Category: General

In 2019 rich liberals, most of whom do not live in Southern California, including George Soros (New York), Patty Quillin  & husband Reed Hastings (San Francisco), Elizabeth Simons (San Francisco), M. Quinn Delaney (Oakland), Cari Tuna (San Francisco), Susan Pritzker (Oakland), Kaitlyn Krieger ( San Francisco), Nicole Shanahan (San Francisco), Dorianna Blitt (New York), Anne Devereux (New York), and Anne Rosenbaum Irwin (San Francisco), gave $12.4 million to George Gascón’s campaign for Los Angeles District Attorney.  Immediately after taking office, Gascón announced that he would not be prosecuting most property and drug criminals and that most arrestees would be released without bail. He also pledged to seek the shortest sentences possible for criminals convicted in Los Angeles County, including murderers, rapists and other violent offenders.  While progressive state sentencing reforms (read reductions) along with Governor Newsom’s pandemic emergency orders for inmate releases and zero bail had been fueling crime increases before Gascón was elected, his new policies exacerbated this trend.  The Los Angeles County Sheriff reports that homicides increased by 94% and auto thefts by 59% over the past two years.  News footage of the daily “smash and grab” robberies across LA and the recent Beverly Hills home invasion and murder of liberal philanthropist Jaqueline Avant and the brutal killing of UCLA student Brianna Kupfer in exclusive Hancock Park, both by habitual felons, was a reality check for LA area liberals.

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Progressive California District Attorneys who have chosen not to prosecute offenders who commit so called “low level” crimes are violating the state Constitution according to Hasting’s law professor Zachary Price.  In a piece published in SCOCA blog, a joint project of the U.C. Berkeley and Hastings Schools of Law, Professor Price asserts that while district attorneys such as San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin and Los Angeles DA George Gascón ran for office promising not to prosecute drug users and small-time dealers, trespassers, shoplifters, traffic offenders and those resisting arrest among others, the state constitution

specifically limits local district attorney discretion by imposing an affirmative duty on California’s attorney general “to see that the laws of the State are uniformly and adequately enforced.” And although state law provides for elected district attorneys in each county and obligates them to “attend the courts, and within his or her discretion . . . initiate and conduct on behalf of the people all prosecutions for public offenses,” the state constitution requires supersession of local prosecutorial functions when the attorney general determines that local enforcement is inadequate.

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Imagine your five-year-old daughter was being wheeled into surgery to have a defective heart valve replaced.  What would be the most important qualification for the surgeon about to cut her open?  Would it be the doctor’s race or gender?   When the hospital’s chief administrator decided that it was more important that the members of surgical staff “looked like the community” than their level of competence, he put your daughter’s life at risk.  As a parent, if I suspected that this was the case, I would choose a different hospital.  The U.S. Supreme Court is the last word on what constitutes law in our country.  The exercise of this sweeping power has and will continue to have life-altering consequences on the millions of people who live in America.  What then, should be the most important qualification for the selection of a Supreme Court Justice?  Heather MacDonald’s compelling piece in the City Journal exposes the absurdity of elevating race, gender or any other criteria beyond competence, integrity and temperament governing the selection for membership on the nation’s highest court.  By limiting the selection of the next justice to a black woman, MacDonald notes that President Biden is “rendering 98 percent of all possible candidates beyond consideration because they lack `qualifications’ that have nothing to do with judging.”

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Investigative reporter Andrew Kerr’s piece in yesterday’s Washington Examiner exposes the corruption behind the curtain of Black Lives Matter (BLM), the nation’s most influential social justice organization.  BLM was founded in 2013 by black activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, in response to the acquittal of Hispanic neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman after the fatal shooting of black teenager Trayvon Martin in self defense.  The movement gained national exposure after the August 9, 2014 shooting death of black teenager Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.   BLM immediately launched protests which turned into several weeks of riots, with businesses looted and set on fire. The St. Louis Chief Financial Officer estimated a total cost at $20 million.  Months later a grand jury and the Obama Justice Department concluded that the shooting was in self defense.  By the May 25, 2020 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the group had amassed several million in contributions and had a worldwide network of chapters and affiliates.  Within five days of Floyd’s death BLM coordinated protests occurred, almost simultaneously, in 2,000 cities in 60 countries.  Many of the protests, especially in over 200 U.S. cities, devolved into riots with government buildings and businesses burned, police officers, bystanders and reporters attacked, and widespread looting and violence.  In the end the “mostly peaceful” protests took 25 lives and cost at least $1 billion in damage.   So how did BLM get the money to finance these protests and where did it go?

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In an apparent effort to divert money away from the legitimate campaign to recall pro-criminal LA District Attorney George Gascón, a copycat recall effort called Recall Gascón Now (RGN) has been launched.  The group does not have a recall petition and, based upon its website, apparently intends to copy the legitimate petition and circulate it as their own.  The Metropolitan News Enterprise reports that former LA District Attorney Steve Cooley, co-Chairman of the Recall DA George Gascón Committee said those behind RGN are “rogue, gadfly activists,” and that their false campaign was an attempt to “sabotage, undermine and confuse the recall.”   Last December Cooley’s Committee announced that it had raised $2.5 million and hired professional management to begin the recall effort this year.

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Yesterday, I wrote an entry that focused on the explosion in murder in this country over the last two years, an explosion that has grossly disproportionately harmed black people.  I thought this a particularly noteworthy subject on Martin Luther King Day.  Now, a matter of hours later, the New York Times, of all things, features a discussion of the same subject that in some ways seems like a slightly different draft of my piece.

It is, to say the least, unusual that the NYT and I see any significant issue in crime the same way, but at my age, I’ll take what I can get.  The Times’ view of the causes of the spike is largely misguided, in my view, but its description of the problem is spot-on, and belies the dismissive attitude of many in the criminal justice “reform” movement.

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For decades liberal and progressive politicians in Washington have funded numerous “studies” on racial profiling and then forced consent decrees on big city police departments to address the disproportionate arrest and prosecution of black and Hispanic criminal offenders.  The purpose of these activities has been to advance the narrative that the American criminal justice system is racially biased, targeting black and brown populations either by having them murdered by racists police officers, or by railroading them into long prison sentences for non-violent offenses while white folks who commit the same offenses get probation.  One of the ways the federal government tries to resolve this systemic racism is through its grant-making policies.  A recent example comes from the Federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, which operates under the authority of Attorney General Merrick Garland.  The agency recently announced a new approach which conditions federal grants to state juvenile justice systems on the elimination of disparities between black and brown juveniles arrested and prosecuted for crimes and non-Hispanic white juveniles.  Attorney Hans Bader discusses this apparent return to government-enforced quotas in this piece in Liberty Unyielding.

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“The disappointment was palpable. As the one-year anniversary of the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot approached, the Department of Homeland Security had warned state and local law enforcement officials that ‘domestic violent extremists’ could strike again. Security forces were on guard and many people were on edge, reported the New York Times. Yet, as a CNN anchor morosely observed during the network’s saturation coverage of the anniversary celebration: `There’s been no violence at the Capitol today.’ “

So begins Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald’s City Journal piece discussing the remarkable show of hypocrisy laid out in wall to wall national coverage of last year’s January 6 “insurrection” by evil Trump supporters. “The media’s Capitol riot anniversary celebration, however, was choreographed to underscore the fictional claim that white supremacy is the biggest impediment to civil order in the U.S. today,” MacDonald says. Continue reading . . .

Last Sunday, (January 2) a woman and her 13-year-old daughter were driving through an intersection in the the LA County town of Norwalk when a speeding car ran a red light and T-boned their car.  Both died from their injuries.  CBS Los Angeles reports that the driver of the speeding car, 26-year-old Brittany Lopez, was driving without a license.  Investigators believe that Lopez was under the influence of drugs and alcohol.  She was arrested on charges of vehicular manslaughter which can be charged as a  felony.  Running a red light through a crowded intersection at high speed resulting in death can be charged as gross vehicular manslaughter, a violent felony.  Depending on the toxicology report, Lopez could have faced charges of “gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated,” which carries a possible sentence of 15-years in prison.  But before the toxicology report was available, Lopez was released from jail after the district attorney’s office refused to file charges against her for any crime.   In Sacramento, Bakersfield or San Diego, this woman would be sitting in jail awaiting trial. In George Gascón’s Los Angeles she is, likely as not, driving around in another car, probably drunk.  And Gascón tells us that his policies are restoring justice and have made LA safer.