Monthly Archives: November 2022

Full transcript of Dahle versus Newsom debate!

The transcript is here:

Unfortunately, Dahle is farther to the right and even more slavishly pro-corporate than Newsom!

Newsom, when asked to admit a mistake, skirts the issue and does not talk about any political mistake or bad governance decision he had made:

Scott Shafer: All right. We are short on time, but we want to ask you a question that’s a little bit of a curveball. And, Governor, let’s start with you. Name a time in your life you were wrong about something and did a complete about face. How did you realize your mistake and what did you do to remedy it and make sure it wouldn’t happen again?

Gavin Newsom: I mean, there’s there’s a myriad of issues where that’s the case. Look, mistakes are a portal of discovery. I have a failure award in businesses I’ve started, really one of the great prides in my life is starting a business right out of college. Putting pen to paper and creating roughly 1,000 jobs at peak. One of the things I always encouraged was initiative. Risk taking, not recklessness. And if we make a mistake, we learn from that mistake and we try not to repeat it. Now, let me be specific. Over the course of my life, personally, professionally, in every way, shape or form, I’ve been iterative. There are things that I asserted that I learned from that didn’t turn out to be as clear as I had hoped or consequences intended that turned out to actually produce the results as intended.

Scott Shafer: Can you be specific?

Gavin Newsom: Dozens of them. I’ll tell you, one of the perhaps most significant ones, I have a significant learning disability. I couldn’t read or couldn’t write, and I was doing speech therapy as a kid. I thought I was dumb and I made the mistake of falling prey to that. Back of the classroom, not raising my hand, feeling other than, feeling lesser than. And that’s why I don’t like bullies. I don’t like cruelty. I don’t like people that humiliate other people. And I learned I wasn’t that person. I’ll tell you, that’s the most profound mistake I made early in my life that I did not did not learn quickly enough that all of us are unique. All of us have a unique expression, and all of us deserve dignity and respect. And as a young child, I didn’t fully embrace that or understand that. And that was a mistake.

Newsom falls radically short of California housing goals!

CalMatters reports:

Measured against the goal he set for himself, Newsom’s record is less impressive. Just 13% of the 3.5 million homes he campaigned on building have been permitted, let alone built. He’s walked back the goal many times, settling on a new target earlier this year: Cities need to have planned a combined 2.5 million homes by 2030. So, 1 million fewer homes planned for, not built, and over a longer time frame.

Newsom rejects controls on outdoor lighting!

Facts don’t matter!

The NY Times writes: A.B. 2382: Light pollution

This bill aiming to reduce light pollution would have required all outdoor lights on state properties to have anti-light pollution shields, as well as motion sensors or automatic dimming or shut-off functions to limit the amount of light they project.

Newsom said the costs associated with changing light requirements at 24,000 state buildings “may cost millions of dollars not accounted for in the budget.”

Assemblyman Alex Lee, who introduced the bill, called the veto “extremely disappointing.” “This bill would have protected our night skies and migratory species, while reducing wasteful and unnecessary electricity consumption,” Lee told The Los Angeles Times.

Gavin, the Presidential race and controversies

Evan Symon, of the California Globe, evaluates his chances. Symon writes:

But let’s push all of what he did back in. And look, I typed “Gavin Newsom controversies” into Google and got 909,000 pages back. When I was gathering links of what he had done just as Governor from the Globe’s archives, it looked like I was going into the Library of Congress. Even giving a highlight reel would still make for a small book. Suffice it to say that for every good or successful thing Newsom has backed, such as the Care not Cash program in San Francisco in the early 2000’s that replaced giving straight cash to the homeless for medical care and other health programs, there has been one other that had disastrous consequences, like extramarital affairs with wives of his own aides.

We showed another side of Con Not Cash in our 2016 post here.

Newsom’s policies for the unhoused are discussed in the Sacramento Bee here.