u/Cool-Present7260

A great op-ed in the SF Chronicle by a doctor at a Tenderloin clinic:

There is another John Doe in the intensive care unit. 

“He is critically ill, hoping someone might know this person. Found down with overdose at 1180 Howard Street around 5am.”

This email, and too many others like it, arrive in the all-staff listserv at the San Francisco homeless clinic where I work as a physician. Leftover pizza reminders and meeting agendas routinely roll into frightening, blandly described near-death experiences.

“John Doe arrived to SFGH on 1/22  found down near MISSION ST / 6 TH ST, possible overdose ( + fent & cocaine ), active seizing on route to SFGH. See photo attached.”

Usually, the messages are sent by hospital social workers asking our team to help identify their client. 

“He tested positive for amphetamines. He currently is more awake, but cannot speak at all. He suffered a stroke. Oh, and in addition to the tattoos seen in the photos he has a very distinctive scar over his LEFT leg.”

The photographs are garish. The men, always men, look close to death. Limp faces with ointment smeared across half-closed eyes. Mouths hang agape. Floppy necks cannot support heavy heads that loll to one side. Oily, long hair lies limply across white, rough pillowcases. Breathing tubes are taped to lips, fastened across cheeks, wrapped behind occiputs. Tubes and lines everywhere. Sometimes, there is a neck brace. A laceration on a cheekbone. A black eye. Stiff, blue and white hospital gowns are draped over them like a funerary shroud. 

They are discovered lying on the sidewalk, folded in a tent, face down in a recreational vehicle. With lights and sirens, they are shuttled to hospitals, where their cold bodies are warmed, lacerations sutured, infections treated with antibiotics, broken bones set — they are resuscitated, revitalized, reanimated. But the hypoxia, the brain bleed and the acute kidney injury are serious, and they have not regained consciousness. Often, they are of uncertain neurological recovery. 

These men have no wallet, phone, driver’s license or registration. No electronic items to unlock, no numbers to call. In the middle of a city that lives and breathes technology, there are no digital footprints here. 

Usually the problem is the opposite — with personal data ubiquitous online, credit card hacks and security breaches seem pro forma. But when you have few possessions and live in a tent on the sidewalk, no one is stealing your identity. In fact, that is exactly the problem: No one can figure out what that identity even is. 

It is a luxury, it turns out, to be someone with an identity to steal. Living outside all the normal regulatory, governmental tracking systems of modern life, these men are unbanked. Off-grid. Anonymous.

Living an anonymous life, paradoxically, in the heart of a city, on a sidewalk, in public view. An acutely conspicuous form of anonymity.  

“They are currently in the ICU at St. Francis under John Doe. They were brought in this morning via Ambulance, found unresponsive with 2 others on Larkin St, OD.” 

A pile of unconscious people, with too few respirations among the three of them. Fentanyl, or the rat-poison-and-adjacent-horrors it could have been cut with, is, my god, taking out groups, blocks. Maybe the fact they were all together means they were friends, I tell myself. Or maybe they just all had the same dealer. 

When one, singular patient languishes in a hospital bed, it is easier to persuade yourself it is an unfortunate, personal event. But when groups of unconscious people arrive at a hospital, it feels cataclysmic, apocalyptic, b iblical. Instead of locusts, our pestilence is high-potency synthetic opioids — it makes bugs feel provincial.

During my residency on an inpatient rotation at the San Francisco General Hospital, I watched a homeless man die alone. He had drunk himself into liver failure, and there was nothing left to do except watch his cirrhosis cause a cascade of other organs to fail. His labs became more and more abnormal. We had offered to reach out to his family or friends, but he said there was no one to call. He became increasingly confused and fatigued until, one night, he died. 

Afterward, our attending physician asked how everyone was doing, and I said it felt like a sad way to go, with no friends or family by his side, knowing, as he had, that his actions had caused a premature and completely avoidable death. I could not imagine a more sorrowful way to end a life full of sorrow. 

The attending told me she didn’t view it that way. She had seen a lot of people die and said he died with people taking care of him, with me, his worried, harried resident, checking in on him two times a day. He had meds to make him comfortable, a soft bed, three warm meals. This could have been the most communal, the most social, the most comfortable he had been for some time. 

I was trying to tell her, This is sad. I would never want this for myself, for anyone.

She was trying to tell me, It could be much, much sadder...

An op-ed in the SF Chronicle by former Yosemite superintendent Robert Binnewies:

In 2022, a YouGov poll found that National Park Service rangers are broadly popular among members of the public. In fact, 75% of respondents said that they viewed the NPS either favorably or somewhat so, the highest overall approval ratings of any federal agency, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the branches of the U.S. military.  

The men and women who wear the gray and green uniform, topped by the distinctive tan campaign hat, are seen by the public as a combination of educators, wildlife protectors, emergency responders, cultural interpreters, search-and-rescue experts and law enforcement specialists. Admired stewards of our nation’s most precious natural and historic treasures, they oversee 433 national park sites spread over 85 million acres from Maine to islands in the western Pacific Ocean. 

While many NPS employees carry guys, the public, by and large, still see them as approachable, and 40% say they have met a park ranger. That trust is critical to preserving our national parks, and explains why the NPS motto “Ask a Ranger” has been so effective. 

But this trust is in danger of fraying. 

Testifying this spring before the House of Representatives Natural Resources Subcommittee, Charles Cuvelier, associate director for visitor and resource protection in the NPS, expressed the need to assure that “the public understands the law enforcement authority of NPS personnel.”

This was followed by an internal memorandum to NPS regional directors stating that, beginning in 2027, patrol vehicles used in national park areas will be relabeled from  “U.S. Park Ranger” to “Police.”  About one third of the 3,000-4,000 rangers currently serving hold law enforcement commissions and they soon will be patrolling our nation’s national parks in cars marked “Police.” In addition, ballistic vests issued to those rangers will also display the words “Federal Police Officer.”

One must ask what the point is of what journalist Kyle Mohr called the “cop-ification” of our park rangers. Are visitors to Yosemite and other NPS areas confused about their authority? 

The  Department of the Interior seems to think so. 

“Clear identification helps reduce confusion and supports coordination during incidents involving multiple responding agencies,” the agency told SF Gate in an email. 

In a mission statement on its website, the NPS declares that park rangers are drawn to serve to “preserve unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the NPS for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of current and future generations.” 

Those rangers who have earned law enforcement commissions through accredited college and university bachelor’s degrees, enhanced by demanding and extensive law enforcement field training and evaluations, take great pride in the unique public service they have chosen. They have the badges, equipment, and authority to defend the public and themselves, and to make arrests. The ills of society do not stop at national park boundaries. Serious crime occurs although, statistically, national parks are among the safest spaces in the nation. For example, according to NPS and FBI statistics, one homicide per 10 million visitors is recorded in NPS areas compared to 590 homicides per 10 million people in the general national population. 

Just 1% of visitors to NPS areas are issued citations by park rangers, and 66% of those citations are traffic related. Accidents due to wildlife encounters, weather extremes, and terrain and water hazards, as well as medical emergencies, are tracked statistically by the NPS, confirming that these operational challenges also are well below the national average. 

For the rangers who will now be labeled as police, their jobs will continue to entail much more than law enforcement officers who work outside the borders of our national parks. They will still help protect endangered species, oversee the removal of invasive vegetation, conduct prescribed burns and monitor air and water quality. 

Rangers who have earned law enforcement commissions, wear a badge and carry guns are distinctive from their counterparts, the unarmed rangers whose primary tasks are to provide information, educate the public, perform resource management and cultural services. But there is strong respect flowing both ways. A law enforcement ranger may give an educational talk at the visitor center; a noncommissioned ranger may be a key member of a search-and-rescue team.

To constrain this effective relationship by administratively moving commissioned park rangers ever more toward tight “police” designations to the exclusion of general NPS visitor services is grievously misguided. The public and the resource are best served by rangers widely engaged as a stewardship team, not letting job boxes stand in the way. 

Before the National Park Service agency was established in 1916, the U.S. Cavalry, assisted by civilians and patrolled parks. In Yellowstone, a “gamekeeper” named Harry Yount was employed in 1880 by the cavalry.  In 1889, Capt. Joseph E. Caine, commanding the 1^(st) Utah Volunteer Cavalry in Yosemite, was assisted by four “forest agents.”  He changed their title to “park ranger,” judging the new title more descriptive of the task...

From the SF Chronicle:

At Aquarium of the Bay, the most important moments are often quiet ones.

A child stands in the tunnel beneath San Francisco Bay and looks up as a leopard shark passes overhead. A parent reaches into a touch pool and feels the wing of a bat ray. For a few seconds, the bay stops being scenery — something glimpsed from a ferry, a bridge or a restaurant window — and becomes alive. Close. Present.

That is why the recent news about ocean heat feels so urgent to me. The ocean’s crisis is easy to miss because it can look, from shore, like nothing at all. No flames. No smoke. A bright, sunny day where land meets the bay. Sea lions barking at Pier 39. 

But beneath the water’s familiar surface, the long memory of the climate is changing.

For decades, the ocean has absorbed more than 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases. It has been the buffer between us and the full force of what we have done to the atmosphere. Our oceans have kept absorbing the heat we’ve fed them, keeping it like a secret. Because the bill was hidden beneath the surface, most of us never had to look at it.

This year, it has started giving that secret up.

Last month was the warmest June ever recorded for the global ocean, with an average sea surface temperature of roughly 70 degrees. Even more alarming is the reach of that heat: Over the first six months of this year, marine heat waves touched about 82% of the global ocean. Not one hot patch. Not a bad week off one coast. A vast share of the sea is exposed to extreme warmth in the same half-year.

Some of this was expected. An El Niño is emerging in the Pacific, and El Niño years run warm. But this heat is arriving early and hard. Scientists at Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service have described ocean conditions as a possible “new phase” and “uncharted territory.” When the people who spend their lives measuring the ocean use those words, the rest of us should listen.

I write this as board chair of Aquarium of the Bay, a San Francisco institution devoted to the ocean in a city defined by it. Climate change is not happening to someone else’s water. It is happening to ours.

Off the West Coast, a large Northeast Pacific marine heat wave that began in 2025 reached nearly 4 million square miles in September — larger than the contiguous United States and the largest maximum area recorded in that region since monitoring began in 1982. On Sept. 9, 2025, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that the Northeast Pacific reached its highest average temperature on record, about 69 degrees. Now the prospect of a strong El Niño threatens to add heat

We have already seen what can result. During the 2014-16 marine heat wave known as “the Blob,” the California Current changed in ways no Bay Area resident should dismiss as abstract. Toxic algae shut down Dungeness crab fisheries. Seabirds died in large numbers. Whales became entangled as fishing seasons shifted. Salmon returns crashed. Starving sea lion pups washed up on California beaches. Northern California kelp forests collapsed, and red abalone declined so severely that the recreational fishery remains closed.

The chain that connects all of these things is short, and it reaches all the way to us.

Our coastal ecosystem depends on upwelling: winds and currents that pull cold, nutrient-rich water up from the depths. That water feeds phytoplankton, which feed krill, anchovies and sardines. Those small animals feed salmon, whales, seabirds and sea lions. When ocean heat disrupts that chain, the damage does not stay offshore. It shows up as hungry pups at rehabilitation centers, fewer fish for boats, delayed or closed crab seasons, thinning kelp forests and a quieter, poorer coast.

The central job of aquariums is not to frighten people. Fear is a poor long-term motivator. Our job is to make the invisible legible. Not by pretending there is a single tank that can display ocean warming, but by helping visitors understand that every animal they meet is part of a larger system — a system connected to overheated water thousands of miles wide, to winds that drive upwelling, to the food web off our coast and to choices made far from the shoreline...

From the SF Chronicle:

Imagine spending decades in prison, only for a new law to finally give you the power to prove your trial was corrupted by overt racial bias. You finally have a legal path to freedom, and the law guarantees you a lawyer to help fight your case. But when you show up to court, the judge looks at you and says, “There are no lawyers available.” You are on your own until help arrives, and who knows how long that will be. 

This is not a hypothetical nightmare. It is the reality in California, where a catastrophic, billion-dollar funding imbalance has turned progressive criminal justice reforms into an empty promise for the state’s poorest residents.

In recent years, California has passed landmark, civil rights-forward legislation like the Racial Justice Act of 2020 and its retroactive expansion, the Racial Justice Act for All. These laws allow incarcerated people to challenge convictions or sentences infected by racism or systemic errors. Crucially, the Legislature wrote a vital safeguard into these laws: If you cannot afford an attorney, the state will appoint one for you.

But passing a law without funding is just political theater.

The breaking point finally burst with a recent landmark California Court of Appeal decision, Harmon v. Superior Court. In Riverside County, an incarcerated man named Taiwan Orran Reed successfully proved that law enforcement used explicitly racist language during his trial. The court agreed his case had merit and ordered the local public defender’s office to represent him at his upcoming hearing.

But the public defender’s office fought back, arguing it literally did not have the bodies or the budget to take the case. The office was being flooded with up to five new post-conviction requests every single day from state prisons, while holding a skeleton crew of just six attorneys to handle them. Under local laws, they were forced to prioritize active, pre-conviction trial dockets.

The Court of Appeal ruled in favor of the public defender. The court held that while public defenders must represent poor defendants at trial, they have the absolute legal discretion to say “no” to post-conviction cases.

The result? Vulnerable, indigent individuals are left entirely stranded in a complex legal labyrinth without a guide.

How did we get here? The crisis is driven by a profound, structural math problem for California counties. According to a report by the Office of the State Public Defender, California counties allocated nearly $2.2 billion to local district attorney offices in a single fiscal year, compared to just $1.28 billion for all public defense systems combined.

Furthermore, the state pours hundreds of millions of dollars into exclusive prosecution grants to fund specialized task forces. These front-end dollars naturally drive up convictions and prison sentences. But the state provides virtually zero matching funds for public defenders to handle the back-end avalanche of post-conviction appeals and petitions that follow. To make matters worse, the few state grants that do exist to support public defense are legally scheduled to expire this year.

This financial starvation fractures the right to counsel. A report by UC Berkeley’s Criminal Law & Justice Center, the ACLU and the Wren Collective revealed that 24 California counties rely on unregulated, flat-fee contracts with private lawyers to handle poor defendants’ cases. Because these contracts pay a single lump sum regardless of workload, they financially disincentivize attorneys from doing basic investigations or tackling complex post-conviction fights — leaving clients with representation in name only. 

Our legal system operates on a simple principle: Fairness requires a balanced scale. Pumping billions into the front-end machinery of prosecution while starving the back-end infrastructure of defense creates an inescapable bottleneck that clogs our courts and wastes taxpayer dollars on prolonged, unconstitutional incarcerations.

When we deny adequate legal representation to individuals trying to correct proven errors or systemic bias, we undermine trust in the law itself. Decades of legal scholarship — from the from the U.S. Supreme Court's foundational ruling establishing the rights of indigent defendants filing appeals in Griffin v. Illinois, 351 U.S. 12 (1956), to empirical research — show that robust post-conviction representation doesn’t just improve legal outcomes; it humanizes the forgotten, roots out institutional rot and saves public resources by ensuring the state isn’t paying to lock up the wrong people...

Op-ed in the SF Chronicle:

In 1985, a plainclothes San Jose police officer shot and killed Melvin Truss, a 115-pound, 17-year-old Black queer kid wearing women’s clothing. The slurs used by the police to describe Melvin enraged us as longtime gay rights activists, and we vehemently disputed their account of the incident. One of us still vividly remembers storming City Hall to demand justice. 

Confrontation is inherent in the history of protests demanding LGBTQ rights. After all, the origin of Pride celebrations was a riot against police brutality. It’s for that reason that LGBTQ+ people should be careful before condemning protest. Our rights were not won by waiting quietly for permission. They were won by activists summoning the courage to disrupt, confront and demand change.

But there is no equivalence between protest as a necessary confrontation of power and what transpired at this year’s Trans March in San Francisco. 

State Sen. Scott Wiener, a gay Jewish legislator and one of the strongest LGBTQ+ rights champions in the country, was followed through Dolores Park, physically intimidated and felt unsafe enough that he left an event he has attended since its beginning. That was not merely a sharp disagreement. It was part of a broader pattern in which anger at Wiener had moved beyond protest into personal harassment.

Disagreement with him is fair. Protesting his positions is fair. Making him unsafe in a public space, let alone an LGBTQ+ public space, is not.

While the behavior of the trans activists who raged at Wiener has been widely criticized, the organizers of the Trans March excused it as “holding politicians accountable.”

To be clear, the anger at Wiener did not come from nowhere. His positions on Israel and Gaza are fair game for protest. A few point to his support for an antisemitism-in-schools bill signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and backed by Jewish legislators and civil rights advocates — but opposed by groups including the ACLU over concerns that it could chill speech and narrow discussion of Palestinians and Israel. They also point to Wiener’s initial reluctance to call Israel’s military campaign in Gaza “genocide.”

The atrocities in Gaza are catastrophic, immoral and indefensible. But for many progressive Jews, the word “genocide” carries the weight of the Holocaust in a moment when antisemitism and Holocaust denial are not abstractions. Sen. Bernie Sanders first used the word to describe Israel's military campaign in Gaza less than four months before Wiener. 

Wiener can be challenged over his statements or how he would approach foreign policy if elected to Congress. But directing physical rage at a state senator at a transgender rights event over Gaza does not clarify the cause. It distorts it.

The LGBTQ+ movement has spent decades widening the tent. Even our flag has evolved to recognize more identities, more histories and more forms of belonging. But a bigger family is more complicated. It includes people who share a fight for dignity while disagreeing on foreign policy, legislation, strategy or language. That should look like a family argument, not an expulsion. If our symbols keep becoming more inclusive while our politics become more ideologically narrow, we are betraying the promise those symbols are supposed to represent.

Wiener has authored some of the most consequential transgender rights legislation. Senate Bill 107 made California a refuge for transgender children fleeing states that criminalize gender-affirming care. SB132 strengthened safety for transgender people in custody. SB932 and SB957 pushed California to collect LGBTQ+ health data so we are not invisible in public health systems. SB59 and SB497 protect transgender people from being outed or targeted through sensitive records.

You do not have to agree with Wiener on every issue to recognize the depth of his record on transgender and LGBTQ+ rights.

This is not a call for protest to be quiet or comfortable. ACT UP, the grassroots political group, taught our community that direct action can be righteous, disruptive and necessary. It forced a country that was ignoring AIDS to confront mass death, political indifference and institutional cruelty. But the lesson of ACT UP was not that any tactic is justified if the cause is urgent. Direct action has moral force when it confronts power.

The irony here is that Wiener has been harassed by far-right extremists for years for defending transgender and other marginalized people. The far right has smeared him as a “groomer,” and he has received death threats.

As gay and transgender/intersex men, we know something about what it means to have identity weaponized. During the AIDS crisis, gay men were treated as if our identities made us dangerous or culpable for a catastrophe we did not create. Today, we fear that many Jewish people are experiencing a version of that same moral flattening and being treated as personally responsible for the actions of a foreign government, regardless of their actual views, humanity or record.

That is not justice. It is scapegoating...

From the SF Chronicle:

California voters legalized adult-use cannabis in 2016 with the goals of bringing the industry out of the shadows, generating much-needed tax revenue and a desire to begin repairing the damage that decades of prohibition had inflicted on communities of color.

Nearly a decade later, the illegal market still controls an estimated 60% to 80% of cannabis sales in California. Licensed and lawful retailers are failing because they can’t compete with unlicensed growers who continue to operate outside the system. Illegal storefronts operate openly on our cities’ boulevards while the legal cannabis industry — the one Sacramento created, licensed and taxed — is dying. California’s legal weed market contracted for the third consecutive year in 2025, with retail sales dropping from $4.2 billion in 2024 to $3.9 billion in 2025. This was driven by competition from an enormous illicit market, severe pricing compression and a state excise tax hike.

This is not a federal problem. It is a Sacramento problem.

California’s cannabis excise tax has been raised, cut and raised and cut again. The rate started at 15% under Proposition 64, before jumping to 19% in 2025, a move that crashed legal sales almost immediately. Gov. Gavin Newsom then signed legislation lowering the rate back to 15%, but that will only extend through June 30, 2028, when an automatic adjustment mechanism will kick in again, raising the tax back to 19%.

This is no way to govern. The Legislature should fix the excise tax for recreational cannabis at 10%, permanently, with any subsequent increases requiring a supermajority vote. Combined with local taxes and sales tax, the effective rate on a legal transaction would still exceed those for tobacco or alcohol — but at 10% would still be low enough to close the price gap with the unlicensed market.

The math on cannabis revenue is counterintuitive but sound. Every customer buying from an unlicensed operator generates zero tax revenue. A lower rate that captures even a fraction of the illegal market’s volume generates more total revenue than a higher rate applied to a shrinking legal one. The Legislature understood this logic when it eliminated the cultivation tax in 2022 and projected a 123% increase in revenues through volume effects. The Legislature now needs to apply that same logic to the excise tax, fix the rate and give the industry what it has never had: a stable planning horizon.

Under California’s framework, a cannabis retailer needs a state license and a separate local city or county license. That local license is not a formality — it is a full independent gatekeeping function with its own application, fees, timeline and discretionary approval process. A hostile city council can block a fully qualified operator indefinitely. More than half of California’s jurisdictions have banned cannabis retail entirely.

The result: geographic monopolies in permissive jurisdictions and cannabis deserts everywhere else — deserts the illegal market fills without facing any local opposition. And don’t forget each city adds additional licensing fees, taxes and permit requirements on top of the state requirements. This is excessive.

New Jersey solved this problem. The state cannabis commission issues a business license; municipalities may regulate locations through zoning but cannot run a parallel licensing or taxing process. California should adopt the same model. The Department of Cannabis Control should become the sole licensing authority, while local governments can continue to hold onto the zoning power over where a business operates — not whether it operates at all.

This is not a novel idea. The Alcoholic Beverage Commission issues state liquor licenses without a local licensing counterpart. There is no principled reason cannabis should be different, and a decade of evidence confirms the cost of pretending otherwise. According to the Cato Institute, local municipal taxes severely crippled California’s legal cannabis industry over the past decade, driving operators out of business and bolstering a thriving illicit market. Because more than 86% of local cannabis tax measures have been approved since 2009, operators face compounding local fees that cause effective tax rates to exceed 40% above their federal tax burden.

Since 2022, six years after voters legalized weed, the Unified Cannabis Enforcement Task Force has seized over $1.2 billion in illicit cannabis products — and that represents just a fraction of an illegal market that accounts for an estimated 60% of statewide sales. The problem is not that enforcement has failed. It is that enforcement is not scaled to the problem.

The Legislature should dedicate at least 33% of its collected cannabis excise tax revenues to unlicensed market enforcement, with a statutory firewall against budget-season raiding. One-third of the dollars the state collects should then be locked in for law enforcement and civil enforcement of already existing state laws to curb illegal markets. Further, the state needs to be swift in its enforcement, and it should take advantage of civil enforcement processes, not just criminal processes. Enforcement needs California to also seek civil injunctions. A criminal case takes years, while a civil injunction against an unlicensed storefront can be obtained in weeks.

The California cannabis industry is not asking for charity. It is asking Sacramento to honor the deal it made in 2016: a fair regulatory framework where licensed businesses can actually compete and generate revenue...

From the SF Chronicle:

Republican Steve Hilton’s nearly non-existent chances of becoming our state’s next governor seemed to grow even dimmer this month when the California Chamber of Commerce officially endorsed Democrat Xavier Becerra. 

“California businesses depend on stability and certainty, and the world’s fourth largest economy needs a governor who can work productively with both the private sector and our state legislature,” CalChamber Board of Directors Chair Donna Lucas said in a press release explaining why CalChamber had, for the first time in its history, not thrown its backing to a Republican. 

CalChamber President and CEO Jennifer Barrera concurred. “California needs collaboration, not conflict,” she explained. “Secretary Becerra represents the best candidate to embrace that style of leadership.” 

With the latest Berkeley/IGS Poll showing Becerra leading Hilton by more than 20 points, CalChamber’s endorsement landed like salt sprinkled on a wound. In response, Hilton accused the pro-business outfit of “sucking up to Becerra” so as to “get a few crumbs in the future.” 

Sucking up is a part of politics, man. Sorry.

Hilton is a smart guy, but collaboration isn’t exactly the platform that he has been running on. Instead, his pitch to voters is a deeply partisan vision that posits that everything that Democrats have done has been catastrophic for the state. His incredulous response to the chamber’s endorsement has only confirmed that world view. 

Given that a lot of Silicon Valley techies have done just fine under Democratic rule, and with major help from the Golden State’s tax code, you’d think that Hilton, Elon Musk and their right-wing buddies would be a little more appreciative.

On Friday, Hilton, the former — and likely soon to be returning — Fox News host took his frustrations to the Wall Street Journal, another Rupert Murdoch-owned property, to vent some more. CalChamber’s endorsement was a “corporate version of Stockholm Syndrome,” he said in reference to the psychological condition in which hostages fall in love with their captors.

For better or worse, the truth is that CalChamber probably didn’t fall in love with the Democrats so much as it offered them a frenemies-with-benefits olive branch. Call it pragmatism in a state where registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by nearly two-to-one. 

California Federation of Labor Unions President Lorena Gonzalez, a longtime Becerra ally, didn’t sound particularly shocked by CalChamber’s nod.

“I think this is more about the chamber knowing that they don’t have a lot of options,” she drily noted. “Becerra is going to win and they don’t want to be on the outs.” 

When Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco failed to elbow his way past the throng of Democratic candidates in the primary, it didn’t take a psychic to see that Hilton’s chances of becoming governor were, to quote a Magic 8 Ball, “Very doubtful.” 

Still, not every partisan alliance in California has crumbled. Some actors are still dutifully playing their parts. The less-politically astute California Business and Industrial Alliance offered its own predictable rejoinder to CalChamber that asked, “WHY IS THE CAL CHAMBER ENDORSING BIG LABOR’S BUDDY?”

Gotta love the capital letters: so very Trumpie. 

The thing is, despite what Hilton and CABIA would have you believe, the past two Democratic governors, Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom, haven’t exactly been anti-business firebrands. 

Newsom, who’s been planning to run for president for years, has spent a lot of time and political capital nurturing his relationship with Silicon Valley. Heck, he even used to hang out with the world’s first trillionaire, Musk, and a lot of other not-quite-as-wealthy tech bros. 

Sure, Newsom has hip-checked the petroleum industry, calling for conversion to EVs by 2035. But he is also a small business owner who strongly opposes the proposed one-time tax on billionaires. 

If memory serves, former Gov. Brown managed to create 2.8 million California jobs during his last two terms, and also magically turned a $25 billion deficit into a $5 billion surplus. 

As for Becerra’s pro-business signaling, he’s on the record as a Chevron fan boy and has been slow-walking support for the state’s 2035 EV goals. PG&E has also chipped in lots of cash to help get him elected, which doesn’t exactly position Becerra as a central casting business foe.

So, maybe CalChamber’s politics don’t perfectly align with Becerra’s, but they’re not wrong to conclude that throwing in with Hilton would just be a wasted opportunity.

President Lyndon Johnson once famously observed that it is “Better to have your enemies inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in...”

From a longtime fan writing the SF Chronicle:

For long-time San Francisco Giants fans like myself who are disappointed and angry by last week’s Pride Night incident — in which pitcher Landon Roupp and a handful of other players saw fit to protest the team’s decision to honor the city’s LGBTQ community with hats featuring a rainbow SF insignia — larger, more troubling errors in judgment have been difficult to ignore. 

Indeed, the organization’s response to this fiasco has led me and many others to reevaluate our loyalty to the hometown team. 

My frustration stems not only from manager Tony Vitello allowing Roupp and a cast of relief pitchers to take the field in altered Giants caps bearing messages intended to protest Pride Night, but also from the team’s own response. After the players wrote Bible verses on their hats in protest of the Pride Night caps, Giants leadership had an opportunity to demonstrate thoughtful leadership. Instead, the organization gave us something as ineffective as the performance of those pitchers during the game. 

It begs the question: What kind of clubhouse do the Giants want? Simply put, these young men should not have been allowed on the diamond. How did Vitello not notice — for four innings — the show of disrespect for the people that Pride Night was meant to honor? The obvious answer is, he did, and he allowed it. 

Just as disappointing is the team’s insipid official statement following its loss to the Chicago Cubs: “The San Francisco Giants are proud to support Pride Night and the LGBTQ+ community… We also respect that individuals may make personal choices about participating in team activations,” the statement read. “We understand that the choices by individual players have caused pain and anger to many in the LGBTQ+ community and we are sorry for that.”  

The Giants are speaking out of both sides of their mouths. No, you cannot “support Pride Night” while allowing your players to publicly mock it. Either your organization supports Pride Night or it doesn’t, and trying to shift the blame to your players won’t cut it, either. 

I was hoping that the team would take some kind of action against Vitello, or at the very least, come out with a better statement, but that didn’t happen. Rather than treating the situation as a PR problem, the organization could have used it as an opportunity to reaffirm its commitment to inclusion, to educate its players on what respectful self-expression is. To see an example of a respectful expression of “personal choices,” one need look no further than former Giants superstar Barry Bonds, who wore a cross earring during every game. Unlike Roupp and the other pitchers, he did not choose a day of significance, such as Pride Night, to wear it in protest.

In contrast, Giants leadership, especially Vitello, allowed these young men to wear their altered hats in protest of a team-sanctioned uniform meant to honor the LGBTQ community. It would be no different if on Mexican Heritage Night, some players wore pins advocating that all citizens of Mexican descent be deported. 

As a life-long Giants fan (I’m 60), I’ve sat through my share of subpar seasons with the team, including this one, thanks in no small part to the club’s lackluster pitching. Losing seasons, however, tend to make the winning ones that much sweeter. But after Pride Night, I have decided to forego the rest of the season. I have deleted my MLB account and canceled my streaming service that carries NBC Sports Bay Area. KNBR is how I have always filled my morning commute, and how I catch games that I don’t watch, but not this year. I will miss Kruk and Kuip, and Dave and John. But I cannot simply set aside the terrible behavior of these players, the lack of managerial leadership, or the lackluster response from the team. 

I know there is no crying in baseball. I am not crying. I am making a difficult choice based on principle. What makes this especially disappointing is that there was a better path forward. As a volunteer youth baseball coach for many years, I participated in the Junior Giants coaching clinics at AT&T Park (now Oracle), where I was given a book put out by the Positive Coaching Alliance. It was all about teaching life lessons through athletics, about how to be a “double-goal coach.” At the clinics, players-turned-coaches Ron Wotus and Tim Flannery spoke to it, and it inspired my own coaching. Using the tools from PCA, youth sports coaches across the country teach players that it’s not about the errors you make, but how you respond to them, that winning has more than one definition. It is about how you carry yourself, and how you respond in difficult moments. 

This particular Giants leadership group has not learned this lesson...

From the SF Chronicle:

For anyone who has been following Mayor Daniel Lurie’s social media PR campaign, his a frequently heard refrain is that “The arts will revitalize San Francisco.” 

Based on his repeated comments, one would think that his budget would reflect his priorities. Lurie has declared that “San Francisco’s arts and culture ecosystem is the most vibrant in the country, and under my administration, we are working to do a better job supporting the artists and arts organizations who are driving our city’s economic recovery.”

But the mayor’s public boosterism in the name of Art and his actual budget tell a very different story. 

The San Francisco Arts Commission’s programs include community investments, 11 grant categories for individual artists and organizations, seven cultural centers, an award-winning Public Art Program, galleries, an oversight body for all public development projects, and the Civic Art Collection, which manages and maintains approximately 4,500 artworks owned by the City. SFAC Galleries is one of the only programs that is not in the charter, not legislated, and funded entirely by the General Fund. While Mayor Lurie’s proposed budget for SFAC shows growth, that is almost entirely due to the consolidation of Grants for the Arts and Film SF.

Over the past few years, starting with former Mayor London Breed, San Francisco has cut General Fund dollars from SFAC. General Fund dollars support admin positions, the Civic Art Collection, and SFAC Galleries. Because of those reductions, SFAC has essentially used Prop E money (from the Hotel Tax), which was approved by voters in 2018, to fund cultural community organizations and artists, for SFAC salaries. As a result, an increasing number of staff are being covered by Prop E money. SFAC’s leadership has been unwilling to lead and push back on the previous and current budgets, so SFAC must tap into money meant for cultural centers, community organizations and artists. 

Lurie’s plan also includes implementing a repayment policy for individual artist grantees and grantee institutions to front production costs with their own money. You heard that right: The mayor is requiring grantees to shoulder the upfront capital costs for their city project, to be repaid through a grant later. Seriously? In one of the most expensive cities in the nation, the mayor is asking the working poor to foot the bill for expenses, and he’ll settle up later? 

The mayor’s administration, via SFAC, has even suggested that its grantees take out loans and lines of credit to incur debt in order to complete their work on behalf of the city. What arts organizations around the city feel is that they are being asked to do more with less while watching a system in free fall. To quote Maria Jenson, director of SOMArts, “We’re moving from cultural production to cultural servitude.”

Lurie has also reduced the already shorthanded SFAC gallery staff by 50%. The Fine Arts Museums, the organization that oversees the de Young Museum and Legion of Honor, laid off a dozen employees, and programs that were running with unfilled positions are now being eliminated. And effective July 1, the director of galleries and public programs position at SFAC will be eliminated.

Have you ever noticed that when a city is in crisis, the first public appeal is to the Arts?  They paint murals, hold public concerts, beautify neighborhoods, create community gatherings and pop-up businesses — only for those artists to be quickly forgotten when the economy rebounds. Why are artists only visible to politicians when they have a city in crisis? 

Despite having the largest creative economy in the nation, California ranks 35th in the United States for per-capita state arts funding. The state allocates roughly 60 cents per resident for arts and culture. New York spends $5 per resident. In fact**,** California lags behind Florida, Tennessee, South Dakota, Mississippi and Missouri in arts spending. 

The U.S. as a whole is way behind other countries in how we invest public dollars in arts and culture. The arts generate massive economic returns, contributing over $1.2 trillion to U.S. GDP. They provide broad societal benefits that the free market always underfunds. And with more billionaires here than anywhere else in America, one would think this would be reflected in more philanthropic giving. Sadly, that’s not the case. Yes, the uber-wealthy should be taxed, but our elected officials must also be held accountable for using those dollars to benefit the community and its culture.

The Bay Area arts ecosystem is suffering the result of one of the most difficult periods in its history. Following the closure of all of the independent art colleges in the Bay Area, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Mission Cultural Center, several galleries and an increasingly precarious climate for nonprofit arts organizations. Instead of rallying to defend our cultural heritage and its perilous future we see a budgetary shell game and more pain for those doing our cultural good. 

We need Mayor Lurie to stop paying lip service to the Arts and Culture and prioritize it. 

From the SF Chronicle:

In April, California Attorney General Rob Bonta held a press conference to encourage participation in the statewide audit of California’s untested rape kits and highlighted a cold case in which rape kit DNA was used to identify a suspect linked to seven rape victims across four jurisdictions between 1994 and 2008. 

According to Bonta’s office, the breakthrough in the case “was made possible by a strong partnership” among police in Berkeley, Richmond, Oakland and Beaumont, Texas, and the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office. But at its heart, the DNA collected from a rape kit proved essential.

“Imagine what we can do,” said Bonta, “if we test all of the untested sexual assault evidence kits — and we must.”

When a sexual assault survivor undergoes an invasive and time-consuming forensic examination to compile a rape kit, there’s an implicit promise that law enforcement will test any discovered DNA to identify a perpetrator.

But too often, those rape kits don’t get tested and languish in storage, despite the robust number of cases they have helped solve. 

When a sexual assault survivor undergoes an invasive and time-consuming forensic examination to compile a rape kit, there’s an implicit promise that law enforcement will test any discovered DNA to identify a perpetrator.

But too often, those rape kits don’t get tested and languish in storage, despite the robust number of cases they have helped solve. 

Testing of backlogged rape kits in Ventura and Riverside counties identified serial killers, with one case going back to 1986.

Testing rape kits is also a powerful tool to free the unjustly accused. Last year, the Ventura County district attorney’s initiative to test untested rape kits exonerated a man convicted of a rape in 1982 — decades after he had already been sentenced to serve six years in prison for a crime he did not commit. 

The importance of securing a complete and accurate statewide count of untested kits cannot be emphasized enough. Once the state knows the full extent of the backlog, it can work to eliminate it, bring justice to survivors and accountability to dangerous offenders.

That’s why it’s critical that local law enforcement agencies, medical facilities and crime labs report the number of their untested sexual assault evidence kits to the California Department of Justice by July 1, as mandated by Senate Bill 464, which was authored by state Sen. Aisha Wahab and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in October 2023.

Unfortunately, the response to a previous statewide audit was disappointing, to say the least, as less than a quarter of the state’s law enforcement agencies and no medical facilities reported their number of untested kits. In 19 counties, not a single jurisdiction responded.

A 2020 report from the California Department of Justice summarized results from this audit and estimated 13,929 untested kits throughout the state, undoubtedly a significant undercount.

“Survivors deserve justice,” said San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu, who, when he was an Assembly member, co-authored AB3118, the legislation requiring the initial audit. “The lack of participation in this audit not only fails to deliver justice, but is also a violation of state law.”

Those of us who work to end the backlog of untested rape kits can only speculate as to why the previous audit had such a poor response rate. Was it due to inadequate notification, unclear instructions, or outright indifference?

Whatever the reason, we need to make sure local jurisdictions know about their SB464 requirement to report untested kits by July 1 — and comply. 

In the past two months, the Joyful Heart Foundation has taken action. Founded by actress Mariska Hargitay, known to many as her character Olivia Benson on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” our organization has emailed every police chief and county sheriff in California, reminding them of the July 1 reporting deadline.

The state Department of Justice has also broadcast information about the requirements of SB464 with an information bulletin in June 2024, and Sarai Srain, the state attorney general’s deputy director of sexual assault evidence, has embarked on an outreach campaign. 

But will that be enough to inspire local leaders to comply with SB464? 

Getting a thorough and accurate count of untested rape kits isn’t an exercise in bean counting or a bothersome bureaucratic demand. It’s an important crime-fighting tool that can deliver justice for survivors of sexual assault. 

As the July 1 deadline approaches, we ask leaders in law enforcement, medical facilities and crime labs to take their SB464 reporting requirements seriously and provide their count of untested rape kits — even if they have no untested kits...

From the SF Chronicle:

Most people in California recognize Lake Tahoe, the “Jewel of the Sierra,” for its crystalline waters, stunning landscape and seemingly endless opportunities to enjoy nature. 

Despite the lake’s enduring appeal, invasive species have long posed a threat to its pristine water quality. Nonnative plants and animals outcompete native species, degrade water quality and can cripple infrastructure in lakes, rivers and streams where they spread.

But one invader in particular has become a pressing concern: the golden mussel. There is no greater threat today to Tahoe’s iconic water quality than the golden mussel, which is already on the lake’s doorstep.

On May 31, a boat unknowingly carrying four golden mussels attached to its underside was stopped at a Tahoe inspection station after it had visited waterways near Sacramento. The boat was intercepted and not allowed to launch on Lake Tahoe. If golden mussels are allowed in, they will exponentially accelerate the lake’s slow shift from blue to green, and the region will lose the ability to take management and remediation actions to halt or even slow down the greening.

Lake Tahoe has one of the nation’s strongest aquatic invasive species prevention programs, which has been built over decades and includes mandatory watercraft inspections and decontaminations. These measures have protected Tahoe from zebra mussels, quagga mussels, and now, the growing threat of golden mussels, which are native to China and Southeast Asia...

From the SF Chronicle:

When Wayne Hsiung and other animal rights activists entered Sunrise Farms, a giant egg facility in Petaluma, on May 29, 2018, to provide aid to suffering chickens, they thought their right to rescue these birds would be protected from criminal liability by California’s “necessity defense,” which justifies breaking the law to prevent a “significant evil.”

The necessity defense helps to ensure that people do not hesitate to intervene to prevent harm out of fear that they will be prosecuted for breaking the law in order to do so. After all, isn’t the prevention of animal cruelty more important than prohibiting trespass at a commercial warehouse? 

Confident in this belief, Hsiung and other activists rescued three dozen sick chickens from Sunrise, got them emergency veterinary care and placed them at animal sanctuaries. Hsiung was arrested that day and was eventually convicted of two counts of misdemeanor trespass (one of which stemmed from a protest and action at a separate facility, Reichardt Duck Farm) and one count of felony conspiracy to commit trespass.

But in April, Hsiung won big at the California Court of Appeal, where two of his three convictions — including the felony — were reversed. As the court put it, while Hsiung was mistaken that the necessity defense applied, he should have been able to argue to the jury that he had a “good faith, albeit incorrect, belief that committing a trespass was legally justified.” That meant he did not have the required intent to commit a crime, but the trial court also blocked him from arguing a so-called “mistake of law” defense.

In other words, Hsiung knew he was trespassing, but believed that the necessity defense protected him from liability for the trespass because it was necessary to prevent the greater harm of animal cruelty. The Court of Appeal ruled that he should have been able to argue this to the jury, and it reversed his convictions for that reason.

The appellate court was right to reverse Hsiung’s convictions. But, in one important regard, the three judges got it wrong: Hsiung was not “mistaken.” In our view, he was right that the necessity defense should apply in animal removal cases like his. That’s why his legal team filed an appeal this week with the California Supreme Court, urging it to revisit the case. 

In its opinion, the Court of Appeal held that the necessity defense is available only in “an emergency situation threatening imminent harm.” According to the court, because the Sunrise rescue was planned, it was not a spontaneous response to an emergency that authorized the necessity defense...

From the SF Chronicle:

President Donald Trump’s ethically compromised Justice Department shows no signs of backing off its all-too-transparent retribution campaign. 

After pursuing the flimsiest of federal indictments against Sen. Adam Schiff of California, former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Leticia James, Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Monday’s attempt at political payback targeted Gov. Gavin Newsom and his wife, first partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom.

Their crime? That’s still TBD, and Washington insiders told the New York Times Monday that there were “multiple federal investigations” involving the presumptive Democratic presidential front-runner for 2028.  

Why not just cut to the quick and charge the Newsoms with criticizing King Trump? That must be a felony by now. 

According to Newsom, the FBI has dispatched federal agents to question friends — and, no doubt, a few enemies — of the Newsoms. For his part, wild-eyed FBI Director Kash Patel has denied that this investigation originated in the Trump swamp. Rather, it stems from a California whistleblower — glad Patel cleared that up. 

But whether this latest political hit job originated here or ringside at the UFC White House makes little difference. 

“Donald Trump isn’t just coming after me because of my mean tweets,” Newsom said in a video Monday in which he rightly described the latest “investigation” as a fishing expedition. “He’s coming after me because I am considering running for president.” 

“To get me, he’s coming after my wife,” the governor added.

In her own statement, Siebel Newsom didn’t sound very intimidated, either.

“This is not presidential behavior,” she said, “and the governor and I will continue to speak truth to power because the American people deserve so much more.”

Not to quibble, but this certainly is behavior consistent with one U.S. president — and one alone. The same tough guy has gone after Kelly, former CIA Director John Brennan, former national security adviser John Bolton and former chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, etc., etc. 

Trump’s former lawyer-turned-attorney-general nominee, Todd Blanche, has shown himself to be ready and willing to go after the president’s perceived enemies with a zeal that should, in an alternate universe, be enough to keep Republican senators from voting to confirm him. 

So great is Blanche’s desire to please the boss that he makes his predecessor, Pam Bondi, look like a paragon of ethics in comparison. Testifying before Congress earlier this month, Bondi also blamed the Epstein files mess on Blanche, her former deputy. 

“He was leading the Epstein matter and the release of everything from the beginning,” Bondi told lawmakers. 

That certainly wasn’t lost on Newsom, who recently described Blanche as “the guy covering up the Epstein files” who “gave Trump and his family a lifetime pass to commit tax crimes.”

But this new investigation, which was initiated under the Biden administration, seems to have been   precipitated by the plea deal taken by former Newsom Chief of Staff Dana Williamson and two others, who were engaged in an unlawful campaign fund transfer right under the nose of Democratic gubernatorial finalist Xavier Becerra. 

Seibel Newsom has several nonprofits being examined. One of them, the Representation Project, solicited $4.3 million since Newsom took office and has paid Seibel Newsom’s film production outfit, Girls Club Entertainment, about $160,000 for various projects.

Furthermore, Seibel Newsom also co-founded a nonprofit called California Partners Project, which is devoted to putting more women on corporate boards. Some of the funders have indeed had business before the state. Perhaps it’s a bad look, but, thus far, there has been no directly traceable quid pro quo.

But how on Earth can anyone have faith that a Justice Department led by acting Attorney General Blanche or an FBI led by a man who definitely cannot take criticism will handle this matter fairly? 

Blanche is the guy who negotiated Trump’s insane settlement with the IRS, after all, which quashes all existing IRS audits of the Trump family. 

What’s clear is that if Newsom were a Republican governor of a red state, it’s doubtful the FBI would still be on the case. Instead, Newsom has long been the president’s most high-profile critic, firing off Oscar-level parodies (give his comms team a raise). 

Newsom’s barbs of thin-skinned Trump have infuriated the sunsetting president, who seems to alternate between wanting Newsom (“Newscum”) to be his buddy and wanting to see him thrown into the next cage match...