tap

Reporting from Santa Clara, Calif. — Some of the major Republicans vying to become California’s next governor or U.S. senator have more money than others. Some are better known. Some are more in sync with their party’s traditional views.

But what all five have in common as they look toward the June 8 primary is a determination to tap what they see as public fury over the failures of government.

“Our government is out of control and out of touch, and so we will take it back and we will make it work,” U.S. Senate hopeful Carly Fiorina told hundreds of delegates at a weekend convention of Republicans in the Silicon Valley.

Assemblyman Chuck DeVore (R-Irvine) and former Rep. Tom Campbell, her rivals in the race to challenge Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer, took different approaches. But each appealed just as overtly to the large share of California Republicans who identify with the conservative “tea party” movement.

Gubernatorial candidates Steve Poizner and Meg Whitman did the same as they vied to challenge presumptive Democratic nominee Jerry Brown.

For all of the major Republican candidates, capturing the public mood of revolt is key not only to succeeding in the primary but also to carrying momentum through the November general election, where voters have historically sided more with Democrats.

“These are Republican voters who — not only here, but all over the country — are very, very frustrated at what they’re seeing, and they’re treating the state government with the same contempt as they’re treating the Obama administration,” said Wayne Johnson, a Republican strategist and former Poizner advisor.

“People are going to be willing to pull the lever for people who are saying pretty aggressive things this time around.”

Most aggressive over the weekend was Poizner, the state insurance commissioner. Treading on sensitive political territory, he promised to deny all public benefits to undocumented immigrants and to stop any more from crossing the Mexican border into California.

“If I have to, I’ll send the National Guard to the border,” he told Republicans at a dinner Saturday. “If that doesn’t work, I’ll send the California Highway Patrol to the border. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll send the California Republican Party to the border.”

Poizner also promised to curb welfare, an issue — like immigration — that Republicans last pushed hard during the economic downturn of the 1990s.

Whitman, too, has called for scaling back welfare. But by and large, her attempts to ride tea party anger were subtler than Poizner’s.

“Voters are tired of runaway spending,” Whitman, a former chief executive of EBay, said in a dinner speech Friday. “They are tired of bigger government. And they have had it with broken promises.”

Roughly four of five Republicans see California as moving in the wrong direction, a level of discontent not seen since the recession of the early 1990s, according to a recent Public Policy Institute of California survey.

“The candidates are trying to tap into that very deep skepticism and pessimism and cynicism seen among Republican voters today,” said Mark Baldassare, president of the institute.

The large portion of undecided voters in both the gubernatorial and Senate primaries makes it that much more important for candidates to identify with the public anger.

In the Senate race, Fiorina, a former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, applauded signs of a popular uprising, saying millions of Americans feel betrayed by “detached and arrogant leadership” in Washington.

“Whether we are conservatives, moderates, independents, Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, tea partiers, we are all now members of one party; we are now members of the Had Enough party,” she told Republicans at a luncheon Saturday.

DeVore, an Irvine assemblyman popular among the party’s conservative rank and file, described Democrats as an ominous threat.

“We are facing statists who have it as their objective to trample the Constitution, to submerge future generations under a mountain of debt and to fundamentally transform America into a state that none of us would recognize,” he said.

He described himself as the candidate best suited to draw support from tea party activists who want “to rescue America and to rescue California.”

As for Campbell, his support of temporary state tax hikes has made it tougher to position himself as a champion of the movement, but he tried nonetheless.

“I am running,” he said, “because our freedom is at risk, threatened by a soft socialism that inserts government into every corner of our lives.”

Poizner strategist Stuart Stevens described the voters’ mood as “hot.”

Alluding to the 1976 film about a TV anchor who builds a following of angry Americans, he said, “This is ‘Network’: Mad as hell, not going to take it anymore.”

michael.finnegan @latimes.com

[email protected]

The cultural legacy of the 1984 rock-mock-doc “This Is Spinal Tap” is of sufficient amplitude that, to give the band’s guitarist Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) his knob-twiddling due, it’s gone way past 11.

Perennially quotable, ad-libbed to Brit-accented perfection by co-creators Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer and finessed into an iconic spoof by director Rob Reiner, “Spinal Tap” was born. The movie both ridiculed (and, slyly, furthered the cause for) the metal world’s idiotic excesses, but also an industry’s love of a satisfying comeback saga.

When your fake movie becomes gospel truth to admiring music legends and a pretend forgotten band goes on to play Wembley in real life, the fine line between clever and stupid (again, so quotable) suddenly looks like a rarefied space for a sequel to exploit.

Yet when the key comic minds behind that singular sendup of past-prime glory-seekers aim to rekindle their magic, “Spinal Tap II: The End Continues” leaves one thinking some classics are better left in their original, endlessly re-playable states.

Not that the sight, 40 years on, of the sweetly clueless Tufnel, McKean’s prickly frontman David St. Hubbins and Shearer’s man-of-few-blurts Derek Smalls reuniting for one last concert won’t trigger a low-wattage 83-minute-long smile. But the concept of Tap being revered (by legend cameos Paul McCartney and Elton John, no less) saps the comedy of outsider tension, making for something closer to a feature-length outtake reel than a fresh take on clownish notoriety.

There’s agreeable silliness early on in seeing where the trio has landed in their solo lives, from acknowledged retail dreamer Nigel’s cheese-and-guitar shop to the fringes of the recording world, where California-transplanted David finds himself composing phone-hold music. In these moments, you get a glimpse of the special sauce of personality delusion that Guest, as a director, turned into a mini-genre (“Waiting for Guffman,” “Best in Show,” “A Mighty Wind”). But when dead Tap manager Ian Faith’s daughter, Hope (Kerry Godliman), having inherited daddy’s contract, forces the members to gather in New Orleans for an arena show, the whole thing loses an essential oddball energy, trying to coast on a masterpiece’s fumes.

Gag encores are pitfalls. The famous drummer mortality problem is a case in point, wearing out its understandable reviving with star cameos (Questlove, Lars Ulrich) and a lackluster tryout montage. Then, after the hiring of an energetic young replacement (Valerie Franco), a humor opportunity is missed when we wonder why she isn’t pushing back on having to play songs like “Bitch School.” Even the band’s second chance at a Stonehenge showstopper is more like a joke in name only.

The three leads can still, when given room, generate an anything-can-happen vibe, even if the improvisatory pearls are in short supply. But there are quite a few instances when the promise of comedic friction is undercooked or ignored and the new strains of hinted lunacy (as when Guest regulars John Michael Higgins and Don Lake show up) never quite soar.

The funniest addition, because it feels genuinely pointed about the milieu, is Chris Addison as the band’s aggressive promoter Simon, who prides himself on being impervious to enjoying music, and tells our septuagenarian rockers that for posterity’s sake, ideally, two of them should die during the show. Thankfully, nothing in “Spinal Tap II” will kill off the original’s legacy. It’s just a nostalgia lap you wish had more 11.

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has approved sending up to 600 military lawyers to the Justice Department to serve as temporary immigration judges, according to a memo reviewed by the Associated Press.

The military will begin sending groups of 150 attorneys — both military and civilians — to the Justice Department “as soon as practicable,” and the armed services should have the first round of people identified by next week, according to the Aug. 27 memo.

The effort comes as the Trump administration is cracking down on illegal immigration by ramping up arrests and deportations. And immigration courts already are dealing with a massive backlog of roughly 3.5 million cases that has ballooned in recent years.

At the same time, more than 100 immigration judges have been fired or left voluntarily after taking deferred resignations offered by the Trump administration, their union says. In the most recent round of terminations, the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers said in July that at least 17 immigration judges had been fired “without cause” in courts across the country.

That has left about 600 immigration judges, union figures show, meaning the Pentagon move would double their ranks.

The Justice Department, which oversees the immigration courts, requested the assistance from the Defense Department, according to the memo sent by the Pentagon’s executive secretary to his Justice Department counterpart. The military lawyers’ duties as immigration judges will initially last no more than 179 days but can be renewed, it said.

A Justice Department spokesperson referred questions about the plan to the Defense Department, where officials directed questions to the White House.

A White House official said Tuesday that the administration is looking at a variety of options to help resolve the significant backlog of immigration cases, including hiring additional immigration judges. The official said the matter should be “a priority that everyone — including those waiting for adjudication — can rally around.”

The memo stressed that sending the additional attorneys is contingent on availability and that mobilizing reserve officers may be necessary. Plus, the document said the Justice Department would be responsible for ensuring that anyone sent from the Pentagon does not violate the federal prohibition on using the military as domestic law enforcement, known as the Posse Comitatus Act.

The administration faced a setback on its efforts to use the military in unique ways to combat illegal immigration and crime, with a court ruling Tuesday that it “willfully” violated federal law by sending National Guard troops to Los Angeles in early June.

Cases in immigration court can take years to weave their way to a final determination, with judges and lawyers frequently scheduling final hearings on the merits of a case more than a year out.

Toropin writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Will Weissert, Rebecca Santana and Eric Tucker contributed to this report.

Not that you asked, but yes, I have been feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the bad news out of Washington:

Pardons for tax cheats who line President Trump’s pockets. Talk of pardons for the violent criminals who conspired to kidnap and kill Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Dinners for crypto moguls who shower him with money. His monomaniacal quest to extinguish the light of the country’s most prestigious university. His budget that will deprive millions of their healthcare coverage, while slashing taxes for the rich and swelling the $36 trillion national debt by an estimated $3.8 trillion.

And don’t get me started on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s inane move that could make it harder for pregnant women to get COVID-19 shots, thus depriving their infants of protection against the virus when they are vulnerable and not yet eligible for vaccination.

Good heavens, I needed a distraction. Happily, it arrived in the form of an unexpected video.

You may have seen it: Last Sunday, French President Emmanuel Macron’s wife, Brigitte, got tongues wagging when she did something that seemed entirely out of character for the painfully elegant first lady. She was caught on camera squishing her hands right into his handsome face. It looked like an act of hostility. I was intrigued.

I know, I know. It’s hardly world-shattering news. But who doesn’t perk up a bit when the scrim of perfection that shields the private lives of high-profile, perfectly turned-out couples is torn, even for one brief moment?

Who can forget the sight of First Lady Melania Trump swatting away her husband’s hand during a 2017 visit to Tel Aviv? Or the way her smile faded during his first inauguration the moment he looked away from her, inspiring the #FreeMelania hashtag?

For all the drama and rumor that swirled around the Clintons’ marriage, I can’t think of any public moment when they did not appear civil with one another, even after his disastrous relationship with a White House intern.

And the Obamas? Is there any other intensely scrutinized political couple who seem so downright normal? Not that anyone ever really knows what’s going on in anyone else’s marriage.

Which brings us back to the Macrons.

His plane was on the tarmac in Hanoi, where he was kicking off a tour to strengthen ties with countries in Southeast Asia. As the plane door opened, the couple were caught unawares. A startled-looking Macron backed up as disembodied hands smushed his face. He instantly collected himself, and his wife appeared at his side. As they began to descend the staircase, he offered her his arm, which she did not take.

The bizarre clip went viral, and sent the French government, known as the Élysée Palace, into what one headline described as “chaos.”

Part of the chaos stemmed from the government first claiming that the clip was not real but was possibly a deep fake created by AI and exploited by Russia to make Macron seem weak. After the Associated Press authenticated the video, the French government changed its tune, describing the moment as merely a playful interaction between the couple.

Unsurprisingly, given their back story, the Macrons have been the subject of intense fascination for years.

They met in 1993 at a Catholic high school in northern France when he was 15. She, nearly 40 at the time, and a married mother of three, was his drama teacher. His parents were so concerned about the impropriety of their relationship that they sent him away to Paris for his senior year.

In 2006, she divorced her husband, and married Macron the following year. He was 29. She was 54.

“Of course, we have breakfast together, me and my wrinkles, him with his youth, but it’s like that,” Macron told Elle France in 2017. “If I did not make that choice, I would have missed out on my life.”

Unfortunately, Le Slapgate threatened to overshadow the Macrons’ trip.

“We are squabbling and, rather, joking with my wife,” he told reporters, complaining that the incident was being overblown into “a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe.”

A few days later, though, he was making light of the incident. Or at least trying to.

On Tuesday in Jakarta, Indonesia, as his plane door opened, another disembodied hand appeared, this time waving before Macron stepped into the camera frame smiling before he walked down the stairs arm in arm with his wife. Ha ha.

For a brief moment, the squabbling of one of the world’s most interesting couples gave us a much needed break from the actual geo-planetary catastrophe unfolding around us. For that, the Macrons have my gratitude. Merci, you crazy lovebirds.

‪@rabcarian.bsky.social‬ @rabcarian