The Supreme Court of the United States on Friday did what many expected them not to do – agree to hear challenges to DOMA and Prop. 8.
The challenge to Proposition 8 has been followed closely here. Judge Stephen Reinhardt, of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, offered a very limited ruling that really only applied to California.
The news on the same-sex marriage front was a big no new announcement, with the Court declining to take action at this time. That leaves two huge issues open – the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and California’s Proposition 8.
The delay may be temporary, with the court perhaps as early as tomorrow granting review to the awaiting cases, or the Court could actually be choosing to duck the issue.
California has begun, through the long-delayed AB 32 signed in 2006 by then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, to implement a carbon cap-and-trade system that would reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.
That represents a modest but not insignificant 17 percent cut from where the state’s emission would be without the legislative action. That was the same goal that the Obama administration tried to set nationally in 2009 and 2010, prior to opposition by Republicans in Congress.
It is a day hyped as the biggest shopping day of the year, but Walmart workers are threatening to use that hype to their maximum leverage, as they plan to walk out from a job at American’s largest private-sector employer, whose workers make on average $8.81 per hour with one third of their employees working less than 28 hours per week – thus not qualifying for benefits.
For years since California passed its medical marijuana law, the federal government, often to the bewilderment of many who wonder about the prioritization of resources, has battled the state on the issue of medical marijuana dispensaries, often conducting raids and arresting providers of marijuana to cancer and other terminal patients.
On Tuesday, Colorado and Washington went a step further by making marijuana legal for all purposes.
Human trafficking is a growing problem and Californians overwhelmingly supported the passage of Prop 35, which created harsher sentencing for those involved in human trafficking.
81 percent of the voters supported Prop 35, which will increase fines and prison sentences as well as require convicted human traffickers to register as sex offenders and disclose internet activities and identities.
Four years ago was a time of hope and change amid an economic crisis that came far closer, than most wanted to imagine or believe, to bringing down the entire western financial markets. In the middle of that crisis was the election of the nation’s first African-American President.
Experts were quick to warn that this did not necessarily end the days of racial prejudice against blacks. Indeed, four years later, the on-the-ground circumstances facing many are even more bleak than they were before.
It never ceases to amaze me that when the chips are down and all else is failing, the fallback position of any failing campaign – particularly a Republican one – is to blame the messenger, i.e. the media.
Just Google: “Romney unfair media” and you will see a litany of complaints from the right on this subject. This came up briefly Saturday in a comment.
I have always struggled to distinguish in the classical sense the difference between a comedy and tragedy. I have finally arrived at the reason for the such difficulty – a tragedy should be recast as a comedy of errors.
That, in my view, is largely what has happened this week as we look back upon events. In many ways, the 2008 election turned not simply on the collapse of the economy, but the poor handling of it by one of the candidates. John McCain on September 15 said, “fundamentals of our economy are strong.”
Recently the war in Afghanistan reached a grisly milestone as the number of US deaths surpassed 2000. It was just under 11 years ago, months after the attack on this date, September 11, 2001, that the US launched what was euphemistically called Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.
But now after 11 years, we are still fighting there. In fact, it was only in 2010 when the death toll surpassed 1000. Two years later the figure has doubled.
Labor Day has become a celebration of laborers and workers everywhere. And while we treat Labor Day as a day to honor workers, perhaps a day to celebrate workplace protections – and some take it as a day to extoll (or attack) organized labor and unions, perhaps we ought to treat Labor Day more like we do Memorial Day or Veterans Day.
You see, most of the protections that we take for granted today – the eight-hour work day, the 40-hour week, work place protections and collective bargaining – were achieved literally at gun point, stained in blood, in battles that were not all that different from the battles we celebrate in war.
It is not often that two local columnists speak out and put their necks on the lines. But we have to hand it to Rich Rifkin and Marcos Breton, who take on the power and uncomfortable truths.
I will give Rich Rifkin some props this week for speaking out on an issue that will probably get him more flak than praise. He calls on local Democratic leaders to repudiate Assemblymember Mariko Yamada.
There are times when the issues facing our community mirror the issues facing our nation. I feel at times like I live in two worlds – the world that I sleep in, and the world that I live the rest of my day in.
I see things that most people in the community that I sleep in will never know and sometimes I can never adequately report. I write this message today, because I think we are in trouble as a community, a state, and a nation.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that US carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are at their lowest level for the January-March period since 1992. However, the agency would attribute the decline to three factors, including: a mild winter that reduced household heating demand and therefore energy use; a decline in coal-fired electricity generation, due largely to historically low natural gas prices; and reduced gasoline demand.
The New York Times reports this week, however, that experts are unclear whether this marks the continuation of a trend or an anomaly.
Editorial Carried by Enterprise Notes How Hot This Summer Has Been – Governor Jerry Brown on Monday announced the launching of a new website to document the dangerous effects of global warming and call on those who still deny its existence to “wake up and honestly face the facts.” The website is Climate Change: Just The Facts.
“Global warming’s impact on Lake Tahoe is well documented. It is just one example of how, after decades of pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, humanity is getting dangerously close to the point of no return,” said Governor Brown. “Those who still deny global warming’s existence should wake up and honestly face the facts.”
Back in June, Assembly Bill 1831 by Assemblymember Roger Dickinson was killed in the in the Senate Governance and Finance Committee. The bill would have prohibited requesting criminal background information on the initial employment application for local employees, with the goal of reducing unnecessary barriers to employment for the one in four adult Californians who have an arrest or conviction record and are struggling to find work.
At the time the Vanguard was unable to get a comment from Senator Lois Wolk, who chairs the committee, as to her opposition to the bill.
Politics is often boiled down to its most base and absurd, when simplistic slogans replace rational thought and respectful discourse. Every time we have a horribly tragic mass shooting – which is far too often in my mind – we get the interplay between the gun control advocates and the defenders of gun rights, including the NRA.
We often hear the slogan – guns don’t kill people, people do. That is a foolish, ill-considered, and counter-intuitive statement.
The most appalling factor in the death of young Maria Isabel Vasquez-Jimenez in May of 2008 was not the fact that she was 17, not the fact that she had worked nine hours in temperatures that reached 100 degrees inside the vineyard, and it was not the fact that her body temperature had reached 108.4 degrees when she was finally taken to the hospital where she died.
No, it was the indifference her supervisor had to her medical condition. Back in 2008, the Vanguard interviewed Merlyn Calderon of the United Farm Workers for the Vanguard Radio Show and she told us that at the point when her boyfriend noticed that she was in trouble around 3 pm and she collapsed, the supervisor, apparently more concerned with concealing the fact that they had employed a 17-year-old on the farm for 9 hours than her own safety, did not take her to the emergency room.
Why am I reading this? I asked myself earlier in the week. I am referring to the report from Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona. He purported to the media that he had conclusive proof that President Obama’s birth certificate was a forgery.
I read the AP reports, I even read some of the more colorful articles by “birthers” or “birther-sympathizers.” I’m still astonished that, for instance, Jeffrey Kuhner, a columnist for the Washington Times, writes, “America may be facing a constitutional crisis. Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., has made a startling declaration: President Obama’s birth certificate is fraudulent. If true – and I stress if – then this scandal dwarfs Watergate. In fact, it would be the greatest political scandal in U.S. history.”
At the local level, we were treated to stunning news that might have gone unnoticed by some. The Davis City Manager suggested that, in a few short years, the City of Davis will spend one-quarter of its payroll on health care for retirees.
At the same, national attention focused on seminal rulings from the Supreme Court, as it perhaps surprisingly bucked its conservative trends, siding with the Obama administration on both immigration and the health care reform.
