POLITICS

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.

*

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.

*

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.”

*

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.

ALSO:

Analysts see compromise possible for prison crowding

State officials say federal courts want to release prisoners

Campaign watchdog Ann Ravel confirmed to Federal Election Commission

paige.stjohn@latimes.com

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.”

—

nicholas.riccardi@latimes.com

william.heisel@latimes.com

Riccardi reported from Colorado and Heisel from California.

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.

Reporting from Washington  — When Jim Asher, formerly the investigative editor in the Washington bureau of the McClatchy newspaper chain, tweeted Thursday that a former longtime aide to Hillary and Bill Clinton had “told me in person #Obama born in #kenya,” he set off yet another in the seemingly endless side debates over who is to blame for which seamy aspect of contemporary politics.

Evidence on the question is ambiguous.

Asher’s account about his conversations with Sidney Blumenthal has become a hot issue among political activists since last week, when Donald Trump finally admitted the falseness of the so-called birther theories that he pushed for more than five years.

As part of their statement announcing his climb-down, Trump’s aides pushed another false narrative — that it was Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign that had started the questioning of where Obama was born and whether he met the constitutional test for being president.

Election 2016 | Live coverage on Trail Guide | Sign up for the newsletter | The race to 270

There is no evidence that Clinton or her campaign ever raised that question, and her campaign fired one aide in Iowa who did circulate an email raising the issue. Some supporters of Clinton’s, however, certainly did raise the issue with reporters during the final stretch of the 2008 Democratic primary.

Blumenthal, whose penchant for spinning dark hypotheses long ago earned him the nickname “grassy knoll” — a reference to Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories — did not work for the 2008 campaign. But he has been close to both Clintons since Bill Clinton’s first presidential bid in 1992, so he would be more than just a random, unhappy Clinton supporter.

As a result, Asher’s statement provided grist for the Trump campaign’s position.

Blumenthal has denied Asher’s account.

Asher, in a statement, said that “on the birther issue, I recall my conversation with Blumenthal clearly,” but “I have nothing in writing memorializing that conversation.”

The written records that do exist and the recollections of people involved at the time leave the question unsettled.

Asher, who subsequently was McClatchy’s Washington bureau chief for five years, met with Blumenthal one day in the spring of 2008 at the McClatchy office in Washington, Asher recalled.

Two emails from that period show that Blumenthal sent tips to Asher about potential Kenya-related stories critical of Obama. But they do not include anything involving Obama’s birth.

A March 17, 2008, email said:

“Jim: On Kenya, your person in the field might look into the impact there of Obama’s public comments about his father. I’m told by State Dept officials that Obama publicly derided his father on his visit there and that was regarded as embarrassing and crossing the line by Kenyans for whom respect for elders (especially the father, especially a Muslim father, in a patrilineal society) is considered sacrosanct. Sidney.”

A second email, Asher said, involved possible “connections between Obama and Raila Odinga, who had described himself as Obama’s cousin and would run for president of Kenya” and links between Odinga and “controversial Muslim groups.”

The “person in the field” at the time was McClatchy’s Nairobi-based correspondent, Shashank Bengali, who is now a foreign correspondent for The Times. He looked into Blumenthal’s tips at the time and found they did not check out.

“Asher assigned me to look into everything related to Obama in Kenya,” Bengali said in an email.

“One of the things I researched was the false rumor that he was born in Kenya,” he said, “but I don’t remember where that tip came from.”

Bengali said that although Asher passed along some tips specifically attributed to Blumenthal, he did not recall any conversations in which Blumenthal’s name was linked to the birthplace issue.

“I can’t recall if we specifically discussed the birther claim,” he wrote Monday in an email to Asher, who contacted him after The Times and other news organizations asked Asher about his contacts with Blumenthal.

David.Lauter@latimes.com

For more on Politics and Policy, follow me @DavidLauter

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UPDATES:

2:53 p.m.: This article was updated to add Asher’s subsequent title as bureau chief.

The article was first published at 2:30 p.m.

CHICAGO — There were three Swift boats on the river that day in Vietnam more than 35 years ago — three officers and 15 crew members. Only two of those officers remain to talk about what happened on Feb. 28, 1969.

One is John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate who won a Silver Star for what happened on that date. I am the other.

For years, no one asked about those events. But now they are the focus of skirmishing in a presidential election with a group of Swift boat veterans and others contending that Kerry didn’t deserve the Silver Star for what he did on that day, or the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts he was awarded for other actions.

Many of us wanted to put it all behind us — the rivers, the ambushes, the killing. Ever since that time, I have refused all requests for interviews about Kerry’s service — even those from reporters at the Chicago Tribune, where I work.

But Kerry’s critics, armed with stories I know to be untrue, have charged that the accounts of what happened were overblown. The critics have taken pains to say they’re not trying to cast doubts on the merit of what others did, but their version of events has splashed doubt on all of us. It’s gotten harder and harder for those of us who were there to listen to accounts we know to be untrue, especially when they come from people who were not there.

Even though Kerry’s own crew members have backed him, the attacks have continued, and in recent days Kerry has called me and others who were with him in those days, asking that we go public with our accounts.

I can’t pretend those calls had no effect on me, but that is not why I am writing this. What matters most to me is that this is hurting crewmen who are not public figures and who deserved to be honored for what they did. My intent is to tell the story here and to never again talk publicly about it.

I was part of the operation that led to Kerry’s Silver Star. I have no firsthand knowledge of the events that resulted in his winning the Purple Hearts or the Bronze Star.

But on Feb. 28, 1969, I was officer in charge of PCF-23, one of three Swift boats — including Kerry’s PCF-94 and Lt. j.g. Donald Droz’s PCF-43 — that carried Vietnamese Regional and Popular Force troops and a Navy demolition team up the Dong Cung, a narrow tributary of the Bay Hap River, to conduct a sweep in the area.

The approach of the noisy 50-foot aluminum boats, each driven by two huge 12-cylinder diesels and loaded down with six crew members, troops and gear, was no secret.

Ambushes were a virtual certainty, and that day was no exception.

The difference was that Kerry, who had tactical command of that particular operation, had talked to Droz and me beforehand about not responding the way the boats usually did to an ambush.

We agreed that if we were not crippled by the initial volley and had a clear fix on the location of the ambush, we would turn directly into it, focusing the boats’ twin .50-caliber machine guns on the attackers and beaching the boats. We told our crews about the plan.

The Viet Cong in the area had come to expect that the heavily loaded boats would lumber on past an ambush, firing at the entrenched attackers, beaching upstream and putting troops ashore to sweep back down on the ambush site. Often, they were long gone by the time the troops got there.

The first time we took fire — the usual rockets and automatic weapons — Kerry ordered a “turn 90” and the three boats roared in on the ambush. It worked. We routed the ambush, killing three of the attackers. The troops, led by an Army advisor, jumped off the boats and began a sweep, which killed another half-dozen VC, wounded or captured others and found weapons, blast masks and other supplies used to stage ambushes.

Meanwhile, Kerry ordered our boat to head upstream with his, leaving Droz’s boat at the first site.

It happened again, another ambush. And again, Kerry ordered the turn maneuver, and again it worked. As we headed for the riverbank, I remember seeing a loaded B-40 launcher pointed at the boats. It wasn’t fired as two men jumped up from their spider holes.

We called Droz’s boat up to assist us, and Kerry, followed by one member of his crew, jumped ashore and chased a VC behind a hooch — a thatched hut — maybe 15 yards inland from the ambush site. Some who were there that day recall the man being wounded as he ran. Neither I nor Jerry Leeds, our boat’s leading petty officer with whom I’ve checked my recollection of all these events, recalls that, which is no surprise. Recollections of those who go through experiences like that frequently differ.

With our troops involved in the sweep of the first ambush site, Richard Lamberson, a member of my crew, and I also went ashore to search the area. I was checking out the inside of the hooch when I heard gunfire nearby.

Not long after that, Kerry returned, reporting that he had killed the man he chased behind the hooch. He also had picked up a loaded B-40 rocket launcher, which we took back to our base in An Thoi after the operation.

John O’Neill, author of a highly critical account of Kerry’s Vietnam service, describes the man Kerry chased as a “teenager in a loincloth.” I have no idea how old the gunner Kerry chased that day was, but both Leeds and I recall that he was a grown man, dressed in the kind of garb the VC usually wore.

The man Kerry chased was not the “lone” attacker at that site, as O’Neill suggests. There were others who fled. There was also firing from the tree line well behind the spider holes and at one point, from the opposite riverbank as well. It was not the work of just one attacker.

Our initial reports of the day’s action caused an immediate response from our task force headquarters in Cam Ranh Bay.

Known over radio circuits by the call sign “Latch,” then-Capt. and now retired Rear Adm. Roy Hoffmann, the task force commander, fired off a message congratulating the three Swift boats, saying at one point that the tactic of charging the ambushes was a “shining example of completely overwhelming the enemy” and that it “may be the most efficacious method of dealing with small numbers of ambushers.”

Hoffmann has become a leading critic of Kerry’s and now says that what the boats did on that day demonstrated Kerry’s inclination to be impulsive to a fault.

Our decision to use that tactic under the right circumstances was not impulsive but was the result of discussions well beforehand and a mutual agreement of all three boat officers.

It was also well within the aggressive tradition that was embraced by the late Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, then commander of U.S. Naval Forces, Vietnam. Months before that day in February, a fellow boat officer, Michael Bernique, was summoned to Saigon to explain to top Navy commanders why he had made an unauthorized run up the Giang Thanh River, which runs along the Vietnam-Cambodia border. Bernique, who speaks French fluently, had been told by a source in Ha Tien at the mouth of the river that a VC tax collector was operating upstream.

Ignoring the prohibition against it, Bernique and his crew went upstream and routed the VC, pursuing and killing several.

Instead of facing disciplinary action as he had expected, Bernique was given the Silver Star, and Zumwalt ordered other Swifts, which had largely patrolled coastal waters, into the rivers.

The decision sent a clear message, underscored repeatedly by Hoffmann’s congratulatory messages, that aggressive patrolling was expected and that well-timed, if unconventional, tactics like Bernique’s were encouraged.

What we did on Feb. 28, 1969, was well in line with the tone set by our top commanders.

Zumwalt made that clear when he flew down to our base at An Thoi off the southern tip of Vietnam to pin the Silver Star on Kerry and assorted Bronze Stars and commendation medals on the rest of us.

My Bronze Star citation, signed by Zumwalt, praised the charge tactic we used that day, saying the VC were “caught completely off guard.”

There’s at least one mistake in that citation. The name of the river where the main action occurred is wrong, a reminder that such documents were often done in haste, authored for their signers by staffers. It’s a cautionary note for those trying to piece it all together. There’s no final authority on something that happened so long ago — not the documents and not even the strained recollections of those of us who were there.

But I know that what some people are saying now is wrong. While they mean to hurt Kerry, what they’re saying impugns others who are not in the public eye.

Men like Larry Lee, who was on our bow with an M-60 machine gun as we charged the riverbank; Kenneth Martin, who was in the .50-caliber gun tub atop our boat; and Benjamin Cueva, our engineman, who was at our aft gun mount suppressing the fire from the opposite bank.

Wayne Langhoffer and the other crewmen on Droz’s boat went through even worse on April 12, 1969, when they saw Droz killed in a brutal ambush that left PCF-43 an abandoned pile of wreckage on the banks of the Duong Keo River. That was just a few months after the birth of his only child, Tracy.

The survivors of all these events are scattered across the country now.

Jerry Leeds lives in a tiny Kansas town where he built and sold a successful printing business. He owns a beautiful home with a lawn that sweeps to the edge of a small lake, which he also owns. Every year, flights of purple martins return to the stately birdhouses on the tall poles in his backyard.

Cueva, recently retired, has raised three daughters and is beloved by his neighbors for all the years he spent keeping their cars running. Lee is a senior computer programmer in Kentucky, and Lamberson finished a second military career in the Army.

With the debate over that long-ago day in February, they’re all living that war another time.

*

William Rood is night city editor at the Chicago Tribune; previously, he was a reporter and an editor at the Los Angeles Times. Both publications are owned by Tribune Co.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said in an interview Monday that she does not want embattled mogul Casey Wasserman running the 2028 Summer Games.

Bass told CNN’s Dana Bass that it was “unfortunate” that the organizers of the Los Angeles Olympics are supporting Wasserman amid revelations that he exchanged flirty emails with convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell two decades ago.

Bass initially declined to take a position on the drama surrounding Wasserman, saying two weeks ago that it was up to the board of the LA28 Olympics — the nonprofit behind the Games — to decide whether to keep him.

But Monday, Bass offered a new take on Wasserman’s fate.

“My opinion is that he should step down,” Bass said. “That’s not the opinion of the board.”

She said that “we need to look at the leadership” of LA28 and that her job is to make sure that the city is “completely prepared” for the Games.

Wasserman has previously apologized for his correspondence with Maxwell and expressed regret for having any association with both her and Jeffrey Epstein. The exchanges took place before Maxwell’s crimes became known and before she was sentenced to prison for luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by financier Epstein.

Wasserman announced last week that he would sell his sports and entertainment company because of backlash over the email exchanges.

The executive committee of the LA28 board announced Wednesday that it reviewed the mogul’s past conduct and determined that based on the facts and his “strong leadership” of the Games, he should continue to serve as chair of LA28.

The LA28 executive committee — a subset of its broader, 35-member board — said it took “allegations of misconduct seriously.”

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, carrying the Olympic flag, LA28 chairman Casey Wasserman, front right, and Team USA Olympians skateboarder Tate Carew, second from left, diver Delaney Schnell, rear right, and volleyball player Micah Ma’a, top right, arrive in Los Angeles on Aug. 12, 2024.

(Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press)

It met Wednesday after hiring outside counsel O’Melveny & Myers LLP to assist reviewing Wasserman’s interactions with Epstein and Maxwell. Wasserman, it said, fully cooperated with the review.

L.A.’s Olympic leaders have yet to reveal who is on the committee. Bass’ office last week said her appointees on the executive committee include entertainment attorney Matt Johnson, real estate developer Jaime Lee and union leader Yvonne Wheeler.

At least 10 L.A.-area politicians, including a third of the 15-member Los Angeles City Council, have called on Wasserman to resign from leading the Olympics, with many arguing the exchanges are a distraction.

City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who is challenging Bass in the upcoming mayor’s race is among those calling for Wasserman to step away. Raman previously worked at a women’s rights organization formed in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement before becoming a council member.

Even before revelations about the emails, there were tensions between Wasserman and some Los Angeles politicians concerned that financial shortfalls in staging the $7-billion Summer Games will need to be covered by local taxpayers.

The relationship between the city and LA28 was further strained when the Daily Mail, a British tabloid, published allegations in 2024 that Wasserman was a “serial cheater” who’d carried on affairs with young female staff members. Wasserman, who separated from his wife, Laura, in 2021, has denied the allegations.

Former Mayor Eric Garcetti picked Wasserman, a close friend, more than a decade ago to run the Olympics.

Re Rosenberg vs. Badham in 40th Congressional District:

Nathan Rosenberg can attack Rep. Robert E. Badham. The voters will decide whom to believe and vote accordingly.

Rosenberg can attack Thomas A. Fuentes. The county GOP chairman is fully capable of defending himself.

But Rosenberg goes too far when he impugns the integrity of the late Ronald W. Caspers. Supervisor Caspers loved south coast Orange County and served the area with distinction. He and two of his sons died in a tragic boating accident just after he was reelected in 1974. Ron was a self-made millionaire and had no need, much less desire, to gain personally from his public service.

Young Rosenberg’s lack of respect for his elders, particularly those unable to defend themselves, does not speak well of his own integrity. Nathan, you owe Ron Caspers and his surviving family members an apology.

RANDY SMITH

Irvine

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper is walking away from his second job at “60 Minutes” in the latest sign of upheaval at the storied news magazine.

Cooper said in a statement Monday he is leaving the CBS News program because he wants to spend more time with his two young children. He joined the program in 2007 while maintaining his role as prime-time anchor at CNN.

“Being a correspondent at ’60 Minutes’ has been one of the great honors of my career,” Cooper said. “I got to tell amazing stories, and work with some of the best producers, editors and camera crews in the business. For nearly 20 years, I’ve been able to balance jobs at CNN and CBS, but I have little kids now and I want to spend as much time with them as possible, while they want to spend time with me.”

Cooper’s departure could be the first of a number of changes for “60 Minutes” as Bari Weiss, who joined CBS News as editor-in-chief last October, is expected to substantially overhaul the prestigious news magazine.

Cooper, 58, was courted for the anchor role at “CBS Evening News” last year before the network parted ways with the anchor duo of Maurice DuBois and John Dickerson. Cooper signed a new deal with CNN instead, and CBS News gave the anchor job to Tony Doukopil.

This is a developing story.

After the students’ demonstration on February 12, Venezuela’s most important university will again test how open the Rodríguez regime really is by talking about what they don’t want to hear: that chavismo lost the 2024 vote on a landslide, with Delcy running the economy and Jorge managing the campaign, before Maduro to stole the election.

This Saturday, on February 21st, an international event that advocates for amnesty in Venezuela will screen in 20 cities around the world the documentary that tells the story of the civilian mobilization that defended the votes and documented the results, the fraud, the people’s revolt, and the unprecedented crackdown.

In late 2024, Hacha y Machete, an activism network and communications platform composed of a multidisciplinary team of Venezuelan migrants and residents, dedicated itself to preserving the memory of what happened on July 28th and the days and months that followed. Now, it promotes the International Day for Amnesty in Venezuela with the support of organizations such as the Committee for the Liberation of Political Prisoners (CLIPPVE), the Washington Office for Latin America (WOLA), Laboratorio de Paz and Laboratorio Ciudadano, with the message of justice, not impunity. 

The documentary De Macedonia con amor reconstructs the courage of citizens and the consequences of repression. You can watch it here, or you can join the events. In Washington DC there will be a conversation sponsored by George Washington University (GWU) and WOLA, with Betilde Muñoz, director of Access to Rights at the Organization of American States (OAS); Isabella Picón, activist and PhD candidate at GWU; and Laura Dib, Director of the Venezuela Program at WOLA, at 2:00 pm at the Lindner Family Commons, on the sixth floor of the Elliot School of International Affairs (1957 E St, NW).

In Caracas, the screening will take place at FACES, seventh floor, at the Sala de Usos Múltiples (11:00 am). Let’s what happens.

Here’s the other participant cities and the schedule: 

• Mexico City: Cineclub Mar de Lava, Av. Francisco Sosa 298, Coyoacán. (01.00 pm)

• Madrid: Bar Cotorrita, Calle Santa Engracia, 33. (05.00 pm) 

• Barcelona (Spain): Ateneu El Poblet, Carrer de Nàpols, 268-270, Eixample. (6.00 pm)

• Buenos Aires: Casa Sur, Av. Diaz Velez, 4736, CABA. (04.00 pm)

• Bogotá: Diáspora Ideas Migrantes, Calle 58 #19-25 San Luis. (05.00 pm)

• Montevideo: José E. Rodó 2182, Esq. Joaquín Requena. (04.00 pm)

• Santiago de Chile: General Urriola, 624, Salón Gourmet. (06.00 pm)

• Brescia: Oratorio La Pace, Via Della Pace, 10. (08.00 pm) 

• Berlin: Die DeutSCHule, Karl-Marx-Straße 107. (08.00 pm)

• Portland OR: Independent Publishing Resource Center, 318 SE Main St. (03.30 pm)

• Bamberg: Kunigundenruhstr. 8 (Distel). (07.30 pm)

• Valencia (Spain): Jerónima Gales 16. (03.00 pm)

• Basel: La Tienda Latina, Klybeckstrasse 33. (3.00 pm)

• Alicante: Calle Garbinet, 67. (06.00 pm)

• Mar del Plata: San Luis 2745, Proyecto Bar. (04.00 pm)

• Torino: Sala Polivalente, Via G. Giolitti 21. (03.00 pm)

WASHINGTON — Before a Mt. Rushmore-like painting of seven revered and deceased black heroes, a tuxedoed Bill Clinton stood in a darkened hall recently to describe himself to an audience of black Americans.

The 10-minute speech by the Democratic presidential nominee to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Dinner in Washington expressed a simple, direct and unspoken–though clearly understood–contrast to the last 12 years. Clinton did not have to spell out a course of action to win their support.

Rather, he swore to the 4,000 black diners that if they helped him fulfill his quest to win the presidency, he would provide “full participation, full partnership” in a Clinton White House.

“If I change my address, I will only be a tenant there,” he said. “You still own the place, and I want you to act like it.”

For Clinton, the moment was special only because it occurred in the harsh glare of a spotlighted public gathering. More typical of his efforts to court black support was the private, closed-door fundraiser held hours earlier and a few blocks away at a downtown Washington art museum. That reception, hosted by some 60 affluent black American business owners, produced $600,000 for the Arkansas governor.

“This was a historic event,” Rodney Slater, one of Clinton’s top black aides, said immediately after the fund-raiser. “This represents the fact that African-Americans want to be key players in the Clinton Administration. When they can raise that kind of money–that’s more than African-Americans have ever raised for anybody–you can bet the candidate will pay attention to them.”

Like all contemporary Democratic presidential candidates, Clinton is counting on overwhelming support from the nation’s black voters to propel him to victory. But to achieve that, he has taken a significantly different approach than the party’s previous nominees.

Clinton has avoided offering himself as a benefactor of black Americans through dramatic, highly publicized appeals to them or by proposing a host of social programs. Rather, the Arkansas governor has conducted an almost stealth-like campaign within black communities, quietly collecting chits from influential leaders and middle-class blacks while limiting efforts directed at poor, ghetto-dwelling African-Americans. And in targeting middle-class blacks, he has tried to blend their political and economic concerns into the same mix of issues aimed at attracting the highly coveted white suburban voting bloc.

He has done this in order to claim a larger share of the white vote–especially suburban white males, who polls have suggested viewed previous Democratic presidential candidates as too eager to genuflect to black demands. No Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 has won a majority of the white vote, a major reason the party has lost all but one presidential election since then.

With this strategy, Clinton sought to give his campaign an inclusive middle-class cast, effectively defusing race as an issue and avoiding the need to reassure white voters that he would not unduly bend toward poor and needy blacks.

Surprisingly, as Clinton has pursued this strategy, polls have shown he has garnered increasingly enthusiastic support from black voters. A recent survey of 850 blacks by the Washington-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies showed more than 80% giving Clinton highly favorable marks on questions of knowledge, fairness and leadership.

In fact, if there has been any genius–or luck–to Clinton’s handling of black voters, it has stemmed from amplifying the hard-edged pragmatism with which many black political leaders and their constituents approached the 1992 campaign. Minimizing conflict within their ranks, they have kept their eyes fixed on the prize: returning a Democrat to the White House. And Clinton appears to have been the beneficiary of this growing political maturity among black voters.

“We’re smart,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), one of Clinton’s earliest and most important black backers, said recently. “We know where our best interest lies. Even if it means that we campaign a little bit differently and not in the ways that we have before, we are out to win, and we can win with Bill Clinton.”

Overall, blacks make up about 1-in-6 of Clinton’s voters, according to recent polls. In the final Times national pre-election poll, released last week, he was favored by 78% of black voters, with President Bush and independent candidate Ross Perot each backed by 9%.

Many of these voters are the legacy of the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s unsuccessful 1984 and 1988 campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination, which excited political passions among blacks and swelled voter registration rolls within their communities.

Democratic nominees Walter F. Mondale in 1984 and Michael S. Dukakis in 1988 each publicly enlisted Jackson to their cause in hopes of gaining the allegiance of his followers. But while both Mondale and Dukakis harvested the vast majority of black votes cast in their respective races, neither was able to generate a huge turnout by African-Americans. That was especially apparent four years ago, when the failure of blacks to turn out in large numbers was seen as a major reason Dukakis lost close races to then-Vice President Bush in several states, including Illinois, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Missouri.

Clinton, during most of his campaign, took the alternative approach of keeping Jackson at arm’s length while beckoning an aspiring breed of black leaders to supplant him as a link to black voters.

Among the first black officials to join the Clinton cause early in the primary season–at a time when Jackson’s disdain for the Arkansas governor was undistinguished–were Reps. John Lewis of Georgia, Mike Espy of Mississippi and William J. Jefferson of Louisiana.

These three, like others, are not especially well-known nationally. But for the Clinton camp, what counts is that each commands strong and favorable name identification among blacks in their home states. And while in large measure these politicians offered their early support based on their association with Clinton as a fellow Southerner, it also reflected the new pragmatism among them.

Waters, a national co-chairwoman of the Clinton campaign, most vividly illustrates this phenomenon, given her past close ties to Jackson. Echoing countless other black elected officials, she makes clear that winning the White House is what matters to her this year, not the strategy the candidate employs to get there.

“I don’t question it at this point,” she said. “I want George Bush out of the White House so bad, I’ll buy (Clinton’s) strategy.”

Like Waters, Rep. Craig Washington (D-Texas) is unconcerned about Clinton’s primary focus on white, middle-class, suburban voters.

“He needs to go where he can get votes that I can’t get for him,” Washington said. “The fact that he doesn’t come into black churches every Sunday and that he doesn’t campaign in black communities (to avoid) turning off Joe Willie Six-Pack doesn’t bother me. He doesn’t want to send them back to help the Republicans.”

Linda Faye Williams, associate professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, said statements like those from black elected leaders–most of whom were faithful Jackson supporters in the past–reveals the “12 years of pent-up leadership hopes” among black leaders.

She also said that “many black elected officials chafed during the last two (presidential) elections over their own roles as leaders because Jesse was always the one out front. Clinton has answered their prayers by giving them room to maneuver.”

Ironically, in the campaign’s final hours, Clinton finds himself more dependent on black votes in some key states than many of his advisers anticipated. As many polls have shown the race tightening, the Arkansas governor’s fate appears increasingly tied to a heavy turnout among traditional Democratic constituencies, including blacks.

That’s especially true in two key regions. It appears Clinton needs a high black turnout in the Midwestern battleground states of Michigan and Ohio–where blacks cast 8% and 12%, respectively, of the votes four years ago–and in such hotly contested Southern states as Georgia and Louisiana, where blacks constituted about a fifth of the vote in 1988.

These political realities have helped lead to a rapprochement between Clinton’s campaign and Jackson. The campaign is hoping Jackson can help spur a big turnout among blacks for the Democratic ticket. And the civil rights leader, for his part, is quietly cooperating in hopes of gaining clout.

Meanwhile, some blacks have remained lukewarm toward Clinton, worrying that his campaign strategy will serve only to get him elected without demonstrating a real commitment to helping poor blacks. These leaders were distressed that the well-publicized bus tours that helped define the Clinton campaign immediately after the summer’s Democratic National Convention focused on small towns and rural America, where the crowds were made up mostly of white faces.

“We’re going to have to put a lot of pressure on Brother Clinton once he gets in the White House,” said Cornell West, director of Afro-American studies at Princeton University. “I hope he wins, but I recognize he’s not a true warrior for our cause.”

After a flurry of complaints that the campaign was avoiding black voters and ignoring their issues, Clinton’s staff squeezed in time for him to campaign a few weeks ago with a delegation of black congressional leaders as they barnstormed several Southern states in a get-out-the-vote effort sponsored by the Democratic National Committee.

Still, the bus trip failed to quell all of the concerns. Even some of those who joined in the journey dubbed it “The Back of the Bus Tour.”

Reporting from Sacramento — For all of the unprecedented elements of President Trump’s federal budget plans, there’s an item buried in the list of detailed spending cuts that has a familiar, contentious political legacy in California.

Trump has proposed canceling federal government subsidies to states that house prisoners and inmates who are in the U.S. illegally. He’s not the first president to try it, and undoubtedly will get an earful from states like California.

For sheer bravado, the award for defending that subsidy probably goes to former Gov. Pete Wilson. In a letter sent to federal officials in 1995, two days after Christmas, Wilson threatened to drop off one of the state’s undocumented prisoners — in shackles, no less — on the doorstep of a federal jail. (He never actually did it.)

“The intent of federal law is unequivocal,” Wilson wrote about the subsidy program. “The federal government must either reimburse the state at a fair rate for the incarceration of any undocumented inmate which it identifies or… take the burden of incarceration off the state’s hands.”

Wilson had won a second term the year before, with a blistering campaign attacking illegal immigration. His time in office was also marked by persistent state budget problems, and the money mattered. The state never got as much as it wanted, though, and years of squabbles followed over the fate of the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, established as part of the sweeping immigration reforms of 1986.

Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger did his fair share of complaining about skimpy SCAAP funding. In 2005, he and a bipartisan group of western U.S. governors demanded a boost in the program to a total of $850 million. That didn’t happen.

The past two presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, offered their own proposals to cancel the program. Trump’s budget scores the possible savings at $210 million. His budget blueprint lampoons SCAAP as “poorly targeted,” and describes it as a program “in which two-thirds of the funding primarily reimburses four states” for housing felons who lack legal immigration status.

Want to take a guess which state gets the most? OK, that’s an easy one.

California’s state government received $44.1 million in the 2015 federal budget year, according to Justice Department data. Add to that another $12.8 million that was paid directly to California counties, with the largest local subsidy being the $3 million paid to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

More than one-third of the entire program went to California. No other state’s share was even close. A win on this issue for the president would be particularly bitter for the state, where political animosity toward Trump is widespread.

Political Road Map: There’s a $368 billion reason that California depends on Washington »

In Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget unveiled last month, he assumed $50.6 million in federal help for prison costs related to felons in the U.S. illegally. A budget spokesman for Brown said the governor will ask for help from the state’s congressional delegation in saving the program. Still, it’s safe to say the estimate is now in doubt.

Roll back the clock, though, and take a look at how this political debate has changed. Wilson’s legacy on illegal immigration cast a long shadow as candidate Trump promised to go after “bad hombres” who are illegally in the country. The president’s official plan, by most estimates, would go even further.

When President Obama tried to nix the subsidy, conservatives warned it would endanger public safety. So far, few are making the same case now that it’s coming from Trump — a curious development, given California’s most famous illegal immigration critic once insisted the program was essential.

john.myers@latimes.com

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In the last several months, Tim Russert of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” one of TV’s toughest interviewers, struck out with two of his biggest “gets”:

In August, he quizzed Sen. John F. Kerry, “You both were members of Skull and Bones, a secret society at Yale. What does that tell us?”

Kerry: “Not much, because it’s a secret.”

In February, he asked President Bush, “You were both in Skull and Bones, the secret society?”

Bush: “It’s so secret we can’t talk about it.”

Such coyness on the part of grown men! And yet, their recalcitrance does prove one thing: The guys can keep a secret.

But is that good? Secrecy, after all, leads to rumors. And the rumors about Skull and Bones — naked confessions of sexual conquests, grave robbing, free money and, of course, plans for world domination — don’t look good on the presidential resume. Those rumors received a boost when it became apparent that, for the first time in history, two Bonesmen will face off for the presidency in November.

“It’s certainly a coincidence that lends itself to attention,” said the historian Kevin Phillips, whose recent work, “American Dynasty,” explores how the Bushes have benefited from what he calls “crony capitalism.” “Is it nefarious? I guess it’s a little insidious.”

Journalist and author Ron Rosenbaum (Yale ‘68), who wrote the seminal article on Skull and Bones for Esquire in 1977, thinks the Bush-Kerry coincidence should be treated thoughtfully. “Obviously, it’s part of what shaped the character of the two presidential candidates, and yet there’s a lot of overblown conspiracy theory that has outweighed the seriousness.”

Indeed, a serious political discussion might examine the meaning of both presidential candidates maintaining an inherently undemocratic affiliation and refusing to address an important aspect of their university lives. Instead, discussions on the Internet, talk radio and cable TV, generally turn on suspicions that Skull and Bones has attempted to mastermind a “new world order” in which only a handful of wealthy, old-line families control the planet.

“Is this a satanic cult? No. Is this a group that operates as a shadow government? No. Is this a group that has an institutionalized superiority complex? Yes,” said Alexandra Robbins, a 27-year-old journalist and Yale alumna whose book “Secrets of the Tomb” explores the 172-year-old club based on interviews with 100 anonymous Bonesmen. Bones, she said, has “a power agenda” that “prioritizes its own elitism and its own members above other concerns.”

Rosenbaum disputes that there is a specific “power agenda” at work. “I would say the best way of describing it is by analogy to the old boys’ network in England, where graduates of Eton and Oxford and Cambridge form a network of influence and power and share a mind-set. They know each other, they trust each other and they bonded at an early age.”

If nothing else, Skull and Bones has produced some odd bedfellows. “I am a liberal Democratic criminal defense attorney who voted for George Bush, and I will vote for him again,” said Bush’s fellow Bonesman Donald Etra, an Orthodox Jew who lives in L.A. and was appointed by Bush to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. Etra, who called himself “a strong Zionist,” said one of his closest Bones friends is a Jordanian-born Muslim. “Most of us,” he said, “put friendship first and politics a far, far second.”

Next month, an eclectic group of 15 juniors will be tapped for Skull and Bones by this year’s seniors. There have never been specific criteria for membership, which in generations past might have included some standard campus types: the editor of the Yale Daily, an outstanding athlete, a son of a Bonesman etc. Women were admitted in 1991, after a rancorous 20-year battle.

Bones members spend each Thursday and Sunday of their senior year in the Tomb, the group’s clubhouse on High Street in the middle of the Yale campus. It is windowless, ersatz Greco-Egyptian temple, readily identified on Yale maps.

“It’s kind of foreboding looking,” said a 48-year-old Toronto writer who sneaked into the Tomb with her boyfriend during spring break 1975. “They made it into this big mystery thing. But it wasn’t. It’s just like a big clubhouse, but it’s not in a tree.” There was a large dining room with a long table, and she recalled a room full of license plates. “They were always ripping things off with ‘322’ on them.”

The number 322 is a variation on the year (1832) that the club was founded by William H. Russell, a Yale student who modeled it after one he’d encountered in Germany. At its inception, said Dr. Alan Cross, one of Kerry’s classmates and a third-generation Bonesman, the club was “basically a debating society, where members of the senior class would get together and discuss important topics of the day.” (Bonesmen have a special regard for Demosthenes, the famed Greek orator who died in 322 BC.)

In later generations, the conversations became not just confessional but confrontational in the manner of group therapy, according to some reports. There was always security, said Cross, a professor of social medicine and pediatrics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in the knowledge that “what goes on inside, what people reveal about themselves … would stay inside the building.”

Not surprisingly, given Yale’s lofty status in the firmament of American universities, Bonesmen often have occupied positions of power and prestige as adults. Three have become president (both Bushes and William Howard Taft). A partial roster of the famous includes diplomat Averill Harriman, poet Archibald MacLeish, financier Dean Witter Jr., Time magazine founder Henry Luce, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, national security advisor McGeorge Bundy, writers William F. Buckley and Christopher Buckley, former Sen. David Boren and FedEx founder Frederick Smith.

Not every Bonesman has loved the club unconditionally. As an adult, William Sloane Coffin, the Yale chaplain known for his opposition to the Vietnam War, developed a distaste for it. “He thought it was inappropriate,” said Cross. “A snobby thing. We were discouraged from gathering in groups around campus because it would perpetuate the notion that this was an elitist group.”

But of course, it is an elite group. Members can’t apply for membership — they are secretly elected. They have lifelong access to Deer Island, a private 40-acre sanctuary in the St. Lawrence River, which is owned by Skull and Bones’ corporate parent, the Russell Trust Assn. And they are accorded other, less tangible benefits for life, not the least of which are their connections to the well-connected.

The Bush family has a long history with Skull and Bones. George W. Bush’s father tapped him in 1967, as a favor to the seniors who nominated him. The president’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, who was a U.S. senator, supposedly boasted in a journal that he stole the skull of Geronimo in 1918 for display among the many osseous relics in the Tomb, according to Robbins.

The current college generation of Bushes may represent a break in family tradition: Barbara Bush, a Yale senior, reportedly rejected an invitation to join the club.

Kerry, tapped in 1965, has no family history with Bones, although David Thorne, the twin of his first wife, Julia, is a member, as was his current wife’s first father-in-law, John Heinz.

Whether the president and his challenger are influenced by their Skull and Bones associations is, in a general sense, a matter of record. Both men have close friends and political contributors who are Bonesmen. Bush’s early forays into business were helped along by older Bonesmen. Bush has appointed several of his clubmates to government positions, including William H. Donaldson, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Tales from a ‘savage’

The general goings on in the Tomb — particularly of eras past — are not truly secret anymore. This is due, mostly, to the investigative efforts of the two Yalie journalists, Rosenbaum and Robbins.

Robbins was an editorial assistant in the Washington bureau of the New Yorker when she first wrote a story about Skull and Bones for the Atlantic in 2000, which she expanded into a book two years later. Her own membership in a Yale secret society, Scroll and Key, helped open doors. “I got a lot of hang-ups and a lot of gruff voices saying, ‘I’m not talking to you about that!’ ” But when she identified herself as a “savage” — Bones-speak for a member of another secret society — it worked as an entree. (Regular folks are “barbarians.”)

Robbins has revealed that all Bonesmen receive lifelong nicknames, some handed down. (The president’s father, she writes, was “Magog,” a name given to the most sexually experienced Bonesman. George W. never got around to choosing a nickname and was dubbed “Temporary.”)

Like Rosenbaum (who has participated in covert taping operations of Bones rituals with infrared equipment), Robbins has written about the Tomb’s initiation rites. Bonesmen dress up as a variety of characters — “right out of Harry Potter meets Dracula” — and conduct what she has described as “a cross between haunted-house antics and a human pinball game.”

“World domination aside,” she writes in “Secrets of the Tomb,” the most pervasive rumors about Bones are that initiates must masturbate in a coffin while recounting their sexual exploits and that their candor is ultimately rewarded with a no-strings gift of $15,000.”

No Bonesmen interviewed for this article would comment on the nature of the confessional conversations. But Cross and Etra laughed at the idea that there was a monetary gift. “There was no check,” said Cross. Another Bonesman who graduated from Yale in 1975 and lives in Los Angeles, agreed: “That’s ridiculous! I never got any money.”

‘Somewhat laughable’

Despite the fact that the presidential race has kindled interest in Skull and Bones, many believe the club has been in a long decline. Admitting women may have struck a blow for equality, but the Tomb just hasn’t generated much juicy buzz since then.

These days, wrote Franklin Foer in an April 2000 issue of the New Republic, Yale’s secret societies are “high temples of political correctness” where women outnumber men and “conservatives are scarce.”

While Kerry has said that he favored admitting women, the Bush position is not known. However, rumors have it that some older Bonesmen have forsaken the club now that it is coed.

“Once upon a time there was something called the Eastern Establishment, and Skull and Bones was a significant institution feeding into it,” said Jacob Weisberg, 39, editor of the online magazine Slate. “There is the residue of it, but it is not the same kind of network, not the same kind of career path.”

Weisberg should know.

In spring 1986, Weisberg, a Yale student interning at the New Republic, was invited to Kerry’s office. “I was writing about politics, so I thought maybe he was going to give me a scoop or something,” Weisberg said. But when Weisberg showed up, Kerry tapped him for Skull and Bones.

“I said, ‘Sen. Kerry, as a liberal, how do you justify supporting this club that doesn’t admit women?’ ”

Kerry was taken aback. According to Weisberg, Kerry said: “I’ve marched with battered women.”

Weisberg declined the tap and has no regrets.

“The institution is somewhat laughable at this point,” he said. “That we’re having a presidential race with two alumni of this club tells you something, but it tells you more about what’s changed, because it’s inconceivable that in 20 years we’ll have an election where two candidates are from Skull and Bones. This is the last time this could plausibly happen. I think it’s sort of the last gasp.”

SACRAMENTO — Tom Steyer must solve this dilemma: How does he convince financially struggling Californians they can trust a billionaire to be their governor?

Because, after all, the former hedge fund titan doesn’t exactly share their daily ordeal of scraping up enough money to pay for rent, groceries and gas in the run-down car.

And he doesn’t have any record in public office to point to. He’s trying to start his elective career at the top.

So, what’s the solution? Well, you can be a global celebrity like super-rich actor Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was elected in 2003. Or a Gold Rush tycoon like Leland Stanford back in 1861. Other than those two, there’s a long list of well-heeled rookie failures.

They include Republican Meg Whitman, who blew $144 million of her fortune losing in 2010. And Al Checchi, who spent $40 million of his own money getting beaten in the 1994 Democratic primary.

“Look, they didn’t have anything to say,” Steyer told me while sipping tea at a popular hangout near the state Capitol, specifically mentioning Whitman and Checchi. “They’d never done anything. Not like I’ve done for 14 years.”

Steyer, 68, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, touts his record of funding and promoting progressive causes, including successful ballot campaigns that raised tobacco taxes, closed a major corporate tax loophole and beat back oil industry efforts to kill climate fighting laws.

“I could give you 10 things I’ve done about environmental sustainability and economic justice,” he said.

“Why trust me? Because I’ve gotten results. And I don’t owe anybody anything.”

The Democrat spent $12 million on TV ads last year pushing Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Proposition 50 that allowed the Legislature to gerrymander congressional districts aimed at gaining five more Democratic seats in California.

Being a billionaire allows Steyer to buy all the TV spots he wants. He already has popped for $27 million worth running for governor.

But astronomical wealth comes with a political price.

“California voters do not cotton to some rich guy who has never spent a day in office but looks in the mirror one morning and suddenly sees a governor of California,” says veteran Democratic strategist Garry South.

So, in his campaign TV commercials, Steyer wears casual backyard barbecue garb trying to look like Mr. Average, but with a populist agenda.

“I’m the billionaire who’s going to take on the billionaires,” he says.

That sounds counterintuitive, and I’m skeptical about how well it sells.

Steyer knows he sorely needs labor support to seem credible among the working class. That’s why he recently joined rallies for striking teachers in San Francisco and healthcare workers in San Diego.

He has scored endorsements from the California School Employees Assn. — a union representing school staff — and the California Nurses Assn.

Nurses are backing Steyer largely because he has embraced their No. 1 goal: a single-payer, state-run health insurance system.

They’ve attempted to push that in Sacramento for years and failed. And for good reason.

Single-payer would cost the state barrels of money it doesn’t have. Moreover, it would replace not only private insurance, but popular federal Medicare and the state’s Medi-Cal program for the poor. The federal government would need to agree. Fat chance.

I asked Steyer whether he really believes the state bureaucracy is capable of handling such an ambitious undertaking.

“We’re going to have to get back to having a government that works,” he replied, in what sounded like a knock on Newsom and his predecessors.

How could he make a single-payer system work? “God is in the details,” he answered, a phrase he frequently uses. Translation: “I don’t know.”

“We’re going to work through it. That’ll take at least three years… But we’re going to have to do it…. Healthcare costs have been escalating for a very long time. And they’re eating up the [state] budget.”

After Steyer left hedge fund investing, he became an ardent crusader for clean energy and fighting climate change. It was his core issue running for president in 2020, when he spent $340 million before giving up.

But these days, he barely mentions climate. The better politics du jour is advocating for “affordability” — especially affordable housing.

Steyer said he doesn’t have a “silver bullet” for lowering housing costs. He has “silver buckshot” — a scattergun of solutions for boosting housing supply, plus rent control.

He’d shorten the time for issuing construction permits, require rezoning to develop vacant land, tax unoccupied housing left off the market and build higher — more like in New York’s Manhattan, where he was raised.

“What we’re doing is sprawl,” he said. “And what sprawl leads to is an awful lot of commuting, a lot of driving.”

That’s been a problem for generations, I noted. Suburban ranch-style housing is the California way. “People can change,” he said. “I think people want to.”

I asked him about the slow-poke bullet train project that’s costing four times original estimates.

“Of course, I’m in favor of high speed rail,” he said. “But good grief. We’ve been working on this for an incredibly long time and spent an incredible amount of money. As far as I can tell, we haven’t built anything. If we’re going to do high-speed rail, we have to build it at a reasonable price. And we haven’t been able to do that.”

Might he abandon the project? “I want to look at it,” he said.

The odds are against him ever getting the opportunity.

But the odds aren’t exciting for any candidate in this ho-hum contest.

Steyer is running in the middle of the pack, based on polls. He has hired the strategists who managed Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani’s victorious campaign for New York mayor.

There’s no front-runner for governor. But Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Dublin) has some momentum. He recently was endorsed by Sen. Adam Schiff. And he’ll also soon be endorsed by influential former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, I’m told.

Voters will do their all-important endorsing in the June 2 primary.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: In 50-year fight to protect California’s coast, they’re the real McCoys, still at it in their 80s
CA vs. Trump: Trump, California and the multi-front war over the next election
The L.A. Times Special: Who pays for Newsom’s travel? Hint: It’s not always taxpayers

Until next week,
George Skelton

—
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Meg Whitman strode to the podium, cloaked in righteous indignation. Her husband stood silently by her side.

Just one day earlier, her former housekeeper had revealed that Whitman — the Republican candidate for governor with the tough talk on immigration — had employed an illegal worker for nine years.

Although she said she fired Nicandra Diaz Santillan after she heard about her housekeeper’s status, Whitman was in a no-win situation. Conservatives wondered why Whitman hadn’t turned “Nicky” over to authorities. Liberals bristled that the candidate hadn’t helped this “member of our extended family” find an attorney.

After a 45-minute barrage of questions, the always-on-message candidate finally delivered her main talking points: “We have to secure the borders. We have to hold employers accountable. We’ve got to eliminate sanctuary cities. And we’ve got to get a temporary guestworker program so people like Nicky can work here legally.”

The dueling news conferences that week — Whitman vs. Diaz Santillan and her attorney, Gloria Allred —were remarkable for more than their political repercussions. Salted between housekeeper tears and candidate bluster were as many details as had ever been known about the closely guarded private life of the billionaire who aspires to be governor.

Whitman has spent a lifetime in business, shepherding, protecting and selling some of America’s most valuable brands: Ivory soap, Keds, Mr. Potato Head, EBay. For the last 19 months, she has burnished her own brand — using more than $141 million of her personal fortune in the process.

Her money has made Whitman a ubiquitous presence in California living rooms, her aristocratic tones wafting out of television sets in an unprecedented barrage of ads. It has allowed her to largely avoid the spontaneity that gets novice politicians into trouble. Campaign stops tend to be by invitation only, or photo ops, like her recent stint as NASCAR grand marshal: “Gentlemen, start your engines!”

The former EBay chief is running on resume, not biography, to an extent rarely seen in modern politics. At a time when candidates’ extended families gambol on stage, and cameras are invited to watch them ski, fish and barbecue, Whitman’s is still largely unknown.

The candidate is married to Dr. Griffith Rutherford Harsh IV; his silent cameo in Santa Monica was a rare appearance on his wife’s behalf. The Stanford University neurosurgeon has given just one interview in their 30-year marriage. Whitman’s sister and brother have neither spoken nor appeared for her. Ditto, her two grown sons. Despite repeated requests, the campaign did not make Whitman available for an interview.

As a result Californians have learned more about Whitman from campaign crises and court cases than they have from the candidate’s own telling: For most of her adult life, she did not vote. She has a temper that can flare under pressure. Her primary residence and household staff are modest by billionaires’ standards: 3,700 square feet in tony Atherton for the first, a part-time housekeeper, landscape and pool service for the second.

Whitman and her campaign staff “refuse to relinquish any kind of control over the candidate, her image and her message,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a USC political analyst. “They can afford to; they have all the money in the Western world.… When her people don’t have control, there is danger there.”

It’s not as if Margaret Cushing Whitman’s 54 years haven’t had their share of personal drama. But there are stories she tells on the campaign trail — and ones she doesn’t.

Whitman was raised in wealthy Lloyd Harbor, N.Y., the youngest of three children. Her 6-foot 8-inch father, Hendricks Hallett Whitman, was a World War II veteran who worked in the financial industry. But it was her stay-at-home mother, Margaret C. Whitman, whom the candidate describes as her inspiration, a woman blessed with a “bias for action.”

Whitman actually talks as much about her mother’s personal life as her own.

In the depths of World War II, Whitman’s Boston-born mother wanted to do her share. She ended up in New Guinea with the Red Cross fixing airplane and jeep engines — though she had never popped a hood in her life.

“What that story really told me as a little girl was the price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a mistake,” Whitman said at a recent campaign event. “That you have to try things that you’re not sure you can do.”

Buried deep in Whitman’s recent book, past 200 pages of corporate bromides (Be frugal. Be authentic. Results matter.) are two tales that do not make the campaign-trail cut: the story of her own birth defect and of her sister Anne’s struggle with mental illness.

Tall, patrician and athletic today, Whitman was born with dysplasia; her left hip lacked a socket. Doctors discovered the condition shortly after she was born, and she spent her toddler years strapped in a metal brace that helped mold a socket.

The treatment worked, and Whitman gravitated toward sports. She was captain of the swim team at Cold Harbor High School, where she graduated a year early. At Princeton University, where she was in only the fourth class to admit women, she played lacrosse and squash.

Stories of overcoming hardship are staples for most candidates, but Whitman eschews the emotional in favor of pragmatic connections to her audiences. Her campaign pays particular attention to women voters, and the candidate regularly reminds audiences that she would be the first woman governor. But she spends little time talking about the difficulties of balancing home and family and whether she shared those problems.

At a campaign event last month, a member of the audience asked Whitman: “Does being a woman and a mother give you a different perspective on running this state, and if so, how?” Her answer? Maybe, but it doesn’t really matter.

“In the end, as all the women in this audience know and all the men, you have to deliver the results, don’t you?” she responded. “And that’s what I did in my business career, and that is what I will do as governor.”

Whitman argues that her corporate experience makes her uniquely qualified to run a place as complex as California. And she offers up her decade at online auction giant EBay as exhibit A for why voters should choose her over Brown.

But between consulting firm Bain & Co, one of her first jobs out of business school, where she said she learned to be a corporate “all-around athlete,” and EBay, which she boasts grew from 30 to 15,000 employees during her tenure, there was FTD. In her book she describes her two years there in the mid-1990s as “probably the most frustrating and, ultimately, least satisfying executive experience in my career.”

When Whitman arrived, the member-owned association of florists had just been bought by an investor group and turned into a for-profit company. To service the debt, the company had to be immediately profitable, but many of the association’s florists had decamped to the competition.

“I finally quit that job,” she wrote, telling the arbitrageur who bought FTD: “ ‘This company is not fixable, at least by me.’ ”

Whitman wasn’t the only one who rued her time at the Southfield, Mich., headquarters.

Peggy Thompson, her assistant, recalled that FTD administration had been segregated in an isolated executive wing. Whitman shut that down and “moved us in with everyone else. We thought, ‘That’s really awesome. She wants us to be one team.’ But she didn’t have anything to do with us. She didn’t like us…. She was the worst boss I’ve ever had, and I’ve had some winners.”

Nearly a year into her stint at FTD, Whitman was sued for age discrimination by a 55-year-old technology executive named David M. Carlson, whom she fired and replaced with a 39-year-old, a man her age.

At a strategy session shortly before Carlson was let go, Whitman said the company needed “about fifteen killer young executives,” according to court documents. When FTD’s head of government affairs suggested that she not use the word “young” and probably didn’t mean it, she replied: “Actually, I do.”

The suit ended in a confidential settlement. Carlson could not be reached for comment.

It was EBay, of course, that Whitman helped make a household name, and the quirky online auction company returned the favor with wealth and opportunity. In the course of a decade, two brands were born.

No campaign appearance or debate is complete without at least a taste of her EBay experience. As she noted during the final debate: “I ended up running one of the great Internet success stories…. I was a job creator.”

Her tenure earned her accolades. Harvard Business Review named her one of the top performing CEOs of the past decade; Fortune magazine put her on its list of the Top Five most powerful women.

Maynard Webb, whom she wooed to the company to rebuild its faulty computer system after a 22-hour outage, calls her “the best boss and leader that I ever had.”

He saw her push the company to expand outside of North America, and “today international is over 50% of EBay’s revenues.” And he remembers the day in 2001 when the system again broke down. First the primary system failed, then the backups.

The site was down for hours, leaving buyers and sellers paralyzed. Even after the outage ended, time-consuming technical cleanup followed.

“Meg stayed with the team, made sure it was all OK,” Webb recounted. “She left at 2 a.m. This was the kind of leader she was.”

But her tenure was not without controversy. She pushed the company into a string of acquisitions. Some, like PayPal, were successes. Others, like Skype and Butterfield & Butterfield, were widely panned. Her last three years at the company coincided with slowing growth and a faltering stock price.

In 2007, while being prepped for an interview with Reuters, Whitman became angry with a communications aide, uttered an expletive and shoved the young woman.

The incident led to a confidential settlement in which Young Mi Kim reportedly received $200,000. At first the campaign sought to portray the matter as a “verbal dispute,” but Whitman later acknowledged that she had laid hands on Kim.

“Sometimes,” she said, “these things happen.”

Whitman never planned to go into business or politics. Her ambition to become a medical doctor was derailed by a collision with organic chemistry; she opted for business after selling ads for a student magazine called Business Today.

Her shift to politics came at the request of Mitt Romney, who had been her mentor at Bain. Romney asked her to help him run for president; she raised millions for him. When he dropped out of the 2008 race, she shifted her support to John McCain. Forever the marketer, she also came up with his slogan: “Country first.”

Her own venture into politics left many to wonder why the deeply private Whitman would open herself up to the scrutiny of campaigning. Introducing her to his employees at Cisco Systems recently, Chief Executive John Chambers asked her if a particular event pushed her to run because, “as a friend, I worry.”

An hour or so later, Whitman would make her first remarks about her housekeeper. But she made no mention of that in responding to Chambers. Characteristically impersonal, Whitman recalled a meeting at EBay, where the company’s executive team rued how hard it was for businesses to function here. Today, she told Chambers, she wants to change that.

“I remember my executive team sitting in a conference room,” she recounted. “And I said, ‘If we were going to start EBay again, would we start it in California?’ And you know, I’m not sure the answer to that is ‘Yes.’ ”

maria.laganga@latimes.com

After some 150 students walked out of Redlands schools early this month in support of immigrants they were dealt an unexpected consequence: a temporary suspension of school privileges as administrators enforced rules that forbid them from leaving a classroom without permission.

The punishment — the loss of access to sports, dances, performances and other school events — in a school system with a conservative-majority governing board stands in sharp contrast to the positive reception that student activism has received in some other California school systems, including Los Angeles Unified School District.

The disparate actions show how school officials throughout various states and school systems — in blue and red regions — have been dealing with a wave of student walkouts that began in late January as part of national protests over the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement crackdown.

Redlands school officials said the suspension of privileges will remain in place until a student satisfies certain conditions, such as attending a session of Saturday school or performing four hours of community service.

“The superintendent’s message is consistent: We care deeply about our students, and we recognize that many young people are dealing and engaging with issues they see in the news and in their community,” said district Public Information Officer Christine Stephens. “Students have the right to express themselves peacefully. At the same time, the district must uphold its responsibility to maintain a safe, supervised learning environment during the school day.”

Districts that expressed support for students’ free-speech rights included those in San Francisco and Sacramento. In Palo Alto, district officials worked with schools to make sure students could carry out their announced walkout safely.

L.A. Unified officials have not set districtwide penalties for walkouts — and its leaders align with the students’ anti-ICE critique. Supt. Alberto Carvalho, an immigrant himself, has pledged to do all in the district’s power to maintain schools as sanctuaries for children of immigrant families — and activists patrol outside schools to help ensure safe passage to campus for parents and students.

At the same time, LAUSD educators have encouraged students to stay on campus for safety reasons. In L.A. there were reports of physical confrontations between officers and protesters after students walked out on Feb. 5 and on Feb. 13, when three federal agents were injured after some in the crowd threw objects at them.

State and education leaders in Texas and Florida outlined significant consequences for students and educators related to student walkouts. In Texas, state leaders have talked about possible suspension and expulsion for students, dismissal for educators and state takeovers for school districts.

The ACLU of Georgia sent a letter Jan. 29 expressing concerns to the Cobb County School District after it threatened out-of-school suspension, loss of parking and extracurricular privileges and warned of college admissions consequences for participation in walkouts.

The ACLU warned that the school system would be acting illegally if walkout participants were singled out for especially harsh treatment based on their viewpoints.

The young activists

Student high school activists — in Redlands and elsewhere — said they are willing to face consequences, if necessary, to stand up for what they believe by protesting the actions of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“As organizers, it’s expected for us to take the first wave of retaliation,” said Redlands High School senior Jax Hardy. “So while we would be very disappointed in the district for doing such a thing, for us, it’s important to exercise our free speech rights to oppose a government that is encroaching on our human rights.”

Student leaders see their protests as a civics lesson in action.

“It’s necessary to act, because, if we don’t, who knows how things will escalate further,” said Redlands High junior Aya F, who goes by her last initial rather than her full legal name. “So that’s why we feel it’s important for us to stage this walkout.”

Redlands is about 60 miles east of downtown L.A. and enrolls about 20,000 students. In November 2024 a conservative majority was elected to the five-person Redlands Board of Education, aligning the board with key policies of the Trump administration. Redlands joined a handful of ideologically similar California boards in approving policies that would allow parents to challenge library books with sexual content and prohibit display of the rainbow pride flag, which is associated with the LGBTQ+ community.

But the district stated that its actions on the walkouts have no ideology attached.

“The district’s response is not based on the viewpoint, theme or content of a student’s expression,” Stephens said.

Students walk out despite punishment

Some Redlands students organized another walkout Friday and organizers said they expected representation from students at seven middle and high schools. Many showed up from Redlands High School. They carried “Stop ICE” signs and Mexican flags and blew whistles as they made a 15-minute trek to a downtown intersection that some refer to as “Peace Corner.”

“I haven’t seen this many people in Redlands do anything ever,” said sophomore James Bojado, who also said that, for days, administrators had attempted to dissuade students with threats of discipline.

Several Redlands police vehicles patrolled the rally area, slowly rolling by.

A man in a sun hat shouted: “Why don’t you fly the American flag? Are you ashamed of America?”

“Leave us alone!” a chorus responded.

“My mom and my dad are immigrants,” said sophomore Carmen Robles. “Why deport families that care about America back to where they came from?”

At the rally, student demands included an ironclad district commitment that ICE will never be allowed on campus. Students also called for the abolition of ICE and spoke of wanting the school board to rescind what they regard as anti-LGBTQ+ policies. These include the flag ban and the book restriction policy.

During the Friday Redlands rally, there were a few tense minutes when a student in a MAGA hat was pelted by water bottles. The student spoke to police but also said he wasn’t hurt.

A person wearing a MAGA hat gets water and pizza thrown at him during a student walkout and protest in Redlands.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

Adult volunteers were on hand with the goal of keeping things safe and positive. Parent Toni Belcher said that students have a right to be heard.

“I’m happy to see all these kids trying to get their voice to matter,” Belcher said. “If it doesn’t now, it will. … They’re starting early.”

What the law says

The right of students to express themselves begins with the U.S. Constitution.

“You do not lose your right to free speech just by walking into school,” according to guidance from the American Civil Liberties Union. “You have the right to speak out, hand out flyers and petitions and wear expressive clothing in school — as long as you don’t disrupt the functioning of the school or violate the school’s content-neutral policies.”

A walkout, however, could be treated as a disruption. But greater punishment cannot be applied based on the nature of the views expressed.

Redlands Unified believes it is complying with that legal standard.

California law offers some additional protection for student protests, but it’s not unlimited.

A California law, which took effect in 2023, allows a middle or high school student to miss one day of school per year as an excused absence for a “civic or political event.” This includes, but is not limited to, “voting, poll-working, strikes, public-commenting, candidate speeches, political or civic forums and town halls.”

The bill’s author, then-state Sen. Connie Leyva, said at the time that the law “emphasizes the importance of getting students more involved in government and their community by prioritizing student opportunities for civic learning and engagement both within and outside their education.”

One caveat is that the law requires that “the pupil notifies the school ahead of the absence.”

Students exercising this right must be allowed to make up missed schoolwork without penalty. There are potential gray areas — such as whether a large-scale school walkout — which organizers intend to be dramatic — would fall outside this protection because students don’t formally check out, for example.

One Redlands parent said he notified the school that his son had permission to take part in an earlier walkout after the walkout. But his son was still penalized because, the parent said, he was not allowed to grant permission for his son retroactively.

State law does require advance notice, but it does not say parental permission is required for that one protected civic activity day per year. The law also stipulates that schools, at their discretion, can allow additional excused absences for civic participation.

The parent, who did not want to be named out of concern for retaliation, said his son was placed on a “No-Go List” for extracurricular activities and events.

President Trump and his allies are questioning ballot security. Democrats are warning of unconstitutional federal intervention. Experts and others are raising concerns about partisan redistricting and federal immigration agents intimidating people at the polls.

Voter trust in the upcoming midterm elections, meanwhile, has dropped off sharply, and across party lines, according to new research by the UC San Diego Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections.

Out of 11,406 eligible voters surveyed between mid-December and mid-January, just 60% said they were confident that midterm votes will be counted fairly — down from 77% who held such confidence in vote counting shortly after the 2024 presidential election.

Shifts in voter confidence are common after elections, with voters in winning parties generally expressing more confidence and voters in losing parties expressing less, said Thad Kousser, one of the center’s co-directors. However, the new survey found double-digit, across-the-board declines in confidence in the last year, he said.

According to voting experts, such drops in confidence and fears about voter intimidation are alarming — and raise serious questions about voter turnout in a pivotal midterm election that could radically reshape American politics.

While 82% of Republicans expressed at least some confidence in vote counting after Trump’s 2024 win, just 65% said they felt that way in the latest survey. Among Democrats, confidence dropped from 77% to 64%, and among independents from 73% to 57%, the survey found.

“Everyone — Democrats, Republicans, independents alike — have become less trusting of elections over the last year,” Kousser said, calling it a “parallel movement in this polarized era.”

Of course, what is causing those declines differs greatly by party, said Kousser’s co-director Lauren Prather, with distrust of mail ballots and noncitizens voting cited by half of Republicans, and concerns about eligible voters being unable to cast ballots because of fear or intimidation cited by nearly a quarter of Democrats.

Trump and other Republicans have repeatedly alleged that mail ballots contribute to widespread fraud and that noncitizen voting is a major problem in U.S. elections, despite neither claim being supported by evidence.

Dean C. Logan, Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, oversees the registering of voters, maintaining voter files, administering federal, state, local and special elections and verifying initiatives, referenda and recall petitions.

(Gary Coronado / For The Times)

Many Democratic leaders and voting experts have raised concerns about disenfranchisement and intimidation of eligible voters, in part based on Republican efforts to enforce stricter voter ID and proof of citizenship requirements, and Trump suggesting his party should “take over” elections nationwide.

Others in Trump’s orbit have suggested Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents will be deployed to polling stations, and the FBI recently raided and seized ballots from Fulton County, Ga., long a target of Trump’s baseless claims of 2020 election fraud.

Prather said that research has long showed that “elite cues” — or messaging from political leaders — matter in shaping public perception of election security and integrity, so it is no surprise that the concerns being raised by Trump and other party elites are being echoed by voters.

But the survey also identified more bipartisan concerns, she said.

Voters of all backgrounds — including 51% of Democrats, 48% of independents and 34% of Republicans — said they do not trust that congressional districts are drawn to fairly reflect what voters want. They primarily blamed the opposing party for the problem, but nearly a quarter of both Democrats and Republicans also expressed dissatisfaction with their own party leaders, the survey found.

Various states have engaged in unprecedented mid-decade redistricting to win more congressional seats for their party, with Republicans seizing advantage in states such as Texas and Democrats seizing it in states such as California.

Voters of all backgrounds — including 44% of Democrats, 34% of independents and 30% of Republicans — also said they believe it is likely that ICE agents will be present at voting locations in their area, though they did not all agree on the implications.

Half of Democrats said such a presence would make them feel less confident that votes in their area would be counted accurately, compared with fewer than 14% who said it would make them more confident. Among Republicans, 48% said it would make them more confident, and about 8% less confident. Among independents, 19% said more confident, 32% less confident.

Perceptions of ICE at polling locations also varied by race, with 42% of Asian American voters, 38% of Hispanic voters, 29% of white voters and 28% of Black voters saying it would make them feel less confident, while 18% of Asian American voters, 24% of Hispanic voters, 27% of white voters and 21% of Black voters said it would make them feel more confident.

Among both Black and Hispanic voters, 46% said they expect to face intimidation while voting, compared with 35% of Asian American voters and just 10% of white voters. Meanwhile, 31% of Hispanic and Asian American voters, 21% of Black voters and 8% of white voters said they are specifically worried about being questioned by ICE agents at the polls.

A man waits in line to vote at Compton College in November.

(Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times)

Kousser said voters’ lack of confidence this cycle reflects a remarkable moment in American politics, when political rhetoric has caused widespread distrust not just in the outcome of elections, but in the basic structure and fairness of how votes are collected and counted — despite those structures being tested and proven.

“We’re at this moment now where there are people on both sides who are questioning what the objective conditions will be of the election — whether people will be able to freely make it to the polls, what the vote counting mechanisms will be — and that’s true sort of left, right, and center in American politics today,” he said.

Prather said research in other countries has shown that distrust in elections over time can cause voters to stop voting, particularly if they think their vote won’t be fairly counted. She does not think the U.S. has reached that point, as high turnout in recent elections has shown, but it is a longer-term risk.

What could have a more immediate effect are ICE deployments, “especially among groups that have worries about what turning out could mean for them if they expect ICE or federal agents to be there,” Prather said.

Election experts said voters with concerns should take steps to ensure their vote counts, including by double-checking they are registered and making a plan to vote early, by mail or with family and friends if they are worried about intimidation.

What voters should not do if they are worried about election integrity is decide to not vote, they said.

“The No. 1 thing on my list is and always will be: Vote,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the Voting Rights and Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law. “That sounds maybe trite or simple, but the only way we hold on to our democracy is if people continue to participate and continue to trust it and put their faith in it.”

Registrar voter staff members process ballots at the Orange County Registrar of Voters in Santa Ana in November.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

“Now is the time to buckle down and figure out how to fortify our protections for fair elections, and not to give into the chaos and believe it’s somehow overwhelming,” said Rick Hasen, an election law expert and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law.

“I don’t want people to feel like nothing is working, it’s all overwhelming and they are just being paralyzed by all the news of these attacks, these threats,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the Voting Rights Project at the ACLU. “There are a huge range of folks who are working to ensure that these elections go as smoothly as possible, and that if anything comes up, we are ready to respond.”

Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant in California, said the erosion of confidence in U.S. elections was “a deliberate strategy” pushed by Trump for years to explain away legitimate election losses that embarrassed him, and facilitated by Republicans in Congress unwilling to check Trump’s lies to defend U.S. election integrity.

However, Democrats have added to the problem and become “the monster they are fighting” by gerrymandering blue states through redistricting measures such as California’s Proposition 50, which have further eroded American trust in elections, Madrid said.

Madrid said that he nonetheless expects high turnout in the midterms, because many voters have “the sense that the crisis is existential for the future, that literally everything is on the line,” but that the loss of trust is a serious issue.

“Without that trust, a form of government like democracy — at least the American form of democracy — doesn’t work,” he said.

Trump — who in a post Friday called Democrats “horrible, disingenuous CHEATERS” for opposing voter ID laws that most Americans support — has long called on his supporters to turn out and vote in massive numbers to give him the largest possible margin of victory, as a buffer against any election cheating against him. One of his 2024 campaign slogans was “Too Big to Rig.”

In recent days, some of Trump’s fiercest critics — including Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) — have made a similar pitch to Democrats.

In an interview with The Times, Schiff said that he is “deeply concerned” about the midterms given all of Trump’s threats, but that voters should understand that “the remedy here is to become more involved, not less.”

“The very best protection we’ll have is the most massive voter turnout we’ve ever had,” he said. “It’s going to be those with the most important title in our system — the voters — who end up saving this country.”

Admittedly, I am a guy who generally dreads the thought of plodding through a shopping mall on any day of the year, but to me the encroachment of Black Friday into Thanksgiving evening seems not only insane but also disturbingly unpatriotic.

It was bad enough when it became the norm for people to show up in the middle of the night in order to be near the front of the line when store doors swung open early on the morn after Thanksgiving. Every time I heard about the herd of shoppers being culled as someone got trampled or sent to the hospital after a fight over a Tickle Me Elmo, I felt justified in my smugness and disdain of this retail frenzy. If that is how the rabble wanted to spend their time and money, so be it. The manic rush to save a hundred bucks on a 50-inch flat-screen TV or finish Christmas shopping by 9 a.m. on Black Friday could go on without me.

Over the years, though, retailers have pushed the starting time for this mad dash earlier and earlier until now it is bumping up against the slicing of the pumpkin pie at the Thanksgiving dinner table. This does not seem right.

PHOTOS: Top of the Ticket cartoons

I pity the poor retail workers who have to leave home and hearth and turkey dinner on the most venerable national holiday of the year. Instead of giving thanks for the opportunity to be confronted by a greedy horde of bargain hunters, I suspect most of those workers are cursing the store owners who decided to ruin the day with their own lust for a dollar. I think it is safe to assume the guys who own Target or Best Buy or the other big retailers will not be manning the cash registers. No, they will be sharing a leisurely Thanksgiving repast with their heirs in the peace and safety of their gated communities.

In 2013, it will be exactly 150 years since Abraham Lincoln set aside the fourth Thursday in November as a national day of “Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.” Obviously, traditions shift over time, but let us hope that by next year those who put making money and spending money above all other values will not have totally desecrated what was once an all-American day like no other.

For anyone who feels as disgusted as I am with the plundering of Thanksgiving, go to Change.org and sign the petition urging Target to stop being the Grinch who stole Thanksgiving from employees. Maybe if one retailer is shamed into doing business more thoughtfully, others can be, as well.

Reporting from Sacramento — Uber and Lyft continue to expand their dominance in California, and taxi companies are looking to the state Legislature for some relief.

“If communities value taxicabs, then we’re going to have to have a regulatory environment that allows cab companies to thrive,” said William Rouse, general manager of Yellow Cab of Los Angeles. “Right now, that’s just not the case.”

Rouse and others in the taxi industry have turned to Assemblyman Evan Low (D-Campbell) for help. Low has introduced AB 1069, which aims to ease taxi regulations to make the companies more competitive with their ride-hailing rivals.

Under Low’s legislation, which overwhelmingly passed the Assembly last month, taxi regulation would occur regionally rather than city by city. This means, for instance, cabs could pick up passengers in Los Angeles, drop them off in Santa Monica and vice versa without needing multiple permits.

Taxis also could lower or raise their prices — similar to Uber and Lyft’s surge-pricing models — in response to demand, with a maximum price set by each region.

“If we don’t do anything now, they will completely be annihilated,” Low said.

In California, numbers show the extent of the taxi industry’s decline and the ride-hailing boom. Taxi trips dropped nearly 30% in Los Angeles from 2012, right before Uber and Lyft began operating, to 2015. New research from the Brookings Institution shows that the number of ride-hailing drivers doubled in Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego and San Jose in 2015.

Uber and Lyft’s business models rely on using public pressure and lobbying to shape and change laws and regulations, said Elizabeth Pollman, a professor at Loyola Law School who has written about how Uber and Lyft have challenged existing state and local rules.

“Their business model wasn’t just to replicate the world we had, but rather to create a new model,” Pollman said.

Uber and Lyft have succeeded at the state Capitol in getting regulations and laws passed to benefit their industry and shooting down those that don’t. Even if Low’s bill passes, major regulatory disparities between ride-hailing companies and taxis will remain.

Taxi drivers still will have to pass fingerprint-based background checks, while Uber and Lyft drivers face less onerous rules. After years of delays, the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates ride-hailing statewide, is scheduled in the fall to decide whether ride-hailing drivers will need to pass fingerprint checks as well. Neither Uber nor Lyft has taken a position on Low’s bill, but each company has been generally supportive of loosening taxi regulations.

Still, cab companies and transportation experts said the legislation could have clear benefits for the taxi industry. Currently, it costs more than $3,000 a year for taxi permits to operate in four cities — Torrance, Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach and Manhattan Beach — that stretch roughly six miles along the Los Angeles County coast. In Silicon Valley, similar annual city-by-city fees can run $13,000. Low’s bill aims to wipe away such charges and replace them with a single payment.

The measure would promote greater competition by allowing taxis to grow their own on-demand apps and other dispatch services with fewer restrictions, said Bruce Schaller, a New York-based consultant who monitors both industries.

Schaller said the taxi industry’s problems go beyond regulation, and cabs will need to dramatically improve their service and reduce their fares.

“Why do people use Uber and Lyft?” Schaller said. “It’s because they’re cheap and they show up. That’s it.”

Low’s bill faces many obstacles. Last year, he wrote legislation that would have turned over taxi regulation to the state, but Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed it. The governor’s veto message said he didn’t believe such a major change was warranted. Low’s current bill shifts the burden from cities to counties, but counties don’t want the responsibility.

In a May letter opposing the bill, a representative of the California State Assn. of Counties wrote that counties were ill-equipped to handle taxi regulations without help from cities.

“AB 1069 confuses the relationship between counties and cities by arbitrarily placing the entire burden on the county for taxicab licensure,” the letter said.

Low said he’s open to another entity, such as regional agencies including the Southern California Assn. of Governments in the Los Angeles area, to regulate taxis instead of counties handling them. But he warned that local governments shouldn’t be shortsighted in maintaining strict regulations and high fees that could continue driving taxis out of business.

In that case, Low said, cities “won’t get any of their revenues whatsoever.”

liam.dillon@latimes.com

@dillonliam

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WASHINGTON — The extraordinary steps taken by congressional Republicans to save the life of Terri Schiavo have won plaudits from evangelical Christians and other conservative activists, but some Republicans worry about a potential backlash among others who view the intervention as an overbearing use of government power.

Just as Congress passed and President Bush signed legislation allowing federal courts to review whether Schiavo’s feeding tube should be withdrawn, a poll by ABC News found that 70% of those surveyed believed congressional intervention was inappropriate.

Though some GOP strategists have argued that the issue is a political winner for the party because it appeals to religious conservatives, other Republicans warn that the bold maneuver risks alienating swing voters as well as Republicans worried about government invasions of individual privacy.

“It goes beyond shameless politics,” said Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster. “It becomes a more crystallized proof point that we are no longer the party of smaller government. We have become a party of ‘It doesn’t matter what size government is as long as it is imposing our set of values.’ ”

Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), before voting against the bill Bush later signed, asked: “How deep is this Congress going to reach into the personal lives of each and every one of us?”

Still, some Republican analysts say the immediate poll results — and the concerns raised by Shays and others — are not politically significant because the activists pushing to keep Schiavo alive care more passionately than those opposing that view.

“Intensity matters,” said Gary Bauer, a conservative leader who ran for the GOP presidential nomination in 2000. “The people who know the most about this controversy are the most likely to believe” that Schiavo should be allowed to live.

The Schiavo controversy does not split lawmakers or the country strictly along ideological lines; many people are influenced as much by their personal experiences as they are by political leanings.

The decisive legislative action on the Schiavo controversy is widely viewed within the political community as a show of strength for social conservatives, who are preparing for even bigger congressional battles.

Many of the activists are urging GOP leaders to move more aggressively this spring to win confirmation of Bush’s judicial nominees.

They argue that the Schiavo case reinforces the importance of placing conservatives in the judiciary.

“This is just one more perfect portrait of why we need to have fair and just men on the bench,” said Lanier Swann, director of government relations for Concerned Women of America, a conservative group that has made the Schiavo case a priority.

Bauer said the Schiavo controversy was the beginning of a much larger debate that would shape U.S. politics for years to come.

“We’re on the cusp of a really gigantic national debate about life and advances in medicine,” Bauer said. The Schiavo controversy “touches in a very important way in the whole debate on the sanctity of life, and it will encourage voters to believe that it is something Republicans feel strongly about.”

The fight over whether to remove the feeding tube that has kept Schiavo alive since a heart malfunction caused severe neurological damage in 1990 has become a cause celebre for the Christian evangelicals and antiabortion activists who were crucial to Bush’s reelection.

The issue came to a head in an extraordinary weekend session of Congress, when lawmakers were recalled from spring recess to vote on a bill to allow Schiavo’s parents to bring the case to federal court.

The political advantages of pursuing the legislation were trumpeted in a GOP staff memo circulated in the Senate late last week, although Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said he had no knowledge of the memo.

“This is a great political issue,” the memo said, because it puts Democrats in a difficult position and because “the pro-life base will be very excited that the Senate is debating this important issue.”

But the ABC poll, conducted by telephone Sunday as Congress was acting, found that 63% supported removal of Schiavo’s feeding tube and 28% opposed it.

The poll also found that among Republicans, Congress’ action did not win strong backing. According to the poll, 58% of Republicans believed the intervention in the case was inappropriate, and 61% supported removing Schiavo’s tube.

The survey’s margin of error for its entire sample of 501 adults was plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.

Among the Republicans surveyed, the margin of error was plus or minus 8 points.

The legislation passed the Senate on Sunday under the chamber’s unanimous consent rules. Three senators were on the floor — Frist, Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) and John W. Warner (R-Va.).

In the House, the bill passed at 12:45 a.m. EST Monday, 203 to 58, with 174 members not voting. Supporting it were 156 Republicans and 47 Democrats; opposing it were five Republicans and 53 Democrats.

Some of the conservative critics of Congress’ action say the issue goes to the core of what kind of party the GOP will become. They worry it will further erode the party’s commitment to limiting the role of the federal government.

“Conservatives who have criticized the idea that Washington should run everything ought to be sheepish” about getting involved in the Schiavo case, said David Boaz, an analyst at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.