evidence of the gas to dissipate in the bodies.
“It is impossible to predict what role CS played in this case,” said Dr. Nizam Peerwani, chief medical examiner of Tarrant County, Tex., whose office performed the toxicological tests on the bodies.
While the criticism has mounted, the Justice Department has held firm that the use of the CS was appropriate. Within the past two weeks, Reno went back to Salem to ask him about the safety of CS gas, according to Justice Department spokesman Stern.
“He hasn’t changed his thinking at all,” Stern said.
Times staff writer Ronald J. Ostrow contributed to this story.
WASHINGTON — Democratic presidential candidates are stepping up their assault on President Bush’s handling of Iraq, increasingly faulting the White House for failing to anticipate or avert the tumult that has engulfed the war-torn nation.
The Democrats have urged Bush to rely more on allies to help stabilize Iraq, reviving past criticism that the administration is too reluctant to work with the international community. And they have questioned Bush’s credibility after White House officials conceded this week that part of his case for going to war was based on incomplete intelligence.
The escalating attacks signal a sense among the Democratic campaigns that Bush may be vulnerable on a front that has been his strength — national security.
Bush couched the conflict with Iraq as crucial to America’s war on terrorism and basked in the quick overthrow of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Violence Continues
But since Bush triumphantly flew aboard the aircraft carrier Lincoln off San Diego and declared the end of major conflict in Iraq, U.S. occupational forces have been plagued by continuing violence.
Since Bush’s May 1 speech, 31 Americans have died as a result of hostile fire.
On Thursday, in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, Army Gen. Tommy Franks said U.S. troops are facing 10 to 25 attacks a day by Iraqi insurgents.
Franks, the commander of the war, was grilled by lawmakers about problems — and rising costs — confronting the U.S. effort to rebuild Iraq. He warned that American troops could be there for years.
Franks’ remarks followed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s estimate on Wednesday that monthly military costs in Iraq total about $3.9 billion — almost double the administration’s projection in April.
These developments — along with the White House’s acknowledgment on Monday that there was insufficient support for Bush’s claim in January that Hussein had tried to buy uranium in Niger for use in a nuclear weapons program — have fueled the growing Democratic criticism of the president on Iraq.
“We lack sufficient forces to do the job” of restoring order in Iraq, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts said Thursday. “It is time for the president to step forward and tell the truth: The war is con- tinuing and so are the casual- ties.”
Kerry, who like several other Democratic presidential candidates supported the congressional resolution last fall that authorized Bush to use force against Iraq, released his own four-point plan for reconstructing the country.
Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, campaigning in New Hampshire on Thursday, berated Bush for making the claim in his State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to buy uranium.
Resignations Sought
Dean, whose rise in the Democratic race has been based largely on his opposition to the war, called for the resignation of any administration official responsible for the mistake.
“Anyone who deliberately misled the president about a matter as serious as sending our troops to war should resign — whoever that might be,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee sent an e-mail to activists seeking donations to pay for a television ad questioning Bush’s credibility on Iraq.
Democrats in Congress joined in the criticism of Bush’s postwar policy.
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, backed by other Democrats, sponsored a measure that urged Bush to seek military support from NATO and the United Nations in the occupation of Iraq.
The measure passed 97 to 0; because it was nonbinding, few saw it as an accurate measure of likely divisions among lawmakers over how far Bush should go in seeking international aid.
But Biden said there was broad bipartisan anxiety about the rockiness of the postwar period.
“Find me somebody on the floor who says, ‘This is going great,’ ” Biden said.
The barbs from Democrats have intensified as a recent poll indicated that the pub- lic has an increasingly nega- tive view of the situation in Iraq.
The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found fewer than one-quarter of those surveyed in June and July thought that the U.S. effort was going “very well” — down from 61% in mid-April.
Still, the poll found little sign that those anxieties had seriously hurt Bush’s political position — 63% of those surveyed said there was a “good” chance or “some” chance they would vote for him in 2004.
The Democrats “need a lot more than some screwed-up intelligence report to really be able to peck at the president on foreign policy,” said a Republican political consul- tant close to the Bush cam- paign.
But he added: “If three months from now things aren’t any better [in Iraq], people are going to be asking: ‘What’s the plan, Stan?’ ”
The more pointed Democratic criticism of Bush stands in contrast to the wartime posture of most candidates.
Among the party’s major candidates, only Dean and Sen. Bob Graham of Florida opposed the decision to attack Iraq.
Along with Kerry, those supporting the war were Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri and Sens. Joe Lieb- erman of Connecticut and John Edwards of North Caro- lina.
Coalition Urged
The emerging critique among the candidates of Bush’s handling of Iraq echoes the argument some used against him before the war: that he has been too reluctant to build a coalition of allies to share cost and responsibilities.
“The United Nations, European Union, NATO — all have to be involved,” Ed- wards said at a recent town hall meeting in New Hamp- shire.
“We should welcome their involvement. It gives us a chance to re-engage in the international community.”
Kerry, in the plan he unveiled, called on the administration to increase troop strength in Iraq by adding coalition soldiers.
He also proposed more rapid training of Iraqi troops for security functions, development of a clear plan for transferring power to Iraqis and increased efforts to improve basic services such as electricity and water.
“The administration went to war without a thorough plan to win the peace,” said Kerry.
“It’s time to face that truth and change course.”
This week Lieberman mounted a similar attack in an opinion article in the Washington Post.
“Enough time has passed to conclude that what we are doing is not working,” said Lieberman. “The administration has … mishandled the efforts to get key allies on board….”
Erik Smith, a spokesman for Gephardt, said the congressman and other candidates have been arguing for some time that the presi- dent had not adequately pre- pared a postwar strategy for Iraq.
The criticism “takes on a new urgency in light of unfolding events,” said Smith.
“Voters are increasingly concerned about it.”
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Times staff writers Mark Z. Barabak and Ronald Brownstein contributed to this report.
OAKLAND — A federal judge Thursday said she is likely to allow a lawsuit alleging that solitary confinement conditions at Pelican Bay State Prison amount to psychological torture, to be expanded from the cases of 10 prisoners to include about 1,100 inmates now held in indefinite isolation.
U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken expressed concern at a hearing, however, that changes the state has made in how it identifies inmates for isolation means those prisoners won’t be included in the pending class-action lawsuit.
What’s more, lawyers for the state say they are in the process of moving some existing prisoners out of confinement in Pelican Bay’s super-maximum security isolation cells.
“I’m wondering how I would manage a class that has people moving in and out,” Wilken said. Nevertheless, she used Thursday’s hearing in Oakland to set Nov. 3, 2014, for the trial. Her ruling over whether that trial will be a class action, or remain confined to the few inmates who filed the case, is yet to be decided.
Inmates in Pelican Bay’s segregation units spend 22.5 hours a day confined to their cells and, though some have cellmates, are otherwise allowed limited human contact and few activities to occupy their time. They are allowed fewer possessions than other inmates, cannot earn good-time credits toward early release like other inmates and are generally refused parole.
The lawsuit alleges that the sensory deprivation of that confinement, especially for 500 men held in isolation more than a decade, causes irreparable psychological harm. The claims were also at the heart of three statewide prison hunger strikes, including a 60-day protest that ended last month when lawmakers pledged public hearings on the practice.
Only one hearing at the moment is planned, Oct. 9, in Sacramento, said staff for Assembly Public Safety Chairman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco).
Meanwhile, hunger strike leaders who had been moved during the protest have been returned to their old cells at Pelican Bay, said Anne Weills, one of the lawyers representing those prisoners. She met with them two weeks ago, and said several reported health problems related to their fasting, including cardiac trouble.
LONGMONT, COLO. — Dale Klotz’s business repairing power tools took a nose dive when foreclosure signs sprouted up on lawns across the northern suburbs of Denver here.
He’s looking for a second job, and he wishes he wasn’t saddled with a mortgage. But amid the hard times, he took some satisfaction Tuesday in the House’s vote to turn down President Bush’s $700-billion rescue package for the financial system.
“I don’t think we ought to bail out Wall Street,” Klotz, 45, said as he loaded groceries into his white Ford pickup at a shopping center. “I’m an average American, trying to make a living. I’ve got a home mortgage I’d like to unload, but I make my payments every month.”
Why, he asked, should his tax dollars go to save reckless Wall Street executives?
Sentiments like that fueled this week’s rebellion in the House, where members bucked party leaders and the Bush administration to block approval of the rescue package.
Election-year politics also played a role, analysts say. Klotz’s representative, Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-Colo.), is locked in a tight reelection battle and said she heeded the views of her constituents in voting against the bailout Monday.
“It’s not a moment at which people can put the national interest ahead of constituent interest,” said Robert Loevy, a political science professor at Colorado College.
According to one count, 30 of the 38 representatives in the most competitive Nov. 4 House races voted against the bill. Americans have bombarded members of Congress with calls and e-mails urging “no” votes, causing some computers on Capitol Hill to crash repeatedly over the last two days.
Organizations such as ACORN, or Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a national advocacy group for low-wage workers, organized rallies outside Federal Reserve offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco and other major cities.
“You look at an electoral battleground map and you are looking at Nevada, the foreclosure capital of the country, and Michigan and Ohio and Florida,” said Austin King, director of an ACORN center in New Orleans. “These swing states have tens or hundreds of thousands of foreclosures. Voters there want to see something done that helps them, not just Wall Street.”
On Monday, the opponents got their wish: The House rejected the plan. But stocks cratered, with the Dow Jones industrial average diving 777.68 points — a gut-wrenching experience for almost everyone with stocks, mutual funds or 401(k) retirement funds.
Stocks regained much of their losses Tuesday, but that wasn’t the only twist — as some congressional officials said they detected growing support for some kind of rescue plan.
Rep. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles) said she voted against the bailout Monday after her office was swamped over the weekend with more than 1,000 calls on the plan, with just two of those in support.
But Tuesday, after attending a funeral at First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles, Watson said she was besieged by people demanding to know what she was going to do to get the economy back on track.
“These are teachers, nurses, regular working people, and they’re worried about their 401(k)s, their jobs, the whole economy because they don’t understand how this is all going to work,” Watson said.
Watson’s urban district bears little resemblance to Musgrave’s 4th Congressional District in the eastern part of Colorado, which is dotted with ranches and tiny agricultural settlements.
Most of that district’s population, however, is in the exurbs at the northern edge of the Denver metropolitan area. Some of those cities had the nation’s highest foreclosure rates before last year’s housing bust kicked rates even higher in parts of California and other states.
A former schoolteacher and small-business owner who was first elected to Congress in 2002, Musgrave is a staunch social and fiscal conservative who narrowly won reelection in 2006. She is considered one of the most vulnerable incumbent House members this year.
Floyd Ciruli, a Denver-based pollster, said the district is populated by people inherently unsympathetic to the proposed bailout.
“Fiscal conservatives; small-government, anti-government ideologues,” Ciruli said. Musgrave “has both a good sprinkling of those individuals in her district, and she has a personal philosophy like that.”
Even residents with starkly different politics were unenthusiastic about the bailout.
“If people who were being rescued are like you and me, working hard every day and struggling to make ends meet, that’s one thing,” said Roni Lavine, 61, a Longmont meeting planner with an Obama pin on her purse. “People are really angry that they’re losing their homes and they see these corporate executives walking out with millions of dollars.”
Still, some were unnerved at the package’s failure and eager for some action.
“There’s a perception out there it just relates to a bunch of people in New York, on Wall Street,” said Mike Preigh, a 42-year-old chemist. “But it all flows downhill. . . . Doing nothing is probably worse than doing something that’s not great.”
Musgrave announced her opposition to the bailout on Sept. 23, the day Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson presented the plan to Congress.
Her spokesman, Joe Brettell, said Musgrave was not moved by politics but by the people she represented. “The congresswoman looks at her district first, and she really feels she made the right decision,” he said.
On Tuesday, Musgrave said she was not concerned about the huge stock sell-off that followed Monday’s rejection of the bailout plan.
“We don’t answer to Wall Street,” she said in an interview on “Good Morning America.” “We answer to Main Street. We answer to our constituents.”
Later Tuesday, however, Musgrave was huddled in meetings as negotiators worked to craft revised legislation expected to go to a vote in the Senate tonight and in the House on Thursday. “It is important,” she said in a statement, “for people around the country to know that we are actively working toward a solution to this problem.”
Ian Choudri, the CEO of California’s High-Speed Rail Authority, was arrested on suspicion of domestic battery earlier this month at his Folsom home, officials said.
The 57-year-old was arrested Feb. 4 on suspicion of battery against a spouse, Sgt. John Triplett of the Folsom police confirmed. The arrest occurred in the 500 block of Borges Court, where records indicate he owns a home.
“The High-Speed Rail Authority is aware of the matter and is reviewing it,” a spokesperson for the agency said Monday in a statement. “We have no other comment at this time.”
Choudri was approved as CEO of the state agency in August 2024, and lauded by Gov. Gavin Newsom as having more than 30 years’ experience in the transportation sector.
Choudri replaced former CEO Brian Kelly, who retired. Choudri joined the agency from HNTB Corp., an infrastructure design firm where he previously held the position of senior vice president.
Choudri did not immediately respond to requests seeking comment.
Choudri’s attorney told The Times that police were called to Choudri’s home by a third-party and that prosecutors did not file charges in the case.
Choudri was set to appear in court Feb. 6 but was notified by the Sacramento district attorney’s office that they had declined to file charges, said Allen Sawyer, Choudri’s attorney.
“This matter is over and no further action will be taken,” Sawyer said.
Officials at the Sacramento district attorney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The day before his arrest, Choudri had appeared with Newsom in Kern County to announce the completion of a 150-acre facility that would serve as a hub for construction of the high-speed rail project in San Joaquin Valley.
“The railhead facility is a critical step in the track-installation process and keeps us on pace to deliver this system smarter, faster and more economically,” Choudri announced at the media event, according to a statement released by Newsom’s office.
Newsom’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Choudri is among the highest-paid state employees in California, having earned $563,000 last year, according to payroll records obtained by The Times from the state controller’s office.
Times staff writer Melody Gutierrez contributed to this story.
