Watching The Wire, I don’t think think “wow, Baltimore is super awful” but instead, “wow, that’s a lot like Oakland.” We all remember in Season One when Clay Davis’ driver is caught driving away from the Towers with $30,000 in cash, and how Davis intervenes with Burrell to make Daniels’ investigation into Barksdale and Davis go away. Well, basically the exact same thing just went down in Oakland.
Recently, a wave of homicides and restaurant robberies have struck Oakland. In response, the police arrested 56 members of the infamous Acorn gang who were connected to the crime wave. One of the gangbangers caught up in the police sweep was 27 year old William Lovan, the “nephew” of City Administrator’s Deborah Edgerly. Edgerly intervened, ordering the cops on the scene to tell her why the car was being towed and then, according to San Francisco Chronicle reporter Chip Johnson, “she vowed to contact Oakland Assistant Police Chief Howard Jordan and Tucker when the officers refused to tell her, police say. She then promised an internal affairs investigation into the whole matter.” She wasn’t very effective at bailing out her nephew, Lovan has now been charged with murder and armed robbery, while Edgerly has been forced to resign.
But it gets worse, not only was Lovan a gangbanger receiving protecting from a high ranking city official, he was also a repairman for the parking division, and was one of “several people” in the Edgerly family who was employed by the city. And, shockingly, these relations got special treatment when applying for city jobs:
Edgerly has requested - and received - concessions in the past from the Police Department, most notably a change in the city’s physical training requirements to help her daughter’s efforts to become a police officer.
Erin Breckenridge, her daughter, who still works as a civilian employee in the department, was provided with an unprecedented four opportunities to pass the academy training’s physical skills test.
Of course, Edgerly is likely to replaced by another corrupt hack, or an ineffective boob in the mold of Dellums, but still, it’s nice to see someone in Oakland facing accountability. It would nice if this happened a bit more.
Was there a very progressive legal decision that helped a marginalized group in society come closer to achieving full equality and legal dignity recently? Yes there was! And like clockwork, Jeffrey Rosen is here to criticize it:
So what makes the legal reasoning so inflammatory? Most controversially, the Court held that sexual orientation discrimination should be treated just as skeptically as racial discrimination–a conclusion that the U.S. Supreme Court and the other state Supreme Courts have refused to accept. Social conservatives are already invoking contested science to question one of the premises of this conclusion: that sexual orientation, like race, is immutable. “There is no evidence to establish that a homosexual lifestyle is an immutable characteristic such as race,” a lawyer for Advocates for Faith and Freedom told The New York Times. There was no need to open this Pandora’s Box: The Court could have held more modestly that there are no rational reasons for limiting the label “marriage” to straight people and denying it to gays and lesbians.
Rosen’s argument is that, essentially, because conservatives view homosexuality as a lifestyle choice, the California Supreme Court shouldn’t offend them by basing their ruling on the fact that discrimination on basically immutable characteristics like race or sexual orientation should have strict scrutiny applied to it. Rosen points out that the Federal Supreme Court and other courts haven’t adopted this line of reasoning, but I suspect they will eventually, as society gets farther and farther away from viewing homosexuality as some sort of mental illness. The second poor argument is that because they ruled to apply strict scrutiny, it will galvanize opponents of gay marriage more than if they had used a more narrow criteria. This, quite frankly, is just BS. Opponents of gay marriage will not be mollified by whatever legal reasoning the Court takes - the reason they think gay marriage is wrong is because they view the “homosexual lifestyle” as sinful. Strict vs moderate scrutiny doesn’t matter to those people.
Rosen, however, argues that reasoning does matter by making a poor analogy to Roe v Wade, “Because Roe was so poorly reasoned, pro-life activists found it easier to rally undecided voters under the guise of attacking judicial usurpation.” We can table this statement for a while, but the analogy between Roe and the California decision is just wrong. The idea that some unelected judges are usurping the will of the people just isn’t true. Once again, all seven of the judges on the State Supreme Court were elected by overwhelmingly majorities, the California state legislature twice passed bills to recognize same-sex marriage, and when Schwarzenegger vetoed them, he explicitly said that he wanted the Court to rule or some sort of referendum to pass. And now, he says that he doesn’t support a referendum to overturn the Court and that he supports the decision. Also, the legal reasoning wasn’t all that out-of-left field, the application of strict scrutiny was perfectly within the realm of California’s constitution, which “treats sexual orientation as a suspect classification” so that any discrimination must be reviewed under strict scrutiny.
Rosen further claims that the decision will be inflammatory because “Judicial decisions that blithely pronounce the basic positions of major political parties to be unconstitutional haven’t fared well in American history, as the Dred Scott decision shows.” As evidence, he points to the fact that Obama, McCain and Clinton all support civil unions. This argument may be relevant if the Federal Supreme Court had issued this ruling, but they didn’t. The California Supreme Court did, and this decision was well within the political and judicial mainstream for the state. All of this just begs the question, is there any progressive legal decision that Jeffrey Rosen likes?
If there is any backlash, it will be because gay marriage opponents oppose gay marriage, not because they’re ticked off about the reasoning.
Kevin Drum looks at some survey data and the results from California 2000 referendum banning recognition of out-of-state and international gay marriages and is pessimistic:
In 2000 Californians voted to ban same-sex marriage by a margin of 63%-37%. If attitudes toward gay marriage have followed their historical pattern, about 9% more Californians are in favor of it this year, which means they’d still vote to ban it, but by the smaller margin of 54%-46%.
In other words: this is likely to be very close. These numbers have fairly big error bars attached to them, and it’s also possible, especially in California, that attitudes toward gay marriage since 2000 have softened faster than in the past. Still, right now it looks to me like the odds are slightly stacked against those of us who favor same-sex marriage. This is going to be a very tough campaign.
Although I agree with Kevin that the campaign to defend the Court decision will be tough, I’m also quite optimistic. For one, the argument that this is “judicial activism” or some sort of usurpation of the legislature won’t hold water. The legislature passed bills to recognize gay marriage twice, and the Governor vetoed them both times, because he wanted the court to make a ruling. Governor Schwarzenegger fully supports the decision and has said that he won’t support an amendment overturning it. This is a huge blow to the referendum, Schwarzenegger is by far the most popular and credible Republican in California. Also, the judges who made the decision were all elected in landslides and have basically zero controversy around them, so a populist, anti-judicial activist campaign will not work.
The real reason I’m optimistic that this referendum won’t pass is because gay marriage will have some inertia behind it. It’s much easier to oppose gay marriage when it’s some looming threat out to destroy your family and what not. When gay marriage is a reality, and you see that the negative effects are all phony, it becomes much harder to organize people and channel the energy necessary to overturn the Court’s decision. It will be a hard fight, of course, but I’m cautiously optimistic.
Despite Kevin Riley and the Cal offense eviscerating Air Force in the Armed Forces Bowl, star receiver DeSean Jackson, who would have been a senior this coming season, has declared for the draft. Although I’m disappointed that DeSean won’t be in Berkeley for another year, he’s provided me and all Golden Bears fans with some amazing memories from his three years at Cal. We’ll miss ya, number one.
Here’s a little taste of what a lucky NFL team will soon see:
Since the 1970s, California has claimed a unique exemption to EPA pollution mandates, and has been able to enact stricter regulations due to “special topographical, climate and transportation circumstances.” The Bush administration is claiming that California doesn’t need to put in their stricter CO2 standards and should instead just go by the federal regulations, and has refused to let California and 16 other states put in their stricter standards.
The Bush administration, at least on pure legal grounds, has a decent case. The Clean Air Act waiver was established because California needed to enact stricter pollution guidelines due to the lion’s share of the car pollution was being emitted in a coastal basin abutted by high mountains that ten million people live in. The rather unique circumstances of the Los Angeles basin call for California to have their own stricter pollution standards. The same argument, however, can not be made with CO2. Even if a massive amount of CO2 is emitted in the LA basin, it doesn’t meaningfully affect the quality of life in the basin. CO2 doesn’t get trapped up against the hills like lower lying smog or sulfur dioxide. In short, CO2 emissions concentrated in a single area won’t make life in that area uniquely misreable.
This is all academic, however. The Bush administration isn’t making this judgment based on the reasoning I just described. It’s because they really don’t want to have strict CO2 emissions standards, and since California is the state that buys the most cars, they can effectively set industry standards with their rules. And as far as CO2 emissions standards go, they should be national and much higher.
It looks like the cops have a suspect for who set off one of the wildfires in Southern California:
Officials blamed a wildfire that consumed more than 38,000 acres and destroyed 21 homes last week on a boy playing with matches, and said they would ask a prosecutor to consider the case.
The boy, whose name and age were not released, admitted to sparking the fire on Oct. 21, Los Angeles County sheriff’s Sgt. Diane Hecht said Tuesday. Ferocious winds helped it quickly spread.
It seems weird to prosecute someone for playing with matches and starting a fire, in this case. There was going to be a fire anyway - the area is full of dry brush, there aren’t that many buildings, and there hadn’t been rain in nearly a year. To go after the poor kid who may have started the fire because of playing with matches seems besides the point. The reason there are wildfires, isn’t because of arsonists, but because of the underlying ecological conditions. There was a high probability of a large fire in that area — it doesn’t really matter if it was a kid playing with matches, a motorcycle accident, a inadvertently left on pilot light. THe point is that cracking down on “arson” isn’t going to prevent wildfires in an area so prone to them
Apropos of Ezra’s recent article on why state-run health care is unlikely to ever be a sustainable solution because states will always bail on their health care plans when the economy takes a turn south - we have news (via Dana Goldstein) that (southern) California is bailing on a proposed extension of public transit so that the state can do some long term budget balancing. This is unfortunate, but not all that surprising given California’s -and all states- budget constraints. So, if states can’t run deficits, than how are they supposed to fund infrastructure projects in times of sluggish tax recipts or downright decline in revenue? That’s right, they hit up the feds.
Unfortunately, this is the exact type of spending that’s derided as “pork” and these days there’s calls from Glenn Reynolds and “porkbusters” to eliminate this type of spending. But states are very rarely in the fiscal shape to initiate such spending, and there’s always time when they can’t keep up. Sure, various bond measures and accounting trips will keep these projects afloat temporarily, but just using federal dollars would be a much more efficient way to fund them.
