October 26, 2016 5:31 AM
Good morning. On behalf of The Sacramento Bee’s editorial board, welcome to The Take, your opinion-politics newsletter. Please sign up for it here.
Like several other newspapers, our editorial board voiced its outrage about the Pentagon’s demand that California National Guard soldiers return their signing bonuses. Many of the bonuses were bogus, as The Sacramento Bee exposed in 2010. In 2013, fully three years ago, we urged that the Guard ease the hardship of soldiers caught in the incentives scandal. Forgive us, then, if we hear grandstanding by members of Congress who are now attacking the Pentagon. That, plus the start of Tom Hayden’s oral history, forever unfinished.
Take that
It took a while, but it’s finally time for Volkswagen to start making things right with the customers who bought diesel-powered vehicles with software rigged to cheat emissions tests. Starting in November, the German automaker will spend $10 billion to buy back or modify about 475,000 2-liter VWs and Audis. It’ll spend another $4.7 billion on programs to offset air pollution and promote zero-emission vehicles, of which about $1.1 billion will be spent in California.
This is all under a settlement deal approved Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco. It doesn’t entirely resolve the issue; a settlement for the 90,000 rigged vehicles that VW sold with 3.0-liter engines is still being negotiated. But those are big numbers – big enough, we’ve opined, to be a warning to other automakers: Don’t try to skirt clean air laws – or else. – Erika D. Smith, @Erika_D_Smith
Take a number: 501,206
That’s the number of California voters who registered online Sunday and Monday, the final two days to sign up and be eligible to vote Nov. 8. More than 297,000 registered just on Monday, a one-day record since online registration started in California, according to the Secretary of State’s Office. The office will issue its final pre-election voter registration report late next week, but more than 18.2 million, another record, had already signed up by Sept. 9.
Our take
Editorial: Congress should stop the Pentagon from requiring California National Guard soldiers to repay enlistment bonuses, but the outrage of politicians seems timed to the election. It’s so easy for politicians to stand up for veterans now, two weeks before Election Day. Where were they three years ago when we and others warned about the looming crisis? And why hasn’t the problem been fixed by now?
The Mercury News, San Francisco Chronicle Los Angeles Times, and San Diego Union Tribune also weighed in on the incentives.
Endorsements: Bonnie Gore, John Allard and Scott Alvord for Roseville City Council.
Donald Heller, who as a young lawyer wrote the 1978 ballot initiative that created California’s current death penalty law, became a death penalty opponent. He debates Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert and Richard Riggins, the father of a murder victim, on Proposition 62, which would repeal capital punishment, and Proposition 66, designed to speed up executions.
Heller: California’s death penalty is beyond repair and should be repealed.
Schubert and Riggins: California’s death penalty can be fixed by speeding up appeals.
Their take
Redding Record Searchlight: When someone kills a good cop, a man or woman who signed up to protect the rest of us and faced danger on our behalf, we understand that the fabric of our security has torn. The outcome is backward. We grieve for the person lost, and recoil at the unfairness. A good man died last week, and it hurts. It hurts us all.
Denver Post: Palmer Ridge High School student-journalists did the hard work of researching the candidates. They carefully and substantively argued their position in a well-written and admirably thought-through editorial. Their adult critics should have responded in kind.
David French, National Review: Barack Obama is 2016’s biggest winner.
Syndicates’ take
Ruben Navarrette: Latinos need to vote.
Kathleen Parker: The celebrity’s apprentice.
Dana Milbank: The lap dogs of democracy who don’t bark at Donald Trump.
David Brooks: The epidemic of worry.
Mailbag
“When these overpaid athletes respect the fans, maybe we will turn the TV back on to football. Until then we will take a bike ride.” – Helen Bouslaugh, Woodland
And finally,
Innocently enough, in what was to be the first installment of an oral history on June 15, California State Librarian Greg Lucas asks Tom Hayden how it was that he came to run for the Assembly. Hayden, who died Sunday, proceeds to recall his Freedom Rider days, his first contacts with Jerry Brown, Jane Fonda, his failed run for U.S. Senate, and more. Having taken 38 minutes and 43 seconds to set the stage, Hayden turns to the formation of “Team Hayden” and his Assembly campaign, “a much more modest agenda which was (to) elect Tom to something because from there he could start his climb.” Among the Haydenisms is this reference to another legislator: “I used the word ‘corrupt.’ I didn’t say ‘prostitutes.’ ” Lucas ends the 110-minute chat by saying they’d pick it up soon.
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