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The new Rivale 56 yacht from iconic Italian brand Riva is a combination of simplicity, elegance, and advanced technology.
Members of the California Legislature apparently believe they have the power to change outcomes they don’t like. This is like awarding the NBA Championship to Cleveland by retroactively mandating that all of Golden State’s three point baskets be counted as only two.
While basketball is not on the minds of lawmakers, they are working to interfere with something of much greater value to average Californians, their constitutional right to recall elected officials. The Sacramento politicians think they have found a way to derail what appears to be a successful grassroots effort to recall state Sen. Josh Newman, who cast a key vote imposing a new $5.2 billion annual gas and car tax on already overburdened taxpayers.
The power of recall is a powerful tool of direct democracy. The secretary of state’s website says, “Recall is the power of the voters to remove elected officials before their terms expire. It has been a fundamental part of our governmental system since 1911 and has been used by voters to express their dissatisfaction with their elected representatives.”
In the 29th Senate District, covering parts of Orange, Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties, voters have been busy exercising their right to recall their tax-raising representative Josh Newman. Much to the surprise of Sacramento insiders, it looks like the campaign will succeed in gathering enough signatures to force the senator to be held accountable in a special election — already the secretary of state has instructed county registrars to begin counting the signatures. The chance that the recall of one of their own will be successful has lawmakers panicking. Their solution is to surreptitiously change the recall rules that have been in place for over a century.
With little notice, the Legislature amended Senate Bill 96, as it was about to pass in connection with the state budget on June 15, for the purpose of changing the rules governing the current recall effort. The purpose of the bill is shamelessly transparent: “It is the Legislature’s intent that the changes made by this act in the Elections Code apply retroactively to recalls that are pending at any stage at the time of the act’s enactment… .”
Their end game is delay. They want to delay the ultimate vote on ousting Newman for as long as possible, despite the constitutional guarantee to have the vote as quickly as possible — between 60 days and 180 days from the recall petitions having been certified.
Here’s how they do it: First, they try to delay the petition review process by requiring the county Registrars of Voters to check the validity of every signature submitted. Normally, the registrars are permitted to check a random sample of the signatures, saving both time and money.
Second, and more disturbing, is the provision buried deep in the text that states, “Notwithstanding any other law, the Secretary of State shall not certify the sufficiency of the signatures [on the recall petitions] until the Legislative Joint Budget Committee has 30 days to review and comment on the estimate [of recall costs] submitted by the Department of Finance.”
Here’s the kicker. The Department of Finance is part of the governor’s office and the bill does not require the governor’s office to prepare that analysis under any time limit. Gov. Brown, who has already come out against the recall, can simply delay that report indefinitely, which, in turn, would hold up certification of the recall effort and the ultimate election.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that those in power in Sacramento will stop at nothing to retain their power and influence, putting their own interests ahead of those of average Californians. But lawmakers who disrespect voters should be wary. Polls show that nearly 60 percent of Californians oppose the new gas tax. The higher taxes will kick in just before the beginning of next year’s election season. Voters are very likely to remember who is responsible and choose to retire multiple representatives, not just a single senator, in the regularly scheduled 2018 election.
Jon Coupal is president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.
Countering decades of increasingly draconian and expensive penalties for low-level, non-violent offenses, Proposition 47 offered Californians a compelling alternative.
By reducing a handful of drug and property offenses from felonies to misdemeanors, the state could save hundreds of millions of dollars in incarceration and court costs and invest those savings into rehabilitation and crime prevention efforts.
Upon voter approval in 2014, the first component has since gone into effect. According to a recent report from Californians for Safety and Justice, there were 15,000 fewer people incarcerated in jails and prisons in 2015 compared to 2014. Nearly 280,000 people have petitioned for resentencing and reclassification.
These changes have not only freed jail and prison space for more serious offenders, but have also freed formerly incarcerated individuals from thousands of laws creating 4,800 post-incarceration restrictions, more than half of which limit employment opportunities for people with felony records.
What has been missing, until now, has been the allocation of money saved from incarcerating fewer people for the handful of offenses covered by the initiative. On June 8, the state announced the distribution of $103 million in estimated state savings to 23 city and county rehabilitative programs over the next three years.
The Orange County Health Care Agency is among those approved for funding. The agency will receive $6 million for the proposed Orange County Community Supported Re-Entry Program, which seeks to better connect individuals being released from jail with community-based services, increase access to housing for chronically homeless offenders and expand existing services.
This includes the development of a Community Support and Recovery Center to work with people upon release from booking or incarceration through intensive case management, as well as the expansion of the agency’s Community Counseling & Supportive Services program.
Such efforts are long overdue. But there is reason to go further. Last year, the Legislative Analyst’s Office challenged Gov. Brown’s Prop. 47 savings estimates, arguing the administration underestimated savings by as much as $83 million, while overestimating costs.
There are the obvious things that need to be done in a real estate transaction that take coordination between the buyers and sellers when the sellers are still living in the house.
Like when buyers and the home inspector can literally take over the house for three to four hours. Like when the appraiser can make arrangements to collect all the data necessary to generate his or her report. And when the buyers can perform their final walk-through.
There are a few more events that tend to occur toward the end of escrow that can take some coordination to avoid miscalculations, misunderstandings, and disruptions. Among them:
Utilities: Who’s shutting off what and when often takes coordination during the last week or so of escrow.
The timing gets complicated when there are questions about the actual close of escrow date. There have been times when the unexpected occurs and the close is delayed.
If the sellers order the service shut down, the closing gets delayed and the buyers don’t get the utilities transferred in time, reinstating the service frequently takes longer than a transfer of service and can cause some rather significant inconveniences. Not having electricity or hot water can make it difficult to conduct one’s daily routines.
The actual closing date: This can require some nimble coordination regarding moving vans, access to the property, and other people’s schedules.
For example, if the closing is delayed, many sellers will postpone their moving truck until the sale has actually concluded. Since many contracts are written with the seller remaining in the house for one to three days after the close of escrow, the date that the buyers can move in slides even further past the original close date in the case of a delay, causing their moving truck to be postponed.
Most moving companies are booked weeks in advance, which makes these last-minute delays difficult to pull off. Add in any impact caused by delaying the close from a Friday to a Monday, and you often need to take off work to make the move rather than moving over the weekend as planned.
Cooperation and coordination go a long way toward making this as easy as possible for all parties.
Handing over the keys: Once escrow has closed, sellers need to get the keys to the new owners.
If the sellers have stayed for a few days after the close of escrow to pack up and move out, it’s difficult to predict the actual time they’ll be finished and completely out. And buyers usually are anxious to get the keys as soon as possible.
Most agents would love to be the ones handing their buyers the keys, with lots of celebration and good wishes for a long and happy life in their new home. Instead, it often ends in a text message letting them know the sellers are gone and the key is under the mat.
Often people can only take so much pressure before they seek to release it in rash and sudden ways, throwing caution and a careful consideration of consequences to the wind.
There were good signs when President Trump was elected that many Americans were entering into that kind of moment. And now, with millions realizing just how widespread and deeply rooted are the problems cool-and-collected President Obama had helped us emotionally paper over, the urge to find release in rash words and deeds is kicking into overdrive.
There’s talk of a “cold civil war,” a bitter longing for “national divorce,” and now, fresh interest in a “convention of the states” to add several big constitutional amendments. However gratifying the fantasy may be of renewing our founding charter’s virtue in this way, it’s ultimately unwise and misconceived.
Liberty-minded citizens could be forgiven for latching onto the convention project out of a combination of frustration, desperation, and high ideals. While our constitutional system helped ensure that policymaking would work more slowly than the passions of the people and the interests of elites might demand, today, even areas of life where substantial reform is clearly needed are languishing. Politics, probably at least in part as a result, has devolved decisively into a mouth-foaming “debate” over the relative moral and coercive power of symbols and semiotics — a great way for rallying pseudo-tribes against other groups, but a terrible way of governing.
With both policy and politics locked in such a frenetic kind of attrition, ordinary reckless strategies of breaking free from the impasse by “shaking the tree” take on a certain kind of calculated logic. At this point — even without reference to ideology or political philosophy — why not crack open the Constitution and see if we can get something more promising going?
Add in the particular convictions and aims of some conservatives and libertarians, and the idea can seem irresistible: just ask deposed Heritage Foundation chief and ex-Sen. Jim DeMint, who recently came aboard the movement as an adviser.
Unfortunately, DeMint’s involvement in such a half-cocked scheme speaks even more loudly to the wretched condition of “the liberty movement” than it does to the urgency of radical reform. The convention of the states is not just a Plan B relative to traditional means of advancing a federal-level liberty agenda. It is a last-ditch effort that no one would bank on if anything else in Washington seemed to favor their goals.
Although organizers and supporters feel sure that they would control the tempo of change and define the content of the changes, the truth is that nationalist and populist sentiment today tilts more to the left than it does to the right. Once the constitutional seal is broken, pro-liberty convention supporters would be stunned to discover how quickly the initiative could be taken away from them and delivered into the hands of socialist-leaning reformers ready to hardwire permanent general entitlements, under the language of fundamental rights, into the law of the land.
A growing constituency on the left has even begun to question the legitimacy of such basic institutions as equal state representation in the Senate. Conservatives and libertarians are deluding themselves if they think such powerful ideological currents are so alien to our traditions that they can simply be swept aside, or that the odds of a constitutional free-for-all that slips from their more modest agenda are too low to worry about.
Even if the convention were to go off without an ideological hitch, its proponents would be in trouble. As an abstract ideal or conceptual lodestar, there’s plenty to be said from a liberty standpoint for the convention’s mission: “to debate and impose a complete package of restraints on the misuse of power by all branches of the federal government.” Open the box, though, and what’s inside squares too poorly with that objective even on its own terms.
Among the examples of concrete changes to be sought, the convention lists a balanced budget amendment, term limits on Congress and the Supreme Court, an upper limit on federal taxes, a sunset clause on all federal taxes and a supermajority requirement to add new ones, and a limitation on the ability of Congress to delegate its lawmaking power to regulatory and executive agencies.
From one standpoint, these are incredibly audacious goals, which a majority of Americans will likely oppose or support for reasons at odds with the liberty movement even very broadly construed. From another, however, they are actually tediously uncreative.
The term limits debate is a tired holdover from the 1980s and 1990s, with no clear evidence that it will lead to a decrease in electioneering or ideological attrition, or to an increase in wiser, more prudent lawmakers (to say nothing of justices!). Ditto the balanced budget amendment — a hoary and immature notion akin to ridding your kitchen of knives to ensure your children don’t wind up stabbing you to death.
There is no prudent place to peg an ontologically “correct” upper bound to taxes, and no place in a founding document for such a context-dependent rule. No supermajority will exist to rewrite all federal taxes, and abandoning federal taxes will drive a dagger through infrastructure, military and other already underfunded spending.
The sad fact is that America’s sorry state will not be fixed by a constitutional convention or by the specific amendments convention organizers support most. Even as an exercise in trying to break the cycle of debilitating attrition in Washington, it will do more harm than good.
The tree in need of shaking today is cultural, not constitutional.
James Poulos is a columnist for the Southern California News Group.
If Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be challenged to write anything as dramatic as the epic chapter of history that concluded this week, with one mega-CEO solidifying his position on top of the world and another forced to step down from the heights of power.
The story begins in 2008, in the autumn of the last year of George W. Bush’s troubled presidency. A catastrophic meltdown of the financial markets had brought Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to Congress to plead for $700 billion to buy up “troubled assets” in order to stabilize the financial system.
But then, in an Oct. 13 meeting, Paulson told the CEOs of the nation’s biggest banks that the government was instead going to buy a stake in their companies. Paulson said the “investments” were mandatory, whether the banks wanted the money or not, because the public must not find out which banks were weak.
The bailout was extremely unpopular — one congressman said calls to his office were coming in 50-50; half “No” and half “Hell, no.” The following February, those same bank executives were hauled before Congress and attacked as villains who were living large on taxpayer money. In March, President Barack Obama called the bankers to the White House for a meeting in the state dining room. “My administration,” Obama said, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”
But one CEO wanted nothing to do with the government’s “help.” JP Morgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon showed up at the meeting holding an oversized check for $25 billion to pay back the bailout he never wanted. Obama refused to take it.
One hundred and eighty degrees away, General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt was echoing White House talking points in a speech to shareholders at GE’s 2009 annual meeting in Orlando. Immelt told investors that the economic downturn had “fundamentally reset” the way companies do business, and capitalism itself. He said the recession “would ultimately lead to changes such as greater government involvement in business.”
Immelt said he had a plan to capture some of the $2 trillion of government stimulus spending worldwide. Angry shareholders wondered if part of his plan was to silence criticism of Obama’s policies on the company-owned TV networks: NBC, CNBC and MSNBC. Speaker after speaker came to the microphone to complain about biased news coverage. Immelt insisted he was “hands-off.”
But that may not have been true. The New York Post reported that after CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli’s rant against bailouts inspired hundreds of “tea party” tax protests across the country, the “top suits and some of the on-air talent at CNBC” were called to a secret three-hour meeting with Immelt to discuss whether the business news channel had “turned into the President Obama-bashing network.”
Eight years have passed. How did the story turn out for everybody?
• The tea party groups were harassed by the IRS.
• Everyone with any experience in government was rejected for president in favor of a billionaire businessman.
• Jamie Dimon has just outlasted another potential successor and continues to run JP Morgan Chase, outperforming competitors.
• Jeffrey Immelt has just stepped down as CEO of General Electric amid complaints from shareholders about the weak performance of the stock.
What does it all mean?
Only Shakespeare could explain it. But a theater critic might write that the “fundamental reset of capitalism” laid an egg.
Susan Shelley is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. Reach her at Susan@SusanShelley.com.
Yeohlee Teng crafted her key tenets of efficient design and fabric diversity into a crisp, summery resort collection. Her fabric choices include white denim, black microfiber, gray cotton linen, a multicolored jacquard and a plethora of cotton stripes that were worked on silhouettes and styles that had a refreshing nautical effect. The look was a casual and layered compilation of T-shirts and tanks, sarong skirts, voluminous jackets and tunics. Two standout jackets included a white denim style cut from a zero waste pattern and a jacquard pod jacket over a slim skirt. Teng jazzed up simple, effortless shapes with clever pocket details, hiding a pocket cut to fit a cell phone on a jacket or turning the pockets of a black tunic dress inside out to create triangular streamers that could be tied together for a sarong look.
See More From the 2018 Resort Collections:
Sandy Liang Resort 2018: The overall tone was noticeably quieter, more relaxed, but retained that playful dose of subversion to keep things modern.
Brock Collection Resort 2018: Laura Vassar and Kristopher Brock brought fairytale romance into modern reality.
Pamella Roland Resort 2018: Pamella Roland’s starting point for her newest collection took place in her own backyard.
Redemption Resort 2018: The inspiration for the collection is “aristocratic
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With personalized, inimitable product the new luxury, Alessandro Sartori continues to ramp up the savoir-faire at Zegna.
Impressive techniques included handmade shadow effects mimicking elbow patches and edging the pockets of a perforated suede blouson, and a woven jacquard jacket entirely hand-embroidered at the back, courtesy of one of two nimble-fingered artists recently tapped for the house’s design studio (the other specializes in paintbrush effects.)
Silhouettes were tactile yet light, like the silky blouson-cum-shirts that inflated in movement. The laid-back mood extended to the ath-luxe mix deconstructed jackets, scoop-neck knits, joggers and jackets dotted with oversized handmade patch pockets. The T-shirts in stretch leather mesh and the silk tops with painterly bamboo prints were terrific.
The handiwork extended to the brand’s triple-stitch logo criss-crossing the see-now-buy-now Tiziano sneakers. They carried on, explained Sartori during a preview of the collection, from an idea introduced by the house’s former head of design Stefano Pilati, inspired by the double stitch used on tailor-made jackets to end the cuff or collar.
The day after the show, 12 show looks from the Ermenegildo Zegna Couture line will be available to order in a selection of the house’s boutiques worldwide, with delivery within eight weeks. Having launched its bespoke service
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The prized handbag continues to break records auction after auction.