State of Jefferson, state of frustration

Many residents of Del Norte and Tehama counties are upset, as in, "We're being ignored."
Nobody cares, they say, what they think or what they need, especially all the nobodies in Sacramento. Next week they will go to the polls and express their anger on an advisory measure that asks each county's board of supervisors to join a wider effort to form the nation's 51st state.


Signs such as this dot the extreme north state.

Elected officials in Glenn, Modoc, Siskiyou and Yuba counties already have voted to join the movement. Butte County supervisors will vote June 10. Boards in several other north state counties are awaiting the results of the Del Norte and Tehama votes before deciding what to do.
Backers want to form the state of Jefferson. In fact, in Siskiyou County, voters on Tuesday will decide whether they want to rename their county the Republic of Jefferson.
What's going on?
Consider just one fact: Del Norte and Tehama counties have a combined population of just 91,000 residents. In California, there are 62 cities with populations of more than 100,000 people. Not one of those cities is north of Sacramento (OK, Roseville, population 105,940, is slightly northeast of the capital city, but don't try that argument out in, say, Red Bluff or Yreka).
In what the north-staters longingly consider the good old days, each county used to have a state senator. That all ended in the mid-1960s with the Supreme Court's one-man-one-vote decision that apportioned the state's upper chamber by population rather than by geography.
Eleven north state counties now share one state senator. The greater Los Angeles area has 20 and the San Francisco Bay Area has 10.
In terms of getting their voices heard by elected officials, the plight of north state residents might be compared to that of, oh, most Americans. Increasingly, only the rich, urban and powerful get their voices heard in Washington. A good number of north state residents are poor, rural and, certainly in their view, powerless. Oh, and north state residents are overwhelmingly white so some might draw other conclusions about what's going on.
Rules are made and laws passed without any consideration for how they will affect them, Jefferson state backers say. The north state has much of California's forest and farm land, its minerals and its water, but north state residents have little say over those assets (by that logic, perhaps the state should be split at San Joaquin County's southern border and then Gov. Jerry Brown can try to find another freshwater estuary to tunnel under). It's an argument hard to dispute.
On the other hand, it also is hard to dispute the logic of the one-man-one-vote court ruling. If you were a resident of Los Angeles in 1960, population 6 million, having one state senator seemed unfair given that Tehama County, population 25,000, also had one state senator. Back then, a Los Angeles resident could reasonably argue a resident of Red Bluff had a louder voice in Sacramento.
The argument can be made that all states have two U.S. senators so why not one state senator for each county? But that's based on the premise that the relationship between the counties and the state is the same as between the state and the nation. It is not, and that reality makes it highly unlikely the one-man-one-vote ruling will be reversed.
So, what to do?
North state counties say the only solution is succession from California. Forgetting for the moment the highly complex financial and logistical problems of slicing off the north, there are the political realities.
Under the U.S. Constitution, separation requires a vote of the state Legislature -- where north-staters say they don't have a voice -- and the U.S. Congress, where increasingly Americans don't have a voice unless they also happen to be American billionaires.
The reality is this Jefferson state movement is going nowhere. Some of the arguments backers make are reasonable and their frustrations legitimate, but reason and legitimacy have little to do with political reality. Short of armed rebellion -- and those haven't worked out too well in the past -- statehood is a pipe dream.

Our season of disinvitation

The former president of Princeton University, William Bowen, did a little name calling Sunday.
Students who campaigned against the guy who was supposed to deliver the commencement address at Haveford College were "immature: and "arrogant."
That probably wasn't exactly the uplifting, now-go-out-there-and-get-yours speech students were expecting.


Robert Birgeneau

Condoleezze Rice

More than 40 students and three professors at the college outside Philadelphia had protested a commencement speech invitation to Robert Birgeneau, former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. The protestors objected to Birgeneau's 2011 handling of an incident in which police used force at a Cal student protest. Haveford protestors wanted him to apologize, support payments for victims, and write Haveford students a letter explaining what he'd learned from the incident.
Oh, and they wanted him to buy them ice cream too. OK, that part's not true, but just barely false.
"I am disappointed that those who wanted to criticize Birgeneau's handling of events at Berkeley chose to send him such an intemperate list of 'demands,'" Bowen said Sunday. "In my view, they should have encouraged him to come and engage in a genuine discussion, not to come, tail between his legs, to respond to an indictment that a self-chosen jury had reached without hearing counter-arguments."


Christine Lagarde

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Birgeneau is among a group of speakers who've been disinvited this year by colleges nationwide following student protests. Among them, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who canceled her speech at Rutgers University, International Monetary Fund Director Christine Lagarde at Smith College, and Muslim women's advocate Ayaan Hirsi Ali at Brandeis University. Even first lady Michelle Obama stayed away from a high school graduation in Topeka, Kansas, although her offense apparently wasn't her politics so much as fear her appearance would draw so many spectators there wouldn't be seats for parents.
You don't have to agree with what happened at Cal to understand that Birgeneau is an outspoken advocate for undocumented aliens. You don't have to agree with Rice and the Iraqi War to appreciate her extraordinary mind and how she rose from a childhood in the segregated South to occupy one of the most prestigious positions in the nation. You don't have to agree with IMF policies to understand that Lagarde is one of the most powerful women in the world. And you don't have to agree with her views on Islam to appreciate Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born author and one-time member of the Dutch Parliament, to recognize her work on women's rights.
What is interesting about all these people is they are interesting. Interesting people are often controversial people. And controversial people are the people who make us think, who challenge our biases and force us be more tolerant.
Armed with their newly-minted college degrees, it doesn't seem too much to ask that college students endure a few minutes of talk from someone with different views. If they didn't learn even that much patience and tolerance after four years of college, perhaps their degree doesn't indicate as much learning on their part as the students like to believe. 

VA resignation comes just before retirement

A senior deputy at the Veterans Administration will leave the agency, VA Secretary Eric Shinseki announced Friday.
The announcement came one day after both men underwent a congressional grilling about severe mismanagement in the VA health system including appointment waits, treatment delays and the falsification of records.

Robert Petzel, M.D.

The Associated Press, quoting an unnamed source, said Shinseki asked for the resignation of Robert Petzel, the undersecretary for health.
There's only one small problem: Petzel announced in September he was retiring and earlier this month his replacement was named.
In other words, this is just more dodge-and-evade behavior from an agency charged with caring for the men and women who put on the uniform for this nation.
“I am committed to strengthening veterans’ trust and confidence in their VA healthcare system,” Shinseki said in announcing Petzel's departure (or more correctly, announcing again Petzel's departure).
If this looks like damage control, it is. How the resignation of someone who was retiring anyway suggests a much-needed bureaucratic culture shift is anyone's guess.
For his part, Shinseki, a retired general, continues to urge patience and the arrival of what he promises will be an independent review of VA practices. That report is supposed to arrive in three weeks.
The Los Angeles Times reported Friday that federal prosecutors have joined the agency's investigation to determine whether criminal behavior is involved. And the White House sent Deputy Chief of Staff Rob Nabors to intervene at the beleaguered agency.
Ordinarily those moves could be considered a hopeful sign, but the same promises of change accompanied 2007 reports by the Washington Post about horrific conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, arguably the crown jewel of the VA health care system.
Point in fact, little changed leading to the latest revelations about VA facilities nationwide "cooking the books" to make it appear officials were doing their jobs.
Patience? How many more reports? How many more committees? How many more promises?

VA deserves at least as much concern as a tank

Last year the Pentagon was in a pitched battle with Congress over the Army's hulking Abrams tank, only this time it wasn't the military brass assaulting Capitol Hill to beg for more money and warning of threats to the nation if it wasn't forthcoming.
Nope, it was a bipartisan Congress pushing to spend an extra $436 million on a weapon the experts explicitly say is not needed. In fact, the military planned no more Abrams purchases until at least 2016. The Pentagon has all the 70-ton monsters it needs, especially since the Abrams was designed specifically to thwart an attack in Europe by the then Soviet Union. The chance of that is considerably less it was 20 or 30 years ago.
Why, then, did 173 members of Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, want the government to buy more tanks? Because it protects jobs and businesses in congressional districts where the tank's many suppliers are located, never mind that 2,000 of the tanks are currently mothballed in the desert north of Reno.


M1A1 Abrams tank is a heavy weight in Congress

Congress's insistence on spending money on what's not needed seems in marked contrast to the miserly way it is willing to spend money on those broken and injured Americans we send off to war.That sad irony was underscored again this week when Veterans Affairs head Eric Shinseki was hauled before Congress to answer allegations the VA has been delaying treatment and falsifying patient scheduling reports at facilities across the nation.
Problems at the VA are not new, of course. In 2007, The Washington Post published a disturbing series of articles about problems at what's arguably the VA's premier facility, Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Walter Reed, where generals go for treatment, became shorthand for scandal. In the wake of the stories, some commanders were dismissed and the VA announced a review of all its medical facilities as then-VA Secretary Jim Nicholson put it, "to make sure veterans are receiving access to the best possible care and environment."
How's that worked out? You don't have to read Shinski's testimony before Congress on Thursday to find out. Just drive to the area around San Joaquin General Hospital in French Camp, CA. You'll see an empty field where the VA says it will build a 150,000 square foot multi-specialty outpatient clinic and a 150,000 square foot community living center.
But, the VA has been making that promise for years and years and years. Each year, the construction start date changes. Last month a VA official told a Stockton town hall meeting held by two congressmen that approval is two to five years away.
"Funding, funding, funding," grumbled Richard Campos, 62, a veteran of the Vietnam and Iraqi wars. "Why was it not an issue when we funded this war (in Iraq and Afghanistan)? We are spending trillions of dollars on these wars. Why is it a problem now to serve these veterans?"
Why indeed?
Why is it so much easier for this nation to spend money on weapons and wars than on fulfilling the promises made to the men and women fighting those wars?
How can health care not be the nation's highest priority for the men and women who are sometimes shattered by their military service?
The concern members of Congress expressed as they grilled Shinseki would seem more impressive if it was backed up by action -- and that means money -- and had it not come just one year after some of those same members pushed so hard to buy an expensive weapon even the Pentagon didn't want.

Median San Joaquin Co. home prices above $250K

Median single-family home prices in San Joaquin County climbed above a quarter million dollars in April.
Figures out from the California Association of Realtors put the median price at $251,000, up more than 28 percent from a year earlier.
Home sales jumped nearly 19 percent in April compared to a month earlier, but were off nearly 21 percent compared to April 2013.
CAR also reported that there is roughly a three month supply of homes available for sale -- six to seven months is considered normal -- and the homes that are on the market are staying there a bit longer. In April, the average time on the market was just under 24 days compared to just over 20 days a year earlier. Statewide, homes remain on the market an average of about 34 days.
Part of that longer sales time can be attributed to lower affordability and relatively higher interest rates during the first quarter of 2014.
This week CAR reported that statewide affordability declined sharply in the first quarter compared to the first quarter of 2013.
Home buyers, CAR said, needed a minimum annual income of $86,419 to purchase of a $416,720 statewide median-priced, existing single-family home in the first quarter of 2014.  The monthly payment, including taxes and insurance on a 30-year fixed-rate loan, would be $2,160, assuming a 20 percent down payment and an effective composite interest rate of 4.46 percent.  The effective composite interest rate in fourth-quarter 2013 was 4.43 percent and 3.56 percent in the first quarter of 2013.
Affordability -- the percentage of all households that can afford to buy a median-priced single-family home -- is considered the most fundamental measure of housing well-being for home buyers. Affordability has dropped 23 percent since its peak in the first quarter of 2012.
In the first quarter of 2013, 44 percent of the state's households could afford the median-priced home. That dropped to 33 percent in first quarter of 2014.
As of Wednesday, CAR was only reporting affordability rates for 22 of the state's 58 counties (data for San Joaquin County has not been released). However, in Sacramento County about 50 percent of the county's households could afford a median-price home costing about $264,000, CAR said.

Fighting irreversible error

From arrest to "the moment of death," how this nation executes the death penalty should be overhauled, concludes the bipartisan Constitution Project, a Washington-based legal research group made up of capital punishment supporters and opponents.
Release of the group's two-year, 217-page study comes just one week after Oklahoma killed a murderer in such a barbaric fashion as to offend the sensibilities of all but the most strident capital punishment advocates. Inmate Clayton Lockett writhed and gasped for 43 minutes before he died not from the drugs the state was administrating, but from what officials said was a heart attack.
That should not have happened; that should never happen again.
The Constitution Project makes 39 recommendations to overhaul capital punishment, including abolishing the use of the lethal drug cocktail used by Oklahoma and many of the other 31 death penalty states. Instead, a single drug protocol -- a large dose of a barbiturate -- should be used, panelists concluded. Texas, with the nation's most active death chamber, uses the single-drug protocol.
The panel's recommendations, however, call for changes beginning long before the condemned enters the death chamber. They range from how suspects are interrogated to how they are defended, and from how evidence is handled to what evidence can be considered on appeal (the complete report is available at http://www.constitutionproject.org/).
"Without substantial revisions — not only to lethal injection, but across the board — the administration of capital punishment in America is unjust, disproportionate and very likely unconstitutional," said committee member Mark Earley, who was a Republican attorney general of Virginia when the state carried out 36 executions.
 If we're going to insist on this sentence, then as Americans we are required to carry it out in adherence with the constitutional prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment." That's true even for those among us who believe a murderer does not deserve a swift and painless death.
We also are required to make sure that every person condemned be judged guilty beyond any reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty. A recent study by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that at least 4 percent of death row inmates are likely to have been wrongfully convicted.
Recently there has been much hand-wringing in some political circles about alleged voter fraud, the demonstrated occurrence of which is considerably lower that even 1 percent. Forgetting the thinly veiled political reasons for this voter fraud fear-mongering, shouldn't we be more concerned about the possible miscarriage of justice that occurs when an innocent man or woman is executed?  That is a mistake which cannot be reversed.

One nation, pretty much under one God, justices say

The U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that explicitly Christian prayers opening meetings of government bodies do not violate the concept of the separation of church and state begs the question: had the case before the court been brought to defend an explicitly Muslim prayer, would the ruling have been the same?
The answer goes to the heart of diversity and our willingness to accept and tolerate our differences, be they gender, age, racial, ethnic, sexual orientation or religious.
Monday the high court ruled 5-4, voting along the court's usual liberal-conservative lines, that a town in upstate New York did not violate the Constitution by starting its meetings with a prayer offered by a "chaplain of the month." As it turns out, that chaplain was almost always Christian; although town officials say they have invited other faiths to participate.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy

The prayers, said Justice Anthony M. Kennedy writing for the majority, were merely ceremonial. Such ceremonies have a tradition dating to the first meeting of Congress, he noted. In fact, the court ruled in 1983 that the Nebraska Legislature could open its sessions with an invocation from a paid Presbyterian minister because such ceremonies were "deeply embedded in the history and tradition of this country."
Kennedy echoed that reasoning.
"Ceremonial prayer is but a recognition that, since this nation was founded and until the present day, many Americans deem that their own existence must be understood by precepts far beyond that authority of government to alter or define," Kennedy wrote.
By this rationale, such prayers are but a tip of the hat, as it were, to a creator, rather like the Pledge of Allegiance is a tip of the hat to the Founders. To be honest, we often mindlessly do both as a rote exercise because tradition demands it.
Justice Elena Kagan begged to differ in her dissent. The practices of Greece, N.Y. could not be reconciled "with the First Amendment's promise that every citizen, irrespective of her religion, owns an equal share of her government."
All five votes on the majority side came from Catholic justices: Kennedy, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Three of the four dissenters are Jewish: Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan. The fourth justice, Sonia Sotomayor, was raised as a Catholic, but she is said to be not a regular church goer.
Disputes over the propriety of ceremonial prayers have been fought many times, including recent disagreements at several agencies in San Joaquin County. In many cases they have been settled by rotating those offering the prayer among the faiths, requiring that prayers not be specific to a given religion, or both.
By this new ruling, such rules have been tossed. In fact, Kennedy made clear the courts cannot be asked to be the nation's prayer police.
“To hold that invocations must be nonsectarian,” he wrote, “would force the legislatures that sponsor prayers and the courts that are asked to decide these cases to act as supervisors and censors of religious speech, a rule that would involve government in religious matters to a far greater degree than is the case under the town’s current practice of neither editing or approving prayers in advance nor criticizing their content after the fact.”
Greece, N.Y. had been sued by a two citizens, a Jew and an atheist, on First Amendment grounds. They were offended because, in Kennedy's words, the prayers "made them feel excluded and disrespected."
Kennedy's answer: tough.
"Adults often encounter speech they find disagreeable," he wrote.
True, but rarely are does government essentially require its citizens to put up with disagreeable speech as the price for participating in that government. Which brings us back to the threshold question posed earlier: would the ruling have been the same had the question been about a Muslim prayer opening a government meeting?
The answer is clear, especially if the court's defense centered on tradition and the myth that this nation's earliest settlers came here seeking anything but freedom for their own Protestant religion (only one Catholic signed the Declaration of Independence, the Maryland planter Charles Carroll).

Death in Oklahoma: a sloppy, sordid affair

The shamefully sloppy execution this week of convicted killer Clayton D. Lockett should give pause to even the most ardent supporters of capital punishment.
The Oklahoma convict was left to gasp and moan under the effects of the drugs the Sooner State used. Eventually Lockett died of what officials said was a massive heart attack.
Ziva Branstetter, an editor at The Tulsa World, was a witness. She wrote that Lockett had begun rolling his head from side to side. “He again mumbles something we can’t understand, except for the word ‘man,' ” she wrote. “He lifts his head and shoulders off the gurney several times, as if he’s trying to sit up. He appears to be in pain.”
The whole messy business took 43 minutes.


The pillow is a nice touch, don't you think?

To be sure, there are those who believe those facing the death penalty deserve something less than a quick, painless death. They should, some believe, suffer at least as much as their victims. And Lockett's victim must have suffered. He was found guilty of shooting a woman and burying her alive.
However, such Old Testament eye-for-an-eye thinking at best violates the constitutional ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" and at worst countenances barbarism. There is a reason we no longer draw and quarter convicted killers, no matter how heinous their crimes. Even the Nazis convicted at Nuremberg after World War II, guilty as they were of crimes horrific beyond comprehension, were dispatched quickly by a hangman.
Not Lockett. Oklahoma officials blame the botched execution on one of Lockett's veins collapsing. That hindered the flow of the deadly cocktail being pumped into his body, they said.
Others are less sure that was the cause, especially since the state was using the sedative midazolam for the first time. Then another unnamed agent was then supposed to stop his heart. There also have been problems in states that execute by lethal injection with the placement of intravenous catheters and making sure they were working. Those placing the IV lines, and they are presumed to be prison officials although their identity is always kept secret, are not doctors or nurses.
Oklahoma has exercised considerable secrecy about the doses it used and even the where the state got the chemical. This has been the pattern in many states, including California, that still have the death penalty. Growing public apprehensions about capital punishment has led some companies to stop producing the chemicals and others to stop selling them to the states.
And Oklahoma is not alone in having problems with lethal injections. In January, an Ohio convict gasped for more than 10 minutes while dying.
 “The move to lethal injection in 1977 was an effort to combat all the ills associated with other methods," Fordham University law professor Deborah W. Denno said. Nevertheless, we’ve seen botch after botch.”
Added Ohio State University sentencing law expert Douglas A. Berman, "There's a reasonable modern consensus that death alone should be our maximum punishment, not a torturous death."
Gov. Mary Fallin of Oklahoma has ordered an independent review of the state's death penalty procedures. That's the least the state should do.

The minimum wage? It's all just politics

Anybody that believes President Obama was as upset as he pretended when he chided Republicans for blocking an increase in the federal minimum wage isn't paying attention.
GOP senators did exactly what the president knew they would do. It was all political theater giving Republicans a chance to play to their core constituents, especially small business owners, and Democrats a chance to play to their core supporters, including young people and low-wage earners.
Proposed was a plan to boost the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.10. Republicans argue such a boost would cost 1 million jobs. Democrats argue the increase would lift millions out of poverty.
Increasing the minimum wage has widespread public support, although it is less popular among Republican voters than Democrats and independents. It is so popular, in fact, that more than a dozen states -- including California -- have raised their rates above the federal minimum or started legislative debates to do so.
Adjusted for inflation, for example, today's $7.25 federal minimum wage is 33 percent lower than it was at its height in 1968.
The recovery from the Great Recession has created millions of jobs, but a new report from the National Employment Law Project, finds that the poor economy has replaced good jobs with bad ones, certainly low-paying ones. The president loves to talk about all the jobs that have been created on his watch, but he rarely mentions the kinds of jobs.
Unemployment has fallen to 6.3 percent, but that means 10.5 million Americans are still looking for work, giving employers little incentive to raise the wages of those who are working. Result: the average household's take-home pay has declined through the recession and recovery from $55,627 in 2007 to $51,017 in 2012. Republicans don't talk about this much.
At the same time, the average CEO of big companies is paid an average 300 times the pay of the typical American worker, a pay disparity that on its face puts the lie to the idea that people are paid what they're worth. Were the heads of all those too-big-to-fail banks American taxpayers had to bail out worth the millions lavished on them by their employers? Something else Republicans don't talk about.
Last year, Wall Street bonuses jumped 15 percent to an average of $164,000, and that's beyond salaries. The bonuses handed out totaled $26.7 billion, according to New York's state comptroller. That amount, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, would be enough to more than double the pay of all 1,085,000 full-time Americans who are now paid the federal minimum wage.
Not that Wall Streeters are going to share the goodies with those who serve them lunch in the corporate dining room. Neither is Washington, despite the political antics that surround the debate on the minimum wage issue.
Big companies provide big money to politics. With recent Supreme Court rulings making corporations "people" for the purposes of political free speech, the fix is in. And despite crocodile tears shed by Democrats about the horrors of the Citizens United and McCutcheon rulings, that party is just as guilt as the Republican Party of playing the money game. The only voices heard in Washington are those who belong to those toting money.
So why the Kabuki theater of minimum wage? The cynic might suggest it is the Democrats' way of diverting attention during the coming election season from Obamacare, the health reform act that Americans hate (except for all the beneficial parts they love). This may be poor calculus on the Democrats' part since a recent New York Times/CBS poll found that 52 percent of registered voters said they were willing to vote for someone who disagreed with them on raising the minimum wage, and only 30 percent said they would vote for someone who differed with them on Obamacare.
Democrats will pound Republicans about minimum wages; Republicans will pound Democrats about Obamacare. Americans are left with low wages and a health care system in serious need of actual reform. In other words, continued dysfunctional politics in America.