The court ruled on two related cases, Twitter v. Taamneh and Gonzalez v. Google, in which victims of terrorist attacks by the Islamic State sought to hold Twitter and Google liable because the companies “aided and abetted” the deadly terrorists by not sufficiently moderating their platforms.

This line of argument strikes at Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. As First Amendment lawyer Robert Corn-Revere argued in a commentary for Reason Magazine, Section 230, “promoted the ​​development of parental controls and filtering as an alternative to government censorship, and encouraged online platforms to allow free communication by immunizing them from liability for hosting speech by third parties. Crucially, Section 230 also ensured online platforms’ ability to regulate posts that violate their terms of service.”

The liability protections for online platform operators is critical.

Can you imagine what the internet would be like today if a website could be held liable because a single user posted something offensive?

The challenges in the cases before the U.S. Supreme Court tried to argue that Twitter and Google were liable because terrorist propaganda could be accessible through their platforms.

In the Google case, the argument was made that Google, which owns video streaming site Youtube, was specifically liable because of the algorithmic video recommendation system on Youtube. This, they argued, could mean that terrorist recruitment videos could be recommended to someone using Youtube.

The court, however, rightly saw the flaw in these types of arguments.

“The mere creation of those platforms, however, is not culpable. To be sure, it might be that bad actors like ISIS are able to use platforms like defendants’ for illegal—and sometimes terrible—ends. But the same could be said of cell phones, email, or the internet generally,” wrote Justice Clarence Thomas.

Opined Cato Institute policy analyst Will Duffield, “In a world where the basic business models and default openness of major social media platforms has come under attack, this recognition is valuable in any context. Paired with the court’s decision to pass up an opportunity to reinterpret Section 230, it is a victory for free speech worth celebrating.”

Indeed.

Section 230 has been in the headlines over the years, mostly because it has been under attack by both the left and right. Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have called for it to be repealed, with Trump going so far as to threaten to veto the annual defense budget bill if Section 230 repeal wasn’t included.

There’s little doubt much of the anger about Section 230 is a result of ignorance about what it does, what it doesn’t do and why it matters

The section has been scapegoated as somehow the culprit behind real or perceived bias on major internet platforms. But, of course, in a free country with a First Amendment, internet platform owners can be as biased as they want if they wish. That’s just free speech.

This said, it is for the best that the Supreme Court declined these recent challenges to internet freedom.

As law enforcement leaders, we know that these discriminatory practices betray fundamental values of policing, including courtesy, respect, and authentic service. They undermine public trust in policing as an institution, making us all less safe. Yet Antioch is not an outlier. 

And that is why it is critically important that California pass Senate Bill 50, a bill that will ban discriminatory traffic stops that fail to make California roads safer. If passed, officers will not be allowed to conduct certain stops that drive racial disparities, including pretext stops and stops for specific minor traffic offenses, such as having a brake light out or expired registrationtinted windows. Instead, tickets would be issued through license plate numbers when deemed necessary. Passing it is a critical first step to root out the racially discriminatory practices the Antioch texts so explicitly revealed, and make our roads safer.

After all, some officers stop drivers not because they are driving unsafely but to randomly search their car. Pretext stops, for example, are used by officers to justify pulling drivers over for traffic violations when they are actually motivated by a hunch or bias. Frequently, officers conduct these non-safety related traffic stops using things like a broken tail light as pretext, allowing officers to question the driver and try to obtain probable cause or consent to search the vehicle. This practice drives racial disparities; in San Francisco police were 10.5 times more likely to use a pretext stop to pull over Black drivers than white drivers. 

As a recent report by Center by Policing Equity shows, it is a dangerous and ineffective practice that not only fuels racial bias but also ensnares innocent drivers and diverts traffic enforcement resources away from effective public safety strategies.

In California, traffic stops are a key driver of racial disparities in both the likelihood of someone being stopped and the likelihood of a search and or use of force during that stop. A 2021 study uncovered another alarming pattern: During stops, officers spoke to Black men in a less respectful and less friendly tone than they did to white men. At the same time, officers do not find guns, drugs, or any evidence that a crime has been committed in an overwhelming majority of these pretext stops. Additionally, Black drivers are more likely to be subjected to intrusive searches, despite the fact that contraband discovery rates are higher among white drivers. These frightening and humiliating experiences poison the well of police-community trust that many of us in law enforcement have spent years trying to protect.

Rooting out the racism exposed by police officers’ texts in Antioch will not come easily, but we as law enforcement leaders can start by unequivocally condemning bigotry and taking concrete steps to protect the public from discrimination.

SB 50 offers an opportunity to build trust, conserve police resources, and enact policies and training that are based on empirical research. Moreover, it strikes a careful balance between the use of sound enforcement tools and respect for Californians’ constitutional and civil rights. 

Diane Goldstein is a 21-year veteran of law enforcement who served as the first female lieutenant for the Redondo Beach (CA) Police Department. She is the Executive Director of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, a group of criminal justice professionals that work advancing justice and public safety solutions.

Chris Burbank was with the Salt Lake City Police Department for 25 years, spending nine years as Chief of Police. He served as Vice President of the Major Cities Chiefs, and President of the FBI National Executive Institute Associates. He is currently at the Center for Policing Equity.

By now, we have all heard stories like Coulson’s—example after example of California’s draconian sentencing laws. The legislature more recently abandoned the most severe excesses that made us the mass incarceration capital of the country, exacerbated disparities, drained taxpayer resources and failed to make us safer. However, the legacy remains in the form of thousands of people serving life (or virtual life) sentences for nonviolent crimes—like Coulson.  Thousands more are serving lengthy sentences under other excessive sentencing regimes—the vestiges of the failed tough on crime era of the 1990s.

Today, California has the second largest prison population in the United States—nearly 100,000 Californians are currently incarcerated in our overcrowded state prisons (at an average annual cost of $106,000 per incarcerated person).  California also leads the nation in life sentences with 32% of the incarcerated population serving life or virtual life sentences, though researchers have found that lengthy sentences and high rates of incarceration have diminishing returns in reducing crime rates. 

Today, almost half of the people in California prisons have already served at least 10 years of their sentence. According to data from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), 57% of all individuals in prison are rated “low risk” to reoffend.  88% of individuals in prison over 50 years old are “low risk,” and 95% of individuals that have served 20 or more years are “low risk.”  

Why do we keep spending so much to keep people in cages that pose a low risk to the rest of us? 

Recognizing both the significant cost and diminishing returns of excessively long sentences, the California Legislature has taken steps to safely and equitably release those whose continued incarceration is no longer in the interest of justice through “second look” resentencing.  Through this process, the court considers factors, including an incarcerated person’s age, physical and mental health, and conduct while in prison, to determine whether they would pose a risk to public safety if they were released and whether their continued incarceration is in the interest of justice.  Crime victims are also involved in the process and have the opportunity to provide their input. 

While the possibility of “second look” resentencing has existed in California law for decades, a series of recent bills has substantially improved the process and broadened its reach. New laws increase the number of authorities that can initiate resentencing to include the prosecuting attorney and provide additional funding to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (“CDCR”) to make resentencing referrals and recommendations. 

These changes in the law reflect the data demonstrating that criminal involvement diminishes dramatically after age 40 (even more so after age 50), that lengthy sentences do not deter crime, and that crime victims overwhelmingly favor reducing sentencing lengths for people in prison who are assessed as a low risk to public safety.

Coulson’s release is the product of “second look” resentencing.  He was recommended for release by CDCR based on his exceptional conduct while in custody and in recognition of the substantial portion of his sentence which he had already served.  A Los Angeles Superior Court Judge did not hesitate to act on CDCR’s recommendation, but a gap in the law means the court could not have acted on their own motion to remedy a punishment which, the judge said, “shocks the conscience and offends fundamental notions of human dignity.”  The Legislature is poised to fix that.

As Assemblymember Ting told me, “While I have successfully championed resentencing efforts, I know there’s room for improvement. There are potentially many more Californians like Mr. Coulson, whose extremely long sentences are unjustly harsh and deserve a ‘second look.’ My bill makes technical and procedural changes to current law to achieve fairness and equity in the application of such reviews – goals worth aiming for.”

Cristine DeBerry is the founder and executive director of the Prosecutors Alliance of California. 

Back in February, members of the California Association of Professional Scientists — a union that represents scientists in the state’s myriad regulatory agencies — overwhelmingly rejected Gov. Gavin Newsom’s offer to boost pay by 2% to 4%. The union says their pay, which averages $7,400 a month plus generous benefits, lags state engineers and federal scientists by 40%.

Had the union been reasonable, negotiations might have been fruitful. The union demanded raises of up to 43% to address the so-called disparities. It has been in the midst of a three-year bargaining dispute. As the Sacramento Bee reports, the union has been calling for dramatic pay increases since a 2005 contract increased engineer salaries. Rank-and-file scientists are still seething over a 2014 court case that boosted pay for supervisors, but not scientists.

Now, the Legislature is intervening.

Last week, the Assembly Appropriations Committee approved Assembly Bill 1677, which directs the union-friendly UC Berkeley Labor Center to study this particular bargaining unit’s salary structure.

At some point, the union might want to cut its losses and accept a deal.

This isn’t exactly the best time to be pushing for 435 raises given that California is facing a $31.5-billion budget deficit. California state employees, including its scientists, perform some important tasks but they earn enviable pay and benefits packages.

This one relatively small labor dispute speaks volumes about Capitol politics and the way one bargaining unit’s pay creates an upward ratchet for other bargaining units.

Unions don’t always win, but it’s time for the state to base all of its pay levels more on market conditions and less on union power.

It’s the ever-increasing conflict between the state government’s current and projected tax revenues, which are drifting downwards, and the demands for billions of additional dollars for vital services, such as health care, homelessness and mass transit.

In January, when Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled his initial budget for the 2023-24 fiscal year that begins July 1, he projected a $22.5 billion deficit – just a few months after boasting the state had a $97 billion surplus. This month, in a revised budget, he said the deficit had grown to $31.5 billion.

As worrisome as those numbers appear, they might be a best case scenario, according to the Legislature’s budget analyst, Gabe Petek.

“Based on our assessment, there is a roughly two‑thirds chance revenues will come in below May Revision estimates,” Petek said. “As such, while we consider the May revision revenues plausible, adopting them would present considerable downside risk.”

Moreover, Petek said that using the Newsom administration’s own projections and assumptions, “the budget condition would worsen in future years” with annual operating deficits of around $15 billion in the following two years, and hinted that the real shortfalls in the final years of Newsom’s governorship could be larger.

These estimates of a chronic and perhaps widening gap between income and outgo also assume that the state’s economy won’t be clobbered by recession.

Many economists believe that the Federal Reserve System’s increasing interest rates, meant to slow the economy and battle inflation, could trigger a recession within the next year. If it occurred, Newsom’s budget says, “revenues could decrease by $40 billion in 2023-24 alone, largely driven by losses in personal income tax,” adding that “revenue declines relative to the May Revision forecast could reach an additional $100 billion through 2026-27.”

While the state has amassed more than $30 billion in reserves to cushion the impact of recession, an even moderate economic downturn would quickly consume them, drowning the budget in red ink as the Great Recession did.

To summarize: California’s budget faces several years, at least, of budget difficulty. But the demand side of the fiscal ledger is not shrinking.

After the January budget was released, advocates for programs, particularly health care and social services, cranked up pressure on legislators to protect their slices of the pie. That pressure is even more intense with the May revision’s deficit increase.

They have been joined by three other major stakeholders seeking multi-billion-dollar increases in state aid: hospitals, transit systems and cities on the front lines of the state’s worst-in-the-nation homelessness crisis.

Hospital and transit system officials say they have been unable to fully recover from the impacts of COVD-19 on their patronage and finances and may be forced to shut down or at least reduce services. Mayors of the state’s largest cities say they need an additional $2 billion per year to maintain ongoing efforts to house those on the streets.

There’s little question that advocates for existing and new state financing would prefer that Newsom and the Legislature tap into reserves and/or raise taxes to satisfy their demands. In fact, the state Senate’s budget framework proposes a hike in corporate income taxes, although Newsom has rejected it.

Were California’s budget squeeze to continue or grow tighter, as seems likely, the remainder of Newsom’s governorship would be dominated by the difficult task of resolving it.

CalMatters is a public interest journalism venture committed to explaining how California’s state Capitol works and why it matters. For more stories by Dan Walters, go to Commentary.

But bad news for young job seekers is stewing. Some politicians in Washington are attempting to pass a policy that would severely compromise teenage employment opportunities.

Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) unveiled a plan that would more than double the federal minimum wage to $17 an hour. The move would broadly shrink the pool of available jobs—either forcing businesses to consolidate positions, scale down operations, or encourage automation. And in this environment, younger American workers would be the first to get the boot.

When faced with the decision to fill an open position that is required by law to pay a higher minimum wage, employers are more likely to choose a more skilled job candidate, rather than take a chance on a high school student with little experience.

The extra hurdle to locking down employment as a teenager would set off a domino effect—having implications well beyond not being able to find near term work as a lifeguard, restaurant worker, or retail associate. Teenage jobs are the first rung on the career ladder, and without that experience, it can be much more challenging to ascend to higher paying positions in the future.

Because some states are already implementing higher wage floors, a natural experiment has unfolded that reveals the connection. According to a recent analysis from the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), there is a clear correlation between state minimum wage levels and the teenage unemployment rate. As government mandated wage floors rise, so does the rate of teenage joblessness.

When comparing minimum wage levels between the 10 states with the worst teen unemployment rates to those with the best, the former group has a significantly higher average minimum wage level. More specifically, states with the top ten highest teenage jobless rates have an average minimum wage of $12.78 per hour, while states with a healthier teenage job market have an average government-mandated wage floor that’s roughly 38 percent lower.

Washington, D.C. provides the most jarring example. With the highest minimum wage in the country, the city’s young workers grapple with an unemployment rate of nearly 35 percent. Meanwhile, California has a rolling 12-month average teen unemployment rate of 11.6 percent—a reading that’s above the national average.

Experts confirm what the statistics suggest.

A 2022 survey found that three-quarters of labor economists agree a $15 minimum wage would have a negative effect on teen employment. With Sen. Sanders’ $17 proposal, the negative impact predicted by economists would likely be even more dramatic.

Other academic research points in the same direction.

Summer jobs provide young Americans with the opportunity to gain valuable work experience that will act as a building block for a future career. Given that state employment statistics and economists agree that higher minimum wages will have an outsized negative impact on youth employment opportunities, Sen. Sanders should rethink his proposal.

After all, to get a good job, everyone needs a first job.

Elaine Parker is the President of the Job Creators Network Foundation.

As this column has previously revealed, all phases of the budget dance are fake insofar as they are subject to substantial amendments throughout the year by so-called “trailer bills” and “junior budget bills,” rendering what was for decades a rational process for fiscal planning into a never-ending convoluted outflow of taxpayer cash.

(The budget process was wholly perverted in 2010 by Proposition 25, laughingly labeled the “On-Time Budget Act of 2010.” Its real purpose was to repeal the two-thirds vote requirement for state budgets. Voters fell for the promise that budgets would be passed on time, with greater transparency and that legislators would forfeit their pay if the budget was late. Thirteen years later we now know that all three of these representations were lies.)

While the May Revise is not the final budget, it usually has the benefit of providing a bit more clarity as to the financial state of the state. But that may not be the case this year as explained below. As with previous May revisions, this one had a couple of surprises.

First, a pleasant surprise. Despite heavy pressure from far left progressives in the legislature and public sector labor organizations, the governor is not proposing any significant tax increases. So, despite the innumerable disagreements taxpayers have with Newsom, give some credit where credit is due, especially when the rejection was unequivocal: “I do not think it’s the right time to raise taxes, and I was crystal clear on that.”

The second surprise is not so pleasant: The May revise envisions even higher spending over that originally proposed in January. ($306.5 billion in total spending up from $297 billion.) More troubling is that fact that the projected deficit is $9 billion higher. ($31.5 billion deficit up from $22.5 billion projected in January.)

This is a surprise given that the odds of a recession are increasing according to most economists and California continues to spend at alarming levels. Just ten years ago, California’s general fund was $93 billion, which adjusted for inflation, would be $118 billion in today’s dollars. The state has long spent beyond its means, but the spending addiction is now in overdrive. No rational observer believes this trajectory is sustainable.

The third surprise in the May revision is the data we don’t have. Revenue projections are always tricky, and it often seems that budget planners would have more accurate projections using a Magic 8 Ball. But as difficult as it is in normal years projecting how much tax revenue will be generated, it is even more difficult this year. Because of several declared disasters, the filing deadline for most Californians is now in October, not on April 15th. Millions of Californians have yet to file their returns, making revenue projections even more speculative.

Both the budget process itself and the unsustainable level of government spending are bad for California. But it’s what we can expect with monolithic one-party control. And that’s no surprise at all.

Jon Coupal is president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.

When Donald Trump eventually builds his presidential library, he’ll need a pavilion twice that size to hold the “Trump was Right” exhibit.

He might need two of them.

Special Counsel John Durham has released his “Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns,” and it confirms that Trump was right when he called the investigation into alleged collusion between his campaign and Russia “a hoax.”

There never was any actual evidence, none at all, to support that allegation or the opening of an FBI investigation. None. Nothing. Zero.

In fact, there was evidence to the contrary, and the FBI ignored it. “It is the Office’s assessment that the FBI discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia,” the report states.

Trump was framed and the country was torn apart by vicious, false allegations of treasonous conduct by the duly elected president of the United States. Who was responsible?

Hillary Clinton did this, aided and abetted by a number of people in the government.

How high did it go? All the way to the top. In late July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies learned that Russian intelligence had picked up information alleging that Hillary Clinton had approved a proposal from one of her campaign advisors to vilify Trump by tying him to Vladimir Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee, in order to distract from the investigation into her use of a private email server as Secretary of State.

According to his own notes, then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Barack Obama with that information on July 28, and on August 3 Brennan met with Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, FBI Director James Comey and other senior administration officials, including Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who participated remotely, to brief them on intelligence related to Russian interference and on the “Clinton Plan” intelligence.

So they all knew. The Durham report says the FBI “failed to act on what should have been — when combined with other incontrovertible facts — a clear warning sign that the FBI might then be the target of an effort to manipulate or influence the law enforcement process for political purposes during the 2016 presidential election.”

Exculpatory evidence, tending to establish innocence, was ignored, while Clinton-funded materials —the Steele Dossier, full of salacious and unverified claims, and false accusations that Trump shared a computer server with Alfa Bank in Russia—were treated as credible. Material from the Steele Dossier was even presented to the FISA court to back up a request for a warrant to spy on a Trump campaign advisor. The court was not told of its political origin.

“Put another way,” the Durham report states, “this [Clinton plan] intelligence — taken at face value — was arguably highly relevant and exculpatory because it could be read in fuller context, and in combination with other facts, to suggest that materials such as the Steele Dossier reports and the Alfa Bank allegations…were part of a political effort to smear a political opponent and to use the resources of the federal government’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies in support of a political objective.”

That’s exactly what happened. And while it was going on, they all knew. It was a hoax. Trump was right.

This corrupt manipulation of the FBI and other government agencies for political purposes did not end with the Russia hoax and still continues today. Consider how our elections have been affected.

As voters went to the polls in 2018, the special counsel investigation into the baseless Trump-Russia allegations was dragging on. How many voters were influenced by the belief that Donald Trump had engaged in treasonous conduct with Russia? The Mueller report was finally released in April 2019, finding no conspiracy or collusion.

As voters went to the polls in 2020, the FBI was in possession of the Hunter Biden laptop, in full knowledge that it was authentic, and keeping silent while the Biden team rounded up misleading statements from former U.S. intelligence officials asserting that the laptop looked like Russian disinformation. Revelations from the Twitter files show government involvement in the suppression and censorship of the New York Post’s truthful reporting that the laptop contained email evidence that Biden was lying to the American people when he said repeatedly that he had no conversations with his son about his business dealings.

As voters went to the polls in 2022, they had recently seen images of a massive FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in August, an unprecedented use of government force at the residence of a former president, suggesting some gravely serious violation of law and national security which has yet to be identified. But it wasn’t until February 2023 that Biden’s lawyers acknowledged that on November 2, before the election, they had found classified documents from Biden’s time as vice president in his office closet at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C.

There were no police vehicles, no flashing red and blue lights, no news cameras for that discovery, or for subsequent discoveries at Biden’s Delaware home of illegally held classified documents from his time as VP and U.S. senator.

The abuses of power in the FBI are not limited to presidential candidates. On Wednesday, the House Judiciary subcommittee investigating the weaponization of government heard from three FBI whistleblowers whose lives and reputations have been devastated by improper retaliation. One had brought forth concerns about the tactics used against protesters arrested in connection with January 6th.

There must be accountability. This cannot continue.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley

From CNN and MSNBC hosts to neoconservative war hawks to creeps in the so-called intelligence community to the grifters at the Lincoln Project, a lot of terrible people don’t like Trump.

And sure, the Democratic conspiracy theories about Trump being a Russian asset and the Russians successfully “hacking the election” were gibberish from the start.

And yes, many of Trump’s supporters are wrongly smeared and talked down to by elitist left-wing snobs who don’t care to understand why they support Donald Trump.

All of this said, Donald Trump is a malignant force in American politics who doesn’t deserve a second term in the White House.

A thought experiment

For one, Trump has obviously done things which if done by a Democrat would have Republicans frothing at the mouth.

Imagine, for example, if President Barack Obama lost the 2012 presidential election, spent every subsequent day insisting the election was stolen from him (and therefore the country was stolen from the American people), called at least one secretary of state demanding they “find the votes” to help change the results, held a “stop the steal” rally outside of the Capitol building as electoral votes were being counted and said nothing as his supporters stormed the Capitol building and assaulted police officers. Obama, in this scenario, would’ve also been angrily attacking Vice President Joe Biden for not violating the Constitution and throwing out electoral votes.

Then, imagine Obama kept things up, including calling for the “termination” of the Constitution. Separately, imagine Obama faced a possible criminal prosecution for the previously mentioned efforts to meddle in one of the state election counts and was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in a civil trial.

Imagine how mad Republicans would be at Democrats who, amid all of this, made excuses for Obama, said it was all a Republican plot against him orchestrated by “the deep state.” And, besides, the economy was booming so all of Obama’s wrongs were totally fine. Just minor character flaws.

Go ahead, imagine that.

No really, think about it.

Seriously, meditate on it.

If you actually thought about that, my point has been made.

Trump is no conservative

Second, Trump has steered Republicans away from any coherent conservative philosophy.

Even before COVID, Trump blew up the national debt and didn’t care. His signature statement about fiscal matters: “Who the hell cares about the budget? We’re going to have a country.”

He abandoned conservative commitments to free trade in favor of abusing executive power to launch a trade war with longtime allies like Canada, Mexico and the European Union because he seriously believed the following nonsense:  “Because of tariffs we will be able to start paying down large amounts of the” national debt, “while at the same time reducing taxes for our people.”

Trump evidently didn’t understand that the tariffs are in fact taxes “for our people,” that the main result of the tariffs was to undercut American companies and workers by raising costs to do business, and that tariff revenues were a drop in the bucket to the trillion-dollar deficits he approved every year as president.

And now, ironically, he’s running to the left of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis by repeatedly hammering DeSantis for having previously supported reforms to America’s unsustainable entitlement programs. The trustees of Social Security and Medicare have long warned that both programs are facing insolvency, which will trigger significant benefit reductions if nothing is done. And doing nothing is exactly what Trump wants to do.

“Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security,” he said in a video earlier this year.

Trump has instead floated as solutions cutting foreign aid and “left-wing gender programs in the military.” Yeah, no. That won’t make Medicare and Social Security solvent.

These fiscally and economically reckless ideas from Trump might be good politics for Trump in the short term, but they’re bad for the country and worse for the coherence of the Republican Party in the long term.

Trump is a loser

Americans gave him a shot in 2016 and have rejected him and his ilk ever since, which should tell you something.

In 2018, the “blue wave” wiped out Republican control of the House.

In 2020, Trump was ousted from the White House. He and his supporters were reduced to blaming everything from Venezuelan voting machines to phantom ballot-stuffing operations.

In 2021, Republicans managed to lose two Republican Senate seats in Georgia thanks to Trump’s temper tantrums, in turn losing control of the Senate.

In 2022, Trumpism stifled what should have been a “red wave” by yielding clowns like Dr. Oz and Herschel Walker as Senate candidates in key races, protecting the Democratic Senate and yielding a razor-thin Republican House majority.

Public opinion polling has consistently shown most Americans don’t want either Trump or President Biden to run again. They want someone new.

If you’re a Republican, a conservative, and you’re deeply worried about the woke leftists winning elections and taking the country to a bad place, shouldn’t you want a president who can actually, I don’t know, win? Because the backlash to Trump is what gave the country major victories for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

The country needs better

A lot of pundits have complained in recent weeks about CNN’s town hall with Trump, saying he shouldn’t have been “platformed.” I disagree.

Like him or not, Donald Trump is an important political figure in the United States, and by extension the world. It’s important to know what he says and how he thinks.

Anyone who hasn’t been chugging the MAGA Kool-Aid, thanks to CNN, got to see and hear how remarkably incoherent and nutty Trump is. We got to see and hear Trump, right after being found liable for sexual abuse, attack the victim  on live television with complaints: “Her dog or her cat was named Vagina, the judge wouldn’t allow to put that in.”

We’re living in “Idiocracy” so long as he’s a powerful political force in America. And guess what? He is, so we are.

Sal Rodriguez can be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com

One of the worst ideas I’ve reported on – and that’s saying something given that this is, after all, California – is redevelopment. On these pages today, we recount the history of that 1940s-era urban-renewal program. Designed to revive blighted cities, the agencies (RDAs) morphed in a central-planning tool that ran up debt, diverted tax dollars from traditional public services, showered subsidies on corporations and abused eminent domain on behalf of developers.

In particular, former Assemblyman Chris Norby of Fullerton, who played a key role in convincing former Gov. Jerry Brown to dissolve those agencies a dozen years ago, details the fiscal problems they caused. It hasn’t been that long since they’ve been gone, yet some lawmakers haven’t gotten the message. In the ensuing years, the Legislature reprised some aspects of it, by allowing cities to use a similar financing mechanism for a narrow range of projects.

This year, however, one bill tried to bring back redevelopment agencies in their entirety (albeit with some modest restrictions on eminent domain). When I first came to work for The Orange County Register in the 1990s, redevelopment was a very big deal. Its lobbyists had immense power in Sacramento and on city councils. I uncovered so many abuses – e.g., cities that seized small businesses and neighborhoods to make way for big-box stores – that I wrote a book about it.

Then in 2011, California faced massive budget deficits and Brown noticed that – because the state backfilled revenues the agencies diverted from public schools – redevelopment imposed a multibillion-dollar drain on the budget. Then poof, they were gone – and the courts affirmed the Legislature’s decision. They’ve been gone long enough that no one in the media seems to remember them.

This new redevelopment bill was moving through the Legislature, so this should have been front-page news. But my Google searches yielded nothing – no news stories or opinion pieces other than the ones that I personally had penned. One aspect of “eternal vigilance” is paying attention to the goings-on in the state Capitol. In fairness, a dozen years is an eternity in politics – and the state faces so many other challenges to our freedoms and wallets.

Fortunately, one of the state’s most-powerful lobbies, the California Teachers’ Association, was indeed paying attention. I’m a constant critic of this teachers’ union, which has done so much to turn California’s public schools from among the best in the nation to among the worst. Yet I was thrilled to hear that CTA helped kill the bill, even if it did so for obviously self-interested reasons.

“AB 1476 would divert local property taxes that currently go to schools to instead fund RDAs and would require the state to backfill schools to meet the Proposition 98 minimum guarantee,” the union wrote in a letter to the Assembly Appropriations Committee. And that was that. Other news events sealed the deal. You might have noticed, but California faces a $31.5-billion budget deficit, larger than the shortfall faced by Brown in 2011. The bill’s supporters had terrible timing.

Today’s special section recounts the legacy of redevelopment agencies because, although the latest effort to revive them is dead, some legislative slow-learner will almost certainly try to bring them back in a future session. Redevelopment posed a threat to one of our most precious freedoms – our property rights – so let’s be more vigilant next time. Suffice it to say, but it’s not the safest bet to rely on a teachers’ union to protect us.

Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute and a member of the Southern California News Group editorial board. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.